Chartist poetry was written by and for workers. In contrast with the portrayal of workers by mainstream Victorian writers, Chartist verse is intellectual, complex, and socially conscious and reflects an international outlook.
First published in 1999. For the first time since their appearance in Chartist newspapers these two major radical narratives are reprinted in a single volume. The Political Pilgrim’s Progress combines Utopian politics with Bunyanesque satire to tell the story of the journey of Radical and his family from the City of Plunder to the City of Reform. Sunshine and Shadow is the only serialized novel to have been published in the Northern Star. It brings together fictional biography and historical chronicle to form the first truly working-class novel. Both texts offer a unique insight into the literary achievements of the Chartist movement, and will be a valuable and entertaining source for scholars of radical politics. The texts are fully annotated, and the editor also provides an introduction to each story and a bibliography of recent scholarship.
First published in 1995. Chartism inspired a prodigious literary output, based on its own newspapers and journals. However, while some Chartist political writings have been reprinted, the aesthetic texts of the movement have largely been neglected. This selection of short stories and extracts from longer fiction aims to remedy this situation and covers a diversity of authors, genres and themes. Ian Haywood has written a cogent and wide-ranging review of the Chartist movement and its literature as an introduction to this collection of little-known and revealing stories. The diction is divided into the following areas: the condition of England, Ireland, revolution, women and Chartism itself. This title will be of interest to students of history.
Chartism was the first time ever that British workers fixed their eyes on the seizure of political power: in 1839, 1842 and again in 1848. In this struggle, they conducted a class war that at different times involved general strikes, battles with the state, mass demonstrations and even armed insurrection. They forged weapons, illegally drilled their forces, and armed themselves in preparation for seizing the reins of government. Such were the early revolutionary traditions of the British working class, deliberately buried beneath a mountain of falsehoods and distortions. This book sees Chartism as an essential part of our history from which we must draw the key lessons for today.
The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.
The publisher Edward Lloyd (1815-1890) helped shape Victorian popular culture in ways that have left a legacy that lasts right up to today. He was a major pioneer of both popular fiction and journalism but has never received extended scholarly investigation until now. Lloyd shaped the modern popular press: Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper became the first paper to sell over a million copies. Along with publishing songs and broadsides, Lloyd dominated the fiction market in the early Victorian period issuing Gothic stories such as Varney the Vampire (1845-7) and other 'penny dreadfuls', which became bestsellers. Lloyd's publications introduced the enduring figure of Sweeney Todd whilst his authors penned plagiarisms of Dickens's novels, such as Oliver Twiss (1838-9). Many readers in the early Victorian period may have been as likely to have encountered the author of Pickwick in a Lloyd-published plagiarism as in the pages of the original author. This book makes us rethink the early reception of Dickens. In this interdisciplinary collection, leading scholars explore the world of Edward Lloyd and his stable of writers, such as Thomas Peckett Prest and James Malcolm Rymer. The Lloyd brand shaped popular taste in the age of Dickens and the Chartists. Edward Lloyd and his World fills a major gap in the histories of popular fiction and journalism, whilst developing links with Victorian politics, theatre and music.
In Britain, the period that stretches from the middle of the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century marks the emergence of the working classes, alongside and in response to the development of the middle-class public sphere. This collection contributes to that scholarship by exploring the figure of the "working-class intellectual," who both assimilates the anti-authoritarian lexicon of the middle classes to create a new political and cultural identity, and revolutionizes it with the subversive energy of class hostility. Through considering a broad range of writings across key moments of working-class self-expression, the essays reevaluate a host of familiar writers such as Robert Burns, John Thelwall, Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Ann Yearsley, and even Shakespeare, in terms of their role within a working-class constituency. The collection also breaks fresh ground in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship by shedding light on a number of unfamiliar and underrepresented figures, such as Alexander Somerville, Michael Faraday, and the singer Ned Corvan.
This book takes a new look at the evolution of popular literature in Britain in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Making use of a wide range of archival and primary sources, he argues that radical politics played a decisive role in the transformation of popular literature. By charting the key moments in the history of 'cheap' literature, the book casts new light on the many neglected popular genres and texts: the 'pig's meat' anthology, the female-authored didactic tale, and Chartist fiction.
English Industrial Fiction of the Mid-Nineteenth Century discusses the valuable fiction written in mid-nineteenth-century Britain which represents the situations of the new breed of industrial workers, both the mostly male factory workers who operated in the oppressive mills of the midlands and north and, in other stories, the oppressed seamstresses who worked mostly in London in very poor and low-paid conditions. Beginning with a general introduction to workers’ fiction at the start of the period, this volume charts the rise of an identifiable genre of industrial fiction and the development of a substantial mode of seamstress fiction through the 1840s, including an analysis of novels by Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, and more briefly Charlotte Bronte, Geraldine Jewsbury and George Eliot. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of industrial fiction and nineteenth-century Britain, or those with an interest in the relationship between literature, society and politics.