Victorian Writing about Risk
Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World

This book, first published in 2000, explores the geography of risk produced by a wide spectrum of once-popular literature.

Elaine Freedgood (Author)

9780521781084, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 September 2000

232 pages, 6 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.51 kg

"Freedgood's work is most compelling..." Albion

In Victorian Writing about Risk, first published in 2000, Elaine Freedgood explores the geography of risk produced by a wide spectrum of once-popular literature, including works on political economy, sanitary reform, balloon flight, Alpine mountaineering and African exploration. The consolations offered by this geography of risk are precariously predicated on the stability of dominant Victorian definitions of people and places. Women, men, the labouring and middle classes, the English and the Irish, Africa and Africans: all have assigned identities which allow risk to be located and contained. When identities shift and boundaries fail, danger and safety begin to appear in all the wrong places. The texts that this study focuses on reveal the ways in which risk moralizes and naturalizes the economic and political institutions of industrial, imperial culture during a period of unprecedented expansion and change.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: the practice of paradise
1. Banishing panic: J. R. McCulloch, Harriet Martineau and the popularization of political economy
2. The rhetoric of visible hands: Edwin Chadwick, Florence Nightingale and the popularization of sanitary reform
3. Groundless optimism: regression in the service of the ego, England and empire in Victorian ballooning memoirs
4. The uses of pain: cultural masochism and the colonization of the future in Victorian mountaineering memoirs
5. A field for enterprise: the memoirs of David Livingstone and Mary Kingsley
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]