British Writers, Popular Literature and New Media Innovation, 1820–45

Alexis Easley is Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–70 (2004) and Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914 (2011). She has also co-edited four books, most recently Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s–1900s, with Clare Gill and Beth Rodgers (2019). Her most recent book publication is New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer, 1832–60 (2021). This project was a 2019 recipient of the Linda H. Peterson Prize awarded by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. She is currently at work on a biography of Eliza Cook.

Few edited volumes support a central idea as clearly as this one does. Read together, the twelve chapters flesh out the surprising modernity of the Age of Reform. Any SHARP members interested in the history of publishing, the development of the modern digital age, or the problems inherent in periodicity as a scholarly organizing function must read this volume.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsSeries PrefaceNotes on ContributorsIntroduction, Alexis Easley1. ‘Collect and Simplify': Serial Miscellaneity and Extraction in the Early Nineteenth Century, Mark Turner2. William Hazlitt and Celebrity Culture: Periodical Portraits in an Age of Public Intimacy, Chris Haffenden3. Periodical as Memorial: Remembering Felicia Hemans in The New Monthly Magazine, 1835, Elizabeth Howard4. ‘Mirth' and 'Fun': The Comic Annual and the New Graphic Humour of the 1830s, Brian Maidment5. Fauna, Flora and Illustrated Verse in Mary Howitt’s Environmental Children’s Poetry, Linda K. Hughes6. Literature, Media and the 'Advertising System’, Richard Salmon7. Keeping 'pace with the growing spirit of the times': The Women’s Magazine in Transition, Jennie Batchelor8. Beyond the Literary Annuals: Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Periodical Poetry, Caley Ehnes9. A Familiar Transition: Dinah Mulock Craik’s Early Career in Periodicals, 1841–5, Helena Goodwyn10. Paratextual Navigation: Positions of Witnessing in The Anti-Slavery Reporter, Sofia Huggins11. The Media System of Charitable Visiting, Sara L. Maurer12. Invincible Brothers: The Pen and the Press in The Compositors’ Chronicle, 1840–43, Françoise Baillet BibliographyIndex