Novelists, poets and pilgrims: the Mayflower in British literature
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-02-23

Discover the central role literature played in the development of the Mayflower myth in Britain, from the 18th century onwards.

In this talk Dr Ed Downey will take you through some of the poems and novels that established the popular understanding of the Mayflower on both sides of the Atlantic.
Until the 18th century, the emigration of a group of Brownist separatists was a minor historical footnote in the settlement of North America, and one without much significance in popular culture in Britain. But, by the early decades of the 19th century, this now famous voyage began to be celebrated and mythologised by poets, musicians and novelists. Literature played a central role in the development of the Mayflower myth, especially after the wild success of Felicia Hemans’ celebrated 1825 poem The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England. Set to music soon after by her composer sister Harriet Browne, the settlement of New Plymouth became a venerated symbol of national and religious freedom. Later, Chartists, abolitionists, and even Irish revolutionaries all published their own literary interpretations of the story.

Speaker: Dr Ed Downey is a post-doctoral researcher specialising in the history of popular culture. His doctoral thesis examined the social and political context that informed the development of print-culture during the French Revolution and Romantic period. He is the Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project, Voyaging through history: the Mayflower in Britain, 1620-2020 through which he is recovering examples of the long and protean legacy of the Mayflower story in British cultural history.

Organised by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library: https://www.bl.uk/eccles-centre 

The Voyaging Through History project: http://voyagingthroughhistory.exeter.ac.uk/ 

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