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Abstract
While the number of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century novels that deal with the Gordon Riots (1780) is modest, most of the texts that do depict these events conflate them with other urban uprisings in the fictional world. This article shows how Isaac D’Israeli’s Vaurien (1797), George Walker’s The Vagabond (1799) and Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington (1817) merge the Gordon Riots with images of, e.g., the Massacre of St George’s Fields (1768), the French Revolution, or the public outcry against the Jewish Naturalisation Bill (1753). In order to account for this literary phenomenon, the present study draws upon the theory of “conceptual blending,” as developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002). In this cognitive mechanism, elements from two input spaces are projected into a new mental space, the blend, giving rise to meanings that were not available in any of the inputs. The article points to the propagandistic import of these blends, but also interprets their use as an attempt to grasp the nature of the riots. As a final step, the question is raised whether blending is a common mental operation for understanding explosions of popular violence in general.