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The Poetry and the Politics - Radical Reform in Victorian England (Hardcover)
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The Poetry and the Politics - Radical Reform in Victorian England (Hardcover)
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The nineteenth century was a time of 'movements' - political,
social, moral reform causes - which drew on the energies of men and
women across Britain. This book studies radical reform at the
margins of early Victorian society, focusing on decades of
particular social, political and technological ferment: when
foreign and British promoters of extravagant technologically
assisted utopias could attract many hundreds of supporters of
limited means, persuaded to escape grim conditions by emigration to
South America; when pioneers of vegetarianism joined the ranks of
the temperance movement; and when working-class Chartists, reviving
a struggle for political reform, seemed to threaten the State for a
brief moment in April 1848. Through the forgotten figure of James
Elmslie Duncan, 'shabby genteel' poet and self-proclaimed 'Apostle
of the Messiahdom', The Poetry and the Politics considers themes
including poetry's place in radical culture, the response of
pantomime to the Chartist challenge to law and order, and
associations between madness and revolution.Duncan became a
promoter of the technological fantasies of John Adolphus Etzler, a
poet of science who prophesied a future free from drudgery, through
machinery powered by natural forces. Etzler dreamed of crystal
palaces: Duncan's public freedom was to end dramatically in 1851
just as a real crystal palace opened to an astonished world. In
addition to Duncan, James Gregory also introduces a cast of other
poets, earnest reformers and agitators, such as William Thom the
weaver poet of Inverury, whose metropolitan feting would end in
tragedy; John Goodwyn Barmby, bearded Pontiffarch of the Communist
Church; a lunatic 'Invisible Poet' of Cremorne pleasure gardens;
the hatter from Reading who challenged the 'feudal' restrictions of
the Game Laws by tract, trespass and stuffed jay birds; and foreign
exotics such as the German-born Conrad Stollmeyer, escaping the
sinking of an experimental Naval Automaton in Margate to build a
fortune as theAsphalt King of Trinidad.Combining these figures with
the biography of a man whose literary career was eccentric and
whose public antics were capitalised upon by critics of Chartist
agitation, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in
radical reform and popular political movements in Victorian
Britain.
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