This instalment in the Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition series concerns a decade that was as technologically transitional as it was eventful on a global scale. It collects work from a group of internationally renowned scholars across disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with the wide array of cultural developments that defined the 1830s. Often overlooked as a boundary between the Romantic and Victorian periods, this decade was, the book proposes, the central pivot of the nineteenth century. Far from a time of peaceful reform, it was marked by violent colonial expansion, political resistance, and revolutionary technologies such as the photograph, the expansion of steam power, and the railway that changed the world irreversibly. Contributors explore a flurry of cultural forms to take the pulse of the decade, from Silver Fork fiction to lithography, from working-class periodicals to photographs, and from urban sketches to magazine fiction.
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The fullest account yet published of the diverse, global literary culture of the crucial transition between Romantic and Victorian eras.
Introduction John Gardner and David Stewart;
1. On the eve: William
Benbow, Francis Macerone and the transmission of revolution John Gardner;
2.
'An infectious madness': disability and the epidemiology of social unrest in
Dickens's Barnaby Rudge Essaka Joshua;
3. Augustus Hardin Beaumont, slavery
apologias, and popular radical literature in the 1830s Tom Scriven;
4.
Patterns of industry: Harriet Martineau's illustrated masculinities Valerie
Sanders;
5. Mother Earth: gender and geology in the 1830s Adelene Buckland;
6. The polite fictions of slavery: British antislavery in the 1830s Juliet
Shields;
7. Suffering, sentiment, and the rise of humanitarian literature in
the 1830s Porscha Fermanis;
8. Steam and iron in the 1830s: liberal
imperialism, Thomas Love Peacock, and the Nemesi Peter J. Kitson;
9.
Lithography and the comic image 18251840 Brian Maidment;
10. Jorrocks's
canon: Dickens, Surtees and 1830s print culture John Strachan;
11. Tennyson,
Dickens, Poe, Browning, and the Brontës: Blackwood's Magazine and 'The
foreheads of a new generation' Robert Morrison;
12. Boz in London: The
1830s and the urban turn in the English novel Sambudha Sen;
13. Letitia
Elizabeth Landon, chronicler of the 1830s David Stewart;
14. Railway
imaginary in the 1830s Nicola Kirkby: finding form;
15. The emerging language
of photography Jennifer Green-Lewis; Afterword Richard Cronin.
John Gardner is Dean of the Doctoral School and Professor of English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University. Gardner is also the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow on 'Turning the Screw: Engineering Romanticism', a project which examines convergences between literary and engineering cultures. David Stewart is Associate Professor of English Literature at Northumbria University. He is the author of Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture (2011) and The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s: A Period of Doubt (2018).
