The bombs planted in British cities by Irish Fenians during the 1880s had a literary impact as well as a political one. The popular genre of the ‘dynamite novel’ marked the beginning of the influence of Irish political violence on literature, a phenomenon that continued into the 1890s. The influence of Fenianism can also be found in later literary modernism, as we will see in Chapters 3 and 4. The shock waves generated by these bombs were also felt in some of the more highbrow novels of the 1880s, with discussions of revolutionary politics also appearing in classics such as Henry James's The Princess Casamassima and George Moore's A Drama in Muslin. These ultimately uneventful but consciously stylish works differ from the more lurid adventures offered by Robert Louis Stevenson in his 1885 potboiler, The Dynamiter, which James praised for combining ‘high-flown’ extravagance with what he regarded as its unusually ‘steep’ political content. However, in his own dynamite novel James refused to indulge the popular taste for frantic plots laced with excitement, danger and explosions, and instead used anarchism as a vehicle for an extended discussion of the need for culture, as opposed to chaos, in late Victorian Britain. Unlike popular political novels, which served the literary needs of the mass market by affording readers exciting brushes with Irish and anarchist terrorism, James presented his readers with the aesthetic, rather than anarchic, dilemmas that were raised by late Victorian revolutionaries.