Susanne Stoddart (Royal Holloway, University of London)
‘“Life has been hardly worth living,” he said, as a tear trickled down his cheek’: Exploring Print-Press Representations of Edwardian Old Age Pensioners
Further details including abstract available here: 2013 Semester 2 Lunchtime Seminars
Dr Tuomas Tepora (University of Helsinki; Visiting Post-Doctoral Researcher, Queen Mary, University of London).
Coping with Violence: Sacrifice, Collective Memory and Emotion in Finnish Early 20th Century War Experiences.
Further details including abstract available here: 2013 Semester 2 Lunchtime Seminars
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On arrival in the penal colony, Van Diemen’s Land, convict exiles were grilled about their offending histories, occupations and family ties while their bodies were inspected for distinguishing characteristics. The resulting convict indents thus preserved the penal state’s biographical record on each offender with snatches of their responses to interrogation. Unwittingly, however, the authorities also captured an alternative form of personal testimony by transcribing the tattoos with which many convicts had adorned their bodies.
This paper proposes a method of ‘intimate reading’ using multiple record linkage to decode the symbolic and emotional worlds of the convicted via their tattoos. Immersive reading of this kind can help us reconstruct the agency and sensibility of those who have left few traces of personal testimony but whose behaviour was captured in abstract information garnered by officialdom. The paper focuses on convict men sentenced at Great Yarmouth in the 1830s and 1840s, and argues their elaborate tattoos spectacularly depicted the men they felt themselves to be. As in the sign of the Hope and Anchor that many convicts wore, tattoos anchored the Yarmouth men in the life they had known – their loved ones, trade, sports and passions – as they entered an unknown land.
Dr Helen Rogers is Reader in Nineteenth-Century Studies at Liverpool John Moores University, and the author of the blog Conviction: Stories From a Nineteenth-Century Prison.