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From The Archives

From the Archives allows us in the Humanist Library and Archives to share some of our wonderful items and our learning with you!

Victorian Blogging – Human Rights, from Victorian Reformers to the Universal Declaration

Today marks 70 years since the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris on 10th December 1948.  Human rights are the basic rights and freedoms that belong to every person in the world, regardless of where you are from, what you believe or how you live your life. The declaration consists […]

Victorian Blogging – Creative Writing Workshop (3)

Through July and August we ran a series of three creative writing workshops led by creative writing practitioner Michelle Crowther, as part of the Heritage Lottery funded Victorian Blogging project. Six pamphlets were chosen to provide inspiration for participants to write their own poems or short stories and some of the participants have kindly allowed us to share their […]

Victorian Blogging – Creative Writing Workshop (2)

Through July and August we ran a series of three creative writing workshops led by creative writing practitioner Michelle Crowther, as part of the Heritage Lottery funded Victorian Blogging project. Six pamphlets were chosen to provide inspiration for participants to write their own poems or short stories and some of the participants have kindly allowed us to share their […]

Victorian Blogging – Creative Writing Workshop

Through July and August we ran a series of three creative writing workshops led by creative writing practitioner Michelle Crowther, as part of the Heritage Lottery funded Victorian Blogging project. Six pamphlets were chosen to provide inspiration for participants to write their own poems or short stories and some of the participants have kindly allowed us to […]

Victorian Blogging – Nineteenth-Century Utopian Sci-Fi

This post was written by Conway Hall Library & Archives volunteer, Katarina, about an early sci-fi story found within our pamphlet collection. This is just one of over 1300 nineteenth-century pamphlets we are making freely available online through the Heritage Lottery funded digitisation project, Victorian Blogging. ‘The Man from the Moon’, a short science fiction story written […]

Victorian Blogging – A Pre-Raphaelite Pamphlet

This post was written by Conway Hall Library & Archives volunteer, Katarina, providing some interesting background to ‘Down Stream’, a pamphlet of the Rossetti poem that is part of our namesake Moncure Conway’s own pamphlet collection. This is just one of over 1300 nineteenth-century pamphlets we are making freely available online through the Heritage Lottery funded digitisation […]

Victorian Blogging – Zine Workshop

On the 13th of July we ran a zine-making workshop as part of the Heritage Lottery funded project, Victorian Blogging, taking our collection of nineteenth-century activist pamphlets as inspiration to create contemporary zines. Participants in the workshop have kindly allowed us to share their work. Our collection of over 1300 Victorian pamphlets covers topics such […]

Victorian Blogging – Edward Carpenter: ‘fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer and sex maniac’

Conway Hall’s library and archive collections bring together the words of many progressive individuals, but the phrase ‘a man ahead of his time’ has never been more fitting than when used to describe Edward Carpenter. The poet, writer and socialist promoted gay rights at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence, advocated for recycling […]

Charlotte Payne-Townshend

“She knows the value of her unencumbered independence” (George Bernard Shaw) Charlotte Payne-Townshend (1857-1943) was an Irish heiress and a political activist.  She married the playwright George Bernard Shaw in 1898 at the registry office in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. The economists and social reformers Beatrice and Sidney Webb, early members of the Fabian Society, […]

Victorian Blogging – Ten years since the abolition of the blasphemy laws

The 8th May 2018 marks ten years since the blasphemy laws were abolished in England and Wales through the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, following hundreds of years of campaigning. The offence of blasphemy has its roots in late medieval canon law, which allowed ‘heretics’ to be imprisoned and burnt to death under ecclesiastical authority. In the seventeenth […]

Victorian Blogging – The Conway Tracts

Dr. Moncure Conway (1832–1907) was an American, after whom Conway Hall is named. He settled in South Place Chapel from 1864 until 1897 with a break (1885-1892) when he returned to the United States to write his definitive biography of Thomas Paine and edit his letters. During his ministry in London he steered his rationally […]

Delving into Conway Hall’s suffrage history

In light of the recent centenary of the Representation of the People Act, which granted all property-owning British women over 30 the right to vote for the first time, we have been looking into our links with the women’s suffrage movement. Given Conway Hall’s long history of association with London’s most radical thinkers and reformers, we were […]

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