Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors for permission to use extracts from ‘Adam Bede and “the green trash of the railway stall”: George Eliot and the Lady Novelists of 1859’, in Carolyn Oulton and Adrienne Gavin, eds., From Brontë to Bloomsbury, volume 1: 1840s and 1850s (London: Palgrave, 2018) in Chapter 2, and to Kate Newey and Pat Smyth for permission to use parts of ‘Patriotism and Charles Kean: Henry V in 1859’, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 36:1 (2009), 61–72 in Chapter 5.

This book has benefitted from the help and expertise of the archivists and librarians of Yale’s Beinecke Library, the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, the National Portrait Gallery’s archive, University of Reading Special Collections, Cambridge University Library, and the British Library.

Open access publication of this work was made possible thanks to a generous bequest, established to promote open access publishing of academic research. The University of Reading would like to express its deepest gratitude to the family of the late Professor Cyril Tyler.

This book has been long in the making, and I have been very fortunate to benefit from the thoughts and suggestions of colleagues at a number of conferences and seminars, including at the University of Leicester; the University of Tennessee at Knoxville; Ca’ Foscari (BAVS/NAVSA/AVSA 2013); Canterbury Christ Church; London (ESSE 2016); Manchester Metropolitan University; the University of St Andrews; the Leicester Victorian Society; the British Library; the University of Buckingham (Dickens Journals Online 2012); Royal Holloway University of London; Dallas (INCS 2019); and James Koranyi and colleagues at Durham’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies. I’m indebted too to the anonymous readers who have been enormously thoughtful and helpful, and to Bethany Thomas and George Laver at Cambridge University Press for their care and efficiency throughout.

All books rely on a network of colleagues and friends who offer their own particular and invaluable forms of support, and this work is no exception. My parents, Brian and Shirley Marshall, have been unfailingly supportive and interested. I have also really appreciated the ideas, conversation, and encouragement of Lucy Bending, Bridget Bennett, Elleke Boehmer, Robert Eaglestone, Helen Eaton, the George Eliot Fellowship (especially its Chairman, John Burton), Roy Gibson, Fiona Green, Tracy Hargreaves, Nancy Henry, Kathryn Hughes, Sara Jan, Juliet John, Simon Kövesi, Clare Lees, Steve Matthews, Gordon McMullan, Catherine Morley, Kate Newey, Carolyn Oulton, Lorna Pearce, Adrian Poole, Clare Rees, John Rignall, Dominic Sandbrook, Jessica Sharkey, members of the wonderful Victorian Studies Centre at the University of Leicester (especially Gowan Dawson, Richa Dwor, Holly Furneaux, Julian North, Joanne Shatttock), Sarah Wah, and Liz and Ian Wallis.

I’m particularly grateful to those generous friends who have read chapters for me, and whose comments have always proved illuminating, acutely engaged, and valuable: Rosemary Ashton, Holly Furneaux, Elisabeth Jay, Andrew Mangham, and Ralph Pite.

During the course of working on 1859, I have been especially lucky to get to know Rosemary Ashton, whose marvellous book of a year, One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858, was written much more quickly than mine and came out with Yale University Press in 2017. Rosemary and her work have been an inspiration throughout. It has also been a great privilege and pleasure to work at Oxford Brookes and Leicester with Elisabeth Jay and Joanne Shattock, Victorianists whose friendship, leadership, and scholarship have been critical.

Ralph Pite, wonderful eco-critic and poet that he is, always manages to see both the wood and the trees and, in the latter stages of working on this project, has crucially helped me to do so too. He’s read and talked through most of this book with his characteristic acuity and generosity, for which I feel truly fortunate.

And finally, the greatest of thanks to Lily and Rosa, who have had to live (put up) with 1859 for a long time, and who, for the promise of an ice cream, have been happy to scamper around British and European galleries and museums, finding art and artefacts from 1859. I’m glad that since then their knowledge of the year has proved useful in school- and latterly pub-quizzes. This book is dedicated to them with much love.