Category: Romantic and Victorian

Mike Jay, Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025) 382 pp. + 27 bw illustrations, $22.00 PB, ISBN: 9780300282610. Mike Jay’s Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science purports to be a ‘revised and updated edition’ of…

Elfed Huw Price, William Lawrence and the Organ of Mind: The Theology, Medicine and Politics of the Brain (London: UCL Press, 2025) 240 pp. £20.29 Pb. ISBN: 9781787357907 Today, the assertion that ‘the brain is the organ of mind’ is treated as an almost self-evident scientific truth. Yet, as Elfed Huw Price demonstrates in his…

John MacNeill Miller, The Ecological Plot: How Stories Gave Rise to a Science (University of Virginia Press, 2024) 228 pp. $110 Hb. $32.50 Pb. ISBN: 9780813951775 John MacNeill Miller’s The Ecological Plot (2024) offers an ambitious contribution to the intellectual history of ecology by tracing the narrative forms through which ecological thinking first became imaginable.…

Hugh Epstein, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020) 312 pp. £27.99 Ebook ISBN: 9781474449885 Hugh Epstein’s book offers a persuasive and deftly managed reconsideration of Hardy and Conrad, through which they emerge as ‘compatible’ writers and as particularly eminent figures in late-Victorian culture more broadly (18). Indeed, Hardy, Conrad and the…

Jessica Cox, Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cheltenham: The History Press, 2023) 320 pp. £25.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780750998574 The nineteenth century witnessed a population boom that has long been the subject of historical attention, particularly within in the context of industrialisation and expansion. However, Jessica Cox, a reader in English…

Silvia Riccardi, Dark Romanticism: Literature, Art, and the Body, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) 242 pp. £109.99 Hb, ISBN 978-3-031-64364-4 Silvia Riccardi’s Dark Romanticism: Literature, Art and the Body brings together elements of the visual, literary, and scientific in a beautifully illustrated and incredibly detailed volume. Throughout the work, Riccardi presents a fascinating interplay between the…

Stefanie Markovits, The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025) 240 pp. $100 Hb. ISBN: 9780198937791 ‘Number sense’ is the term Stefanie Markovits uses to describe the numerical thinking that permeates the lines and pages of nineteenth-century novels and poems, crafting patterns across the tapestry of poetic imagery and narrative arcs. As she…

Adrian Desmond, Reign of the Beast: The Atheist World of W. D. Saull and his Museum of Evolution (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2024) xii+664 Free e-book. £25.46 Pb. £37.36 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-80511-240-2 In 1851, Admiral Sir John Ross returned to London from the Arctic expedition that had discovered the sad fate of Franklin’s lost expedition.…

Lucy Cogan and Michelle O’Connell, eds, Life, Death and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) 280 pp. £119.99 Hb. ISBN: 9783021133626 The long nineteenth century was a time of vast scientific advances, when new knowledge of chemistry, anatomy and medicine developed at an unprecedented rate, changing the way people interpreted the world…