Book contents
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 On the Eve
- Chapter 2 ‘An Infectious Madness’
- Chapter 3 Augustus Hardin Beaumont, Slavery Apologias, and Popular Radical Literature in the 1830s
- Chapter 4 Patterns of Industry
- Chapter 5 Mother Earth
- Chapter 6 The Polite Fictions of Slavery
- Chapter 7 Suffering, Sentiment, and the Rise of Humanitarian Literature in the 1830s
- Chapter 8 Steam and Iron in the 1830s
- Chapter 9 Lithography and the Comic Image 1825–1840
- Chapter 10 Jorrocks’s Canon
- Chapter 11 Tennyson, Dickens, Poe, Browning, and the Brontës:Blackwood’s Magazine and ‘The Foreheads of a New Generation’
- Chapter 12 Boz in London: The 1830s and the Urban Turn in the English Novel
- Chapter 13 Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Chronicler of the 1830s
- Chapter 14 Railway Imaginary in the 1830s
- Chapter 15 The Emerging Language of Photography
- Afterword
- Index
Chapter 8 - Steam and Iron in the 1830s
Liberal Imperialism, Thomas Love Peacock, and the Nemesis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 May 2024
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 On the Eve
- Chapter 2 ‘An Infectious Madness’
- Chapter 3 Augustus Hardin Beaumont, Slavery Apologias, and Popular Radical Literature in the 1830s
- Chapter 4 Patterns of Industry
- Chapter 5 Mother Earth
- Chapter 6 The Polite Fictions of Slavery
- Chapter 7 Suffering, Sentiment, and the Rise of Humanitarian Literature in the 1830s
- Chapter 8 Steam and Iron in the 1830s
- Chapter 9 Lithography and the Comic Image 1825–1840
- Chapter 10 Jorrocks’s Canon
- Chapter 11 Tennyson, Dickens, Poe, Browning, and the Brontës:Blackwood’s Magazine and ‘The Foreheads of a New Generation’
- Chapter 12 Boz in London: The 1830s and the Urban Turn in the English Novel
- Chapter 13 Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Chronicler of the 1830s
- Chapter 14 Railway Imaginary in the 1830s
- Chapter 15 The Emerging Language of Photography
- Afterword
- Index
Summary
This chapter deals with the development and increasing prevalence of steam-powered technology in the life and culture of the 1830s. It discusses the vexed question of the relationship between liberalism and empire and the contribution of liberal progressives and technological radicals, such as Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Babington Macaulay, to the process of empire. It argues that a war begun in 1839 between the British and the Qing empires acts as a summation of the progress in the decade towards a new form of steam-powered colonialism. The ‘Steam Romanticism’ of the 1830s had a strongly imperialist dimension. This chapter discusses the crucial contribution of the Romantic period satirical novelist and essayist to this process. As a leading administrator of the East India Company, Peacock was intimately involved with the commissioning, design, and construction of new, steam-powered vessels for use by the Company, notably the iron-hulled warship the Nemesis, the presence of which proved crucial in the First Opium War with China.
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- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s , pp. 170 - 190Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024