Friends of the John Rylands

5.45 for 6.15 at the John Rylands Library, Deansgate.

Bill Hutchings was Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester until his retirement in 2008. He has published mainly on eighteenth-century poetry (William Cowper, Thomas Gray, James Thomson) and on the teaching of literary studies. He continues to lecture to literary groups, such as the Jane Austen Society. He will mark the tercentenary of the birth of Samuel Johnson in 2009 by discussing the significance of "The Vanity of Human Wishes", Johnson's major poem and an imitation of Juvenal's tenth satire.