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This is the first modern critical study of Thomas Hood, the popular and influential nineteenth-century poet, editor, cartoonist and voice of social protest. Acclaimed by Dickens, the Brownings and the Rossettis, Hood’s quirky, diverse output bridges the years between 1820 and 1845 and offers fascinating insights for Romanticists and Victorianists alike.
Lodge’s timely book explores the relationship between Hood’s playfulness, his liberal politics, and contemporary cultural debate about labour and recreation, literary materiality and urban consumption.
Each chapter examines something distinctive of interdisciplinary interest, including the early nineteenth-century print culture into which Hood was born; the traditional, urban and political ramifications of the grotesque art and literature aesthetic; the cultural politics of Hood’s trademark puns; theatre, leisure and the ‘labour question’.
Lively and accessible, this book will appeal to scholars of nineteenth-century English Literature, Visual Arts and Cultural Studies.
Introduction
1. Material backgrounds: print, dissent, and the social society
2. Hood and the minor: at the London Magazine and after
3. Performing the city: the audience as subject
4. A common centaur: Hood and the grotesque
5. Pun and pleasure: Hood’s tied trope
6. Sine qua non-sense: work, play, and criticism
Index