Down and out in London: 'Hack' Authorship and Penny

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DOWN AND OUT IN LONDON: ‘HACK’ AUTHORSHIP AND PENNY

FICTION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITAIN

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A Thesis

Presented to the

Faculty of

San Diego State University

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In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

English

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Sarah Elizabeth Redden

Summer 2013

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DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to my family, in particular to Jeanne, who always knew I had it in me.

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

Down and Out in London: ‘Hack’ Authorship and Penny Fiction in Nineteenth Century Britain by Sarah Elizabeth Redden Master of Arts in English San Diego State University, 2013

There exists a vast amount of scholarship dedicated to the study of nineteenth century British literature and its influence on the era’s working class masses. Jonathan Rose correctly asserts in his book, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, “the question of whether Dickens, Conrad, or penny dreadfuls reinforced or subverted patriarchy, imperialism, or class hierarchies has become an obsession in academic literature departments and cultural studies programs.” Notable Marxist scholars such as Louis James, Raymond Williams, and George Levine pioneered the critical examination of this subject and laid a strong foundation upon which subsequent scholars have exhaustively built. Yet there is one related area of study that has been largely neglected: the literary voice of the working class. In other words, what literary voice or power did the working class possess during this period? Did working class authors contribute anything to the popular Victorian literary sphere? Much of the published research as it stands suggests that the answer is no; working class individuals were helpless, passive receptors of hegemony that remained perpetually at the mercy of the middle and upper classes. However, I argue that “hack” authors—British writers who were marginalized due to their social status and radical French political beliefs-- and their authorship of penny dreadfuls shaped a strong working class literary voice that threatened hegemony by revolutionizing the way in which popular Victorian literature was consumed. As such, this thesis examines three specific points that I feel have not been adequately addressed in the study of Victorian literature: The literary voice of the working class, the literary merit of the penny dreadful, and the function and importance of illustrations in penny dreadfuls

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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ABSTRACT ...... v LIST OF FIGURES ...... viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... ix CHAPTER 1 PRINT DEMOCRACY AND THE EMERGENCE OF RADICAL LITERATURE ...... 1 The Aristocracy of Labor ...... 3 Social Stagnation in the Victorian Industrial Novel ...... 5 The Democracy of Print ...... 9 Hacks and Dunces: The Usual Suspects ...... 11 The French Connection ...... 13 “Hacking” into the British Mainstream ...... 15 2 OH, THE HORROR!: SENSATIONALISM AS SUBVERSION ...... 20 For All Intents and Purposes ...... 22 All the World’s a Stage ...... 23 Pickwick in France ...... 24 When in Rome … ...... 26 You Say You Want a Revolution...... 28 Fear and Loathing in Bannerworth Hall ...... 30 Pride (of Ownership) and Prejudice (of the French) ...... 31 3 THE NARRATIVE OF ILLUSTRATION, OR CULTURAL CAPITAL IN THE PENNY DREADFUL ...... 36 High-Class Low Lifes: Antecedents to the Victorian Printed Image ...... 38 The Not-So-Comical Implications of Satire ...... 42 The 19th Century Artists ...... 44 Subject Matter as Determinant of Values ...... 48 Everything in its Right Place ...... 54 The Subversive Power of Intertextuality ...... 59

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WORKS CITED ...... 64

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LIST OF FIGURES

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Figure 1. Hogarth, The Enraged Musician...... 39 Figure 2. Gillray, Sir Richard Worse-than-Sly Exposing his Wife's Bottom, O Fye! ...... 40 Figure 3. Rowlandson, A Parliamentry [sic] Toast...... 41 Figure 4. Cruikshank, Oliver Claimed By His Affectionate Friends...... 45 Figure 5. Anonymous, Les Mysteres de Paris...... 49 Figure 6. Thackeray, A Fine Summer Evening...... 50 Figure 7. Phiz...... 51 Figure 8. Varney the Vampire...... 52 Figure 9. Les Mysteres de Paris...... 53 Figure 10. Seymour, Mr. Pickwick Gives a Speech, The Pickwick Papers...... 56 Figure 11. Anon, Sweeney Todd, or The String of Pearls...... 58

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I'd like to extend my sincerest gratitude to my thesis committee, in particular to my thesis Chair, Quentin Bailey, for his insightful, inspiring guidance and encouragement throughout this project's entirety.

CHAPTER 1

PRINT DEMOCRACY AND THE EMERGENCE OF RADICAL LITERATURE

By the commencement of the nineteenth century in Britain, something intriguing had occurred: authors and publishers alike began to take great interest in the emergent working class, a previously ignored literary demographic. Almost overnight, the subject matter of literature shifted from exclusively middle and upper class affairs to a focus upon the various aspects of working class life. The growing concern over socioeconomic and cultural implications of the Industrial Revolution – and the working class as casualties of this movement – generated fear, empathy, pity, and even revulsion among middle class authors. Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot, for instance, penned sympathetic homages to the poverty-stricken underclasses; other authors, like George Gissing, condemned the working class, blaming them for their own state of filth and destitution. Publishers of cheap “penny” fiction pumped out abundant publications for, and about, working class life. Therefore, years later when George Orwell proclaimed “If you look for the working classes in fiction, and especially in English fiction, all you find is a hole … the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make the wheels go round, have always been ignored by novelists” (11), such a statement may seem fallacious. However, what Orwell correctly alludes to is the problematic ways in which Victorian authors from traditional middle-class backgrounds situate and identify the working classes within these novels. In such texts, the “ordinary” proletariat does not exist because the authors’ aim is always to depict working class characters as being in some way extraordinary; such individuals range from the virtuous hero, to the overly deferential and noble victim, to the repentant criminal or addict. Even more troubling is that in all of these cases, the working class victim eventually re-assimilates seamlessly, and happily resumes his “place,” in mainstream Victorian society. As a result, these flat characters fall into predictable, moralizing storylines, which may succeed in directing the middle class reader’s

