Publications

Books etc.

  • Darwinism’s Generations. The Reception of Darwinian Evolution in Britain, 1859-1909 (OUP, 2024).
  • Very Short Introductions. The Victorians (OUP, 2023).
  • The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain. The campaigns against the taxes on knowledge, 1849-1869 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).
  • ed., The Victorian World (Routledge, 2012)
  • ed., An Age of Equipoise? Reassessing mid-Victorian Britain, (Ashgate Publishing, 2000)
  • (with Robert Poole), eds, The Diaries of Samuel Bamford, 1858-61 (Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2000)
  • The Emergence of Stability in the Industrial City: Manchester 1832-67 (Aldershot, Scolar Press, 1996). 


EDITED SERIALS, SPECIAL ISSUES etc
Seven volumes of the Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies, including (with Rachel Cowgill), Victorian Soundscapes (2007), (with Paul Hardwick) The Pre-Raphaelite Ideal (2004), Culture Institutions (2002), Unrespectable Recreations. The Victorians at Play (2001), Platform-Pulpit-Rhetoric (2000), Representing Victorian Lives, (1999), Scholarship in Victorian Britain (1998). Special issue of Nineteenth Century Prose entitled ‘Platform, Pulpit, Rhetoric’, 29.1 (Spring 2002).

ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS

  • Geography, Class and Industry in the North of England” in Victorians on Film. Entertainment, Innovation and Everyday Life (Adam Matthew online, 2022). See here.
  • “British Social History 1770-1918” (Routledge Historical Sources series, online 2023-), co-editor with Susie Steinbach (Hamline University, USA). See here.

Articles, Chapters in Books, etc.

