The article presents and discusses thirteen previously unpublished letters from the British novelist and poet Rose Macaulay to the Irish poet and novelist Katharine Tynan, who in 1913 initiated a correspondence and friendship when she wrote to congratulate Rose on winning with The Lee Shore in a prestigious and valuable Novel Competition which she too had entered. Katharine continued to express admiration for Rose’s writing, especially her novels, not only in her letters to Rose (not preserved), but also in memoirs and articles. Rose in turn praised Katharine’s work, especially her poetry, emphasising particularly the comfort it gave her and others in wartime. She herself had lost several friends, including Rupert Brooke, and was anxious about her brother, who was serving in the army. Katharine’s two sons were in the army too. Rose took an interest in Katharine’s daughter, Pamela Hinkson, who was showing early promise as a writer. In 1925 Katharine sent Rose a novel, The Victors, by Peter Deane. When Rose replied, she did not realise that Peter Deane was a pseudonym used by Pamela, let alone that the sad story was closely based on the postwar experiences of Katharine’s elder son.

The essay is the first detailed study of Richard Williams Reynolds (1867–1947). It reveals that, although born in Liverpool, he was the illegitimate son of Brigadier-General Daniel Harris Reynolds of Arkansas by Annie Franklin, a British settler who had been widowed just before the Civil War, in which her lover fought for the Confederate Army. Educated at King Edward’s School (KES), Birmingham, and Balliol College, Oxford, Richard spent the 1890s in London, where he trained for the Bar and did some journalism. His membership of the Fabian Society brought him into close friendship with the writer Edith Nesbit. In 1900 he joined the staff of KES. His most famous pupil was J. R. R. Tolkien. In 1910 he married the novelist Dorothea Deakin, Nesbit’s niece, with whom he had three daughters. In 1922 he retired from KES. He and his family moved to Capri, where they associated with Axel Munthe and other writers and artists. But Dorothea died in 1924, and in 1935–1936 Richard suffered further losses on a Greek-tragic scale – the deaths of his daughters Diana and Pamela, and of the second wife whom he had just married. Pamela, a promising poet, perished in a fall down a cliff.

The essay is a detailed study of the visit Virginia Woolf made to Greece with Leonard Woolf, Roger Fry, and Roger’s sister Margery Fry in April–May 1932 – the one happy time in an otherwise unhappy year for Virginia. The study, the first by a classical scholar, is based on close examination of the primary sources, published and unpublished. These are: Virginia’s diaries and letters; Roger’s letters; Leonard’s pocket-diary; and Virginia and Leonard’s photographs. After explanation of the background to the holiday and discussion of the relations between members of the party, especially Virginia and Roger, the exact itinerary and timetable are set out. Many of the scenes in the photographs are correctly identified for the first time, including one in which the Woolfs and Frys are seen standing in front of a ruined temple in Athens. The temple, said by leading Bloomsbury writers to be on the Acropolis, is shown to be no such thing. Comparison of the published versions of Virginia’s diary and letters with the manuscripts of them reveals some significant errors, including one that seriously misrepresents her assessment of Roger’s character – no trivial matter, given her admiration for him and their close friendship.

Chapter 4 focuses on G. W. M. Reynolds, a hugely important figure in the development of both the popular press and Chartism. Refusing to accept the commonplace reading of Reynolds as a commercial entrepreneur using a half-baked radicalism to sell copy, the chapter argues that Reynolds was a dedicated radical attempting to maximise the size of his audience by folding into The Mysteries of London (1844–45) the non-radical, the reformist, and liberal. Reynolds’s radicalism continues to be widely questioned simply because the popular is not deemed to be compatible with a genuine radicalism. But Reynolds’s radicalism, his engagement with Chartist positions before he formally took the banner and declared himself a Chartist, becomes clear when measured against a Chartism that itself was filled with ambiguities, incongruities, and differences. The chapter offers a new reading of The Mysteries of London focused on its theme of vengeance by comparing it not to middle-class literature but to Chartist literature.

