Working with the Juvenilia Press: Students edit and publish the juvenile writing of Felicia Hemans

Seven PLC Year 11 students have been working with the Juvenilia Press in editing the juvenile poems of Felicia Browne, the child who became the noted nineteenth-century British poet, Felicia Hemans.

Emily Le, Marina Ruan, Imogen Sabey, Nicoletta Staphopoulos, Jemima Wall, Katherine Zhang

and Yvonne Zhao have worked enthusiastically to produce a volume of substance and significance. Felicia Hemans: Selected Early Poems has been launched. The Juvenilia Press, based in the School of the Arts and Media, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture at the University of New South Wales Sydney, is an academic teaching program usually involving post-graduate students. Our students have been privileged to work in this project and have been developing skills in research, editing, annotating and designing as they worked with myself as mentoring editor, and international scholar Professor Christine Alexander. Researching the life and times of Felicia Hemans allowed the students to understand the changes that the Romantic Revolution brought to life and art at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and to appreciate the difficulties involved in becoming a published poet, especially as a woman. Felicia Browne was born in 1793 in Liverpool, England, but by the time she was six years old, her family had moved to Gwrych in North Wales because of her father’s bankruptcy. Not many years later, he left the family to seek financial security for them in Canada but died before he achieved this. Growing up in a setting that she adored, the young Felicia was able to view the Welsh landscape through the lens of Romanticism, and her early poems reflect a fascination with landscape and the imagination. She read widely from an early age and her prodigious memory of this reading is evident in her youthful poems, where she quotes William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, William Collins and Robert Bloomfield, among others. As a juvenile poet, Felicia Browne was well aware of those who preceded her, and those whom she wished to emulate.

In 1808, when she was fourteen, Felicia’s first volume of poems was published, with a long list of subscribers that included the Prince of Wales. The students researched the significance of such lists in publishing as they explored the process of publication. From this volume, they selected poems to edit

Professor Christine Alexander introducing the students to the genre and history of Juvenilia.

Felicia Hemans: Selected Early Poems has been launched.

and annotate, developing skills in research and critical writing. The initial poem in the volume, addressed to a family friend and her patron, Lady Kirkwall, acknowledges her recognition of these early poems as “youthful vows to Poesy” that she intends to form “the future path I tread” and the student editors noted the growing maturity and assurance of the young poet. They were able to work with original manuscripts provided by the New York Public Library and the library of the University of Liverpool, England. In 1812, and nearly nineteen, Felicia Browne married Captain Alfred Hemans, a wounded veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, and had five sons in quick succession. In 1818, by the time the fifth was born, Captain Hemans had left his family to live in Rome (“for his health”) and Felicia Hemans was left to raise her young family initially with the assistance of her mother, and largely from the proceeds of having her poems published. She died in 1835, but her works continued to be popular for much of the nineteenth century, especially her poem “Casabianca” that famously begins “The boy stood on the burning deck”. This has been a journey of well over twelve months for the young editors. Sadly, they have had a virtual rather than a physical book launch, but you can still purchase a copy of their beautifully produced volume through the Juvenilia Press website (https://bit.ly/3qrAs2J) or by contacting Pamela Nutt at pnutt@ plc.nsw.edu.au. The Virtual Book Launch can be viewed at PLC Sydney’s YouTube Channel (https://youtu.be/PGLSpgLgz_Y).

Mrs Pamela Nutt

Juvenilia Coordinator, English Faculty