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This book examines the British ghost story within the political contexts of the long nineteenth century. By relating the ghost story to economic, national, colonial and gendered contexts it provides a critical re-evaluation of the period. The conjuring of a political discourse of spectrality during the nineteenth century enables a culturally sensitive reconsideration of the work of writers including Dickens, Collins, Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, May Sinclair, Kipling, Le Fanu, Henry James and M.R. James. Additionally, a chapter on the interpretation of spirit messages reveals how issues relating to textual analysis were implicated within a language of the spectral.

This volume is the first to bring together research on the life and work of the author, activist, and traveller Margaret Harkness, who wrote under the pseudonym ‘John Law’. The collection contextualises Harkness’s political project of observing and recording the lives and priorities of the working classes and urban poor alongside the broader efforts of philanthropists, political campaigners, journalists, and novelists who sought to bring the plight of marginalised communities to light at the end of the nineteenth century. It argues for a recognition of Harkness’s importance in providing testimony to the social and political crises that led to the emergence of British socialism and labour politics during this period. This collection includes considerations of Harkness’s work in London’s East End at the end of the nineteenth century, but moves into the twentieth century and beyond Britain’s borders to examine the significance of her global travel for the purpose of investigating international political trends. This collection gives substance to women’s social engagement and political involvement in a period prior to their formal enfranchisement, and offers insight into the ways this effected shifts in literary style and subject. In offering a detailed picture of Harkness’s own life and illuminating the lives and work of her contemporaries, this volume enriches critical understanding of the complex and dynamic world of the long nineteenth century.

The book considers all of Elizabeth Siddal’s poems in the contemporary critical context of the ongoing retrieval and re-evaluation of nineteenth-century women’s poetry. More significantly, it close reads the texts alongside those of five male authors, Dante Rossetti, Swinburne, Tennyson, Ruskin and Keats, who were either personally known to her or were a source of influence or inspiration. Modern scholarship has tended to include female voices in single-sex anthologies which stress their unique collective contribution but shield them from comparison with the much larger male canon, which denies lesser-known poets like Siddal an augmented critical reception. Association with these ‘greats’ of Victorian and Romantic literature enhances and consolidates her reputation and encourages alternative readings of poems that at first glance can appear slight, self-indulgent and derivative. The work of contemporary female poets, notably Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning is used to evaluate the distinctive and meritorious nature of Siddal’s oeuvre and all the poems are read with reference to the prevailing social, religious and political contexts that had a bearing on their construction and reception. As Siddal’s poems are very short and ambiguous their initial impression is visual, making the inclusion of certain of her artwork an informative entrée to chapters that consider her poetic dialogue with the interplay of erotic and spiritual love, the ballad tradition, the Romantic conception of the physical and spectral body, and the nineteenth-century ‘woman question’ while reflecting upon the paradoxes and dualisms that pervade her work.