The lecture will take place at 7pm on Monday 28 May 2012 in room AG32/33 at Leeds Trinity University College with a wine reception from 6pm. The lecture is free and all are warmly welcomed to this event. However, for catering purposes, please let Heather Jones know that you will be attending by 24 May h.jones@leedstrinity.ac.uk
Faust Comes to Leeds: Creative Destruction in the Victorian City
Abstract: Nowadays we associate the Victorians with the instinct to preserve. John Ruskin, William Morris and the founders of the National Trust laid the bases for the modern preservation movement and heritage industry. This lecture reminds us that preservation only came as an afterthought and as a reaction to destruction. The Victorians were great destroyers, driven by a profound belief in the power of capitalism to create modern wonders out of the destruction of the past. The impact of ‘creative destruction’ was at its peak in the centre of historic towns such as Leeds, which - as a result of their Victorian renewal - lost
nearly all of the historic character they had retained before the nineteenth century.
Biography: Peter Mandler is Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and Bailey Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College. His books on modern British history include Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform (1990), The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (1997), History and National Life (2002), The English NationalCharacter (2006), and Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War, forthcoming from Yale University Pressin 2013. With a team of colleagues in a variety of disciplines he has recently completed a five-year Leverhulme Trust-funded project on Victorian attitudes to the past. In November 2012 he will succeed Colin Jones as President of the Royal Historical Society.
The Centre runs:
- a public seminar programme with speakers from all over the country and our own staff and postgraduates
- a regular series of one-day colloquia, associated with the Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies
- annual public lectures by our distinguished visiting professors.
For more information on the centre contact r.mitchell@leedstrinity.ac.uk