This paper considers the odd circumvention of the revolutionary year 1848 in Anglophone literary criticism, and suggests some reasons for this. It then places Elizabeth Gaskell's novel, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life in a European series of novels of revolution, challenging dominant readings of the novel and calling into question Raymond Williams's category of the 'English Industrial Novel'. This work comes from Clare Pettitt's forthcoming book Serial Revolutions 1848: Writing, Politics, Form which will be published in the Autumn by Oxford University Press.

Clare Pettitt is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture at King's College London. She has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and culture, with a focus on the Victorian novel. She has published monographs on the Victorian novel (Oxford UP, 2004); on empire and communications (Harvard UP, 2007) and, most recently, on seriality, Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity 1815-1848 (Oxford UP 2020). Her next monograph, Serial Revolutions 1848: Writing, Politics, Form is due out this Autumn with Oxford. She is just starting work on the third monograph in this three-book series, The Digital Switch: Writing, Race and Resistance 1848-1918.