Word with Wagtails: Poetry and Testimony from York Castle Prison, 1750-1850.
Project Lead: Adam Smith
Student as Researcher: Tom Young
This website centres on an eighteenth-century poet and controversial newspaper man (journalist?) James Montgomery. It is a digital archive of poetry written by prisoners held in the York Castle and invites responses from students, academics and broader scopes within the public, reintroducing those eighteenth-century characters, stories and attitudes into twenty-first century York.
Tom young will be helping in widening the corpus of data by consulting with the York Castle Prison Criminal database, York Minster Archive, York Explore and the Burney Newspaper Archive. Alongside this Tom will be getting involved in social media, making blog posts to the website and being an active presence on Twitter.
This project hopes to add historical information to the archives, contributing to a chapter in a book on eighteenth-century poetry, and leading to bids for large network grants to the AHRC and British Academy; along with local, smaller, stakeholders.