2 attention toward social injustice, but ultimately do nothing to socially advance the working class. In part, these extraordinary representations of working class individuals arose from the authors’ desire to impart their sympathy for the plight of the working class. There is no doubt that writers such as Dickens and Gaskell felt true empathy for the poor and believed them to be victims of poverty through no fault of their own. Even Gissing, who oscillated between harsh criticism of the working class and somber acknowledgement of their inferior living and working conditions, was unable to reconcile these two viewpoints into creating an “ordinary” proletariat. This leads us to examine the other cause of working class character misrepresentation in the Victorian novel: the fact that very few authors were from working class backgrounds themselves. Since most hailed from middle-class upbringings, and their direct engagement with the working class was limited to none, they struggled to construct a realistic picture of a working class character. In other words, what is truly missing from the Victorian novel—and the history of British fiction, canonically speaking—is what Orwell stated in not so many words, the voice of true working class authorship. We need something that would give us an accurate portrayal of working class people and their lives. Instead what we have is mostly a collection of works by middle class authors, written for their middle class peers, about the working class. However, when we cast our net outside the bounds of the traditional canon, we will discover the voice of true Victorian working class authorship hides in plain sight. I argue that the social milieu of nineteenth century literary “hacks”—lower-middle class authors to whom the doors of reputable printing houses were closed—provide the genuine working class literary voice that the era otherwise lacks. Furthermore, I assert that these authors were not talentless hacks, but were victims of elitist prejudice and numerous economic and social barriers that occluded their entry into the realm of “honorable” literature. Specifically, I claim that the debasement of the “hacks” had nothing to do with lack of talent, but existed because of their avid support of French revolutionary ideals, the radical press, and Chartism. For example, penny dreadfuls, the wildly popular sensationalist weekly papers written by “hacks” purposely for working class audiences, contained many radical ideals and, as such, were deemed worthless by the aristocracy. Regardless, penny dreadfuls became enormously popular with working class readers, which suggests that working class citizens were not

3 passive receptors of dominant culture – a common assertion in the realm of literary criticism – nor were they the helpless victims described in the canonical novels. Essentially, “hacks” transformed the way in which British readers consumed literature because they spoke to, and depicted, the ordinary proletarian. By examining how their progressive political beliefs shaped their authorship, I will demonstrate how “hack” writers engendered a revolutionary subversion of upper class norms and values in British literature.

THE ARISTOCRACY OF LABOR Perhaps part of Orwell’s frustration with the absence of the working class from British fiction is rooted in the somewhat problematic term “working class.” Some scholars use it to refer only to the illiterate, uneducated masses while others include the literate and semi-educated “lower class” individuals. Louis James first addressed this problem in Fiction for the Working Man when he states “the factory hand and the miner certainly [belong to the working class], but [what about] the small tradesman, or educated and generally respected ‘lower-class’ men such like William Lovett and S.T. Hall? …. There is no neat definition” (xii). P. J. Keating, on the other hand, claims that “there is no difficulty about defining the [working class]” and uses the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the term to delineate his own use: “the grade or grades of society comprising those who are employed to work for wages in manual or industrial occupations” (7). Other scholars, such as Jonathan Rose, use the term to vaguely refer to the “inarticulate masses,” the “workingmen,” or the “common readers” (3). Clearly, there exists a fair amount of debate and ambiguity as to the true composition of the working class. Much of this confusion can be cleared up, however, by gaining an understanding of what Eric Hobsbawm refers to as the “aristocracy of labour,” an idiom used in the early-to- mid nineteenth century to describe the “distinctive upper strata of the working class, better paid [and] treated and generally regarded as more ‘respectable’ … than the mass of the proletariat” (272). In other words, the working class possessed a hierarchical social structure of its own, with the uneducated laborer at the bottom, and the skilled craftsmen and apprentices at the top. Although there is no single criterion that defines a worker’s position within the labor aristocracy, factors such as level and regularity of earnings, conditions of working and of living, and prospects of future advancement and those of the worker’s

4 children are among the foremost signifiers (Hobsbawm). Those employed in trades that offered more regular work, higher wages, and relatively pleasant conditions thrived well beyond their working class peers. Hobsbawn describes two historical periods in Britain that demarcate the initial growth of the working class, and in turn, the structure of the labor aristocracy. The first period is the age of classical Industrial Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (1780-1840) and the second focuses on the years 1840-1890, wherein capitalism came to rule as supreme. These two stages of development amongst the working class are important because they correlate directly to the formation of a Victorian working class readership and mass audience. For example, of the period from 1780-1840, Hobsbawn notes: it is even doubtful whether we can speak of a proletariat in the developed sense at all, for this class was still in the process of emerging from the mass of petty producers, small masters, countrymen, etc. of pre-industrial society . . . this makes the process of analysis extremely difficult. In this period it is probably simpler to operate with the concept of the ‘working people’ or the ‘labouring poor,’ which was then very much in use – i.e., to include all those who were exploited and oppressed by industrial capitalism in one group… (276-277) Interestingly, as the developed sense of a proletariat was still emerging, so was the prevalence of class tensions in literature. Jon Klancher states that between 1790 and 1832, “writers shaped audiences who developed awareness of social class as they acquired self- consciousness as readers,” and notes that social tensions begin to appear everywhere in texts during this time (4). In other words, working class readership, just like the working class itself, began as a principally homogenous group that initially possessed no awareness of hierarchy within their own class. Therefore, up until 1840, the term “working class” in Britain generally aligns with Keating’s definition of a person employed in any kind of manual or industrial occupation, period. However, as they became more self-conscious and grew acutely aware of social tensions, the working class experienced its own stratification. In the second age about which Hobsbawm writes, the labor aristocracy became quite obvious and well-formed, and “a proletariat in the strict sense was much easier to discern” (277). During the years 1840-1890, “the best-paid stratum of the working class merged with what may be loosely called the ‘lower-middle class’ . . . small shopkeepers, some independent masters, foremen and managers . . . and [later] included clerks and bookkeepers” (273). E. P. Thompson further

5 elucidates this point by stating that the distinction was obvious “between the skilled or apprenticed man and his labourer: the blacksmith and his striker, the bricklayer and his labourer, the calico pattern-drawer and his assistants, and so on” (240). This explanation, then, supports James’s suggestion that the working class comprised both lower-middle class artisans as well as the common laborers, which differs slightly from Keating’s assertion. For the purpose of clarity in this thesis, I refer to the working class in the vein of James’s definition – lower-middle class artisans as well as “the laboring poor.” In a strictly literary sense, this translates into the faction of British society that primarily purchased penny literature over any other available works because of affordability and easily comprehensible text.

