An underground history of early Victorian fiction: Chartism, radical print culture, and the social problem novel

Introduction: can a social problem speak?

Social inheritance in the new poor law debate: William Cobbett, Harriet Martineau, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry

Books of (social) murder: melodrama and the slow violence of the market in anti-new poor law satire, fiction, and journalism

A life in fragments: Thomas Cooper's Chartist Bildungsroman

Questions from workers who read: education and self-formation in Chartist print culture and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton

Revenge in the age of insurance: villainy in theatrical melodrama and Ernest Jones's fiction

"Outworks of the citadel of corruption": the Chartist press reports the empire

Two nations revisited: the refugee question in the people's paper, household words and Charles Dickens's A tale of two cities.