Cry of the Children Exhibition

In spring 2018, Dr. Joshua King's Victorian Poetry seminar (ENG 4362) created an exhibition on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's (EBB from now on) "Cry of the Children" (1843), a poem that protested the injustice of child labor in Britain's mines and factories. Titled "'Orphans of earthly woe': Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Protest for Working Children," the exhibition is divided into several selections.  Each of the students created one section, and two of the students created COVE components to accompany the exhibition: a digital timeline and a geospatial map. The exhibition will form a central component of an international series of events from Oct. 4-5, 2018 in celebration of the poem's 175th anniversary. Participants will be Baylor and local community members and scholars representing universities in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. They will be invited to compare EBB's portrayal of working-class life and labor to the ways working-class poets—especially women—themselves represented their situations. In addition to the exhibition, activities will include a series of scholarly talks, digital interactions with EBB's poem and its contexts, a film inspired by the poem, and live performance of nineteenth-century working-class ballads.