767 A Black Woman in the Romantic Archive (with Mathelinda Nabugodi) | My Last Book with Richard Kopley

Summary

Podcast Summary: The History of Literature — Ep. 767

“A Black Woman in the Romantic Archive” (with Mathalinda Nabugodi) | “My Last Book” with Richard Kopley Release Date: January 15, 2026
Host: Jacke Wilson
Guests: Mathalinda Nabugodi (comparative literature scholar), Richard Kopley (Edgar Allan Poe expert)

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Overview

This episode explores Mathalinda Nabugodi’s experience as a Black woman investigating the archives of Romantic-era writers, bringing new attention to whose histories are preserved and who is left out. Jacke Wilson and Nabugodi discuss race, material culture, literary history, and the joys and challenges of close archival research. The episode closes with Poe expert Richard Kopley’s reflection on the one book he’d choose to read at the end of his life.

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Main Theme

Re-examining Romanticism:

The episode examines the legacies of Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and the Shelleys through the lens of race and archive, considering what is preserved, forgotten, silenced, or subverted—both in materials and memory. Nabugodi discusses her book, The Trembling Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive, and interrogates how Black lives intersected with the material and social worlds of canonical literature.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Mathalinda Nabugodi’s Archival "Sleuthing"

• She describes the “sleuth” label (thanks to her editor) as capturing her mission to find “traces that are often quite small, quite marginal, and yet to bring them center stage.” ([06:16])
• Early discovery: A letter from Byron referencing a “little black boy” (a servant delivering secret notes), spurring questions about Black presences and absences in significant literary archives. ([06:03])

2. Conventional Wisdom About Romantic Poets

• Romantic poets are popularly seen as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” (Lady Caroline Lamb), focused on sublime feeling and subjectivity ([06:58]).
• Wilson references Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility,” and Nabugodi reframes this as an effort to find “universal knowledge” through personal emotions ([07:27]).
• Romanticism is positioned as reaction to Enlightenment rationality, prioritizing subjective truths over quantifiable knowledge ([07:55]).

3. Ties Between Romantic Poetry and Slavery

• Nabugodi highlights the financial underpinnings of Romantic writers’ lifestyles: “where does the money come from to finance that?” For Wordsworth, family income and patronage derived from the profits of slavery ([09:29]).
• She argues “their world is infiltrated and infused with the slave economy” even if the poets did not write about it directly ([10:57]).
• Romantics’ silence on slavery is not innocence: “To choose not to engage with it is a political choice.” ([11:09])
• The complexity of indirect complicity: "Even if they don't come in touch with enslaved people directly, they would no doubt consume sugar or coffee produced by enslaved people." ([09:44])

4. Material Culture: Objects in the Archive

• Nabugodi details unusual items she found: “a bracelet made of Mary Shelley’s hair, Byron’s silk-lined boots, Percy Shelley’s gilded baby rattle.” ([01:06])
• Objects physically tether the poets to the global economy of their era—traveling cutlery, plates, and the ways their everyday lives were tied to colonialism ([12:00]).
• She explores how “material objects anchor them in the world and let us tie political issues to poems” ([12:00]).

5. Omission and Erasure in Literary History

• Coleridge’s engagement with early “racial science” is largely “erased” from literary canons—he sought to taxonomize races with Europeans on top, yet modern scholarship avoids this aspect ([14:00]).
• “We ourselves feel uncomfortable with a thought like, ‘Oh, my favorite poet is a racist.’” Nabugodi addresses the tension in loving works by flawed people ([14:27]).

6. Shame, Justification, and Self-Contortion

• Nabugodi compares British poets to Thomas Jefferson (US) who “contorted” his logic to justify racist positions ([14:34]).
• Wordsworth argued against abolition, fearing chaos, while clinging to a self-image of being “against slavery”—a painful contradiction ([15:48]).

7. “Paper Sleuthing” and Intimate Details

• Paper-making details (watermarks, linen rags) allow dating of manuscripts and reveal connections: Percy and Mary Shelley shared supplies, highlighting collaborative and domestic realities ([17:05], [18:05]).

8. Hair, DNA, and Resonance of Materiality

• Hair as a love token or mourning symbol (like Mary Shelley's hair bracelet) links the Romantic fascination with embodiment to Nabugodi’s own experience as a woman with Afro hair. Hair, for racial theorists, was often more significant than skin color in drawing racial lines ([22:01]-[22:37]).

9. The “Dark Interloper”: Race and Presence in the Archive

• Nabugodi felt the “transgression” of being an archivist not only as a Black woman but as someone with a political agenda, aware that her presence might seem “iconoclastic” when probing well-loved national figures ([26:22]-[27:35]).