SOCIAL STAGNATION IN THE VICTORIAN INDUSTRIAL NOVEL No matter how sympathetic to the lugubrious plight of the common laborer, the Victorian industrial novel does not empower the working class because of the two factors that James mentioned above: price and literacy. It is true that industrial novels of Dickens and Gaskell were first issued to the public as serial parts in monthly journals costing a shilling or two. While such a price did not completely exclude working class patrons from purchasing the journals, it did not do much to entice them either, given the cheaper option of popular penny fiction. James states that in 1840, there were about eighty cheap periodicals circulating in London, “two-thirds of this number cost a penny, none cost more than twopence” (Fiction 27). The second, and perhaps most obvious reason, is the low-literacy of the working class. Even with the expanded education efforts by the middle class for the working class, and the increased levels of literacy en masse, most working class citizens simply could not comprehend the advanced use of language and vocabulary in the Victorian novel. For example, Rose asserts that the working class turned to cheap literature “as a means of comprehending the incomprehensible,” in that the texts assisted them in making sense of otherwise arcane subject matter (134). As such, it is clear that the central purpose of this literature was to alert other middle class citizens to the numerous atrocities and injustices of working class life and garner assistance for the destitute group. Although this was a noble idea, it served to further diminish the agency of the working class because they were portrayed as helpless, passive individuals whose survival

6 was dependent upon the support of the upper classes—an opinion that is not necessarily true. Keating expounds upon this uncertainty when he writes “Most working-class novels are, in one way or another, propagandist. They are usually written by authors who are not working class, for an audience which is not working class, and character and environment . . . [present] a class judgment” (2). As Orwell alluded to, the class judgment in the case of the Victorian novel is clear; the working classes were powerless to help themselves, a conclusion that characterized the working class as a tedious social problem rather than a collection of autonomous individuals. The competent individuals who “made the wheels go round” are notably absent. Yet the middle class novelists failed to see a problem with this rather undignified depiction of the working class. In fact, their archetypical portrayal of the vulnerable working class protagonist was quite intentional. In order to stimulate the middle class to speak out against social injustice, novelists felt they had to generate intense sympathy for the working class. One way to accomplish this was to magnify the characters’ blamelessness and purity of heart. As Keating notes, “the characters [are] treated with a moral intensity that is always directed towards heightening the tragedy of the working-class situation” (8). Constructing this moral intensity also involved showing that the working class was innocuous to the larger social order, never subversive or outspoken. Stephen Blackpool in Dickens’s Hard Times and Jem Wilson in Gaskell’s Mary Barton are two principal models of this exaggerated morality. John Ruskin observes that Stephen is “a dramatic perfection, instead of a characteristic example of an honest workman” (Smith 161), a point that becomes increasingly apparent throughout the novel. For example, Stephen experiences one great hardship after another, which he endures with a saintly level of patience and submission. He is married to a crude, incapacitated alcoholic from whom he has no possibility of being granted divorce, and is in love with Rachel, a morally upstanding factory girl. Yet he forfeits his own happiness with Rachel to remain miserably loyal to his alcoholic, verbally abusive wife. Subsequently, after being framed by the upper class Tom Gradgrind for burglary, Stephen loses his job at the factory and is exiled from Coketown; he dutifully leaves town without protesting his innocence or causing trouble. At the novel’s culmination, Stephen just as obediently returns to Coketown at the whim of Gradgrind’s father—who demands to hear Stephen’s side of the story regarding the burglary—and during his journey back he falls

7 down a mineshaft, which leads to his death. Anne Smith conjectures that given this deplorable series of events, it is obvious that Dickens grew progressively sorry for Stephen throughout the novel, “almost as sorry as Stephen for himself. He is shown as a victim of his wife, his employer, as well as of his own weakness … [all of which] make him a martyr,” and far from an autonomous, hard-working man (160). Dickens’s pity does more harm than good, emasculating Stephen to the point of suggesting that any laboring man is utterly powerless and vulnerable. Likewise, in Mary Barton, factory worker Jem Wilson bears similar tragedies as Stephen, with amplified docility. After his father passes away, Jem is burdened with the financial responsibility of his mother, siblings, and blind aunt. He is deeply in love with Mary, the daughter of his neighbor John Barton, but she rejects him for the wealthy Harry Carson. Like Stephen, Jem is eventually framed for a crime he did not commit: Carson’s murder. Although Jem learns that John Barton murdered Carson, he remains silent because the truth would crush Mary, who loves her father dearly. As such, Jem chooses to place his faith in the justice system, going through the proper channels to plead his innocence in a court of law, hoping he will be rightfully exonerated in lieu of naming Barton. For this deferential and upright behavior, Jem is rewarded. He is acquitted of the murder charges, Mary falls in love with him, and they live happily—and unobtrusively—ever after. While the self-sacrificing nature of both Stephen and Jem is highly unrealistic, even more problematic is the way in which Dickens and Gaskell address the issue of working class radicalism, specifically Chartism. Both authors believed that labor movements and radical unionization “weakened the social viewpoint they themselves wished to advance – conciliation between the classes” (Keating 233). The “noble” working class characters in Hard Times and Mary Barton denounce unionization and Chartism. In Hard Times, Rachel begs Stephen not to join the workers’ union at the factory, fearing that doing so would transform him into a pernicious radical. Stephen, who is ambivalent about the idea to begin with, acquiesces to Rachel’s wish and in doing so, makes himself an enemy amongst his peers by speaking out against unionization at a packed rally. Stephen’s peers angrily ostracize him for this and he is banished from interaction with others. While this ultimately costs him his job and leaves him destitute, Stephen does not waver from his position.

