Ian Haywood

Chartism inspired a prodigious literary output, based on its own newspapers and journals. However, while some Chartist political writings have been reprinted, the aesthetic texts of the movement have largely been neglected. This selection of short stories and extracts from longer fiction aims to remedy this situation and covers a diversity of authors, genres and themes. Ian Haywood has written a cogent and wide-ranging review of the Chartist movement and its literature as an introduction to this collection of little-known and revealing stories. The fiction is divided into the following areas: the condition of England, Ireland, revolution, women and Chartism itself.

This is the first study for more than ten years of this radical genre, covering working class literature over the last 150 years. It argues that working-class fiction has flourished in periods of major social and political change.

Ian Haywood explores the 'Golden Age' of caricature through the close reading of key, iconic prints by artists including James Gillray, George and Robert Cruikshank, and Thomas Rowlandson. This approach both illuminates the visual and ideological complexity of graphic satire and demonstrates how this art form transformed Romantic-era politics into a unique and compelling spectacle of corruption, monstrosity and resistance. New light is cast on major Romantic controversies including the 'revolution debate' of the 1790s, the impact of Thomas Paine's 'infidel' Age of Reason, the introduction of paper money and the resulting explosion of executions for forgery, the propaganda campaign against Napoleon, the revolution in Spain, the Peterloo massacre, the Queen Caroline scandal, and the Reform Bill crisis. Overall, the volume offers important new insights into the relationship between art, satire and politics in a key period of history.--Amazon.com.

"The Gordon riots of June 1780 were the most devastating outbreak of urban violence in British history. For almost a week large parts of central London were ablaze, prisons were destroyed and the Bank of England attacked. Hundreds of rioters were shot dead by troops and for many observers it seemed that England was on the verge of a revolution. The first scholarly study in a generation, this book brings together leading scholars from historical and literary studies to provide new perspectives on these momentous events. The essays include new archival work on the religious, political and international contexts of the riots and new interpretations of contemporary literary and artistic sources. For too long the significance of the Gordon riots has been overshadowed by the impact of the French revolution on British society and culture: this book restores the riots to their central position in late eighteenth-century Britain"--

Romantic Period Writings 1798-1832 provides a valuable insight into the condition of Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century. It includes original documents from a range of disciplines and discourses. Among the material assembled in the anthology are writings by previously neglected or underrepresented women, working-class men, black radicals, and conservative and evangelical polemicists, as well as several unfamiliar texts by canonical writers.