Notable Quote:
“I was also aware that my work might seem sacrilegious to some... It’s not appropriate to bring a contemporary agenda to these icons of literature.” — Mathalinda Nabugodi ([26:48])

• She stresses that her work is about enhancing knowledge, not “taking people down a peg,” and that flawed creators can still produce powerful work ([29:32]).
• Importance of seeking resistance, beauty, and joy in the Black archive, not just pain and dehumanization:
  “By only repeating those kind of dehumanizing materials, I would be repeating the dehumanization of those persons.” ([30:55])

10. Hidden Resistance and Cultural Survival

• Black carnival costumes and cultural practices retained African roots unintelligible to white British observers, highlighting resistance through opacity, creativity, and enduring culture ([32:44]-[34:41]).

11. The Trembling Hand: Layered Meanings

• The title alludes to the literal trembling of hands in manuscripts but also Nabugodi’s own “tentativeness” amidst fragmentary and uncertain historical evidence ([34:53]-[36:39]).
• “Maybe my own uncertainty in the face of these materials...” ([35:39])

Memorable Anecdotes:

• Poignant observation about Shelley writing poems “for Jane only to see” on shared household paper, yet Mary Shelley omitting these from publication after his death ([36:58]-[38:34]).

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Sleuthing:
  “Sleuthing is trying to find those traces that are often quite small, quite marginal, and yet to bring them center stage.” — Mathalinda Nabugodi ([06:16])
• On Wealth and Slavery:
  “It’s money made on enslavement that are enabling Wordsworth to have his education and to have the free time to pursue literature, as opposed to a job that would actually pay him.” — Nabugodi ([09:29])
• On Racial Erasure:
  “Not just a question of what they did or did not say, but also a question of what people afterwards have chosen to emphasize or look away from.” — Nabugodi ([14:09])
• On the Poet’s Flaws:
  “People feel uncomfortable with notion that someone whose work they love might have had opinions that they find distasteful.” — Nabugodi ([28:21])
• On Joy in the Archive:
  “There’s a joy in reading. There’s an interest and passion and commitment in reading poetry, which is in very sharp contrast with a history of enslavement.” — Nabugodi ([30:55])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction to Mathalinda Nabugodi and the Book: [01:06] – [04:55]
• Sleuthing & the "Little Black Boy" in Byron’s Letters: [05:13] – [06:16]
• Conventional View of Romantic Poets: [06:24] – [07:27]
• Romanticism vs. Enlightenment: [07:55] – [08:27]
• Connecting Romanticism to Slavery: [09:18] – [11:09]
• Material Objects in the Archive: [12:00] – [13:20]
• Erasure of Racial Science from Coleridge’s Legacy: [14:09] – [14:27]
• Shame and Intellectual Contortions (Jefferson Parallels): [14:34] – [15:48]
• Paper Sleuthing & Domestic Intimacy: [17:05] – [18:36]
• Hair as Material & Symbol: [19:13] – [22:37]
• Resonance and Presence in Archives: [26:22] – [29:32]
• Seeking Joy & Black Cultural Agency: [30:55] – [32:44]
• Carnival, Cultural Continuity, and Resistance: [32:44] – [34:41]
• Meaning of “The Trembling Hand”: [34:53] – [36:39]
• Personal Reflections on Finding Poetry Manuscripts: [36:39] – [38:34]

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Final Segment: Richard Kopley — “My Last Book” ([41:02]–[45:54])

Segment Overview

Expert Richard Kopley shares what he would want as his last book: the poetry of William Wordsworth, especially for its evocation of nature and childhood.

• He would want to hear “My heart leaps up when I behold…” ([42:14]), and the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.”
• Kopley relates Wordsworth’s “backyard nature” to his own childhood experiences, reinforcing literature’s capacity to universalize the wonder of childhood, regardless of physical environment.

Notable Quote:
“It's as if I had meadows and mountains. That little green space was enough for my imagination.” — Richard Kopley ([43:44])

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Tone and Language

Throughout, Jacke Wilson’s tone is enthusiastic, self-deprecating, and seeking connection (“I feel like a fat-glutted king...except I’m the peasant and these guests are the royalty...” [03:30]). Nabugodi is thoughtful, candid, and open, weaving scholarly analysis with personal insight. The episode maintains an inviting, passionate, and reflective mood, with an emphasis on curiosity, discovery, and wrestling with complexities.

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Conclusion

This episode presents a nuanced, deeply personal investigation into the material traces of Romantic poets, challenging listeners to reconsider whose histories are present and whose are absent in literary legacy. By integrating objects, paper, letters, and even hair, Mathalinda Nabugodi foregrounds the intertwined stories of race, resistance, and literary creation. The episode closes on a meditative note about the enduring power of poetry to evoke wonder and memory, no matter one’s background.

