A fresh new approach to Victorian medievalism, showing it to be far from the preserve of the elite. This book offers a challenge to the current study of nineteenth-century British medievalism, re-examining its general perception as an elite and conservative tendency, the imposition of order from above evidenced in the work of Walter Scott, in the Eglinton Tournament, and in endless Victorian depictions of armour-clad knights. Whilst some previous scholars have warned that medievalism should not be reduced to the role of an ideologically conservative discourse which always and everywhere had the role of either obscuring, ignoring, or forgetting the ugly truths of an industrialised modernity by appealing to a green and ordered Merrie England, there has been remarkably little exploration of liberal or radical medievalisms, still less of working-class medievalisms. Essays in this book question a number of orthodoxies. Can it be imagined that in the world of Ivanhoe, the Eglinton Tournament, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, the working class remained largely oblivious to, or at best uninterested in, medievalism? What, if any, was the working-class medievalist counter-blast to conservatism? How did feminism and socialismdeploy the medieval past? The contributions here range beyond the usual canonical cultural sources to investigate the ephemera: the occasional poetry, the forgotten novels, the newspapers, short-lived cultural journals, fugitive Chartist publications. A picture is created of a richly varied and subtle understanding of the medieval past on the part of socialists, radicals, feminists and working-class thinkers of all kinds, a set of dreams of the Middle Agesto counter what many saw as the disorder of the times.

Pestilence entered The ordinary pursuits of society were paralysed; all previously-formed plans of happiness, business, trade, occupation, and domestic arrangement, were checked as cruelly and abruptly as if every principle of the human mind were in a moment subverted The physicians saw that human aid was vain, and that destruction inevitably awaited all who approached the infected. Terrific mortality! Appalling scourge of the human race! George W.M. Reynolds Throughout history humankind has faced a number of deadly pandemics and such diseases have left their mark in history books, fine art, novels, life writing, and newspapers. This book collects together writings from across the centuries which illuminate people's experiences with plagues and pandemics. From Ancient Greece there is Thucydides on the Athenian Plague; Procopius gives his account of Plague of Justinian; also included is many more extracts of writings on plagues from medieval and early modern writers. Readers can enjoy several works of fiction including an abridged version of Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), a reproduction in full of Jack London's Scarlet Plague (1912), as well as short pandemic stories from Edgar Allan Poe, George W.M. Reynolds, Daniel Defoe, and William Harrison Ainsworth.