Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809) was a key figure in the radical movement of the 1790s. This work is intended for scholars wanting to understand Britain and its literature in the 1790s.

Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809) was a key figure in the radical movement of the 1790s. This work is intended for scholars wanting to understand Britain and its literature in the 1790s.

Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809) was a key figure in the radical movement of the 1790s. This work is intended for scholars wanting to understand Britain and its literature in the 1790s.

Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809) was a key figure in the radical movement of the 1790s. This work is intended for scholars wanting to understand Britain and its literature in the 1790s.

Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809) was a key figure in the radical movement of the 1790s. This work is intended for scholars wanting to understand Britain and its literature in the 1790s.

Thomas Holcroft was a central figure of the 1790s, whose texts played an important role in the transition toward Romanticism. In this, the first essay collection devoted to his life and work, the contributors reassess Holcroft's contributions to a remarkable range of literary genres-drama, poetry, fiction, autobiography, political philosophy-and to the project of revolutionary reform in the late eighteenth century. The self-educated son of a cobbler, Holcroft transformed himself into a popular playwright, influential reformist novelist, and controversial political radical. But his work is not important merely because he himself was a remarkable character, but rather because he was a hinge figure between laboring Britons and the dissenting intelligentsia, between Enlightenment traditions and developing 'Romantic' concerns, and between the world of self-made hack writers and that of established critics. Enhanced by an updated and corrected chronology of Holcroft's life and work, key images, and a full bibliography of published scholarship, this volume makes way for more concerted and focused scholarship and teaching on Holcroft. Taken together, the essays in this collection situate Holcroft's self-fashioning as a member of London's literati, his central role among the London radical reformers and intelligentsia, and his theatrical innovations within ongoing explorations of the late eighteenth-century public sphere of letters and debate.

Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809) was a key figure in the radical movement of the 1790s. This work is intended for scholars wanting to understand Britain and its literature in the 1790s.

Behind our contemporary experience of globalization, precarity, and consumerism lies a history of colonization, increasing literacy, transnational trade in goods and labor, and industrialization. Teaching British laboring-class literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries means exploring ideas of class, status, and labor in relation to the historical developments that inform our lives as workers and members of society. This volume demonstrates pedagogical techniques and provides resources for students and teachers on autobiographies, broadside ballads, Chartism and other political movements, georgics, labor studies, satire, service learning, writing by laboring-class women, and writing by laboring people of African descent.

A new and controversial perspective on the causes, personalities and consequences of the most devastating urban riots in British history.