Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is frequently thought of as a text that emerged from the 1816 Geneva summer, when Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and others gathered in Switzerland in an important creative moment that included a lightning strike of inspiration. This essay seeks to look at the novel in the context of Mary Shelley’s composition process in the late 1810s, whereby the book was carefully sculpted into its final form by her wide reading and thinking, then her redrafting and literary labour, all influenced by collaborative literary environments. Mary Shelley’s process is also explored in relation to her first publication, the travelogue History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817), and two fair-copy manuscript pages of that book. As such, an attempt to look at the young Mary Shelley in the 1810s considers her wider activities and her significance as an author beyond simply the Frankenstein myth and its initial conception.

Gathering in November 1889 for the second annual meeting of the 1888 legislative biennium, South Carolina House Speaker James Simons greeted his colleagues by celebrating that “not a single vacancy has been occasioned by death.” While American legislators still die in office today, the apparent ubiquity of death in the post-Reconstruction South Carolina House hints at broader differences between the state legislatures of that period and the more contemporary congressional and state legislative arenas in which modern political science has honed its theories and measurement strategies.

Focusing on William Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814) and related essays and tourist writing of the 1810s, this chapter explains how he adapted traditional views of Anglican churchyards as sacred commons where local community was composted and cultivated over time, even as dislocation and erasure of rural communities, urbanization, and religious diversification undermined ties between churchyards and local belonging. The chapter interrogates how Wordsworth re-membered the geography, residents, and species of the Lake District within and around an idealized Anglican churchyard that was based on the one near to him in Grasmere yet loosened from denominational boundaries. He did so to reclaim local interspecies and semi-egalitarian lifeways among small landowners and their environments perceived to be threatened by extractive, colonizing capitalism. He nonetheless nostalgically distorted and risked denying agency to those re-membered, and uneasily suggested that agents and beneficiaries of capitalist empire might become conservators of traces of formal local lifeways.

The city dialect of Liverpool has a unique profile in the context of other urban varieties in Britain. It is well known for such features as stop lenition and the NURSE–SQUARE merger, along with TH-stopping, these traits in combination forming a set which is not replicated elsewhere. The present study examines the historical background to Liverpool English, its geographical position in relation to the counties of Cheshire to the south and Lancashire to the north. In addition, the role of immigration to the city, especially that of Irish people in the nineteenth century, is discussed and the role which this input may have played in determining the developmental course for Liverpool English is evaluated. Finally, the current position of local speech in the city is examined and possible future pathways are indicated.

In this chapter, the first law of thermodynamics is developed using a series of experimental setups. In doing so, some new terminology and concepts are introduced. The idea of specific heat is revisited, and it is discovered that there are two forms of specific heat: a specific heat at constant volume and a specific heat at constant pressure. The important concepts of pressure work and thermodynamic cycles are also introduced.

This chapter considers the history of Scots dictionaries in relation to their purposes and the dominant contemporary perceptions of the Scots language. The twenty-first-century Scots Dictionary for Schools (Scots Abc) mobile phone application encourages literacy and creativity in Scots. Thomas Ruddiman’s glossary (1710) assisted readers of Gavin Douglas’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Eneados (1513). In his Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808–1825), John Jamieson followed the Vernacular Revivalists, seeking to preserve and celebrate the language. A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (1931–2002) includes lexis shared with England, while the Scottish National Dictionary (1931–1976, 2005) focuses on distinctive use. Although the online Dictionary of the Scots Language (2004) is a major achievement, there is more work to be done. Twentieth-century dictionaries prioritised rural over urban vocabulary, and the diversity of language in Scotland invites debate. This chapter proposes that Scotland would benefit from a new resource, the ‘Dictionary for Scotland’.