Dickens’s message is clear: it is better to remain isolated and “honorable” than to disrupt the social order. By contrast, characters that involve themselves with Chartism are considered morally corrupt. Mary Barton begins with an apolitical John Barton, a working class cheerful and devoted father, despite his privations. However, radicals at his factory indoctrinate Barton and he progressively becomes more involved with Chartism. As a result he turns hardened, distant from Mary, and ignorant of his fatherly duties. He falls away from all community consciousness and instead descends into a spiral of vice that includes opium addiction and murder. This is particularly interesting, considering Gaskell believed Barton, not Jem Wilson, to be the novel’s ultimate protagonist. As she wrote in a letter to a friend regarding the text, “Round the character of John Barton all the others formed themselves; he was my hero, the person with whom all my sympathies went …” (Surridge 331). If Gaskell’s compassions lay primarily with John Barton, there is much to be said for the fact Barton was punished for aligning with the Chartists. Gaskell decided what course of action was suitable for Barton, as defined by the parameters of her own middle class morality, instead of the actions most beneficial to the advancement of the working class. By consistently downplaying the mass power of the workers and discrediting their leaders, Dickens and Gaskell reveal their fear of class conflict, which not only victimizes the working class but also prevents any means of self-empowerment that the working class might discover through unionization. In other words, the authors advocate social change “but not changes of too radical a nature … they are demanding a revolution in class relationships without any alteration in the balance of power” (Keating 227). Herbert Sussman underpins Keating’s position, stating that by eliminating the possibility of working class revolution, the novels “strengthen the bourgeois perception of the workers as [a helpless] Other” as well as “reinforce as inevitable the distance and difference between the two classes” (Harrison 272). Ironically, such Otherization and distance prevent the very class conciliation that Dickens and Gaskell hope to engender, another point that reveals how disconnected the authors were from the true laboring experience. As such, the industrial novel served absolutely no purpose to the average working class citizen. Instead, the working class turned its literary attention to the vast amount of comprehensible and inexpensive “cheap literature,” in the form of penny magazines and pamphlets, which flooded the Victorian era and reached their sales peak

9 during the time of the industrial novel. Ironically, the middle class patrons who allegedly supported the upward mobility of the working classes condemned cheap literature as meretricious which further undermined the power of the working class, a point I will later analyze in depth.

THE DEMOCRACY OF PRINT The surfeit of cheap literature produced in Britain beginning in the early nineteenth century is of high significance because it allowed the common reader and writer to enter the British public sphere for the first time, something Richard Altick deems “a revolutionary concept: that of the democracy of print” (5). The topics covered in cheap literature ranged from current events; to various instructional and educational endeavors; to the penny dreadfuls, sensationalist tales that became intensely controversial. This new literary egalitarianism was made possible by the trifecta of the mass production of the printing press, the invention of extremely cheap paper, and the increased literacy of the working class. Volunteers at Sunday schools, instructors at the Mechanics Institutes, and speakers at meetings begun by fellow working-class, self-educated social progressives such as William Lovett helped to raise literacy and knowledge among the working class (James, Fiction). As Thompson notes, “One of the most impressive features of post-war Radicalism was its sustained effort to … raise the level of political awareness” amongst the working class; for example, in the industrial town of Barnsley, “as early as 1816 a penny-a-month club of weavers was formed, for the purpose of buying Radical newspapers and periodicals” (717). Additionally, organizations such as the Hampden Clubs and Political Unions “took great pains” to construct penny reading rooms, places where illiterate common laborers could hear the London daily papers and radical periodicals read aloud to them (Thompson 717). However, institutions such as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK)—created by middle class philanthropists to provide knowledge to those who had no access to formal education— attempted to counteract radical periodicals with moralizing works of their own. For example, SDUK’s The Penny Magazine intended to “adapt scientific and similarly high-minded material” for the growing literate masses (James, Fiction 40), and it was oftentimes distributed free of charge. Similarly, SPCK issued numerous complementary pamphlets and

10 low-cost newspapers that reminded readers of the various moral codes encouraged by Christianity. Because London public libraries were not free until 1850, SPCK capitalized on this situation by developing over 5,000 of their own libraries between 1832 and 1849 that were free to the working class public (James 5). The underlying motive for creating this vast network of free libraries should not be mistaken for pure philanthropy; the libraries were heavily used as centers of moral instruction. Thompson writes “The growth in [the] very large … working-class reading public was recognised by agencies such as SPCK and SDUK which made prodigious and lavishly subsidised efforts to divert the readers to … wholesome and improving matter” (719). Similarly, James concludes that the materials and texts available in these libraries were carefully chosen to “create the tastes of the working-class public” (Fiction 5). As such, this created the illusion of a diverse reading selection that in actuality only reified dominant Victorian norms and values. It could be argued that such examples demonstrate how working class readers were helpless victims of dominant culture and that their pursuit of education was nothing more than “an accommodation to middle-class values, a capitulation to bourgeois cultural hegemony” (Rose 23). However, Jonathan Rose disagrees, stating “Actually, it represented the return of the repressed. ‘Knowledge is Power’ … was embraced passionately by generations of working-class radicals who were denied both” (23). But it was not just radicals who sought knowledge. The common laborer, having been exposed to the vast amount of cheap literature, became aware of the accessibility to information. This realization bred a desire to self-educate, and with that desire came the subsequent weeding-out of literature they presumably found dull or inapplicable to their lives. To be sure, working class citizens were the primary recipients of a superfluity of didactic, moralizing literature, but that does not mean that they completely bought into it. As James notes, by the early 1840s, the materials of organizations such as SPCK were “losing [their] appeal to the main body of the lower classes … the masses who [used to] read … The Penny Magazine turned mainly to the growing number of sensational periodicals,” otherwise known as penny dreadfuls (Fiction 22). This clearly demonstrates the working class’s conscious rejection of material disseminated from the governing classes in favor of the penny dreadfuls, which they presumably found more accessible and enjoyable.

HACKS AND DUNCES: THE USUAL SUSPECTS It is accurate to state that the penny dreadful, like other subversive texts that came before and after it, addressed a struggling class’s plight and gave a public literary voice to people who had none. Yet history—and even revisionist history, to a large extent—has been hesitant to acknowledge the penny dreadful as such. Historians and scholars consistently dismiss these inexpensive weekly serials as purely gratuitous entertainment, a topic to which my next chapter is dedicated. Such a dismissal on the part of scholarship is particularly troubling given the legitimacy with which our discipline now treats popular fiction and popular culture. I argue that the primary reason penny dreadfuls’ ill reputation persists is because they were authored by “hacks,” the majority of whom have been unfairly deemed as such due to their low social standing and radical political beliefs, a kind of literary exclusion that is rooted in British class systems. The working class backgrounds of the “hacks” undeniably contributed to their occlusion from the realm of valid authorship, a prejudice that originated with the notion of “Grub Street” in the seventeenth century. Grub Street, which was a physical location in East London, “developed a very mixed reputation as the place in London where authors, and the booksellers and publishers who paid them, lived cheek by jowl, working together to turn a profit” (Glover 15). In other words, the term became synonymous with a tenuous, low-class literary network. Established authors further disparaged these struggling authors in their own literature. For example, Alexander Pope’s 1728 publication of The Dunciad uses the term “Grub Street” to describe a moronic, talentless hack who threatened to degrade the entire literary profession. James Van Horn Melton claims Pope believed that the emergence of “hack” authorship into the mainstream “represented a publishing market spun out of control, one in which standards of literary quality were submerged in a sea of mendacity and mediocrity” (126), which set him on the trajectory of humiliating “hack” authors. Yet, these “hacks” that Pope satirized were a result of the printing explosion of which he himself was a beneficiary (Melton 128), leaving one to surmise his detestation of “hacks” was rooted in nothing more than elitist conceit. “Hack” writer Ned Ward alludes to this kind of snobbish occlusion by established London authors when he sarcastically compares writers such as himself to prostitutes. He writes:

