This volume examines the cultural importance of the coastline in Britain during a time of vast change.

This first volume includes scientific sources that were foundational in the professionalization of science and in the development and dissemination of scientific thinking as it moved towards evolutionary thought, including emerging ideas in biology, botany, zoology, anatomy, natural theology, and geology. The volume is comprised of specialist and popular science, and because science was becoming increasingly internationalised, particularly significant and influential overseas sources have been included. The volume includes extracts from works by Rev. Gilbert White, Baron Cuvier, William Paley, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Rev. William Buckland, Charles Waterton, Charles Lyell, Richard Owen, Louis Agassiz, Roderick Murchison, Alexander von Humboldt, Henry Sedgwick, Hugh Miller, Patrick Mathew, Robert Chambers, John Ruskin, and Philip Gosse.

Charting an 'aesthetic', post-realist tradition of writing, this book considers the significant role played by John Ruskin's art criticism in later writing which dealt with the new kinds of spaces encountered in the nineteenth-century.

Reframes the long-standing critical narrative of the relationship between Harriet Martineau and Charles DickensDemonstrates, through new readings of Martineau and Dickens's travel in and writing about the United States, how their encounters with the American public sphere were crucially formative in both writers' careers and in their shaping as journalistsPlaces Martineau and Dickens within the context of Anglo-American liberalism, thereby expanding our reading of them beyond earlier schema framed in narrower terms of political economyExpands understandings of transatlantic literary exchange to offer a more comprehensive reading than those offered through an earlier critical focus simply on the issue of international copyrightFocusing on the importance of Martineau's contribution to the development of the early Victorian press, this book highlights the degree to which the public quarrel between her and Dickens in the mid-1850s represented larger fissures within nineteenth-century liberalism. It places Martineau and Dickens within the context of Anglo-American liberalism and demonstrates how these fissures were embedded within a transatlantic conversation over the role of the press in forming a public sphere essential to the development of a liberal society.

Dickson identifies the nineteenth century as the beginning of the large-scale absorption of the Arabian Nights into British literature and culture.

In the first hundred years of the UK rail network, the seaside figures as a nerve centre, managing and making visible the period’s complex interplay between health, death, gender and sexuality. This monograph discusses around 130 novels of the railway age to show how the seaside infiltrates a diverse range of literature, subverting the boundaries between high and low literary culture. The seaside holiday galvanises innovative literary forms, including early twentieth-century holiday crime and romance fiction, which has its origins in the sensational strategies of mid-nineteenth-century authors. Where reading takes place is at least as important as what is read, and case studies on literary Brighton and Dickensian Kent explore the occasionally fraught relationship between seaside towns and the metropolis, as London visitors are represented in – and are the target audience for – literary accounts of the seaside holiday. The act of reading by the sea is itself overdetermined and problematic, a dilemma that is managed in part through the development of text-free literary tourism in the late nineteenth century. Deploying strategies from literary criticism, histories of reading, libraries and the book, and literary tourism, this book recovers ‘seaside reading’ as both a literary sub-genre and a deeply contested mode of engagement.

How did scientists, artists, designers, manufacturers and amateur enthusiasts experience and value the sea and its products? Examining the commoditization of the ocean world during the nineteenth century, this book demonstrates how the transaction of oceanic objects inspired a multifaceted material discourse stemming from scientific exploration, colonial expansion, industrialization, and the rise of middle-class leisure. From the seashore to the seabed, marine organisms and environments, made tangible through processing and representational technologies, captivated practitioners and audiences. Combining essays and case studies by scholars, curators, and scientists, Sea Currents investigates the collecting and display, illustration and ornamentation, and trade and consumption of marine flora and fauna, analysing their material, aesthetic and commercial dimensions. Traversing global art history, the history of science, empire studies, anthropology, ecocriticism and material culture, this book surveys the currency of marine matter embedded in the economies and ecologies of a modernizing ocean world.