Brian Maidment, scholar of uncharted byways of Victorian culture from periodicals to dustmen

Yahoo

22-03-2025

Brian Maidment, who has died aged 78, was a specialist in the neglected print culture of the late Regency and early Victorian periods; he unearthed downmarket mass-circulation material of all stripes, from humorous cartoons and penny fiction to religious tracts, scientific magazines for autodidacts, sheet music, almanacs, playbills and other ephemera.
His early interest was cemented by Louis James's 1976 anthology of early Victorian popular culture, Print and the People 1819-1851. 'Never had the printed page seemed so exciting,' Maidment recalled. 'The inky blackness of the lettering, shouting display types and perpetually inventive combination of type, image and white page.'
Maidment, then an academic at Manchester Metropolitan University, had already noticed that early-19th-century periodicals were valued at nearly nothing, and that secondhand bookshops were desperate to get rid of them to free up space, as he told Professor Marysa Demoor in an interview for Victorian Periodicals Review. Travelling the country with the university's new Librarian, Ian Rogerson, he purchased as many as he could, using them to devise a new course on art history.
Several hundreds of the periodicals he saved from oblivion are now preserved in the collections of Exeter, Liverpool John Moores and Manchester Metropolitan Universities. But he also firmly believed that students should continue to handle them, he told Demoor, even if the odd irreplaceable 200-year-old periodical were destroyed through over-pawing.
In 1987 he produced an anthology of working-class writers, The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain, which was praised in The Review of English Studies as a 'highly honourable service to the don't haves of Victorian literature'.
Having been haunted on a childhood holiday to Swanage by the jukebox hit My Old Man's a Dustman, sung by Lonnie Donegan, with its chorus 'He wears a dustman's hat/ He wears Gor-blimey trousers/ And he lives in a council flat,' Maidment later published a history of dustmen in the 19th-century imagination entitled Dusty Bob (2007).
In it he sifted through cartoons and literary depictions, such as Mr Boffin in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, deciphering the social anxieties behind stereotypes of the dustman: as an urban grotesque, the embodiment of dirt; as an aggressive or amorous drunk; as the self-employed urban proletarian or 'penny capitalist', ready to down tools and join in any street merriment.
Decades of Maidment's thinking came together in Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order 1820-50 (2017), which was warmly received by the journal Victorian Studies as an 'important' book, offering a new way of thinking about an awkward, in-between period 'when Romanticism seemed to be a memory, yet full-fledged Victorian culture had yet to emerge… the product of [Maidment's] decades of research into periodicals and print materials that have been overlooked by most of us'.
A native of the New Forest, Brian Edwin Maidment was born on March 19 1946, the younger son of Harry Maidment, an armament depot administrator, and his wife Gladys, née Brookbanks. From King Edward VI School in Southampton he won a scholarship to read English at the University College of North Wales in Bangor.
Joining the Victorian Studies Centre at Leicester in 1970 as a tutorial assistant, he completed his doctoral thesis on John Ruskin. After a spell teaching in Aberystwyth, in 1973 he moved to Manchester Polytechnic, later to become Manchester Metropolitan University.
In 1990 he moved to Edge Hill College in Ormskirk as head of English, and later dean, before joining the University of Huddersfield as professor of English. His move in 2001 as research professor in the History of Print Culture at the University of Salford allowed him to jettison administrative and teaching burdens, and travel more widely, forging links with the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale and the Houghton Library at Harvard.
He later spent six years at Liverpool John Moores University before a retirement of sorts in 2018. In 2023 he returned to Manchester Metropolitan University to co-curate the on-campus exhibition, Nineteenth-Century Mass Media.
A stylish and precise writer, Maidment contributed to a wide range of specialist periodicals, as well as to the books New Approaches to Ruskin (1981), The Victorian Press (1982) and The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (2009). His final standalone book was a study of Dickens's illustrator Robert Seymour.
He was a member of the British Association of Victorian Studies and president of the Research Society for Victorian Publications from 2016 to 2018.
He is survived by his second wife, Maxine, and a daughter from his first marriage.
Brian Maidment, born March 19 1946, died January 27 2025
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