The condition of [a “hack”] Author, is much like that of a Strumpet, and if the Reason by requir'd, Why we betake our selves to so Scandalous a Profession as Whoring or Pamphleteering, the same exusive [sic] Answer will serve us both, viz. That the unhappy circumstances of a Narrow Fortune, hath forc'd us to do that for our Subsistence, which we are much asham'd of. (Troyer 3) The “narrow fortune” to which Ward refers—the misfortune of being born into poverty—is undoubtedly the source of prejudice against “hack” writers, not contentions over talent. Discrimination followed “hack” writers well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where “Grub Street” eventually transcended its physical location and “became a dismissive term for any published work that had been hastily written for money and was thought to be of poor quality, the product of literary hacks, no matter where it had originated” (Glover 15). In other words, literature produced outside the realm of hegemonic middle and upper class printing institutions never stood a chance of being taken seriously by that demographic. Nigel Cross emphasizes the unfortunate truth of this, stating “in practice, the writing, production and reading of books [has always been] a middle-class monopoly” (1). For this reason, “hack” writers could never compete very well in the literary market, even if their upper-class counterparts were not hell-bent upon smearing their reputations. Cross further explains that in order “to succeed at writing the kind of books that would be discussed and reviewed [in nineteenth century London], a university education and a private income were indispensable. For this reason working class writers who aimed to supply middle-class culture failed miserably” (6). This point is particularly important because it implies that “hack” writers had absolutely no desire to write for an audience other than their own peers, the working classes. They were well acquainted with the notion that they would never receive critical acclaim, so they set their literary sights amongst the working classes where they would experience success and respect to some degree. In other words, their facile writing style is not attributable to a lack of talent, but rather to their desire to write material that would be relevant and comprehensible to their peers. By the early nineteenth century, “hack” writers were more loathed than ever because despite their working class backgrounds, they had finally penetrated the publishing barrier, thanks to the development of cheap literature. Yet there is another crucial reason why the British middle and upper class treated “hack” writers with a heightened level of disdain during the nineteenth century: the growing unease of a possible underclass rebellion in England. The governing classes were keenly aware of the French “hack” writers’ subversive

13 role in the French Revolution just a few decades earlier, and they feared the same destabilization of social order on their own soil.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION Richard Altick correctly observed that British nineteenth-century prejudices against “hacks” were indeed “intensified by the panic of the French Revolution” (5). With the depth of social change that had occurred in France, the British middle and upper classes’ paranoia was justified; they could easily see the correlation between the growing civil unrest in and around London and the French Revolution. John Stevenson notes: London was not faced not only with the consequences of urban growth, but also with the impact of popular radicalism . . . the Wilkes agitation and the Gordon Riots seemed evidence of the ability of the populace to break free from traditional restraints almost at will and overwhelm . . . the normal peacekeeping forces of the capital . . . [T]he events in Paris in 1789 served only to confirm the dangers of urban insurrection in a large capital city. (163) The French “hack” writers accelerated the events in Paris in 1789 primarily because they were able to persuade the growing French middle class to revolt. This “literary proletariat,” as Melton calls it, was able to induce radical change simply by its use of powerfully oppositional language—a phenomenon that was first defined by Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin as “dialogic ideology.” The theory explains how a marginalized group’s dialogic power—either vocal or written—can severely compromise hegemonic standards, even if a cultural shift in class and power does not occur. Bakhtin asserted that this is possible because society and the individual—regardless of social class— always have a reciprocal impact upon one another, which explains how disenfranchised groups can provoke social change. In other words, Bakhtin suggests there does not exist a ruling ideology that controls everyone and everything; each individual is essentially an “ideologue” with every word that they speak, and as such, each person has the power to elicit change (Freedman and Ball 5). The dialogic power of the French “hacks” first emerged in the early 1770s and ‘80s when droves of young writers from the countryside flocked to Paris based on the “conviction that the republic of letters really existed as the French philosophes claimed” (Melton 88). These aspiring authors were convinced that the opportunity to write and network with the likes of Rousseau awaited them. Yet soon after these impoverished youths arrived, they

14 learned that the salon circuit was highly exclusive, a reality with which London “hack” writers were already well acquainted. Just as the “hack” writers of London were ostracized, these young French writers were similarly dismissed by the established French philosophes. But the French “hacks” did not tolerate this abuse as obsequiously as their London counterparts. They stridently accused the established philosophes of Paris’s salon circuit of writing in a pseudo-egalitarian style that served only to maintain the status quo. As such, “hack” writers exercised revenge by writing reimagined pieces by Voltaire or Diderot in the vein of populism as a means of appealing to their peers and to the newly educated middle class. In these “revised” works, the detestation of the aristocracy was greatly exaggerated and vulgar, and in many cases, these works were fully designed to antagonize readership into taking immediate action against the Old Regime. Lower- and middle-class citizens admired these texts and found them substantially more influential than the original works (Melton). This exemplifies the dialogic power of “hack” writers, and demonstrates how they subverted upper class norms and values on a large scale. To further subvert absolutism, “[this] literary proletariat, [who] seethed with resentment toward the Old Regime … and a cultural elite from which they felt unjustly excluded” turned to pamphleteering, where they were able to effectively garner an audience for defaming the aristocracy (Melton 134). They sought out heavily trafficked locations, such as outside the immensely popular public theatres, where they attracted lower and middle class audiences by reading aloud their own prologue and epilogue to the scheduled performance that explored the “artificiality of the genres [the performance] framed” (Melton 135). That is to say, “hack” writers took much pride in ridiculing the aristocratic theatrical performances of the King’s Players. The lower-class theatre patrons, who purchased “pit” tickets to these performances, were particularly enthralled by the “hacks’” oppositional message, which intensified their clamor once inside the theatre. In the few years prior to the Revolution, the pamphleteering success of “hack” writers had peaked and they had also earned the support of many middle class citizens. This is important because it implies that the literature of the “hacks” directly influenced the citizens who later came to be the leaders of the Revolution. Thus, Melton rightfully concludes that these demoralized authors were indeed the “literary and intellectual incubators of the Revolution … the revolutionary challenge to the

