"In this book, Jon Mee proposes a new literary-cultural history of the Industrial Revolution in Britain from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Against the stubbornly persistent image of "dark satanic mills," in many ways so comforting to literary Romanticism, Jon Mee provides...

This study shows how aesthetics and economics have been combined in a great work of literature. Widely acknowledged as one of the great English novels, Middlemarch was published at a time which saw the emergence of a commodity-based culture. Frost examines the history of Middlemarch's...