Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s

The fullest account yet published of the diverse, global literary culture of the crucial transition between Romantic and Victorian eras.

John Gardner (Edited by), David Stewart (Edited by)

9781009268516, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 June 2024

370 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.6 cm, 0.68 kg

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.

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 1825–1840 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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]