How, given the murder of those demanding a more representative political system at Peterloo in 1819, did more Britons, at home and in the colonies, get to vote by 1885?

How does an essay change when it appears in a newspaper, aimed at a mass reading public that includes people of varied class backgrounds? This chapter takes up how periodical publication shaped nineteenth-century essays, looking at the effects of serialisation, republication through excerpting, and the intertextual nature of Victorian journals and papers. It explores how the political journalism and social protest movements of the 1830s and 1840s influenced the essay, in contrast to the notion that political campaigning is opposed to the contemplative and reflective values associated with the genre. Focusing on Thomas Carlyle’s response to the social movements of his time, the chapter argues that not only did Carlyle engage ideologically with popular protest but that the writing he encountered in the radical press shaped his style by encouraging an oratorical mode, melodramatic language and rhetorical excesses.

This last chapter discusses two of Wordsworth’s last poems, written when he was seventy-five – poems about old, poor men in their last days, approaching death. Written in 1846, these poems echo the sea poems of the mid-1830s in that they depict people who have been left lonely and isolated, in this case by the death of loved ones. Wordsworth shows extreme old age as a time of alienation, even when the aged person lives where he has always lived. His family having died, he has no one with whom to practise the daily rituals and routines that renew love and secure identity. Memory and recollection do not suffice to restore the missing presence; the self cannot sustain itself by enshrining the spirit of the past. Expressing this bleak view about the limitations of memorialisation, the poems are in dialogue with Wordsworth’s past work: they depict the aged like the sailor of ‘Composed by the Sea Shore’ and the heroine of ‘The Somnambulist’, but unlike the Wordsworth of The Prelude. They are also in dialogue with a large and noisy public campaign, in which the life, and the death, of the elderly poor was a controversial topic.

Frederick Douglass was perhaps the most successful African American abolitionist to traverse the Atlantic and tour the British Isles. In town halls, churches, taverns, and private parlor rooms across the country he spoke to hundreds of thousands of people, sparking a wave of transatlantic abolition that had a deep impact on the British landscape. While he only traveled to Britain and Ireland three times, the friendships and networks he created, together with his transformative experiences there, shaped, supported and sustained his public antislavery work in the United States for the rest of his life.

This chapter analyzes Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Oliver Twist, and Barnaby Rudge to show how the Dickensian novel includes animals in its political critiques, questions the belief that humans have access to animal subjectivity, and cultivates an alternate form of animal character. Although Dickens rarely removes himself from ideologies of pastoral power, his animals often function outside it. Dickens’s animal characters critique dominant notions of liberal character and the character of government, offering a way out from animalizing discourses of both animal and working-class character. This chapter engages with discourse surrounding the New Poor Law and Chartism, and shows how Dickens’s animal characters can be considered minor characters who reflect demands for democracy throughout the period. These three novels highlight the radical nature of Dickens’s animal politics, as they challenge larger constructions of liberal character and posit alternate animal subjectivities within a more democratic political community.

This chapter analyzes Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Oliver Twist, and Barnaby Rudge to show how the Dickensian novel includes animals in its political critiques, questions the belief that humans have access to animal subjectivity, and cultivates an alternate form of animal character. Although Dickens rarely removes himself from ideologies of pastoral power, his animals often function outside it. Dickens’s animal characters critique dominant notions of liberal character and the character of government, offering a way out from animalizing discourses of both animal and working-class character. This chapter engages with discourse surrounding the New Poor Law and Chartism, and shows how Dickens’s animal characters can be considered minor characters who reflect demands for democracy throughout the period. These three novels highlight the radical nature of Dickens’s animal politics, as they challenge larger constructions of liberal character and posit alternate animal subjectivities within a more democratic political community.