Book contents
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 On the Eve
- Chapter 2 ‘An Infectious Madness’
- Chapter 3 Augustus Hardin Beaumont, Slavery Apologias, and Popular Radical Literature in the 1830s
- Chapter 4 Patterns of Industry
- Chapter 5 Mother Earth
- Chapter 6 The Polite Fictions of Slavery
- Chapter 7 Suffering, Sentiment, and the Rise of Humanitarian Literature in the 1830s
- Chapter 8 Steam and Iron in the 1830s
- Chapter 9 Lithography and the Comic Image 1825–1840
- Chapter 10 Jorrocks’s Canon
- Chapter 11 Tennyson, Dickens, Poe, Browning, and the Brontës:Blackwood’s Magazine and ‘The Foreheads of a New Generation’
- Chapter 12 Boz in London: The 1830s and the Urban Turn in the English Novel
- Chapter 13 Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Chronicler of the 1830s
- Chapter 14 Railway Imaginary in the 1830s
- Chapter 15 The Emerging Language of Photography
- Afterword
- Index
Chapter 2 - ‘An Infectious Madness’
Disability and the Epidemiology of Social Unrest in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 May 2024
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 On the Eve
- Chapter 2 ‘An Infectious Madness’
- Chapter 3 Augustus Hardin Beaumont, Slavery Apologias, and Popular Radical Literature in the 1830s
- Chapter 4 Patterns of Industry
- Chapter 5 Mother Earth
- Chapter 6 The Polite Fictions of Slavery
- Chapter 7 Suffering, Sentiment, and the Rise of Humanitarian Literature in the 1830s
- Chapter 8 Steam and Iron in the 1830s
- Chapter 9 Lithography and the Comic Image 1825–1840
- Chapter 10 Jorrocks’s Canon
- Chapter 11 Tennyson, Dickens, Poe, Browning, and the Brontës:Blackwood’s Magazine and ‘The Foreheads of a New Generation’
- Chapter 12 Boz in London: The 1830s and the Urban Turn in the English Novel
- Chapter 13 Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Chronicler of the 1830s
- Chapter 14 Railway Imaginary in the 1830s
- Chapter 15 The Emerging Language of Photography
- Afterword
- Index
Summary
The 1830s were dominated by the cholera pandemic (1826−37) and epidemics of influenza, typhus, and typhoid (1836−42). These events were so important at the time that the discourse of popular protest became interwoven with the language of contagion and of sanitary reform. The reformist unrest of the 1830s was recast in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841) as the 1780 Gordon riots. This chapter explores the extent to which the political and religious unrest in Barnaby Rudge mimics epidemic transmission by placing the novel alongside modern epidemiological studies of urban riots. Further, Dickens connects the 1830s discourses of epidemic and riot with madness, focussing on the problem of the undiagnosability of madness. Barnaby Rudge raises important questions about the transmission of dangerous ideas. Moreover, it connects these to the problem of individual culpability in the case of intellectual disability.
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- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s , pp. 38 - 61Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024