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Transcript

[Jack Wilson]

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[Jack Wilson]

Hello. Do you ever sit back in awe of how your life has gone and think, boy, how did I get so lucky? I feel that way. Just explaining our topic today we're going to be joined by a literary sleuth, a black woman, Mathalinda Nabugodi, who loves the romantic period, the works and lives of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats and Byron and the Shelleys. She's gone into the archives to see what's there. Not just letters and manuscripts, but objects. A bracelet made of Mary Shelley's hair, Byron's silk lined leather boots. Percy Shelley's gilded baby rattle. The death mask preserving Keats calm face. And she's reported back on what she's seen, on what that tells us about them and their writing and what it felt like for her, Mathalinda Nabogodi to be doing that. In her words, she. She felt like a dark interloper. She's not the person they likely imagined would be in those archives examining these remnants. And maybe in some cases they'd have been firmly against her appearance there. Who is this scholar who's here to study and celebrate us 200 years later? Well, how did that experience make Mathilinda feel? We'll talk to her about it today on the history of literature. Hello everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. Like I said, I'm feeling very lucky to have these guests like Francesca Wade who was here in our last episode, and Mathalinda Nabogodi in this one. And our next guest has written a comprehensive biography of James Baldwin. We'll have that on Monday. So wow, I feel like a Fat glutted king. Except I'm the peasant and these guests are the royalty. I'm a fat glutted peasant who somehow has gotten to dine at the royal table. I'm not sure how this happened, but who cares? I'm too busy eating partridge or squab or whatever else they're serving up these days. Okay, remember to shoot me that message about your favorite independent bookstore. I would love to hear about it. If you own one, if you work at one, or if you just like visiting one, I want to know. We're going to cover that intensively in 2026. We're also going to finish up our top 25 books of all time. We still have numbers three, two and one to cover. And we're launching a new feature, Jack Reads the Gospels. So stay tuned for that. Today we will have Richard Copley, an expert in Edgar Allan Poe, who's going to tell us about his choice for the last book he will ever read. Will it be something by Poe? Wouldn't that be an exciting choice? Go out with a heart rushing bang. We'll see. But first let's lets hear from Mathalinda Nabugodi about the heart rushing bang or at least the thoughts of a trembling hand inspired by her visit to the Romantic archives. Okay. Joining me now is Mathalinda Nabugodi, who is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at University College London. She is the author of Shelley with a Critical Mosaic and one of the editors of the six volume Longman edition of the Poems of Shelley. She's here today to discuss her new book, the Trembling Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive. Math. Linda Nambugodi, welcome to the History of Literature.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

Hi. Thank you very much for having me. I'm really excited to be here today.

[Jack Wilson]

So the description of this book calls you a literary sleuth. So tell us about your sleuthing in the Trembling Hand. What question or questions were you attempting to address?

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

I actually love the literary sleuth depiction, which is thanks to my editor John Freeman who came up with it and yeah, absolutely enjoy seeing myself like that. And what I was trying to do is I spent some years looking through different archives associated with Romantic poets and I became increasingly interested in what they revealed about their lives other than the questions I was immediately researching quickly. I was interested in how black people whom they might have met left traces in those archives. Yeah, to give you an example, and this was very early on, before I was even working on the book, but I was looking at Lord Byron's Love Notes to his mistress, Teresa Guccioli. And there's a letter when he talks about a little black boy delivering those notes. So he was a servant in that household, and he was secretly carrying these clandestine notes between Byron and his mistress.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

And so the notes are really exciting as evidence of Byron's love affair, of course. And I mean, they're preserved because it's Byron's handwriting, but I thought, well, maybe they're also carrying a trace of that little black boy whose name we don't actually know.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

Sleuthing is trying to find those traces that are often quite small, quite marginal, and yet to bring them center stage.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, okay, so let's talk about just our general understanding or the common understanding, the sort of conventional wisdom around Romanticism and Romantic poets. What are people reading the poets of that period for? And what does the general narrative maybe leave out?

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

Well, so I think the first thing that comes to mind is a phrase by Lady Caroline Lamb, who's another one of Byron's mistresses, actually, but she called him mad, bad and dangerous to know.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

And I think that really sums up the kind of view of the Romantic poet. He's sort of there with his white shirt wide open, striding across the mountain, having all these sublime emotions. So it's a lot about the power of feeling and poetry to convey strong emotions, but also a lot of it is about subjectivity and how your own experience carries truths.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, right. And Wordsworth here, the emotions recollected in tranquility. That was kind of his whole project.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

Yes, exactly. And I think the key to Wordsworth, the way I read him at least, is that he's spending a lot of time thinking about his own emotions. But not because he's self indulgent and an egotist. Maybe that too. But primarily for him, it's a philosophical project in reconstructing his own mind, he believes to be able to uncover truths about the human mind. As such, your own experience will open up into a kind of universal knowledge.

[Jack Wilson]

Right.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

It'd be quite new for Romanticism because from a literary historical point of view, it comes after the period of enlightenment. And enlightenment is all about reason. It's about being able to analyze, quantify, make up taxonomies of the world. Right. So kind of all knowledge is out in the world and the human mind just counts it, basically. And I think Romantics are sort of turning against that view of reason, against that rationalist attitude, and that's why they're so interested in emotions and subjective experience, in order to say that there are different Truths that can just be conveyed by counting things.