Continuing the discussion of Ishiguro’s formal sensibilities but focusing exclusively on An Artist of the Floating World, Rebecca Karni interrogates what she describes as ‘Ishiguro's tempered presentational realism and practice’. Karni proposes that those aspects of Ishiguro’s writing which appear to offer points of entry into a complex and ambiguous body of work – ‘the deceptive surface transparency of the author's prose, in addition to his Japanese background’ – often result in readings which are inherently reductive (essentialist or Orientalist). Karni explores Ishiguro’s tactics of evasion, which, she argues, result in texts which sustain ‘meaning in ways that go beyond signification’. Taking the idea of ‘presentation’ from Hans-Georg Gadamer – refining this with the usage of the same term in Japanese cinema studies – Karni thinks through the ways in which Ishiguro both borrows from the expectations of traditional realist texts and undercuts these through his characteristic narrative and narratological techniques. Ishiguro’s first two novels, Karni suggests, are peculiarly apposite examples of his presentational realism. Her chapter interrogates the ways in which the novels provoke the reader’s hermeneutic impulse, the desire to uncover, to move ‘from signifier to the supposedly “hidden” signified’, while simultaneously playing on the futility of such interpretative practices. In this way, Karni argues, Ishiguro’s literary devices work to provoke more profound and wide-ranging questions about fiction, the novel as form, and the practice of reading more broadly.

The introduction sets out the argument of the book, that early Victorian popular literature includes previously unrecognised radical political content, demonstrating knowledge of and sympathy with the Chartist movement. It provides a new theoretical framework for reading popular literature, first by reviewing the main ways this literature and popular culture as a whole are most commonly approached, and then by challenging the assumptions behind that criticism. Whereas the dominant criticism has tended towards seeing popular literature as providing the means for some degree of cultural confrontation, it has been adamant in its refusal to accept that cultural confrontations can have a political counterpart, insisting for the most part on the place of social hegemony and the inherently conservative aspects of commercial enterprise. The chapter also outlines the complex relationship between cultural and political confrontations on the one hand, and the equally complex relationship between popular literature and radical politics on the other. Radicalism is treated as a force helping to construct the category of the popular. The popular, in turn, is understood to be exploring the radical to help expand its own market power.

Cynthia F. Wong’s ‘Eloquence and empathy in A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World’ builds on Horton’s analysis of Ishiguro’s first novel, offering a comparative reading of his first, and most typical, narrators. Indeed, Ishiguro’s early novels (his ‘Japanese’ works) share many geographical, thematic and stylistic similarities, perhaps foremost an exploitation of narrators rendered unreliable both because they suffer with imperfect memory and because they have, or appear to have, regrettable pasts. In her chapter Wong pays particular and careful attention to Etsuko and Ono, two characters who, as she argues counter to Ishiguro, are ‘more distinct and contrasting characters [than] claimed by their author’. In the first part of her chapter, ‘The duplicity of eloquence’, Wong traces the often-conflicted critical responses to her chosen subjects, indicating an ongoing ambiguity about whether their accounts of their occluded pasts are wilfully duplicitous or simply inaccurate, partial. In ‘Family resemblances and the domestic drama’, Wong focuses on Ono’s complex relationship with family, understood both literally and figuratively, while also highlighting Ishiguro’s recurring interest in family resemblance, and the manner in which this resemblance manifests as an organising principle in his body of work. Finally, in ‘Empathy unrealised’ Wong continues her exploration of familial relationships, this time thinking through the various characteristic failures of empathy and the fraught interpersonal relations negotiated in these two early novels.

The final chapter examines a number of reformist periodicals of popular progress and improvement that were concomitant with both the heyday of the popular and the Chartist press. In competition with those presses for working-class audiences, they tended to reject the image of their audience that emerges in them as interested in either cultural or political confrontations, or both. Focusing on Mary and William Howitt’s Howitt’s Journal (1847–48) and Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine (1845–48), the chapter looks at the way they cautiously responded to the radical canon but flat out rejected popular or ‘low-life’ literatures. The chapter makes clear that what the liberal periodical press feared most was the slippage of cultural and political confrontation between popular and radical genres. The acceptance of radical, and specifically Chartist, grievances by these papers, however reluctant, was contingent on the rejection of cultural challenges, as if the conflation of the radical and popular too dangerously offered a model for the conflation of moral- and physical-force Chartism.