Edinburgh Critical Editions of Nineteenth-Century Texts

Mona Caird’s immensely successful feminist novel, The Daughters of Danaus (1894), remains a popular choice among scholars and teachers of nineteenth-century British literature. This is the first critical edition and the first twenty-first century reprint of Caird’s novel with a full editorial apparatus including a critical introduction, notes and appendices. Informed by the novel’s fin-de-siècle context, references to Greek mythology and recent scholarship on Caird and the New Woman, this edition will be beneficial for students and scholars of British and Anglophone literature and gender.

Presents the first extended collection of new William Morris essays in several decades

• Gathers a selection of Morris's essays from manuscripts, newspapers and long out-of-print sources
• Follows Morris’s development from a youthful art reformer and anti-imperialist through his years as a skilled political theorist and widely influential pan-socialist presence
• Adds to our understanding of Morris’s views on competition, war, violence, social justice and the need to protect our natural environment

William Morris’s socialist essays remain uncannily relevant for our time, as he addresses issues of inequality, precarity, and the need for pleasure and creative fulfilment in work and life. This scholarly edition traces Morris’s opinions from his early insistence that all must have access to art in its broadest sense, through his years as a leader and theorist of the nascent British socialist movement. Finally, as Morris became the elder statesman of the socialist/labour cause, these writings demonstrate his efforts to reconcile competing factions in the service of common aims.

A new scholarly edition of a bold yet overlooked Victorian text that blends the genres of memoir, travelogue, ethnography and the realist novel

• Permits students and academic researchers to access more subtle assessments of Lavengro, as well as a range of relevant contexts
• Reappraises the relation of Lavengro to nineteenth-century writings on Romani and traveller culture
• Explores George Borrow’s influence on an array of later Victorian and modernist authors such as Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf.
• Surveys and gauges recent debates and critical accounts of George Borrow’s life and literary career

This critical edition of George Borrow’s Lavengro: The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest (1851) brings a renewed focus on a formally inventive and original text for scholars of the nineteenth-century autobiographical novel and travelogue. This edition reflects and develops research that anchors Borrow’s energetically eccentric vision in a range of notable contexts. The scholarly introduction gives readers unfamiliar with the formidably prolific Borrow an opportunity to discover more about this author’s career at home and abroad (as a translator for the British and Foreign Bible Society), his stylistic innovations, and how Lavengro evokes a ‘wild England’ that became crucial for admirers in the next century such as D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf.

First modern scholarly edition of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s 1824 novel Redwood: A Tale

• Completes the modern scholarly library of Sedgwick’s major novels
• Includes an historically and theoretically informed critical introduction that situates the novel within American social and literary history
• Clear and extensive annotations guide readers, particularly undergraduate students, through the novel’s historical, geographical, literary, and religious references

Redwood follows Ellen Bruce as she enters adulthood, navigating the clashing social currents of pious New England farmers, southern belles from South Carolina, slave-owning atheists from Virginia, and sophisticated Philadelphia socialites on her journey to discover the secret of her parentage and craft her own identity as a strong American woman. The novel's embedded slave narrative provides a powerful early prototype for later anti-slavery fiction. Ellen's formidable mentor, Debby Lenox, a single woman who stands over six feet tall and makes her own rules about what constitutes respectable behaviour for women, is remarkably refreshing and original almost two centuries after Sedgwick crafted her.

This new edition includes a historically and theoretically informed critical introduction that situates the novel within American social and literary history, also featuring a bibliography for further research and appendices detailing the significant differences between the two nineteenth-century editions.

First scholarly edition of Philip James Bailey’s epic masterpiece in a readable, modern volume

• Offers a general introduction to Bailey’s life and work with a thematic guide to the poem that made him famous
• Includes a range of critical responses from British and American press

Philip James Bailey’s Festus was an artistic sensation in the Victorian period, a best-seller across the Anglophone world and broadly influential on other writers. This edition marks the first time it has been published in over 100 years, featuring the poem’s first lineation and a contextualization of its scientific and theological imagery. Scholars and students will benefit from a general introduction to Bailey’s life and work with a thematic guide to the poem that made him famous and appendices containing illustrations from period lithography.

A scholarly edition of a neglected and provocative masterpiece of the fin-de-siècle avant-garde

• Offers a comprehensive analysis and interpretation of Crackanthorpe’s first volume of short stories
• Contextualizes the volume in terms of Crackanthorpe’s other work, in terms of contemporary writers and fin-de-siècle culture and society in Britain and Europe
• Includes two non-fiction pieces by Crackanthorpe, which he published in Albemarle and The Yellow Book in 1892 and 1894
• Contains an uncollected short story The Haseltons," which Crackanthorpe published in The Yellow Book in 1894

Hubert Crackanthorpe was a skilful and technically innovative English realist/naturalist writer. This edition of his powerful first collection of short stories features a carefully contextualised introduction to the author and his work. Providing a detailed analysis of his short stories, David Malcolm situates the author within the fin-de-siècle culture and society in Britain and Europe. Appendices contain additional works that reflect Crackanthorpe’s perspective on fiction and contemporary literary trends.