Old Regime came not from the philosophes … but from a literary underground of frustrated, aspiring writers unable to gain entry into privileged writing circles” (131). In the years after the fall of the Old Regime, academies, salons, and privilege were rapidly dismantled, and newspapers and theatres sprang up at high rates; a new egalitarian public sphere emerged wherein the common writer had a voice. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogic ideology provides an understanding of how the literary underground was able to exercise their enormous power and influence, even from a socioeconomically disadvantaged position. The only power they possessed was their written and verbal language, and yet that alone enabled them to induce change. The first group of mainstream British “hack” authors to assert a dialogic power of this magnitude occurred two decades before the mass introduction of cheap literature, via the Cockney School authors.

“HACKING” INTO THE BRITISH MAINSTREAM The Cockney School – a group of newly emerging lower-class poets and essayists including Leigh Hunt, John Keats, and William Hazlitt – was the first group of nineteenth century “hacks” to experience a public assault on their authorship and personal character, which can be traced to the Blackwood’s Magazine attacks. In the 1810s, John Lockhart, the affluent editor of the elite Blackwood’s periodical, wrote a series of denigrating reviews on the writings of these emerging authors, derisively categorizing them as “Cockneys” to humiliate them for their lower-class origins. Lockhart’s vitriolic attacks upon the Cockneys mirror Pope’s detestation for the Grub Street “hacks” a century earlier; it exemplifies how the “‘legitimate bourgeoisie’ [is outraged] when confronted by the social ambitions of the ‘petty bourgeoisie’” (Wheatley 3). As Kim Wheatley notes, Lockhart’s outrage set him about “demolish[ing] Hunt in a series of articles … that take to an extreme the violent personal attacks of early nineteenth century reviewing” (1). But clearly, the extremity of Lockhart’s personal attacks on Hunt goes far beyond class contentions into the realm of blatant fear of the Cockneys’ oppositional values. Lockhart, like much of the British upper class, feared the subversive nature of Hunt’s and Keats’s prose and poetry. For example, Hunt in particular often essayed regarding the imperative need for political reform in Britain, as well as proffering his atheistic beliefs; his fearless commentary at one point cost him two years in prison for libeling the Prince Regent.

Additionally, his poetry contained unfettered views on sexuality, while Keats’s prose challenged traditional rhythm and structure of canonical British poetry at the time. For this, Keats’s poetic aspirations were condemned even more than Hunt’s. In 1818, for instance, Lockhart’s ruthless review of Keats’s “Endymion” declared that the poem: has just as much to do with Greece as it has with ‘Old Tartary the Fierce;’ no man whose mind has been imbued with the smallest knowledge or feeling of classical poetry or classical history, could have stooped to profane and vulgarise every association in the manner which has been adopted by this “Son of Promise” … It is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr. John, back to “plasters, pills and ointment boxes,” &c … but be a little more sparing of … soporifics in your practice than … in your poetry. (Lockhart) While such contentions and criticisms may seem laughable by today’s standards, at the time, Hunt’s circle was perceived as a forceful threat to the status quo. Hunt quickly recognized that his radical political beliefs, not his lower-class background, lay at the crux of Lockhart’s acerbic prejudice. He knew that the literary reception of British writers, in the decades after the French Revolution, was dependent upon their political views and that there existed an obvious connection between politics and literature. As he states in one of his written responses to the Blackwood’s attacks, “They dare not say a word until they know a man’s connexions and opinions. If his politics are not of the true cast, they cannot discover his poetry. If his faith is not orthodox, how can they find any wit in him?” (Cox 31). We can see, then, how the politicized literary history of the French “hack” author exacerbated a pre-existing tendency to dismiss “hack” writings on the basis of their authors’ class backgrounds. While the contentions over the Cockney School diminished by the 1820s, a decade later a new wave of oppositional “hacks” were ushered into the mainstream by the founding father of the penny dreadful, George William MacArthur (G.W.M.) Reynolds. Though he is virtually forgotten now, in his time Reynolds was read more than Dickens and Thackeray. Like the Cockneys, Reynolds was politically radical. Moreover, he was a French sympathizer through and through; this combined with the fact that he pioneered the penny sensationalist genre made him a “major figure that the Victorian ‘respectable’ public conspired to ignore” (Humpherys and James 1). Reynolds hailed from a middle class naval English background, but as an adolescent, became impoverished after his parents passed away. Shortly after, he relocated to Paris in 1830 for a fresh beginning and a few years later became a naturalized French citizen. There he quickly developed an obsession with French

17 radicalism and proletarian literature; as Rohan McWilliam states, Reynolds “was an enthusiast for the French Revolution” (46). For example, Reynolds supported Louis-Philippe, who stood for a “liberal, constitutional monarchy” during the Revolution of 1830, and in 1832 Reynolds wrote his oppositional The Errors of the Christian Religion, by a Comparison of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (Reynolds, Wagner x). Reynolds did not experience much literary success until his return to London in 1840 when he began writing and publishing his radical penny dreadful, The Mysteries of London, modeled after Frenchman Eugene Sue’s sensational Les Mysteres de Paris. The Mysteries of London was groundbreaking because it occupied the “subterranean social space” connected with the “certain classes of people whose very manner of living seemed a challenge to ordered society and the tissues of laws, moralities and taboos holding it together” (Carver 149). That is to say, Reynolds’s locus of concern lay in exhuming the grittiness of poverty, crime, and violence of a great metropolis, and more specifically, in uncovering the reasons they exist in the first place – something that naturally provokes sociopolitical examination. It is in this way that Reynolds “completely politicized the underworld” (Carver 153), a tactic most prominently exemplified in The Mysteries of London by the character of Anthony Tidkins, or the “Resurrection Man.” Tidkins earns the title of Resurrection Man due to his occupation as both body snatcher and executioner, disinterring corpses and murdering new victims to sell them to his customers who are a variety of equally disreputable anatomists and surgeons. He personifies London’s considerable burial problem of the era; as a result of unprecedented population growth, the city experienced a severe dearth of cemetery plots. The combination of improperly buried corpses and the growing scientific interest in anatomy created a high demand for subjects of dissection, which in turn produced a flurry of profitable body snatching activity amongst the laboring poor. As Sara Hackenberg notes, the commodification of the corpse “speak[s] implicitly about the exploitation of the worker, inhuman demands of the employers, and the blind appetite of the consumer for the desirable and affordable product” (69). The Resurrection Man is an extreme example of the exploited laboring poor who turn to criminality as a result of a fundamentally flawed system, something that all of Reynolds’s vagrants and outlaws have in common.

