Blackwell's is delighted to welcome Tom Mole back, this time to discuss his new book What the Victorians Made of Romanticism.

His insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers, discussing Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth. An ambitious study, it looks at the material artifacts and cultural practices Victorian readers produced and used to canonize and commodify Romantic writers, such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles, and how these objects in turn remade the public's understanding of Romanticism. Readers have called the book ‘original and compelling’, ‘convincing and nuanced’ and ‘a major contribution to our understanding of Romanticism’.

Tom Mole is Reader in English Literature and Director of the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh.