Elizabeth Gaskell's 1848 novel Mary Barton is full of poetry, but not where the characters can see it. In the epigraphs and footnotes, for the eyes of readers and narrators only, Samuel Coleridge's ‘Christabel’, John Keats's ‘Hyperion’, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Dante's The Divine Comedy, John Donne's ‘Second Anniversary’, Robert Burns's ‘Mary Morison’, Walter Savage Landor's ‘The Mermaid’, Tennyson's ‘Mariana’ (which Gaskell misquotes), bits of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Wycliffe, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare and Thomas Carlyle – all mark out the common culture of the readers of this novel, who are not the same as its characters. The epigraphs were added at the suggestion of Gaskell's publisher, Chapman and Hall, for reasons I will discuss below, and the footnotes were added by her husband, Peter Gaskell, and are ‘translations’ of Manchester dialect that often use medieval and early modern literary sources as examples.

The reading that the characters do, or the textual matter that they hear (literacy being a complicated matter), is represented in a handful of documents, including a Manchester song, ‘The Oldham Weaver’, which the seamstress Margaret Jennings sings and the lyrics of which the narrator transcribes for us – except that she leaves out one problematic stanza in which conflict emerges between weaver and master, thus softening the song's ‘note of rebelliousness’; the People's Charter, which Parliament refuses to read but of which the Chartist characters in the novel have probably read, or heard, a significant part; ‘an old copy of the Northern Star’, a Chartist newspaper the narrator tells us John Barton has ‘borrowed from a public-house’, a typical source of periodicals for the poor in the period; the Bible; and a poem by Samuel Bamford, ‘the working class radical’, that Job Legh, Margaret's autodidactic grandfather, recites and that Mary Barton then copies down, at her father's request. The apparent homogeneity of this list – all of the reading by the poor seems to concern the poor – is deceptive and relies on the middle-class reader, from 1848 to the present, having very little idea of the complexity of Chartism as a political movement and of the variety and cosmopolitanism of a radical paper like the Northern Star.

Manufactured calico, tea cups, dresses, pins, and forks flowing from the factories and workshops of the ‘great’ towns; imported sugar, coffee, tea, Madeira, silk, and diamonds arriving from the colonies and zones of ‘free trade’; handmade crafts fashioned by middle-class women and by William Morris; souvenir postcards and plates returning home from Blackpool, Skye, and the Alps; collections of butterflies, ferns, and cacti lovingly bought, gathered, and displayed by amateur and professional naturalists; rubbish and ‘dust’ piling up uncomfortably and often dangerously in streets and alleys: the material world of the Victorian period and its literature delights and daunts us in its variety and vastness. How do we read and interpret this array of stuff when we encounter it in the varied genres of Victorian literature? This chapter will enlarge on the possibilities that inhere in these questions, both as they pertain to modes of Victorian writing and to the way we read them now.

‘Even the humblest material artefact, which is the product and symbol of a particular civilization, is an emissary of the culture out of which it comes’, T. S. Eliot writes in Notes towards the Definition of Culture. This is one of the epigraphs of the historian Asa Briggs’s monumental Victorian Things and might be its credo as well. Briggs takes us on an incomparable tour of the Victorian object world: daguerreotypes, spectacles, matches, needles, bonnets, Staffordshire figures, medals, souvenir heads, hankies, penny postage stamps, and cookery books connect us to the people who made and bought and used them, to wars, laws, strikes, fashion, and gender roles, to ideas about home and hearth, many of which were invented by the Victorians and are still practised by us.

This book is about a massive, disorganized and highly successful Victorian cultural enterprise: the textual construction of a safe England in a dangerous world between 1832 and 1897. Beginning in the 1830s, a diverse group of writers labored to help the first victims and beneficiaries of industrialization imagine that danger could be banished from the domestic scene and relocated in the world outside British borders. Careful representations of the precise locations of safety and danger – in such diverse texts as statistical analyses of the British empire, handbooks of hospital reform, memoirs of balloon aeronauts, travelogues of Alpine mountaineers, and ethnographic studies of Africa – suggested that risk could be either avoided altogether (in England) or engaged voluntarily in the dangerous world beyond it. The attempt to resolve risk geographically ignores the most salient feature of risk: that it is by definition a temporal problem; it exists only and always as a possibility, a future contingency. A geographical solution obscures the impossibility of banishing risk. This form of risk management thus involves the colonization of time: danger would seem to be plucked out of its hiding place in the invisible reaches of the future and brought into the present, to be experienced, survived and thus eradicated.

