Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1850s

Examines a period of unprecedented intellectual, class, and geographical mobility through rigorous 21st-century critical priorities.

Gail Marshall (Edited by)

9781009100427, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 January 2025

380 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.5 cm, 0.678 kg

Establishing a fresh critical paradigm, this volume shows how the 1850s was significantly defined by forms of increasing intellectual, class, and geographical mobility. It saw the flourishing of major Victorian writers, including George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Charles Kingsley, Anthony Trollope, Tennyson, and Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Outputs by these writers were read alongside a variety of other genres, including travel writings, learned society reports, statistical returns, popular journalism, working-class writing, and scientific papers in a period which saw an increasing availability of cheap printed matter. Intertextuality and interdisciplinarity are not only key to this volume, but are also one of the most important legacies of the literature of the 1850s. Contributors are attentive to a plethora of voices, disciplines, and forms of knowledge which they read through rigorous 21st-century critical priorities including diversity, cultural and physical geography, and the environment.

Introduction Gail Marshall
1. Pictures of Nature: Observation and Description in Charlotte Brontë's Villette and Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species Supritha Rajan
2. 'When I came back, it was … to the love of a new generation': Affective Genealogies of Race in Dinah Craik's The Half-Caste Alisha Walters
3. George Eliot, the Westminster Circle, and Karl Ernst von Baer's Embryological Germ Theory Andrew Mangham
4. The 1850s Sustainability Novel: Manufacturers, Serials, and (Eco)systems in Dickens and Gaskell Mary L. Shannon and Gail Marshall
5. Serialising London in 'Twice Round the Clock': Metropolitan Travel Writing at Mid-Century Catherine Waters
6. Theatre in the 1850s Katherine Newey
7. Beyond the Art of Conversation: Richard Monckton Milnes and Cosmopolitan Diplomacy Frederik Van Dam
8. Making Soldiers Count: Literature and War in the 1850s Stefanie Markovits
9. Finding the Lost: The Royal Geographical Society and Discourses of Obligatory African Travel Jessica Howell
10. British India in the 1850s Máire ní Fhlathúin
11. Christian Heroism Elisabeth Jay
12. Horsepower in the Railway Age Nancy Henry
13. Trauma, Gender, and Resistance: Working-Class and 'People's' Literature of the 1850s Florence Boos
14. The Poetry of Married Life Joseph Phelan
15. George Eliot, Henry James, Realism, and Europe Gail Marshall.

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