Sarah Parker Remond lecturer, activist, and abolitionist Photo: Wikipedia
Continuing Christine Kinealy’s series on Black abolitionists who visited Ireland, we find, in Sara Parker Remond, a woman who was remarkable and fearless.
Frederick Douglass’s visit to Ireland 175 years ago an experience that he described as “transformative” has been commemorated on both sides of the Atlantic. However, Frederick was not the first or the last black abolitionist to spend time in the country, although he is the most celebrated. On 29 December 1858, Sarah Parker Remond sailed from Boston to Liverpool. Following a short stay in the north of England, Sarah travelled to Dublin, to lecture on abolition. Her gender not only marked her as an unusual spokesperson for abolition, but also her family connections. Sarah was the sister of Charles Lenox Remond who had lectured in Britain and Ireland in 1840 and 1841. During this time, he had spoken alongside Daniel O’Connell, then
The second modern source of the mask was the Parisian castmaking firm Lorenzi, which continues to make copies using a rubber mould. It is unclear how many Lorenzis are in circulation and, as they lack the inscription “Keats” on the throat (visible on the Smith cast), they are not as highly prized.
Peter Malone spent more than a decade tracing the history of Keats’s death masks, after discovering one in the window of a secondhand bookshop in 2001. That copies of the mask eventually reappeared is a sign of its worth, he says: “For the mask to spend 80 years in the dark means that someone valued it and knew its identity, otherwise it would have gone the way of most plaster.”
Poet John Keats, sketched by B R Haydon
Credit: Culture Club
Situated for two centuries in the icy silence of his tomb, in the Cimitero Acattolico, Rome, John Keats at least hasn’t had to confront the Keatsians – the scholars, academics and other buffoons, who have published books and papers about Keats’ Post-Newtonian Poetics, The Etymology of Porphyro’s Name, The Dying Keats: A Case for Euthanasia? and, not forgetting, Keats, Modesty and Masturbation.
Now comes Lucasta Miller’s Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph (Jonathan Cape, £17.99), which is one big farrago of cliché, jargon, mixed metaphor and general sloppiness. Page upon page is filled with phrases like under the skin, scruff of its neck, strapped for cash, cocked a snook, one fell swoop, punches far above the weight. Ad infinitum, via, raison d’être, status quo, inter alia and social kudos pepper the paragraphs, along with opined, emotional fallout, hands-on mentor, helicopter parenting, su