High altar of the Lincoln Cathedral (photo courtesy of the author)
Last summer, I spent four weeks in London through the Richmond Williams Travelling fellowship, a grant that the English department offers to rising seniors to do thesis research abroad. Arriving in London in July, I knew I wanted to research the Pre-Raphaelites, a group of late-nineteenth-century British poets and painters who had been inspired by medieval art. I spent the first several weeks in different places in London—mainly the British Library, which had all the manuscripts, archives and books that I needed, but also several museums that held the Pre-Raphaelites’ work.
By the time my last few days in London rolled around, I had narrowed my topic down to the poetry of a particular Pre-Raphaelite and had read a fair amount of relevant material. But before I left the country, I wanted to get out of the city and see another part of the UK, hopefully someplace that would benefit my research in a new way. I eventually settled on the Lincoln Cathedral, a landmark of English Gothic architecture that was a couple hours on the train from London. The cathedral, parts of which date to 1072, seemed like it should be on any tourist’s bucket list, but it was also a building that the Pre-Raphaelites had especially admired for its medieval grandeur. John Ruskin, probably the most famous English art critic and one of the three writers whom I had spent the last several weeks exploring, wrote to his father after seeing it that it is “worth all the English cathedrals I have ever seen put together.”
