British Writers, Popular Literature and New Media Innovation, 1820–45

The first edited essay collection of its kind to focus on innovators and innovations in the mass-market press from 1820–45

• Explores 1820–45 as a crucial era in the development of the modern press
• Promotes greater understanding of the period between 1820 and 1845 as an era of innovation in nineteenth-century print culture
• Each chapter is designed as a case study that models ways of entering into a vast field of study, drawing attention to the interactivity of readers, editors, publishers and print forms in a period of unprecedented change
• Draws attention to the ways in which our access to this history is enabled by twenty-first-century technologies – digitization, keyword searches and distant reading – that provide access to the periodicals, newspapers and rare books that fuel and shape our research
• Explores intersections between periodicals, books and newspapers within the media system of the period, demonstrating how change affected not only individual titles but also a broader media ecology in which old media were adapted to new contexts and the launch of new publications produced and harnessed new readerships

The emergence of a mass reading public during the early decades of the nineteenth century sparked a period of creative innovation in the popular press. This collection focuses on the early decades of the nineteenth century as a key period of innovation in the popular press. Steam printing, popular education campaigns, and new technologies of illustration led to new trends in book and periodical production.