Author: Clark Lawlor

Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 223pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978–0–521–76667–8. It has become something of a cliché to observe just how destructive consumption or pulmonary tuberculosis was in the nineteenth century and before: one in four people suffered from it, so writers like Thomas Beddoes claimed. Arguably…

James Robert Allard, Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body, The Nineteenth Century Series (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 174 pp. £50 hb. ISBN 0-7546-5891-7. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) James Allard’s title promises much: a consideration of the poet’s body in Romanticism no less. When one looks inside the book one finds that…