RICHARD CRONIN, Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo.

Abstract

RICHARD CRONIN’s new book offers a lively, readable, and valuable portrait of post-Napoleonic literary culture in Britain. An ambitious and broad-ranging study that draws upon an encyclopaedic knowledge of the periodical culture of the era, it will no doubt become a standard text for anyone interested in the intersections between literary and print culture in the early nineteenth century. Paper Pellets is a valuable addition to the recent body of excellent work on early nineteenth-century print culture and periodical writing. Jon Klancher’s influential study The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (1987) has been followed more recently by Mark Parker’s Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (2000) and David Higgins’s Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine (2005). Paper Pellets, however, builds on these studies by offering fresh and illuminating insights not only into periodical culture, but also into a far more diverse body of literature. In doing so Cronin intervenes in recent scholarly debates about literary production and creativity in the Romantic era. Whereas much recent work has emphasized the role of sociability, friendship, and sympathy within literary circles, Cronin’s focus is on the workings of opposition and discord: it was, he writes, ‘a period constituted not … by the doctrine of sympathy that its leading writers held in common but by the antagonisms that divided them’ (13).