  • “‘Lectures from which no human can possibly learn anything’? The Gresham Lectures 1832-1914’, in Anne-Julia Zwierlein and Katharina Herold-Zanker, eds, Transforming Victorian Orality. Articulating Social Change in Victorian Britain (forthcoming: Liverpool University Press, 2025).
  • “‘That we may hear the living voice’: the Gifford Lectures as lectures, 1888-1914”, in Christopher Brewer, ed., The Gifford Lectures for the 21st Century, (forthcoming: Erdmans, 2025).
  • “The importance of birth dates: G.K. Chesterton, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and the age of the Edwardians”, in Lizzie Ludlow and Koenraad Claes, eds, The Nineteenth Century Present (forthcoming, Manchester University Press, 2025).
  • (with Patrick Leary), “Introduction” to Forum on Victorian Talk, Victorian Review, 49.2 (Fall 2023), 189-95. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2024.a936081
  • “Victoria’s Victorians and the Mid-Victorians”, Journal of Victorian Culture 24.4, (2019), 431-39. https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcz049
  • Entries on Absalom Watkin and a group biography for the Association for the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge, Dictionary of National Biography (2019).
  • “The Press and the Law”, in Joanne Shattock, ed., Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth Century Britain (CUP, 2016), 147-164. See here.
  • “John Watts and the provident dispensaries movement”, in Alan Kidd and Melanie Tebbutt, eds, Essays in Honour of Mike Rose (MUP, 2016), 84-108. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/67301.
  •  “A little bit of a Victorian? Asa Briggs and Victorian Studies”, in Miles Taylor, ed, The Age of Asa: Asa Briggs and the shaping of History and Higher Education in Modern Britain (Palgrave, 2014), 46-78. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137392596_3
  •  “Victorian Milestones”, in Hewitt, ed., The Victorian World (Routledge, 2012), 1-53. Link here.
  •  “Preaching from the platform: popular religious lecturing and the challenge of the churching the masses”, Keith Francis and William Gibson, eds, The Oxford Handbook to the British Sermon, 1689-1901 (OUP, 2012), 79-96. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199583591.013.0005
  • “Beyond Scientific Spectacle: Image and Word in Nineteenth-Century Popular Lecturing”, in John Plunkett, ed, Victorian Shows (Chatto and Pickering, 2012), 79-96. Link here.
  • “Max O’Rell and the performance of Frenchness on the late nineteenth-century Anglo-American Lecture Platform”, in Odile Boucher-Rivalain and Catherine Hajdenko-Marshall, eds, Regards des Anglo-Saxons sur La France au cours du long Dix-Neuvième Siècle (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2008), 147-80.
  • “Why the notion of Victorian Britain does make sense”, Victorian Studies, 48.3, (Spring 2006), 395-438. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3829805
  • “Extending the Public Library, 1850-1930”, for Alistair Black and Peter Hoare, ed, Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. Volume III, (CUP, 2006), 72-81. See here.
  • “Diary, Autobiography and the Poetics of Life History”, in David Amigoni, ed., Life Writing and Victorian Culture (Ashgate, 2006), 21-40.
  • Entries on the Continental Congress (277-82), and the Lancashire Cotton Famine (286-88), for Will Kaufman and Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, eds, Britain and the Americas. Culture, Politics and History (ABC-Clio, 2005).
  • “Class and the classes in nineteenth century Britain”, in Chris Williams, ed., Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth Century History (Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 305-320.
  • Entries on John Watts, Edmund Potter, Charles Burton, J.H. Wilson, Charles Rowley and James Hole, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004, etc).
  • “Culture or Society? Victorian Studies 1951-1964”, in Miles Taylor and Michael Wolff, eds, The Victorians Since 1901 (Manchester University Press, 2004), 90-106.
  • Articles on Chartism, Richard Cobden and Victorian Studies for David Loades, ed., Readers Guide to British History (Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003).
  • “Aspects of platform culture in nineteenth-century Britain”, in special issue of Nineteenth Century Prose entitled ‘Platform, Pulpit, Rhetoric’, 29.1 (Spring 2002), 1-32.
  • Article and mapping material on “Industrialising Manchester” for the new Penguin Atlas of  British and Irish History (Penguin Books, 2001), 184-85.
  • “Victorian Studies: Problems and Prospects”, Journal of Victorian Culture 6.1 (Spring 2001), 137-161. https://doi.org/10.3366/jvc.2001.6.1.137
  • “Prologue: Re-assessing The Age of Equipoise”, in An Age of Equipoise? Re-assessing Mid-Victorian Britain (Ashgate, 2000), 1-31.
  • “Confronting the modern city: the Manchester Free Public Libraries, 1850-1880”, Urban History 27.1 (May 2000), 62-88. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44614087
  • (with Robert Poole), “Samuel Bamford and Northern identity”, in Neville Kirk, ed, Northern Identity, (Scolar Press, 2000), 111-131.
  • “District Visitors and the constitution of domestic space in the mid-nineteenth century”, in Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd, eds, Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth Century Interior, (Manchester University Press, 1999), 121-141.
  • Entries on Asa Briggs (125-6), Thomas Carlyle (178-9), John Gallagher (432-3), Eric Hobsbawm (546-7), Gareth Stedman Jones (624-5), Urban History (1246-49), and Raymond Williams (1304-5), in Kelly Boyd, ed., Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, (Fiztroy Dearborn, 1999).
  • “Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Dawson and the control of the lecture platform in mid-nineteenth century Manchester”, Nineteenth Century Prose, 25.2 (Fall 1998), 1-24.
  • “The travails of domestic visiting: Manchester 1830-1870”, Historical Research, (June 1998), 196-227. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2281.00060
  • “Arthur Mursell and the controversies of popular platform religion in Manchester, 1856-65”, Manchester Region History Review, (1996), 29-40.
  • “The Emigration Lecturer: James Brown’s Lecture Tour of Great Britain and Ireland, 1861-62”, British Journal of Canadian Studies, 10.1 (1995), 103-119.
  • “Radicalism and the Victorian Working Class: the case of Samuel Bamford”, Historical Journal, 34.4 (1991), 873-892. https://doi:10.1017/S0018246X00017337
  • “Science, Popular Culture, and the Producer Alliance in Saint John, New Brunswick”, in Paul A. Bogaard, ed., Science and Society in the Maritimes: the Nineteenth Century Experience, (Mount Allison, Centre for Canadian Studies and the Acadiensis Press, 1990).
  • “Science as Spectacle: Popular Science Culture in Saint John, New Brunswick, 1830‑1850”, Acadiensis, XVIII.1 (Autumn 1988), 91‑119. https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/acad18_1art04

Review Articles

  • “Democratic subjects” [Review article on Patrick Joyce’s Democratic Subjects], Victorian Review, 21,1 (1995), 74-81.
  •  “National policies of various kinds: the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Volume XII”, Acadiensis XIII (Autumn 1993), 153-58.

Papers Presented (selected)

‘Victorian Generations’, Keynote Lecture to British Association for Victorian Studies Annual Conference, Leeds Trinity University, September 2015.

‘When was mid-Victorian?’, to the ‘Joanne Shattock: a celebration colloquium’, University of Leicester, November 2011.

 “Manchester in British History”, lecture to the annual conference of the Historical Association, May 2011.

“Society as Space: the territorialisation of social knowledge in nineteenth century Britain”, presented to the ‘The History of Social Investigation: a reconsideration’ conference at the Charles Booth Centre, Open University, January 2005.

 “Samuel Bamford, Peterloo, and the Politics of Radical Memory”, North American Conference on British Studies, Toronto, November 2001.

 “Remembering Samuel Bamford: autobiography as monument’, Victorian Monuments, Annual Conference of the Australasian Victorian Studies Association, Ballarat, January 2001.

“Public Art Culture in Manchester, 1840-1940”, presented to the Symposium on Provincial Art Museums, National Gallery and Royal Academy of Art, April 1998.