How does an essay change when it appears in a newspaper, aimed at a mass reading public that includes people of varied class backgrounds? This chapter takes up how periodical publication shaped nineteenth-century essays, looking at the effects of serialisation, republication through excerpting, and the intertextual nature of Victorian journals and papers. It explores how the political journalism and social protest movements of the 1830s and 1840s influenced the essay, in contrast to the notion that political campaigning is opposed to the contemplative and reflective values associated with the genre. Focusing on Thomas Carlyle’s response to the social movements of his time, the chapter argues that not only did Carlyle engage ideologically with popular protest but that the writing he encountered in the radical press shaped his style by encouraging an oratorical mode, melodramatic language and rhetorical excesses.

This chapter re-visits Raymond Williams’s imagined journey in ‘Three around Farnham’, from The Country and the City (1973), to explore the meanings of georgic in a period of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. It suggests that William Cobbett might be read as a writer engaged with the georgic mode and shows how his writings on rural England contain recognisably pastoral and georgic themes, tropes and rhetorical strategies. It examines Cobbett’s attempts to inhabit the rural ideal through his various farming ventures before reading Rural Rides (1830) as a work in the georgic mode, realised through Cobbett’s detailed mapping of the English countryside. This parallels Cottage Economy (1821–1822), an attempt to take georgic away from elite literary culture and down to the level of the cottage. Finally, the chapter demonstrates how Cobbett’s later tours of industrial Britain imagine a union between agricultural and industrial workers as the only possibility for political reform.

Potatoes were deeply embedded in nineteenth-century arguments about the merits of capitalism. The potato’s contested status emerges clearly in discussions about Ireland. In the eighteenth century, the potato’s contribution to the Irish diet had been viewed positively, because it enabled population growth. By the mid-nineteenth century it had become both an alarming illustration of the perils of economic autarky and a testament to the evils of capitalism. Commentators on all sides of the debate agreed that the potato encapsulated something of capitalism’s essence. At the same time, as urbanisation and industrialisation advanced, the conviction that the population’s eating habits had a material impact on the body politic only deepened. The new language of nutrition provided a vocabulary for expressing this relationship. From the mid-nineteenth century the potato’s growing importance within the working-class diet attracted the worried attention of nutritionists and statesmen, who condemned the effects of ‘lazy potato blood’ on the working body: the potato’s popularity with workers was blamed for lacklustre economic growth. Talking about potatoes provided a way for working people, scientists, economists and politicians to discuss the enormous changes that were reshaping nineteenth-century Europe in ways that stressed the close connections between economic practices and everyday eating habits.