JOSEPH BRISTOW AND JOSEPHINE MCDONAGH (eds). Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions

Abstract

Joseph Bristow and Josephine McDonagh have edited this collection of essays as a tribute to the memory of Sally Ledger (1961–2009), former Hildred Carlile Professor of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. During Ledger’s academic career in Victorian studies, she also held posts at the University of Exeter, the University of the West of England and Birkbeck, University of London. The editors have organized the collection around Ledger’s critical concerns, which included New Woman writing, Dickens and popular radicalism and her late interest in the history of affect. Friends, colleagues and collaborators draw upon Ledger’s intellectual legacy, developed in influential books such as The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (1997) and Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (2007), further to extend her ‘remapping of the field of Victorian literary history’ (p. 1). Bristow and McDonagh conclude their introduction—in large part an intellectual biography—by identifying ‘Ledger’s quest to find a language in which to analyse the capacity of literature not only to move us but also to bring about radical change’ as her ‘most significant legacy’ (p. 18). ‘Radical change’ is a capacious phrase, and the essays that follow convey the heterogeneousness and plurality of the nineteenth-century radical traditions invoked in the title, encompassing political, sexual, literary and journalistic iterations of radicalism. Ruth Livesey’s discussion of turnpike roads as a site of political struggle takes in the etymological dimension of radicalism—the search for roots—as it appears in William Cobbett’s popular journalism and George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866), whose narrative Livesey frames as a ‘continuous inward retreat from […] collective history into the practices of place-bound memory’ (p. 103). Ben Winyard’s queering of Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841), set against the backdrop of the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780, extends Ledger’s discussion of domestic and political paternalism in Dickens, finding a ‘reparative queer radicalism within the text’ that contrasts markedly with the ‘pessimistic, depressed, and deathly radicalism of some queer scholars’ (p. 55).