28th November - Fighting Fire

 

Our final meeting of term will both commemorate the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London earlier this year, with a pair of early modern sources, but will also think more broadly about the relationships between fire, people, and technologies. We meet, as usual, from 7.30-9pm in the Newnham Grange Seminar Room at Darwin College. All are most welcome to join us, as we bid farewell to the flames!

We will be reading:

• Samuel Pepys, Diary, September 1666.
• ‘The Londoners Lamentation’.
• R.M. Ballantyne, Fighting the Flames (1868), chapter IV, ‘Tells of a Fierce Fight with the Flames’.
• Hilaire Belloc, ‘Matilda: who told lies and was burned to death ’ (1907).

Optional further reading: Robert M. Hazen and Margaret Hindle Hazen, Keepers of the Flame: The role of fire in American culture, 1775-1925 (1992), chapter 4, 'Fighting Back'.