Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions Edited by Joseph Bristow and Josephine McDonagh Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture General Editor: Joseph Bristow Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture Series Editor Joseph Bristow Department of English University of California - Los Angeles Los Angeles , California , USA Aim of Series Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fi n de siècle. Attentive to the histori- cal continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing infl uence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It refl ects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800–1900 but also every fi eld within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era. Editorial Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK; Josephine McDonagh, Kings College, London, UK; Yopie Prins, University of Michigan, USA; Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex, UK; Margaret Stetz, University of Delaware, USA; Jenny Bourne Taylor, University of Sussex, UK. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14607 Joseph Bristow • Josephine McDonagh Editors Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions Editors Joseph Bristow Josephine McDonagh Department of English King’s College London University of California - Los Angeles London , United Kingdom Los Angeles , California , USA Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions ISBN 978-1-137-59705-2 ISBN 978-1-137-59706-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59706-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016942091 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identifi ed as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer-Verlag London Ltd. To Jim Porteous and Richard Porteous PREFACE AND AC KNOWLEDGEMENTS The present volume is a tribute to the memory of Sally Ledger, a highly respected scholar of nineteenth-century English literature who died at the age of forty-seven on 21 January 2009. As we explain in our Introduction, Ledger had recently been appointed to the Hildred Carlile chair at Royal Holloway, University of London. The eight chapters in this collection address several of the areas that Ledger explored in her critical writing: the New Woman of the 1890s; fi n-de-siècle culture; the history of English radicalism; and the fi ction of Charles Dickens. Each of these studies emerges from the lively debates that Ledger generated among her gradu- ate students and colleagues, especially at Birkbeck, University of London, where she taught from 1995 to 2008, and at the Dickens Universe, home to the annual conferences held at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which she attended on a regular basis. We speak for all of the contributors when we say that the loss of this inspiring colleague has been considerable, particularly when we take into account the achievement of the last book she published, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (2007). Throughout her career, Ledger remained unwavering in her belief that the radical traditions to which she dedicated her research had much to teach us in our present moment. Especially important for her was the power of literary works to deepen our awareness of possibilities for cultural, social, and political change. The essays gathered here reveal the signifi cance of Ledger’s legacy, which broadened our knowledge of such transformative nineteenth-century movements as Chartism, socialism, aestheticism, and late Victorian feminism. vii viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Besides expressing gratitude to the contributors for their patient sup- port throughout the editorial process, we wish to thank several individu- als and institutions for their assistance. At the University of California, Los Angeles, Joseph Bristow wishes to acknowledge a grant from the Academic Senate’s Council on Research that assisted in preparing this volume. At King’s College London, Josephine McDonagh is grateful to Sarah Gundry and Fariha Shaikh for research assistance. She also acknowl- edges the generosity of the National Humanities Center, North Carolina, USA, in awarding her the Kent R. Millikin Fellowship held during the period in which the editors prepared the volume, and especially the sup- port provided by the Center Librarians. We thank Chris Reid for sharing with us his correspondence with Sally Ledger. Colin Jones provided advice on certain historical points of information, as well as translations from the French. James Grande kindly advised us on several signifi cant details about William Cobbett’s writings. We remain grateful to Ledger’s spouse Jim Porteous and her son Richard Porteous for their assistance in preparing the volume, and the kindness they have expressed towards the project. Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions is dedicated to them. CONTENTS Notes on Contributors xiii 1 Introduction 1 Joseph Bristow and Josephine McDonagh 2 No Laughing Matter: Chartism and the Limits of Satire 21 Mike Sanders 3 ‘Their Deadly Longing’: Paternalism, the Past, and Perversion in Barnaby Rudge 37 Ben Winyard 4 Frederick William Robinson, Charles Dickens, and the Literary Tradition of ‘Low Life’ 63 Anne Schwan 5 Remembering Radicalism on the Midlands Turnpike: George Eliot, Felix Holt, and William Cobbett 85 Ruth Livesey ix x CONTENTS 6 The Commune in Exile: Urban Insurrection and the Production of International Space 113 Scott McCracken 7 Divorce and the New Woman 137 Anne Humpherys 8 Revolutions in Journalism: W.T. Stead, Indexing, and ‘Searching’ 157 Laurel Brake 9 Towards a Perlocutionary Poetics? 187 Isobel Armstrong Bibliography 213 Index 233 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Isobel Armstrong is Emeritus Professor of English (Geoffrey Tillotson Chair) at Birkbeck, University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy, Senior Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, and Honorary Foreign Scholar of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She writes mainly on nineteenth-century literature and culture, literary theory, and feminist thought. Her publications include Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (Routledge, 1993), Nineteenth- Century Women Poets (co-edited with Joseph Bristow and Cath Sharrock; Oxford University Press, 1996), and The Radical Aesthetic (Blackwell, 2000). Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880 (Oxford University Press, 2008) won the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. Her poetry has appeared in Carrie Etter, ed., Infi nite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets (Shearsman Books, 2010). Laurel Brake is Professor Emerita of Literature and Print Culture at Birkbeck, University of London . Recent publications include Nineteenth- Century Serials Edition, a digital edition of seven periodicals (www.ncse.ac.uk), and DNCJ ( Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism ) (Academia Press and British Library, 2009), co-edited with Marysa Demoor. She has also co-edited (with Ed King, Roger Luckhurst, and James Mussell) W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary (British Library, 2012), and is editor of a special issue on W.T. Stead in 19: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She is also co-editor (with Chandrika Kaul and Mark W. Turner) of The News of the World and the British Press: ‘Journalism for the Rich, Journalism for the Poor’ (2015). She is currently completing Ink Work , a biography of Clara Pater and Walter Pater, and the Oxford English Texts edition of Walter Pater’s journalism. Joseph Bristow is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he edited Nineteenth-Century Literature from xi xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 1997 to 2007; during