Events

‘From Today, Painting is Dead’: Victorian Photographers in Highgate Cemetery

Thursday 21 February 2019 £9Book now

A Talk by Stephen Furniss

Stephen Furniss will talk about Victorian photography in general, but concentrate on the many Victorian photographers who are buried in Highgate Cemetery. Some of these were instrumental in making photography accessible and hugely 
popular. Among those included in the talk will be Antoine Claudet, who was a leading expert in the Daguerrotype process and is attributed with inventing the red safelight, the Watkins brothers, who photographed over 1,500 celebrities, James 
Perriman, a studio photographer who went to prison for displaying another photographer’s work outside his premises, and Valentine Blanchard, who took instantaneous photographs of London streets from a disguised van... 
Stephen Furniss was an antiques dealer, is a longtime supporter of Highgate Cemetery and is an expert on Victorian photography and related subjects. The memorial photograph shown is from his extensive collection.

If you have any Victorian photographs you would like Stephen to look at for identification and dating, do bring them along with you.

7.30pm, doors open 7.00pm. ticket includes a glass of wine

George Eliot’s Life in London

Tuesday 19 March 2019 £9Book now

A Talk by Rosemary Ashton

Rosemary Ashton’s talk discusses Marian Evans (soon to be known as ‘George Eliot’) in her early London years as a journalist living at 142 Strand, working for John Chapman’s radical journal, the Westminster Review, and meeting many of London’s major authors.  It follows her progress as she set up home with the married G.H. Lewes, at first in various lodgings in south London where she started writing fiction and began to be famous.  She is then seen in her large house near Regent’s Park, where she and Lewes entertained literary visitors.  Finally her last months in Cheyne Row with her new husband John Cross are described, as is her interment in 1880 in Highgate Cemetery.
Rosemary Ashton is Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at UCL, where she is a Fellow.  She is also a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature, and the Royal Society of Arts, and was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 1999.  She has written widely about 19th-century literature and culture.  Her books include critical biographies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1996), Thomas and Jane Carlyle (2002), George Eliot (1996), and G.H. Lewes (1991).

7.30pm, doors open 7.00pm. ticket includes a glass of wine

The Marx Memorial Lecture: ‘Marxian Political Economy, 201’

Thursday 9 May 2019 £12Book now

A Talk by Ben Fine

The two-hundredth anniversary of Marx’s birth coincided more or less with the tenth anniversary of the worst economic crisis of global capitalism in living memory. This has been followed by failure to renew sustained growth and universal pessimism over the prospects of avoiding yet another financial crisis and economic disaster. This all raises what insights Marxist political economy can offer to explain the current malaise, and to what extent Marx’s own thinking remains insightful more than 150 years since he published the first volume of Capital. These themes will be taken up in a lecture that also addresses the decisive role being played by ‘financialisation’ in the global and national economies, and in our daily lives.
Ben Fine is Professor of Economics, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is co-author of Marx’s Capital, Pluto Press, now in its sixth edition, and has previously been awarded the Deutscher Memorial Prize and the Gunner Myrdal Prize for other books.

7.30pm, doors open 7.00pm. ticket includes a glass of wine