Invented in France in 1783, balloon aerostation became immensely popular in England within months. “The chief feature of the afternoon fêtes” in the pleasure gardens from the 1830s on, a balloon ascent also marked the opening of the Crystal Palace in 1851. Although only a small number of Britons actually went up in balloons, ascents drew large audiences, and aeronautical entrepreneurs were able to charge admission to spectators and passengers alike. The balloon became a popular decorative emblem on fabrics, jewelry and china, and a diverse literature of ballooning attracted a wide readership. The balloon, however, was not solely or even originally an instrument for amusement. It evolved, or devolved, very quickly through three overlapping stages: from its original status as a major technical discovery, the precursor of navigable flight, it became an instrument for meteorological and atmospheric research, and then the Victorian equivalent of an amusement park ride.

In Wonderful Balloon Ascents (1870), Fulgence Marion ranks the discovery of balloons with the discovery of America, “equally” in that “of all other discoveries, these two have attracted the greatest amount of attention, and given, in their respective eras, the greatest impulse to popular feeling.”

The previous two chapters explored the pleasures of risk as recounted in the memoirs of balloon aeronauts and the pains of risk as represented in the memoirs of Alpine mountaineers. This chapter will concern the effects of two writers whose work effectively dismantled ideas about the severity and ubiquity of risk in the most dangerous place in the dangerous world as it was imagined in Victorian Britain: Africa. David Livingstone's Missionary Travels and Researches (1857) and Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa (1897) work to illuminate the “dark continent” and render it less threatening and hazardous than the dominant Victorian discourse of Africa suggested. Livingstone, as a laboring-class Victorian, and Kingsley, as a female Briton, create (because of the exigencies they experienced at “home” as a result of their class and gender) an alternative discourse of Africa. They implicitly direct their readers to a safer Africa, a place in which Britons like themselves could risk subjective expansion in a way that had been impossible for them at home: it becomes what Mary Kingsley calls in West African Studies (1899) “a field for enterprise.” This subjective expansion is the latent content of their narratives; the manifest content of both texts is the geographical expansion that each writer accomplishes in his or her explorations of previously unknown (by Europeans) or little-known areas.

Among the momentous and disorienting changes taking place in the early nineteenth century, a stunning return of epidemic disease produced not only anxiety, but also a distrust of the industrial and imperial expansion that seemed to be responsible for its resurgence. The two most feared (although paradoxically not the most fatal) epidemic diseases, cholera and typhus, were indeed intimately related to imperial and industrial progress. Cholera was stirred out of its usual confinement in the Ganges Delta because of an increase in British troop movements in India and the increased mobility of the population made possible by railroads. Typhus, which is spread by lice, was and is a disease associated with overcrowding and poor sanitation, and was most common in the nineteenth century in the jerry-built and densely-packed housing of the great towns. The doctrine of anticontagionism, which formed the theoretical basis of the sanitary reform movement, held that these dreaded diseases were caused by filth and its odors, rather than by specific germs or particles. Because of its apparent ability to explain, predict and prevent infectious diseases, anticontagionism promised relief from the seemingly random and often deadly visitations of epidemic disease, and, equally importantly, suggested that industrial and imperial progress need not be feared because of their fatal side effects.

In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, a number of British liberal intellectuals attempted to popularize the “laws” of classical political economy in the hope, as the statistician William Farr put it, that “knowledge [would] banish panic.” There is a sense, in many of these works, that knowledge of economic laws might quiet the growing unease of the middle and upper classes and the growing unrest of the laboring classes in regard to the increasingly industrialized market economy. Among the most successful popularizers of classical political economy were Harriet Martineau and J. R. McCulloch who both wrote best-selling works that attached abstract “laws” to their concrete correlatives, in an attempt to make them more easily understood and accepted by the reading public. Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy is a collection of stories, the plots of which reveal the happy endings that await those who place their faith in a market left to its own “natural” workings. McCulloch's Statistical Account of the British Empire supplies numbers, tables, descriptions, comparisons, historical surveys and expert opinions that illustrate the supremacy, when compared to both other places and other times, of the natural resources, industry, commerce, education, government, religion, poor laws, and vital statistics of Britain. In both works, England is represented as self-sufficient and secure. The risks of Britain's new economy and social structures disappear in the predictability offered by the regularities of McCulloch's numbers and the resolutions of Martineau's plots.