To that point, Reynolds shows how the Resurrection Man’s criminal behavior and odious nature is a direct result of his disadvantaged upbringing. For instance, Reynolds describes how a young Tidkins witnessed his working class father being arrested for petty smuggling, which should have only warranted minimal jail time. Yet the local baronet had a personal vendetta against Tidkins’s father, and Tidkins watched as the baronet systematically pursued Mr. Tidkins throughout the remainder of his life to ensure he and his family would suffer unimaginable strife and poverty. The Resurrection Man reflects, “I began to comprehend that birth and station made an immense difference in the views that the world adopted of men’s actions” (Carver 158). Later in the story, the Resurrection Man executes his long-awaited vengeance upon the baronet by burning down his castle with the baronet inside. Of the incident, the Resurrection Man expostulates, “And the upper classes wonder that there are so many incendiary [crimes]: my only surprise is, that there are so few!” (Carver 158). The Resurrection Man’s storyline in The Mysteries of London is highly politicized, but it is not the only way in which Reynolds exhibits his radicalism. Reynolds is also one of the first writers of the era to address the upward mobility of the British working class, a circumstance he believed to be already in motion, and something that played directly on the fears of the upper class. For example, further into the story, Reynolds introduces a storyline involving a group of impoverished children in the East End who are denied the opportunity to attend school despite their ardent desire to do so. The youngest child, Jim, wishes only to become educated so that he will not replicate his eldest brother’s erroneous path of delinquency and vice. Reynolds takes this opportunity to further uncover the causes of lower- class crime in British society, which in this particular instance, boils down to the severe iniquities of the British education system. He sardonically declares, “Although our legislators – trembling at what they affect to sneer at under the denomination of ‘the march of intellect’ – obstinately refuse to imitate enlightened France by instituting a system of national education, - nevertheless, the millions of this country are now instructing themselves!” (Reynolds, The Mysteries of London 487). The final part of this proclamation is most telling, as it embodies the essence of the political values of “hack” authorship. In other words, Reynolds encourages the British working class to emulate the French proletariat and rise up against the numerous injustices put upon them by the governing classes. Reynolds believed his working class readership

19 would feel empowered by his political radicalism and that they would draw from his works a “republican energy … that they could use to agitate for change” (Shirley 88), which mirrors the dialogic desire of the French “hacks” decades earlier. In the same way that the French “hacks” altered the status quo, Michael Shirley notes that Reynolds uniquely mastered the use of “melodramatic language of reform without [a revolution occurring]” which soon became “the common language of the mid-Victorian radical” (88). This point is critical because it suggests that Reynolds, and other politically charged “hack” authors, indeed succeeded in their mission to propagate their radical values amongst working class readership; their achievement also illuminates the dialogic power of melodramatic language, a staple of “hack” authorship, something that is addressed in detail in the next chapter. Though Orwell may be correct that we have yet to become acquainted in British fiction with the British proletarian who makes “the wheels go round,” perhaps it is more important that we have met the British proletarian that the invention of cheap literature afforded us: he who perseveres and becomes upwardly mobile, despite victimization. Unlike the middle class paradigm of the morally upright and deferential working class protagonist, the working class characters depicted in “hack” literature embody the true human nature of the oppressed. The Resurrection Man, while abhorrent, is a product of avaricious upper class desires and social indiscretion. He exists because the abominable effects of class iniquity exist. On the other hand, Reynolds pays equal attention to the working poor who struggle to avoid a life of depravity via education, yet are barred from such an opportunity. By advocating self-education, Reynolds proves himself to be a prominent “hack” author who effectively addresses the concerns of and options for a marginalized working class. The Mysteries of London is one of numerous political gothics and radical melodramas of the mid- Victorian era, a text that investigates social problems and encourages working class political action. In the following chapter, I demonstrate the literary merit of these melodramatic texts by contextualizing their social and political aspirations within the framework of authorial intent, function, and cultural significance. By doing so, it becomes apparent that penny dreadfuls are a reputable genre in their own right.

CHAPTER 2

OH, THE HORROR!: SENSATIONALISM AS SUBVERSION

“The decade that followed 1830 is of great interest to anyone concerned with the problems of class and culture, for it opened with the masses seeking, in an unprecedented way, serious political and cultural reading matter,” so wrote Louis James in Fiction for the Working Man, the first comprehensive, scholarly attention paid to popular fiction of the nineteenth century (12). In this context, “the masses” largely refer to what James calls a “new self-aware working class,” and their demand for serious reading matter that transcended culturally hegemonic standards, a desire that was “inflamed by news of revolutions in France and Belgium” (Fiction 12). Penny dreadfuls, the popular fiction of “hack” authorship, swiftly met the budding political and cultural demands unique to working class readers. For example, as noted in the previous chapter, The Mysteries of London openly revealed Reynolds’s ties to French radicalism and was one of the first popular texts to present a harsh critique of British elitism and xenophobia. Clearly, the penny dreadful did not merely serve as gratuitous entertainment; it also functioned as the voice of a new class-consciousness by examining the gaping socioeconomic inequities of nineteenth century Britain. The cultural power of the penny dreadful was so great that it surpassed that of the middle class serialized novels. As bookseller C. A. Stonehill notes, “it is highly probable that in [the penny dreadful’s] day, more people had read Thomas Prest’s ‘First False Step’ or ‘The Maniac Father’ than had ever heard of a book published in the same decade, entitled Jane Eyre” (Haining 14). Thus, the widespread cultural influence of the penny dreadful is a social phenomenon that unquestionably warrants careful study. Peter Haining understood the need for further study on penny dreadfuls nearly four decades ago when he built upon James’s scholarship, paying close critical attention to twenty-three excerpted penny dreadfuls in his 1975 publication of The Penny Dreadful, or Strange, Horrid, and Sensational Tales! In doing so, Haining admirably sought to assert the literary merit of this oft-dismissed genre. One might expect that the initial progress made decades ago by James and Haining would