[Jack Wilson]

All right, okay. So to kind of tie this back into your book, when you talk about the impact that maybe this little black boy had on the poetry of Byron, what if a skeptic says, well, maybe their lives, you know, maybe that wasn't what they were trying to convey. Maybe they were, you know, when Wordsworth is in a field of daffodils, thinking about his childhood or trying to understand nostalgia and the way that works on him, or if they're looking at a thunderstorm or a waterfall or something and trying to feel the power of it, maybe that didn't have that much to do with things like the slave trade or racial violence and they were just writing about what they knew. What's the best response to skeptical view that wants to keep things narrow like that?

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

Well, I think Wordsworth is a really good example here because the question is, if you're going to walk around all day, look at mountains and waterfalls and think about yourself, where does the money come from to finance that?

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, right.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

In the case of Wordsworth, he was not from a very well off family, but his father worked for someone who was a major slaveholder. So obviously had plantations in the Caribbean, but he lived in England. Later on, his father passed away. When I was quite young, Wordsworth had a patron, his name is Pinney, who also was a major plantation owner. So it's money made on enslavement that are enabling Wordsworth to have his education and to have the free time to pursue literature, as opposed to a job that would actually pay him. So one thing I'm trying to think about is really how this blood money is infiltrating the world of English literature and culture more widely. But there's also another answer to that question. And so thinking about the premise was, can you pose a question as their lives had nothing to do with slavery, so that's why they didn't write about it. And I would also challenge that presumption because the transatlantic slave economy is a really big part of Britain's economy at the time. One estimate is that 60% of British trade is tied up in that transatlantic economy. And of course, slavery is at the heart of it. So even if they don't come in touch with enslaved people directly, they would no doubt consume sugar or coffee produced by enslaved people. They might have mahogany furniture, which is also another good from the Caribbean. So there's a sense in which, materially speaking, their world is infiltrated and infused with the slave economy.

[Jack Wilson]

And it is an issue that is Prominent. It's not. It's not as if this is. Is not in the public discourse and so on. They're not talking about it. They're deliberately choosing not to talk about it.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

Exactly. And I think it's also think about the political campaigns that led up to the abolition of the slave trade. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and then again abolished slavery itself in 1833. I mean, the decades before those dates of abolition. The slavery question, as they called it, is really one of the big questions of public debate. So there's no way that they would have missed that this was a political issue. And to choose not to engage with it is a political choice, as you say.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, okay. So we have that topic on the table. You use particular objects to get at your interrogation of the poets and to frame what you're looking for. Your inquiry, I guess I should say. What appeals to you about approaching these poets through the use of objects?

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

So one of the starting points for this book was, as I mentioned, I was in the archive and I was looking at. I specifically watched an edition of Percy by Shelley's verse. I was looking at his poetic manuscripts. But while I was there, I realized that there are all these other things also in the archive, such as his baby rattle, which is one object I'm talking about in the book. There's his traveling cutlery, because he would have his own knife and fork with him when he traveled. There's like a plate that he used for raisins. And these are slightly random. Collection of personal belongings are just there. And they're part of the archive, but they're not very well known. And as for scholars don't really know what to do with them. So I was quite fascinated by these objects. And I was also thinking about how these objects are in a way, situating the poets in the world. So I'm in a book. The importance of economics and finance and these global flows and how the Romantic period is really a period when you see global capitalism being established and consolidated. Right. So through these material objects, they come in touch with this global economy. So I suppose initially the idea was to use the object to anchor them in the world and to be able to tie in political issues with the discussion of ideas and poems. Initially, I suppose I also had this view that I don't think they said very much about slavery, or they didn't think very much about black people, or they had no ideas about race. And that was kind of my starting point. But I realized the more I looked into the materials that they did actually have quite a lot to say about things like enslavement or black people or race more generally. But often their comments are not very palatable to us. And I think there's also the silence around what they did say. So there's a kind of sense in which maybe we don't want to read. For me, a big, big kind of part of that is Coleridge, who engaged with what we later call racial science. So he had this big project of determining the different races of the world and putting them in a hierarchy where people who are European come out on top and people who are African and Asian come out at the bottom. And he spent loads of time thinking about this and creating this hierarchy. But then that part of his writing is just completely neglected. Not just a question of what they did or did not say, but also a question of what people afterwards have chosen to emphasize or look away from.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, right. We've sort of erased that part from the side of the works of Coleridge that make it into the canon.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

Yes, exactly. Because I think we ourselves feel uncomfortable with a thought like, oh, my favorite poet is a racist.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, yeah. And do you get the sense from these poets that they felt a kind of shame as well? Were they aware enough to have shame around it? And I'll give you an example from the States is we have the example of Thomas Jefferson, who was kind of a contemporary. And on the one hand, he can write, all men are created equal. And on the other hand, he goes through these intellectual somersaults, and he's really contorting his own ability to reason and logic in order to try to prove to himself that a black woman couldn't be an actual poet, for example, and that he's in his own life. He's doing things that he's clearly ashamed of, but he's trying to justify it. And you can get the sense when you're reading his writings about it that he knows he's wrong, but he's determined to kind of support his own racism through some kind of logical argument, even as he can. He must have seen the fallacies that he was committing when he was trying to do that.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

