Image:©Naman Chaudhary
A Shropshire Lad in Highgate
A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad is one of the best-loved volumes of poetry in the language, never out of print since it was first published in 1896. All but one of the poems was written while Housman was living in Highgate, in a house called Byron Cottage at 17 North Road.
In this talk, Peter Parker describes how Housman came to live in Highgate and how he composed his poems while taking long, solitary walks in the area. He also investigates the personal and topographical background of A Shropshire Lad, how the poems were taken up by composers and carried by soldiers to the trenches in the First World War, and how the book came to occupy a central place in the cultural landscape of England.
Peter Parker is the author of two books about the First World War, The Old Lie and The Last Veteran; biographies of J.R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood, and Housman Country, a cultural history of A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. He edited (and wrote much of) A Reader’s Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel (1995) and A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers (1996) and is an advisory editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. His most recent book is A Little Book of Latin for Gardeners (2018), and he is currently compiling an anthology for Penguin of homosexual life in London from 1945 to 1967.
In conjunction with the exhibition Shropshire in Highgate in the Highgate Gallery, 25 March – 7 April 2022.
Please book by 1pm on the day of the lecture.
Members: Free
Non-Members: £5 per lecture