The Revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848, from Sicily to the borders of the Russian empire, were a seemingly inevitable outcome of the sociopolitical pressures which had developed across the early nineteenth century. They emerged out of the potent mix of growing class conflict, food shortages, and poverty fostered by industrialization, and the call for reform of the rigid conservatism which had largely dominated European politics since the Napoleonic Wars. Many British women writers were fascinated by the Revolutions and their consequences and responded to them, with both enthusiasm and anxiety, and in both overt and covert ways, in letters, novels, poems, and journalism.