And I think it's a really interesting question, and it does bring to mind Wordsworth, who throughout his life commented on the slavery question. And there's a particular letter I spent quite a bit of time reading in the book where he is basically arguing against abolition of slavery, so in favor of maintaining slavery. But he's trying to say that actually he is against slavery because that is Bad in its own right. However, given current conditions, it would be worse to abolish it because it would lead to some sort of chaos in the former plantation colonies, and that it would lead to political violence and what have you. And that that goes to that kind of really contorted argument where he's trying to be like, I'm anti gray, but I'm just anti abolition more.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, right. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about your sleuthing. I was wondering if you could kind of explain to the listeners what you have done with paper and what you were able to glean from your study of paper, where you were examining the certain types of paper. I was really struck by how specific that was. But how much is revealed from what you were able to look at?

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

Well, so a wonderful thing about working on Romantic period is because paper was still made by hand. It was made out of old linen rags, predominantly, that would be sort of mushed together, and then that mush would be the material paper is made of. But in that process, they use frames in a certain way, which means that it is possible today to identify papers from the same batch because of features such as watermarks. Watermarks often carry dates, which is really helpful in dating things. So what I was interested in, particularly when I was doing a lot of paper sleuthing, was part of the work I was doing on Percy Shelley's poetry. And I wanted to date as exactly as possible the order of composition in which he wrote his poems. Sometimes he can do that because he talks about it. Say, in the latter, he'll say, like, oh, today I wrote a poem. But often he doesn't. What I wanted to do was identify the exact piece of paper that he wrote the poem on and then try to find letters from the same period. So I can make an argument such as, on the 1st of January, he wrote a letter on this piece of paper. So therefore, the poem written on the same paper is most likely from that same period. It's really great as well, because Percy Shelley obviously lives together with Mary Shelley, so you can see them also using the same paper. So it's also. I just imagine, you know, how the working desk was set up and have a pile of papers, and she might write a letter to one of her friends, and then he'll come and write a poem and so on and so forth. So I think it really gives you a wonderful insight into working habits.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. And it brings these people to life.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Jack Wilson]

And then from there, as you were mentioning, you see other things in the archive Besides just the paper, the baby rattle, the bracelet made of Mary Shelley's hair, and so on. And so for each of these objects, then, are you able to tie them into something to do with either a black person that was in their life or something larger like the industry or the slave trade or something that was able to produce such an item?

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

Yes, exactly. So I try to start with objects, become a focal point of my ideas for each chapter. So each chapter is a particular writer, is the five Poets, plus Mary Shelley. And in a way, there's also a particular idea that I'm trying to explore. So, for example, you mentioned the bracelet made of Mary Shelley's hair, which is such a suggestive item, and the fact that it's made of a piece of her body is completely mind boggling to me. This is something that they did at the times in the 18th and 19th centuries, they would use hair in order to make jewelry. So you weave it into a bracelet or a necklace, and that is a way to commemorate often someone who's passed away. So you keep a piece of them with you. And for me, that is in its own interesting history, of course, it ties in very nicely with Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, which is about a creature which is made of dead body parts. Right, right.

[Jack Wilson]

When you mentioned that, the first thing I thought of was, oh, we probably have her DNA, we could bring her back to life. And then I thought, of all the people in the world that we should be careful about bringing back to life. I think Mary Shelley is probably number one on the list.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

I mean, I think it would be really cool if we could. There's also, I mean, so another thing they did with hair was they would exchange locks of hair as a token of intimacy, as a kind of, you're a close friend or your lover and, you know, give a person a lock of hair, which I think kind of comparable to today. We might share photographs in that way.

[Jack Wilson]

Mm.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

And of course, this is before photography, and it's interesting to see people talking about this practice in the period, and they talk about it as well. It's a way to have someone absent with you. So it's a way to retain a physical connection to someone who is, you know, distant in space.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, right, yeah. Do you feel that then, as an archivist, do you feel like it brings these people closer to you?

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

Well, I think the hair is creepy. So another thing that happens because of that, because of the kind of cultural importance of hair and sharing lots of hair, roughly around the Romantic period, they begin to collect hair of famous people. So it becomes a thing to have. You know, you might collect manuscripts and you might also collect lots of hair. So today, in various archives there, there's quite a lot of hair from people like romantics and other famous authors.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

One question that I was grappling with, like, is this all real? Like, if you would take DNA samples, would it even be from the same person? It was, like, the easiest thing in the world to fake. It's just like, you know, take any lock of hair and say, this is Mary Shelley's.

[Richard Copley]

Yeah.

