Dead Victorian Children - Professor Jackie Labbe

Dead Victorian Children: Professor Jackie Labbe, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, presents her Inaugural Lecture.

The Lecture

In ‘Dead Victorian Children’, Professor Jackie Labbe draws on her research interests in nineteenth-century children’s literature to explore the ways in which children are unsafe and at risk in these stories. Although our modern notion of children as particularly deserving of care and protection was first developed in the late eighteenth century, and was fully fledged by the Victorian period, this went hand in hand with a suspicion that children could so easily go wrong, and were so often the instigators of depravity and corruption. This paradoxical understanding of the child found its outlet in stories aimed at both entertaining children through fantasy adventures, and instructing them in proper behaviour through endangerment.

The Speaker

Professor Jackie Labbe completed her PhD in British Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, in 1994. Her study, entitled "Representing Landscape, Representing Gender: The Configurations of Romantic Visuality", posits that socially-constructed expectations of gender inform the writerly practice of men and women during the Romantic period, and that the sediment of these expectations underpin, to a greater or lesser extent, our own readings of Romantic-era works. This became her first monograph: Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism, published in 1998. She published a second thematic monograph in 2000; The Romantic Paradox: Love, Violence, and the Uses of Romance, 1760-1830 focused on how the romance and the melodrama underpin an unexpectedly wide variety of Romantic-period writing.

After this, Prof. Labbe’s work focuses on the prolific and important poet and novelist Charlotte Smith (1749-1806). Smith is one of the most central writers of the period, and Prof. Labbe has established herself as the world’s leading authority. In 2003, she published the first dedicated monograph on Smith’s poetry: Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender. Her 2011 monograph Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and Willian Wordsworth, 1784-1806 was the first full-length study examining the many ways in which the two poets reflect each other, and in 2020 she complemented this with Reading Jane Austen after Reading Charlotte Smith, which presented these two key writers as the progenitors of the modern novel. She has also published more than 50 articles and several edited collections of essays.

Prof Labbe is a past President of the British Association for Romantic Studies and has acted as both a Strategic and Peer Reviewer for the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She has served as the Head of the University Graduate School and Director of the Humanities Research Centre at Warwick University, and has held Pro Vice-Chancellor positions at the University of Sheffield and De Montfort University. As the Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Gloucestershire, Prof. Labbe is responsible for the academic portfolio across the University, academic planning and budgeting, and works closely with all Heads of School to achieve the University's ambitions. She is co-convenor of the PVC/DVC Network with Advance HE, and has recently been appointed to the Advance HE Strategic Advisory Group for Teaching and Learning.

Admission is free.

We continue to be mindful of running events such as this with COVID-19 safety in mind. Please do not attend the lecture if you are unwell. We encourage the wearing of face coverings when moving around busy areas on campus, although you are not required to wear one during the lecture if you prefer. The lecture theatre is well ventilated, and hand sanitising stations are available for your use.