About this lecture series
Professor Leah Price gives a series of lectures on 'Victorian Books and their Servants'.
Most Victorians who owned a bookcase employed a servant. These lectures ask how that fact shaped both parties’ cohabitation with books. What kinds of labour made print usable? How did masters and servants picture each others’ reading? Why did they care?
The first lecture draws on manuals that taught brides to keep house and bachelors to collect books; the second on novels that pit institutional library against domestic study; the third on Abolitionist polemics that debate whether reading forms a subset of labour or its opposite; the fourth on tracts sold to mistresses for foisting onto maids; and the fifth on stunt journalism that casts the maid as hostile witness to female authorship.
Following the series, recordings of the lectures will be available on the Lyell Lectures series page.
Lecture 1: Bibliodomesticity: Who served Victorian books?
Tuesday 29 April 2025, 5.15–6.15pm
Lecture 2: Shirkspaces: Where don’t George Gissing’s characters write?
Thursday 1 May 2025, 5.15–6.15pm
Lecture 3: The angel in the library: reading aloud between chattel slavery and domestic violence
Tuesday 6 May 2025, 5.15–6.15pm
Lecture 4: Biblioempathy: How rich and poor readers pictured each other
Thursday 8 May 2025, 5.15–6.15pm
Lecture 5: Literacy at nurse: Is it ever too late to read?
Thursday 15 May 2025, 5.15–6.15pm
Speaker
Leah Price is Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University, where she founded and directs the Initiative for the Book. Her works include What We Talk About When We Talk About Books and How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.
Location
The lecture series takes place in person at the Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre, Weston Library.
Weston Library, Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BG | Find us on Google Maps
Booking information
You must register in advance to attend. Please book one ticket per person: your ticket will cover all of the lectures in the series, and you can attend as many as you wish.
Book now
Once you have booked your place, the ticketing system will send you an automated confirmation.
Wheelchair access
The Weston Library is wheelchair-accessible.