[Jack Wilson]

Especially when these people became famous and maybe there was even some money involved.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

Exactly. But then, of course, I was thinking about hair and the way in which this hair is revered and commemorated, and I was thinking about my own hair. I have Afro hair, and I know that I. I have very complex emotions around my hair. So I was also beginning to think, well, how did people understand Afro hair in the period? And so the kind of. The object which is made of hair made me think about the history of hair in a wider sense and also in a racialized sense. And one thing that I discovered when I started reading these people who are theorizing race is that for them, hair is as important and sometimes even more important than skin color in determining who's black and who's white.

[Jack Wilson]

Oh, yeah.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

Which is partially to do with, I suppose, if you're living in a Caribbean climate, white people can also get quite dark. So I think they would sort of see how skin tone was not sufficient to draw the kind of strict boundary they wanted to draw between white and black. And so hair came in as an important additional marker there.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Okay, let's take a quick break and come back with more from Mathalinda Nabogodi.

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[Jack Wilson]

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[Jack Wilson]

Okay, we're back. So, math. Linda, are you familiar with. I know this is asking you to step outside of your specialty here, but Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, and in particular the preface, the Custom House, which is at the beginning of that book, the narrator in that talks about finding a piece of embroidery in the archives one day, and he places it's the A, you know, the scarlet letter. He places it against his breast and he feels it burning as if it's made of red hot iron. And I wanted to say I sort of imagined you like that as I read about you encountering the objects in these archives, that it's. These things are jumping out at you as having a kind of resonance, or like you said, it makes you feel creepy or it gives you this emotional response, and yet you call yourself a dark interloper. So you kind of have this. This mixed response as being someone who is privileged enough to be able to see these objects and items, but also someone who knows that they maybe wouldn't be expecting you to be the person who would be encountering them. So maybe you could just talk about that a little bit. What was it like for you to be a black woman in these physical archives, encountering these materials that you were going to use to write your book, even as you knew that your ancestry was largely absent from those materials?

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

I think in a way, for me, the sense of transgression is not even to do with race primarily. It's to do with how an archive is a space that you need to have permission to enter. And often you get permission because you are a scholar and you're interested in rational, scholarly pursuits that will add to knowledge and so on. And you need to go to Narco and be like, well, actually, all I want to do is fawn over this object. Already there's something sketchy going on. I think I was also aware that I was bringing an agenda. And I think, politically speaking, in the last two years, there's been a lot of debate around questions of race and so on. So I was also aware that my work might seem sacrilegious to some, or it might seem that it's not appropriate to bring a contemporary agenda to these icons of literature. And particularly because I'm based in the UK and I think here the Romantics Amongst other things, are also very much seen as part of a national heritage, national treasures. So there's also something iconoclastic around taking these really canonical and really beloved authors and maybe revealing truths that are not so palatable about them.

[Jack Wilson]

And I always view that as enriching our experience and making it, you know, just understanding them better feels to me like we're going to have a better time and it's going to be more fulfilling for us to understand everything about them as we read their poetry. But I can see where not everybody takes that point of view. And we have the same issue here. I mentioned Thomas Jefferson, where they. They think, well, why can't we just have our heroes? And why can't you leave alone a president and. And someone who was, you know, a founding father and so on? And they feel like, well, why do you have to take everyone down a peg like this? But it. My guess is that's not exactly what. How you would see what you're doing.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

No, definitely not. As they say, it's more about knowledge, and we need to know these things to understand them better. And I also think. I mean, I already mentioned. But I think there's something around people feel uncomfortable with notion that someone whose work they love might have had opinions that they find distasteful. And today we speak maybe about cancel culture and the notion that if someone says something racist, then we should therefore not buy their books. Right. So I think it's kind of. I think as a culture, as a society, we are not fully comfortable with admiring people whom we at the same time might look down upon. That, for me, is very romantic because it's partially to do with that romantic cult of the self and that really strong emphasis on the creator, the genius who writes the poetry, who writes the music, who draws or paints and magnificent work because they're so interested in the individual. That's where it suddenly becomes important for an individual to be a good person, for their art to be good. And maybe what I'm saying somewhere is that also people with problematic opinions can make poetry that I find really powerful. And that speaks to me even if that person might not have respected me because I'm a black woman.

[Jack Wilson]

Right? And when we read literature, we understand that. We understand that characters who are, you know, about whom we only have positive things to say are not the most interesting characters. That it's the flaw and it's the complexities and the contradictions that make the characters interesting. And I don't know why we can't apply that to the poets as well, to know that Tolstoy had such an unusual marriage and things like that, to me, it just makes the work more interesting. But I guess I feel like we're probably preaching to the choir a little bit on that. But one thing that you did is in writing a book like the one that you've written here, one approach might be to take a poet who's writing about daffodils or memory or freedom or something like that, and to contrast it with the pain and the subjugation that that poet's black contemporaries were experiencing. And to kind of just point out, well, look at. Isn't this hypocritical? Or isn't this a terrible blind spot? But you instead were looking for instances of resistance, beauty and joy. So why did you take that approach, and what did you find?

