An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction : Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel (Paperback)

Introduction: can a social problem speak?; 1. Social inheritance in the New Poor Law debate: William Cobbett, Harriet Martineau, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry; 2. Books of (social) murder: melodrama and the slow violence of the market in anti-New Poor Law satire, fiction, and journalism; 3. A life in fragments: Thomas Cooper's Chartist Bildungsroman; 4. Questions from workers who read: education and self-formation in Chartist print culture and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton; 5. Revenge in the age of insurance: villainy in theatrical melodrama and Ernest Jones's fiction; 6. 'Outworks of the citadel of corruption': the Chartist Press reports the empire; 7. Two nations revisited: the refugee question in the People's Paper, Household Words and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.