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A new scholarly edition of a major late-Victorian scientific romance novel

Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds is regarded as one of the most culturally important Victorian bestsellers. This critical edition offers instructive access to this multifaceted but still largely underappreciated novel that is a key text for scholars and students of late-Victorian women’s writing. It also raises urgent questions about a wide array of textual and cultural concerns, especially the form and function of the Victorian ‘bestseller’.

Key Features

• Contains a thorough critical and analytical introduction, annotations and appendices
• Provides context and underlines the aesthetic significance of Corelli’s supernatural romance
• Engages with the full range of secondary scholarship on this neglected late-Victorian author

First scholarly edition of a bestselling historical novel

• Explores the socio-political themes of the novel and deemed as relevant today as they were over 200 years ago
• Situates work in the genealogy of the historical novel and examines its literary and cultural influence
• Scholarly annotations clarify the historical context: the French Revolution, the related war in Poland, and Britain’s response to Polish refugees in the 1790s

Published in 1803, Thaddeus of Warsaw is a beguiling romance that also exposes the hardships faced by migrants in Britain two hundred years ago. Jane Porter tells the story of a dashing Polish refugee, Thaddeus Sobieski, who must escape hostilities in his homeland. In London he faces poverty and prejudice, but his courage and goodness bring him to the attention of a circle of women who, in a surprising role reversal, either aid or woo him. He must also solve the mystery of his birth by discovering and confronting the British father who abandoned him.

A carefully contextualised introduction to the novel and its author situates the work in the genealogy of the historical novel, examining its literary and cultural influence. Supporting materials include contemporary reviews, poems on Poland and correspondence regarding the novel’s early success.

A scholarly edition of a neglected, hugely popular best-seller

• First scholarly edition of forgotten late Victorian classic of rural life and sensation fiction
• Comprehensive selection of contemporary reviews and commentaries
• Carefully contextualized introduction to the novel and its author

Maxwell Gray tells the sensational story of an ambitious clergyman, who accidentally kills the father of a woman he has made pregnant, and then allows his closest friend to be convicted of the murder. The best-seller was subsequently filmed three times (1914, 1915, 1934) and presents fascinating insights into the forgotten world of late Victorian rural life.

Including a carefully contextualised introduction to the novel and its author, this edition also provides a comprehensive selection of contemporary reviews and commentaries.

A collection of articles and letters by Richard Jefferies on agriculture and social change

This book brings together previously uncollected essays on the changing conditions of agriculture and rural life in the 1870s and 1880s. These items, many of which are unknown to researchers, were first published in leading periodicals of the time and offer new insight into the trajectory and timeframe of Jefferies’ career. The material offers fresh perspectives on the economics and politics of agriculture, the condition of the agricultural labourer, the use of steam power, the land question, education and changing farming practices.

Key Features

• Contains significant new material by Jefferies that is republished here for the first time since it appeared in the Victorian periodical press
• Offers new material for research in the areas of Victorian literature, the environmental humanities, the history of agriculture and politics, and to those with interests in rural writing
• Contains a number of newly attributed essays and letters

Features previously unpublished material alongside famous plays

This pioneering edition provides access to some of the most popular plays of the nineteenth century. Characterised by exhilarating plots, large-scale special effects and often transgressive characterisation, these dramas are still exciting for modern readers. This anthology lays the foundation for further scholarly work on sensation drama and focuses public attention on to this influential and immensely popular genre. It features five plays from writers including Dion Boucicault and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. These are supported by a substantial critical apparatus, which adds further value to the anthology by providing rich details on performance history and textual variants. The critical introduction situates the genre in its cultural context and argues for the significance of sensation drama to shifting theatrical cultures and practices.

Key Features

• Provides detailed critical apparatus to facilitate the study of neglected plays, including performance history, notes and recommended further reading
• Widens the critical conversation on sensation drama by drawing attention to the work of female playwrights
• Reprints obscure works by popular authors and shows their involvement with both literary and theatrical cultures

A scholarly edition of a significant and exciting late Victorian science fiction novel

Richard Jefferies’ After London is uncanny and intriguing, an adventure story, quest romance, dystopia, and Darwinian novel rolled into one, but also a pioneering work of Victorian science fiction. Imagining a mysterious natural catastrophe that plunges its people into a barbaric future, Jefferies remarkable novel drowns and destroys London and depicts a challenging ‘Wild England’ dominated by nature and filled with evolved animals and devolved humans. Of its time but also distinctively modern, After London can, in its uneasy expression of Victorian and post-Victorian anxieties about industrial development, urbanisation, natural resources, and climate, be regarded as one of the first novels of the Anthropocene. This new critical edition provides one of the earliest examples of a global catastrophe novel that is part of a flowering of nineteenth-century science fiction. It situates After London in a tradition of mid-late Victorian texts that respond to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and responds to a host of other key social, political, and cultural issues of the period.

Key Features

• Opens up readings that situate the text in relation to a range of literary, cultural and biographical contexts including Jefferies’ life, ideas, and works
• Includes a chronology of Jefferies' life, a list of his key works, a detailed scholarly introduction, and appendices including the text of 'The Great Snow', a catastrophe short story set in London; and 'Alone in London'; both of which reveal his attitude to London, urban life and the future of humanity