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

So it was really important to me in approaching black history and particularly trying to recover black experiences, whether individuals or more widely, to not just focus on the pain and suffering that they have experienced. Because a lot of that is very dehumanizing. And I felt by only repeating those kind of dehumanizing materials, I would be repeating the dehumanization of those persons. I think it also came about partially because I'm writing a book about poetry, which for most of us is something we engage with pleasure. There's a joy in reading. There's a interest and passion and commitment in reading poetry, which is in very sharp contrast with a history of enslavement, which is much more to do with violence and horror and quite painful emotions. And so I suppose I wanted to, because of the emperor, to try to find us that positive experience in the black archive, as it were. And to think of black people also as being creators, as being poets, in a wide sense, in fashioning what was resistance, creating sparks of beauty in what is a really horrible environment and thinking about how they insisted on their humanity. And one way of insisting on one's humanity is through culture, is through music. There's one chapter, talk about carnival practices. It's through dressing up in beautiful clothes. It's to performing plays. It's through acting. So this through cultural expression that we insist on humanity. And I wanted to also highlight how black people are doing that even under the horrendous conditions that slavery was.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. And did you find any other instances?

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

I mean, I must say I was again surprised by how much there was.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, right, right.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

And there's a kind of one thing that I understood which I didn't know when I set out, as there was genuine discovery in my process was that there are many records from the Caribbean, from the British West Indies, from the period where there are white people who are describing what the black people are doing and what they're like. And of course, a lot of them are geared towards a British audience who will not necessarily have met that many black people. And I think that's sort of one of the differences between the US and the UK experience is that a lot of the slavery happened offshore. So it was kind of away from public consciousness in that sense. But what I realized in reading all these accounts of what black people are like is that there's such a lack of understanding in the sense of the commentators are describing something, but they don't understand what they're describing. And so what they realized was the extent to which black people were purposefully hiding what they were up to from the people who claimed to enslave them. And so they're getting quite a resistance was precisely by hiding and not disclosing what's going on and what that meant for the archive is that we can have almost a presence or an absence. Like we sense there's something going on here, but we can't quite tell what it is. Maybe this sounds a little bit abstract. I can give you an example that kind of brings it to life. Okay, so you mentioned carnival and the way. So we have depictions of how black people, many of them are enslaved, would dress up for carnival. And there are some descriptions of those costumes. But what's not evident is that a lot of those costumes have origins in West African cultures. So enslaved people would be recreating certain elements from their ancestral cultures. But the white observers who can describe what they're wearing do not understand the spiritual significance of those elements. As scholars today are trying to do anthropological history to reconstruct what exactly those things might have signified.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Let me move forward a little bit and ask you, where did you draw your title, the Trembling Hand? From whose hand was or is trembling and why?

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

So the Trembling Hand is a title that came to me a very long time ago when I was thinking about reading manuscripts. You can sometimes tell if someone is agitated, for example, because the handwriting seems shaky.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

Or you can sort of try to speculate, oh, this person must have been upset or must have been sad, or what have you so kind of inferring emotional states from the handwriting, which is, from a scholarly point of view, an absolute no go. So I think it was just part of my interest in the kind of marginal additional bits of knowledge that you get in an archive that's not what you're supposed to be looking at. So that's. The trembling was maybe initially the notion of someone's hand trembling while writing something.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

But I think it came to me to also signify my own hands because we spoke about me being in archives and, you know, touching something like a bracelet made of Mary Shelley's hair that makes me tremble, because what if I break it? Or what if I do something wrong? So it's also a sense of uncertainty, and maybe my own uncertainty in the face of these materials, because it's easy to set myself up as an authority. But actually, often I don't know. And as I mentioned, the archive is particular to black history. The archive is often fragmentary. We only have bits and pieces. We don't have a complete picture. So I think I also wanted to capture some of that tentativeness in what I'm trying to do.

[Jack Wilson]

And there's something about spending so much time with these people. And I think you refer to yourself as a starstruck fan girl at one point. And I think it was in the context of the Jane poems that Shelley was writing to Jane Williams, whom he seems to have loved. And I just got the sense that you love these poets and love the archives and that your hand does tremble when you come across something that you know that one of them wrote to another, and that maybe there's going to be some knowledge inside there that will open us up to these people and let us see something new about them.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

And the Jane poems is a really good example to tie back to the question about paper, because Jane Williams is the wife of. She passes as the wife of Shelley's friend Edward Williams. They're not actually married, but that's another story. And they live. They share a house with Mary Shelley. So Mary and Percy Shelley live in one room, and Jane and Edward Williams live in another room. And Shelley is completely besotted with Jane. And he writes these love poems. And this is something that I really don't get. He writes, like, say, a love poem, and then he writes at the top of it for Jade only to see, and another one that says not for Mary to see. I just. I imagine if I'm Mary and I find that. Is that not the first thing I would look at?

