Research Seminar: Musical idealism (and its secrets) in the long 19th century

Location: Conference Room, School of Music

Professor Phyllis Weliver (Saint Louis University)

Using the examples of the Royal College of Music, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the statesman William Gladstone, this paper explores the formulation of musical idealism in nineteenth-century Britain as Janus-faced. It argues that music-making as it was conceptualized had genuine civic benefit, while at the same time it could mask abuses, including of grooming within educational institutions. Because Coleridge's and Gladstone's influences during the century are hard to underestimate, the paper reaches back to Coleridge's poems to analyse how musical idealism was first constructed and to Gladstone's student days at Oxford to understand how such ideas began to spread.

Phyllis Weliver is Professor of English and Research Institute Fellow at Saint Louis University, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and Fellow of Gladstone’s Library in Wales. Much of her research explores literature and music in Victorian Britain as mutually constitutive with a range of nineteenth-century discourses. This work has contributed to BBC Two Television in the UK and to the “Essay” on BBC Radio 3. She has lectured internationally, including by invitation at the British Academy and Royal Academy of Music in London, have given the Annual Gladstone Lecture at Gladstone’s Library, and been twice funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA).

Her monographs are Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism (Cambridge, 2017), The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840–1910: Class, Culture and Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home. (Ashgate, 2000; Routledge, 2016). She has edited three collections of essays: The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry (Ashgate, 2005; Routledge 2016) and, with Katharine Ellis, Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century (Boydell & Brewer, 2013) and Reading Texts in Music and Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century (Boydell & Brewer, 2025).