Introduction

Mee, J. and Sangster, M. (2023) Introduction. In: Mee, J. and Sangster, M. (eds.) Remediating the 1820s. Series: Edinburgh critical studies in romanticism. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, pp. 1-20. ISBN 9781474493277

Abstract

The introduction opens by evoking two interlinked 1820s discourses that both served as registers of seismic cultural change. One was an excited response to novel opportunities grounded in new technologies and burgeoning media; the other a mournful sense of imminent loss that produced a distinctive kind of nostalgia most obviously associated with the radical Toryism which the Lake Poets played a major role in creating. Both these discourses were intensely aware of themselves as remediations, transforming older methodologies and ideals to come to terms with meaningful pasts and possible futures from the standpoint of a deeply uncertain present. We ground our discussion by examining two touchstone events that bracket the decade: the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 and the death of the liberal Tory MP William Huskisson in the world’s first fatal railway accident in 1830. These events are used to frame a postwar moment in which an inexorable move towards a new economic situation based on manufacturing was raising urgent questions about forms of representation, acceptable standards, cultural connections, the nature of improvement and the implications of speed. As London mushroomed, railways began to spread between the new industrial areas, and the stock market rose vertiginously and crashed precipitously, cultural agents produced a bewildering array of new forms and genres that sought to capture and contain the onrush. The reconfigured magic lantern, the cheap magazine, the lithophane, the lecture, the lavish annual and the stalwart hymnal all competed to fix meanings in a time of extraordinary proliferation. While the decade has often been passed over as one full of unformed narratives, uncertain roads and empty spectacles, this reflects the exhilarating and painful feelings of possibility and contingency experienced by those struggling to make sense of a bewildering new order. The introduction also reflects on the collection’s own status as a multiform remediation that surfaces hitherto-neglected characteristics of the decade while benefitting from the retrospective perspective often anxiously evoked in 1820s writing, but which proved impossible to sustain in the heat of the moment.

• Item Type: Book Sections (Introduction)
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Sangster, Professor Matthew
• Authors: Mee, J., and Sangster, M.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• ISBN: 9781474493277

Project Code	Award No	Project Name	Principal Investigator	Funder's Name	Funder Ref	Lead Dept
301809		The Media Revolution of the 1820s	Matthew Sangster	The Royal Society of Edinburgh (ROYSOCED)	58536	Arts - English Literature