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, right. I don't think you'd even need to look at it. I think just. I think if. If I wrote that at the top of. Of a letter, I think my wife would. She wouldn't need to read any further. She would know she would be rightfully upset Right.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

And the thing is. So these letters are written, some of them, these poems to Jane, some of them are written on the same paper as some of Mary Shelley's letters.

[Jack Wilson]

Right.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

So you kind of see the sense in which he's on the one hand hiding them from her, but then on the other hand, they're obviously sharing writing materials. Yeah, yeah. Talking about bringing it to life. And what we do also know is that after Shelley's death, he died not very long after this. Mary Shelley decided to publish all his works and she did a really comprehensive job of gathering everything. But these particular poems written to Jane are absent. So it does strongly indicate that she was not aware of their existence at the time.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Or maybe she wanted to leave them out and she thought, well, here we go, this one's not for Mary. So I guess I can't even look at it.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

Yeah, that's true. Maybe she didn't want to publish love poetry to another woman.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Okay, well, let's leave things there. The book is called the Trembling Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive. Mathalinda Nabugodi, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.

[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

Well, thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

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[Jack Wilson]

And finally today, Richard Copley. What does an expert in Edgar Allan Poe want to be the last book he will ever read? Let's find out. Okay. I'm joined now by Richard Copley, expert in the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe. Richard, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.

[Richard Copley]

Well, thanks for the question. My answer is poetry of Wordsworth.

[Jack Wilson]

Oh, yeah.

[Richard Copley]

William Wordsworth, great romantic poet with Coleridge.

[Jack Wilson]

And.

[Richard Copley]

He wrote just fabulous poetry about childhood. That is, I think, his most celebrated topic. He was a poet of nature, but for him, childhood was in nature. He grew up in the Lake District in England.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Richard Copley]

If this were it, I would ask my wife or my nurse or my daughter or son or whomever to read to me from Wordsworth. I mean, there's a. There's a short poem that goes. I'm reading it here. My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky. So was it when my life began, so is it now. I am a man. So be it when I shall grow old or let me die. The child is father of the man, and I could wish my days to be bound each to each by natural piety. To me, that's as fabulous as literature gets. And then the next thing I would ask is that I'd be reading intimations of immortality upon recollections of early childhood. This is the peak of literary romanticism. It runs about, oh, four pages. And it is the most gorgeous poem about one's memory of childhood and one's sense of the loss of what one had in childhood. And it resonates for me just as somebody who remembers being a kid and what the world was like then.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Richard Copley]

So that's. That's my best response. I would want to hear or read William Wordsworth's poetry.

[Jack Wilson]

Did you grow up in a setting where you had a lot of access to nature?

[Richard Copley]

You know, no, I didn't. I grew up not far from here in Watertown, Massachusetts, in a garden apartment. And behind that garden apartment was green space. And then of course, the parking lot. But for a little kid, you know, three years old, four years old, that green space was enough. It's as if I had meadows and mountains. That little green space was enough for my imagination. In fact, I'd even written a children's book about it. So my connection to Wordsworth is by way of that backyard. Even though of course, he had, you know, all of the Lake District at his feet. My little piece of grass was enough for me.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. And, and like you say, to see things through the eyes of a child. I mean, those of us who are parents know what it's like to kind of get a. Get a chance to do that with kids who are 2 and 3. And you see how, how they respond to clouds and, and the sun and wind and. And just kind of how everything is so new and so fresh and so dramatic and it, it's a reminder of, of what a beautiful natural world we live in.

[Richard Copley]

That's absolutely right. It's. It's very exciting. I have kids too. They're grown, but I can remember their early years and they just reinforce for me my sense of things from when I was there. A little kid myself. So it's ever renewing and you know, sometimes, not frequently, but sometimes Poe wrote about this. But the great poet of the subject is Wordsworth and that's whom I would go to. To be reminded. To be reminded of the. My earliest time.

[Jack Wilson]

That's a great choice. Richard Copley, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.

[Richard Copley]

It was a pleasure. Thank you, Jack.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, there we go. That's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. Short and sweet. My thanks to Richard Copley and to Mathalinda Nabogode for joining me today. Lets make 2026 a great year, people. We can start by celebrating those small local bookshops. Well, it could be large ones, as long as they're local and owned by people trying to make the world a better place. That's our criteria. Let's do that. And you can help me do it by letting me know about the special bookstore in your community. I would love to hear all about it. What makes it so great? We'll be back next week with a look at James Baldwin, the early years. And we have more on Byron soon and Mary Shelley and Shakespeare. We're also headed to Scotland and France and we've got some Chekhov on tap and a look at Rob Reiner, some of his great films and great lines in those films. And we have a lot of other good stuff, too, lined up for you. So do subscribe so you don't miss out. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.

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[Mathalinda Nabugodi]

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