This article seeks to recover civil war radicalism as a fit subject for scholarly enquiry, in the wake of “revisionist” responses to the work of Christopher Hill that challenged the validity of concentrating upon “marginal” figures, and upon aspects of the revolutionary decades that were merely “epiphenomenal.” It does so by drawing attention to one particular individual – Clement Writer – who played a significant part in Hill's work, although it does so by highlighting something other than his ideas, or even his status as a humble and uneducated clothier. My focus, therefore, is less upon Writer's religious radicalism than upon his participatory practices, and his appropriation of print as a tactical device; upon the part that experience of political processes played in his radicalization; and upon evidence of what might be described as his “political imaginary,” or his less-than-fully-theorized understanding of the political system, its faults and its possibilities.

This article considers the impact of Christopher Hill's writing on literary criticism, with particular reference to his work on John Milton, John Bunyan, and Gerrard Winstanley, and it traces the informing principles of his later writing to core concepts developed in The World Turned Upside Down, which in turn is contextualized in the radical thought and action of the later 1960s.

This essay introduces six articles exploring the importance, and limitations, of Christopher Hill's classic work, The World Turned Upside Down. They arise from a conference held in Sheffield in 2012 to mark the 40th anniversary of its publication and discuss the contemporary and subsequent appeal of the book and the stimulus that it gave to the study of the radicals and their writing during the 1640s. In this sense, The World Turned Upside Down is a prose work of some significance in its own right. However, these chapters also consider damaging flaws in the conceptualization of the book and in its underlying methodology. The reputation of the book among professional historians fell dramatically as a result of these flaws, and of its place in a broader Marxist and marxisant historiography that came under sustained attack from the mid-1970s, not long after the book appeared. The essay concludes with some reflections on recent developments in the historiography of the English Revolution, which offer new ways to revisit the topics and questions raised by Hill.

This article rereads George Eliot's Impressions of Theophrastus Such in the light of her early series of journalism “Poetry and Prose, from the Notebook of an Eccentric.” Rather than viewing these texts as experimental deviations, this article casts these texts as part of larger patterns evident in Eliot's canon as a whole. Building on recent studies on Eliot and Victorian perfectionism, it argues that Eliot united an appreciation for complex and diverse configurations of form with her interest in individual development and the extension of sympathy. In these texts, we can see a reflection of Eliot's interest in the attempt to capture and display human thinking processes in order to advance her project of extending the sympathies of her readership. It examines Eliot's organicist views on form and consciousness and suggests that these are key to making sense of the apparently “aberrant” nature of these texts. Eliot, influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach, held to the idea that just as the highest form of organicism was the most complex, so also was the highest form of art the most structurally varied and intricate. From this viewpoint, the texts are eminently successful. Moreover, they point the way to achieving a fuller understanding of the apparent problematics of form that have concerned critics in regard to Eliot's better-known fictional works since their original publication.

What is travel writing? Although travel writing has existed for millennia, its parameters can be as hard to pin down as its protagonists. Early in TheCambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, Tim Y...

Mid-seventeenth-century radical writers often produced a polemically crafted representation of themselves and their actions as a component of their controversial prose, shaping those images to meet the exigencies of debate or to match the stereotypes of radical martyrology. Winstanley steps outside those common paradigms to engage the more challenging task of exemplifying his radical and heretical theological system from the experiences of the Diggers and of illuminating those experiences by demonstrating their alignment with his theological system and its delineation of the battle between the old red Dragon and the Lamb.

JUSTIN D. EDWARDS AND RUNE GRAULUND (Eds), 2011, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, ix +192 pp., ISBN 9780230241190, hb. £52.50 Travel writing, as Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund observe, has oft...

This essay examines the concept of children's autobiography via several autobiographical extracts written by the author as a child. Although only a small proportion of people will compose and publish a full-length autobiography, almost everyone will, inadvertently, produce an archive of the self, made from public records and private documents. Here, such works are seen as providing access to writing both about and by children. The essay explores the ethics and poetics of children's writing via the key debates in life writing; in particular, the dynamic relationship between adults and children, both as distinct stages of life and dual parts of one autobiographical identity. The term “ante-autobiography” is coined to refer to these texts which come before or instead of a full-length narrative. They are not read as less than or inadequate versions of autobiography, but rather as transgressive and challenging to chronological notions of the genre.

Matthew Arnold's readings of Irish politics are heavily influenced by his reading of Edmund Burke. This essay examines his career as a commentator on the state of Ireland as he turned his attention to separate issues such as: (1) Fenianism and the disestablishment of the Irish Church in the late 1860s; (2) the Irish University Question in the 1870s; (3) the Land War in the late 1870s and early 1880s; and (4) Home Rule in the mid-1880s. Despite these differences in immediate object, Arnold continued to take what he considered to be a Burkean approach to Irish politics. In fact, he considered Burke's Irish writings so important that he edited a collection of them for popular consumption during to the Irish Land War. The major ideas Arnold took from Burke's Irish writings were, first, an emphasis on a rhetorical/ethical model for colonial government; second, a critique of the Protestant Ascendancy; and third, an insistence that a failure to reconcile Ireland would threaten the British Constitution itself. This essay will track Arnold's series of “Burkean” interventions into an evolving Irish political crisis, demonstrating along the way that there were persistent slippages between the opposing vocabularies of organicism and mechanization in all of proposals for Irish reconciliation, and that Arnold's Burkean approach to Ireland was integral to his larger thinking about culture and politics.

This essay argues that British domestic and imperial beliefs and identities were significantly influenced by the global postal network, which transported the words and ideas of emigrants back to England and disseminated news and opinions about the colonies throughout the mother nation. In order to make this claim I focus upon the prose of Caroline Chisholm, an Englishwoman who settled in Australia and was a tireless supporter of emigration reform in both colony and metropole. She assisted thousands of emigrants in finding jobs and housing, and penned countless letters and several influential pamphlets that powerfully impacted British beliefs about Australia, the emigrants who voyaged there, the systems of emigration and convict transportation, and the broader project of imperialism. Studying her prose as well as her influential connection with Charles Dickens illuminates the power of global postal networks to transform not only private beliefs but also government policies and practices.