I grew up in Manchester, the venue for this year’s International Conference on Romanticism. Manchester is famous for its weather – not like California or the South of France are famous for their weather: no, Mancunian weather is grey and wet. And there is a distinctive quality to Mancunian wetness. I remember childhood days on which, even when it wasn’t raining, it was still, somehow, moist, Atlantic rain clouds trapped up against the buffer of the Pennines to the east dispersing a kind of inverse miasma from above.

Illness in literature can be approached by writers and readers alike with a certain cautiousness. Accounts of illnesses are considered as stories of a deeply personal journey for the writer, filled with pain and remorse that the readers then have the privilege of viewing.