Contested Liberalisms Martineau Dickens And The Victorian Press Iain Crawford by Iain Crawford 9781474453158, 1474453155 instant download after payment.

• Demonstrates, through new readings of Martineau and Dickens’s travel in and writing about the United States, how their encounters with the American public sphere were crucially formative in both writers’ careers and in their shaping as journalists
• Places Martineau and Dickens within the context of Anglo-American liberalism, thereby expanding our reading of them beyond earlier schema framed in narrower terms of political economy
• Expands understandings of transatlantic literary exchange to offer a more comprehensive reading than those offered through an earlier critical focus simply on the issue of international copyright

Focusing on the importance of Martineau’s contribution to the development of the early Victorian press, this book highlights the degree to which the public quarrel between her and Dickens in the mid-1850s represented larger fissures within nineteenth-century liberalism. It places Martineau and Dickens within the context of Anglo-American liberalism and demonstrates how these fissures were embedded within a transatlantic conversation over the role of the press in forming a public sphere essential to the development of a liberal society.