Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt and Charles Dickens all worked as parliamentary reporters, but their experiences in the press gallery have not received much scrutiny. Nikki Hessell's study is the first work to consider all four of these canonical writers as gallery reporters, providing a detailed picture of this intriguing episode in their careers. Hessell challenges preconceived notions about the role that emergent literary genius played in their success as reporters, arguing instead that they were consummate gallery professionals who adapted themselves to the...

Focusing on poems by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Felicia Hemans, and Robert Burns, and on Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, it provides the first scholarly insight into the reception of major Romantic authors in indigenous languages, and makes a major contribution to the study of global Romanticism and its colonial heritage.