Coventry Patmore’s Journalism: The Interface between Conservative Politics and Social Justice

Critical work on Coventry Patmore has tended to see him through the lens of his perceived misogyny. Although recent scholarship has sought to recover him in a different light, his political journalism remains almost entirely neglected. This essay examines the way in which Patmore’s journalism challenges the complacency of late-Victorian conservative politics from a conservative perspective, asserting a vision of social justice that is predicated on the individual’s responsibility toward their community. This social vision in response to the failure of institutionalised social reforms owes much to Patmore’s original adherence to Tractarian values

Unimagined community and disease in <i>Ruth</i>

Critical assessments of Elizabeth Gaskell have tended to emphasise the regional and provincial aspects of her writing, but the scope of her influence extended across the globe. Building on theories of space and place, the contributors to this collection bring a variety of geographical, industrial, psychological, and spatial perspectives to bear on the vast range of Gaskell's literary output and on her place within the narrative of British letters and national identity. The advent of the railway and the increasing predominance of manufactory machinery reoriented the nation's physical and social countenance, but alongside the excitement of progress and industry was a sense of fear and loss manifested through an idealization of the country home, the pastoral retreat, and the agricultural south. In keeping with the theme of progress and change, the essays follow parallel narratives that acknowledge both the angst and nostalgia produced by industrial progress and the excitement and awe occasioned by the potential of the empire. Finally, the volume engages with adaptation and cultural performance, in keeping with the continuing importance of Gaskell in contemporary popular culture far beyond the historical and cultural environs of nineteenth-century Manchester

Charlotte Brontë’s polyphonic voices: collaboration and hybrid authorial spaces

Charlotte Brontë was aware that authorship was a hybrid process, one involving translation, sharing work, rewriting and engaging with a variety of literary influences. This paper repositions Charlotte Brontë’s authorial identity by drawing out the collaborative nature of her literary relationships with her key masters: Branwell Brontë, Constantin Heger and her publishers at Smith, Elder & Co. Through a Bakhtinian dialogic lens, the literary entity identified as ‘Charlotte Brontë’ inhabits a separate authorial space from the historical person living at Haworth. She becomes a polyphony of minds and voices

“Pilfering, and burning, and studious waste”: food security and political economy in Harriet Martineau’s cinnamon and pearls

A delicious scent pervaded the region as the fire spread, like airs from heaven finding their way among blasts from hell

Ubiquitous theft: the consumption of London in Mayhew's underworld

John Binny’s "Thieves and Swindlers" in Henry Mayhew’s groundbreaking London Labour and the London Poor (1851) uses the motif of the river to chart London’s streets and architecture through categories of theft. From the petty theft of pickpockets to the institutionalized corruption of the commercial centre of Britain’s empire, layers and degrees of stealing physically and ideologically define the city. In this chapter, the environmental decay of the city, figured through the polluted Thames, speaks to the decay across the strata of London society. Criminality is not only as ubiquitous across class, but entrenched in the city’s foundations and flooding the nation beyond London’s boundaries