For over a hundred years, the journal of the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852) was thought to have been destroyed. In 1967 the manuscript was found in the archives of the Longman Publishing House in London. This edition, to be published in six volumes, reveals the essential Moore and introduces the reader to the daily, personal record of Moore's life from 1818 to 1847. The journal begins as an accurate rendering of the author's daily life and ends as a tragic reflection of a failing memory and a deteriorating mind.

The 1820s and 1830s, the gap between Romanticism and Victorianism, continues to prove a difficulty for scholars. This book explores and recovers a neglected culture of poetry in those years, and it demonstrates that culture was a crucial turning point in literary history. It explores a uniquely wide range of poets, including the poetry of the literary annuals, Letitia Landon, Felicia Hemans, Robert Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Hood and John Clare, placing their work in the light of new research into the conditions of the literary market. In turn, it uses that culture to open up wider theoretical issues relating to literary form, book history, print culture, gender and periodisation. The period’s doubt about poetry’s place in culture and its capacity to last prompted a dazzling range of creative experiments that reimagined the metrical, material and commercial forms of poetry.

For over a hundred years, the journal of the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852) was thought to have been destroyed. In 1967 the manuscript was found in the archives of the Longman Publishing House in London. This edition, to be published in six volumes, reveals the essential Moore and introduces the reader to the daily, personal record of Moore's life from 1818 to 1847. The journal begins as an accurate rendering of the author's daily life and ends as a tragic reflection of a failing memory and a deteriorating mind.

Focusing on the Lives of Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, and Letitia Landon, North explores how biographies by writers including Thomas Moore, Mary Shelley, Thomas De Quincey, both perpetuated and, by revealing private weaknesses and domestic failures, challenged the myth of 'the Romantic poet'.