“‘Fortune’s Tennis Ball’: Sir Walter Raleigh as Writer and Subject” will be the topic of a discussion by three speakers at Wilson Library today, Tuesday April 1st, at 3:00 p.m. The panel will include Christopher M. Armitage, UNC Professor of English and Comparative Literature—who served as the editor to the recently published book Literary and Visual Ralegh (that’s not a typo), published last year by Manchester University Press—and two contributors to the book: Thomas Herron, Associate Professor in the Department of English at East Carolina University, and Julian Lethbridge, Lecturer, English Language and Literature, at the University of Tübingen in Germany. The North Carolina Collection is sponsoring the talk and will be displaying Raleigh’s History of the World (published at London, and printed for Walter Bvrre, in 1614) and his The history of the world: in five books (one set of this edition belonged to Edward Gibbon, who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In diary entries from 1762 and 1763 Gibbon documented his reading of books by and about Raleigh.) Other items from the NCC’s Sir Walter Raleigh Collection will also be on display.
With that shameless plug out of the way . . . here at A View to Hugh, I couldn’t pass up the chance to show Hugh Morton’s photographs of Sir Walter Raleigh. Well, not the gent born more than 200 years before the conception of photography, but more recent incarnations caught by Morton’s camera.
First up—the statue of Sir Walter in downtown Raleigh, photographed in 1979. Talk about a tennis ball . . . this statue has been relocated several times since its dedication on December 3rd, 1976. You can learn some of its history by reading this statue’s entry in “Commemorative Landscape,” a website published by UNC Library’s Documenting the American South. Seems like the London’s statue of Raleigh has had to endure relocation, too. Maybe better heads will prevail and these statues will continue to stand statuesquely in their final resting places.
Next . . . Sir Walter, Mount Airy style. Andy Griffith played the role of Raleigh in The Lost Colony, which we blogged about back in 2012.
There’s also a photograph of the British queen receiving Raleigh.
There are a couple handfuls of other related “Raleigh” images by Morton in the online collection. Take a gander!
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Processing the Hugh Morton Photographs and Films