[Laura Ralph, a graduate student from Trinity Western University, British Columbia, visited the museum from 8-13 September 2008. Her purpose was to conduct research on books and other documents held by the museum, and to gain a sense of the place where Cowper lived and worked. This will feed into her MA thesis, on Cowper’s

The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth. (To Benjamin Bailey, 22 Nov. 1817)1 Keats’s reference to Adam’s dream recalls that section of Book VIII of Milton’s Paradise Lost in which Adam tells the angel Raphael what he remembers of his creation and entry into conscious life. A

NOT TO BE FOUND IN ANY OF THE BOOKS. Between Nose and Eyes a strange contest arose, The spectacles set them unhappily wrong; The point in dispute was, as all the world knows, To which the said spectacles ought to belong. So the Tongue was the Lawyer and argued the cause With a great deal

[What follows is a revised extract from the lecture given by Professor James Walvin of the University of York at the Annual Cowper and Newton Day, 24 April 2004. The day’s theme was ‘Olney – a Cradle of Emancipation?’] Cowper, Newton, and their Olney associates are famous for their effective and sustained attack on the

One man alone, the Father of us all, Drew not his life from woman; never gazed, With mute unconsciousness of what he saw, On all around him; learned not by degrees, Nor owed articulation to his ear; But, moulded by his Maker into Man At once, unstood intelligent, survey’d All creatures, with precision understood Their

If you have visited John Newton’s attic study in what is now the Old Vicarage at Olney, you will have seen these two texts which he kept on the wall as reminders to himself: Since thou wast precious in my sight, thou hast been honourable. Isaiah 43:4 BUT Thou shalt remember that thou wast a