Lyell Lectures 2025: Victorian Books and their Servants

This year's Lyell Lectures will be given by Professor Leah Price at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford and via Zoom. The series will look at how Victorians and their servants interacted with books and their respective reading lives.

Price is Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University, where she directs the Initiative for the Book which she founded. Her works include What We Talk About When We Talk About Books and How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. 

The 2025 Lyell Lectures series comprises (all lectures running 5.15-6.15pm):

April 29 - Lecture 1: Bibliodomesticity: Who served Victorian books? which focuses on manuals for newly married women about how to keep house, and for bachelors interested in book collecting

May 1 - Lecture 2: Shirkspaces: Where don’t George Gissing’s characters write? looking at "novels that pit institutional library against bourgeois study and bohemian lodging-house"

May 6 - Lecture 3: Proxy print: How rich and poor readers pictured one other about inscriptions in the pastedowns of tracts "sold to mistresses for foisting onto maids"

May 8 - Lecture 4: Undercover downstairs: Why servants and freelancers judged one another concentrating on children’s fiction and debates about literacy 

May 15 - Lecture 5: The angel in the library: reading aloud between chattel slavery and domestic violence looking at "journalism that makes the maid a hostile witness to literary production"

Each lecture will take place in person at the Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre, Weston Library, in Oxford, and online via Zoom with the last lecture streamed via Teams. Advance registration is needed to attend with one ticket covering the entire series. Recordings of the lectures will be available on the Lyell Lectures webpage soon after they have finished.