Undercover

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-1-009-58639-9
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 153, 336 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 613 g

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

The scandalous 1866 publication of 'A Night in a Workhouse' altered the course of press history. Victorian journalist James Greenwood's disconcerting exposé of spending a night in a casual ward while disguised as a vagrant launched an enormously popular genre of newspaper writing that would come to be known as undercover reporting. Inspired by the exploits of the 'Amateur Casual', imitators infiltrated restricted areas by adopting disguises of their own as beggars, migrants, homeless people, mental patients, street performers, and single mothers. Undercover traces the seismic consequences that the radical innovation of 'going undercover' had for Victorian media, literature, and culture. This revisionist history of a distinctly British tradition of investigative journalism reconstitutes the pioneering investigations that shaped the global development of undercover reporting, analyses the format's vicarious appeal to audiences anxious about their own precarity, and traces the impact that incognito investigations had on the Victorian era's leading novelists.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Donovan, Stephen

Rubery, Matthew

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction: Amateurs; 1. Doing the Amateur Casual: The Legacy of James Greenwood's 'A Night in a Workhouse'; 2. Undercover Authors: Asylum Reform and Lewis Wingfield's Gehenna; 3. Emigration with a Vengeance: Transatlantic Steerage and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Amateur Emigrant; 4. Massacre of the Innocents: 'Baby Farming' Panics and George Moore's Esther Waters; 5. Splendid Paupers: Street Begging and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; 6. The Other Side of the Hedge: Rural Migrancy and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Epilogue: the inside story; Bibliography; Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Donovan, Stephen
Stephen Donovan is Reader in English Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has published widely on empire writing, periodicals history, and Joseph Conrad. His previous works include Speculative Fiction and Imperialism in Africa (2013) and Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture (2005).

Rubery, Matthew
Matthew Rubery is Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of numerous books, including The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (2009). His co-edited works include Further Reading (2020) and Secret Commissions: An Anthology of Victorian Investigative Journalism (2012).