Charlotte Goodge

Visiting Early Career Research Fellow 2025-26, “I mixed with the mob”: Women’s Travel Writing & Ecologies of the Labouring Class (c.1750 – 1850)

Charlotte Goodge (she/her) is a Research Associate, and was a recent PhD graduate (Summer 2025), at the University of York. Charlotte works broadly within the history of embodiment, examining, across genres and media, the representational histories of marginalised persons of the “long” eighteenth century. Her AHRC-funded doctoral thesis demonstrates that both the real-life and the fictional fat female figure was inconstant in her signification but singular in her function as a vehicle through which ideologies of femininity, class hierarchy, and civilisation were reinforced. On the topic of fatness, Charlotte has related publications in the Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies (2023) and Eighteenth-Century Life (2025).

Her new, postdoctoral project – for which she has also received recent funding from the BARS Stephen Copley Research Award to visit the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford and National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh – explores women-authored travel accounts (imagined and recorded) of the labouring-class person. While at the JRRI&L, Charlotte will explore the significance of manuscript, women-authored travel journals (and especially those of Dorothy Richardson, Hester Thrale Piozzi and Mary Hamilton) in gaining insight into localised, labouring-class “ecologies”. Charlotte uses “ecologies” to examine the culture, individualised history, social and religious organisation, and engagement with immediate environment (natural, cultivated or urbanised) of labouring-class communities.