This book provides the first thematic survey and analysis of nineteenth-century writing that imagined outcomes that history might have produced. Narratives of possible worlds and scenarios—referred to here as “alternate histories”—proliferated during the nineteenth century and clustered around pressing themes and emergent disciplines of knowled…[Read more]

This chapter argues that the basis for Honoré de Balzac’s early stories and Charles Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend is the circulation of money, which allows narrative point of view into every living room and place of work where money can be borrowed or owed. Not only does this means of representing the life of a city requ…[Read more]

This chapter provides an overview of the figures and conventions in nineteenth-century literature
that gave rise to what can be glossed as ‘conspiracy fiction’. Networks, invasion and detection
are the tropes to which conspiracy narratives attached themselves, and from which conspiracy
fiction developed into genres that are recognisable tod…[Read more]

William Le Queux’s and George Griffith’s future war narratives, published in Alfred Harmsworth’s and Cyril Arthur Pearson’s magazines and newspapers in the 1890s and 1900s, imagined a war to come that with hindsight they seemed to hasten or provoke. This article reassesses the genre’s literary history by attending to its proliferation at the turn…[Read more]

This article examines how the application of optical technologies to the plurality-of-worlds debate in the nineteenth century brought historical questions of determinism, providence and progress into the field of astronomical science. The development of the telescope and spectroscope, described by Richard A. Proctor in 1870 as ‘light-gatherer’ and…[Read more]

Review of Matthew Beaumont, The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin
de Siècle, Peter Lang, 2011, pp. xii + 307, £40.