Popular Politics in Nineteenth Century England provides an accessible introduction to the culture of English popular politics between 1815 and 1900, the period from Luddism to the New Liberalism. This is an area that has attracted great historical interest and has undergone fundamental revision in the last two decades. Did the industrial revolution create the working class movement or was liberalism (which transcended class divisions) the key mode of political argument? Rohan McWilliam brings this central debate up to date for students of Nineteenth Century British History. He assesses popular ideology in relation to the state, the nation, gender and the nature of party formation, and reveals a much richer social history emerging in the light of recent historiographical developments.

Demonstrating that nineteenth-century historical novelists played their rational, trustworthy narrators against shifting and untrustworthy depictions of space and place, Tom Bragg argues that the result was a flexible form of fiction that could be modified to reflect both the different historical visions of the authors and the changing aesthetic tastes of the reader. Bragg focuses on Scott, William Harrison Ainsworth, and Edward Bulwer Lytton, identifying links between spatial representation and the historical novel's multi-generic rendering of history and narrative. Even though their understanding of history and historical process could not be more different, all writers employed space and place to mirror narrative, stimulate discussion, interrogate historical inquiry, or otherwise comment beyond the rational, factual narrator's point of view. Bragg also traces how landscape depictions in all three authors' works inculcated heroic masculine values to show how a dominating theme of the genre endures even through widely differing versions of the form. In taking historical novels beyond the localized questions of political and regional context, Bragg reveals the genre's relevance to general discussions about the novel and its development. Nineteenth-century readers of the novel understood historical fiction to be epic and serious, moral and healthful, patriotic but also universal. Space and Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century British Historical Novel takes this readership at its word and acknowledges the complexity and diversity of the form by examining one of its few continuous features: a flexibly metaphorical valuation of space and place.

Penny politics offers a new way to read early Victorian popular fiction such as Jack Sheppard, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London. It locates forms of radical discourse in the popular literature that emerged simultaneously with Brittan’s longest and most significant people’s movement. It listens for echoes of Chartist fiction in popular fiction. The book rethinks the relationship between the popular and political, understanding that radical politics had popular appeal and that the lines separating a genuine radicalism from commercial success are complicated and never absolute. With archival work into Newgate calendars and Chartist periodicals, as well as media history and culture, it brings together histories of the popular and political so as to rewrite the radical canon.

Originally published in 1987 Barnaby Rudge is a comprehensive collection of bibliographical resources surrounding Dickens fifth novel Barnaby Rudge. The book addresses what the author terms, a ‘prevalent lack of research’ surrounding the novel. The collection lists bibliographic references which not only looks at the novel itself, but also covers older resources that interested Dicken’s first critics, such as the originality of the settings and characters. The book’s core focus is examining the novel’s historical subject matter in the context of the social and political context in which it was written. The book acts as a core resource for research on Barnaby Rudge.

The Age of Equipoise by W.L Burn was published in 1964 and became a central text in the canon of interpretations of the Victorian period. The book subsequently fell out of favour but recent claims to establish a new interpretative standard have, paradoxically, prompted reviewers to cast back to Burn's work as the orthodox standard against which such claims should be judged. The essays in this volume by British and American contributors all engage, to varying degrees, with the notion of 'equipoise' and how it can help to illuminate the mid-Victorian period in ways which alternative formulations cannot. Some of the chapters develop arguments embedded in Burn's own book; others take up issues largely absent in The Age of Equipoise, such as the position of children, Britain's interaction with the wider world, and the threats the period experienced to its concept of masculine identity. Together the essays demonstrate the intricacy and turbulence of the forces of cohesion in Victorian society, along with the success of that culture in achieving a working, if shifting, modus vivendi. Moreover, they substantiate the argument that, whatever the limitations of Burn's work, 'equipoise' deserves rehabilitation as a powerful conceptual framework for making sense of mid-Victorian Britain. About the Editor: Martin Hewitt is Director of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies and editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture. With Robert Poole he has recently produced an edition of The Diaries of Samuel Bamford, 1858-61 (Sutton, 2000).