21 have, by now, launched an in-depth exploration of the penny dreadful’s intrinsic value; oddly, this has not been the case. With the exception of handful of recent G.W.M. Reynolds scholars such as James, Anne Humpherys, and Michael Shirley, very little academic advancement on behalf of the penny dreadful has been made. This is particularly troubling in the wake of the past decade’s Cultural Studies movement, wherein graphic novels, comic books, and even video games have been awarded varying degrees of merit. Yet the penny dreadful remains strangely disvalued. One particular example of this devaluation is the dismissive manner in which scholars treat the Dickensian penny “plagiarisms.” In Dickens’s heyday, it was not uncommon for “hack” authors to re-write texts such as The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickelby in order to disseminate revolutionary political values to the working class. These “plagiarisms” altered certain facets of the original texts – such as enhanced violence, sexuality, and different characterization – in order to present a tale that more accurately reflected the realistic living and working conditions of working class readership. Yet scholars fail to recognize the innovative nature of such authorship. On the other hand, newer popular fiction that rewrites a classic novel with a specific purpose and audience in mind, such as Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2004 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – Pride and Prejudice rewritten to include a zombie apocalypse – is lauded as innovative or emblematic. In this chapter, I argue for the literary merit of the penny dreadful by examining how thoroughly it accomplished its primary function: to provide rousing, non-moralizing fiction to the marginalized British working class predicated upon the revolutionary political values of “hack” authorship. Specifically, using Reynolds’s Dickens “plagiarism” Pickwick Abroad, or The Tour in France (1837-38) and James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood (1845-47), I examine how “hack” authors used social melodrama – a genre that originates from French radicalism – to fulfill the texts’ subversive functionality. In the case of Pickwick Abroad, Reynolds uses the genre as a platform to equalize the social iniquities of the British class system. Similarly, in Varney the Vampire, social melodrama is used to parody the British gentry’s fears of the French and of radical ideology. By elucidating precisely how Pickwick Abroad and Varney the Vampire are paradigms of “functional” literature, I argue that penny dreadfuls are undeniably a meritorious genre of their own.

FOR ALL INTENTS AND PURPOSES Most Cultural Studies scholars would agree with James’s assertion that “there are formidable problems facing anyone who tries to evaluate popular literature. The intentions of the writers and the attitudes of the audience are so different to those involved in ‘classical’ literature that one cannot condemn it for not coming up to the usual literary standards” (Fiction 45). Since popular fiction oftentimes does not measure up to the usual literary standards regarding content, writing style, or even subject matter, authorial intent and the audience’s attitudes are often the only means of evaluating literary merit in such works. In other words, when assessing literary value in popular fiction, we should always take into account the function of the literature and whether or not a text has satisfied its ultimate purpose. As James asserts, one should consider whether or not the “work succeed[s] in its intentions and function in a particular time and for a particular range of readers” when ascertaining its value [emphasis mine] (Fiction 47). Bearing in mind the particular time period and readership of the penny dreadful, its authorial intention was to present compelling literature to the working class that embraced their values and to accurately portray their lives in the slums. On both of these points it succeeded tremendously, and much of the proof comes directly from the mouths of nineteenth century working class readers; such responses are an integral part of evaluating whether the function of literature has been successfully fulfilled. Jonathan Rose’s Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, a study of collection of memoirs, journals, and correspondence authored by everyday British working class citizens, provides rare insight into the working class’s opinions of the penny dreadful. It appears that, contrary to what history would have us believe, working class readers were hardly oblivious to the widespread disgust at the penny dreadful, nor did they passively receive the literature. They were fully aware that penny dreadfuls “created something approaching a moral panic” within the confines of middle- and upper class society (Rose 368), and many found this fact quite amusing. For example, basket weaver Thomas Okey mused, “Demoralizing literature? Well, none of us in after life adopted highway robbery as a profession” (Rose 367). Similarly, an ironworker’s son professed that penny dreadfuls actually stimulated his reading habit. He avowed that his “’budding love of literature [was attributed to] an enthusiastic reading of Penny Dreadfuls which, so far from leading me into a

23 life of crime, made me look for something better’” (Rose 368). Thomas Frost, an aspiring “hack” author of several penny dreadfuls, asserted that they “were the direct descendants of those charming chapbooks that had entranced earlier generations of common readers … as a genre they were no more horrifying than some of Shakespeare’s plays” (Rose 369). Finally, a South Wales miner corroborated the intoxicating effect of the penny dreadful, admitting “it introduced me to a romantic world when pennies were scarce, and libraries seemed far beyond my reach … [penny dreadfuls] gave us glimpses of freedom, abandon … whilst we chafed at restrictions and shut doors” (Rose 368). These glimpses of freedom and abandon are central to the function of the penny dreadful. Both Pickwick Abroad and Varney the Vampire are predicated on the radical ideals of the French Revolution, which among many things, fought for the literary autonomy of working class citizens. Clearly, such readers were moved by this and experienced a deep emotional connection to penny dreadfuls. The act of reading the penny dreadfuls was titillating, and gave readers hints of liberation that were simply not present in the novels of Gaskell and Dickens; in many ways, reading penny dreadfuls represented the dissolution of literary power over the governed classes. It is the melodramatic attention paid to the declining power of the governing class, and the emerging autonomy of the underclasses, that makes both Pickwick Abroad and Varney the Vampire such compelling pieces of functional literature.

ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE Both Reynolds’s and Rymer’s serialized repertoires are predicated upon melodrama and the principles of theatricality, and with good reason; dramatic genre allows for substantial narrative flexibility. When operating within the parameters of melodrama, the author is free to craft sensational and extraordinary plots and characters without criticism. Since storylines are expected to be outrageous, anything and everything goes. To this end, “hack” authors like Reynolds and Rymer felt quite comfortable using melodrama as a means of propagating their radical political beliefs because of the relative immunity that they faced. This kind of politicized spin on melodrama is what John Cawelti has termed social melodrama, a genre whose subversive origins can be traced back to the French Revolution and the plays of Rene Charles de Pixerecourt (68). Pixerecourt, like the British Romantics,

24 rejected the cerebral morals of the Enlightenment. His dramas valued human emotions over traditional intellect that had “been acquired by privileged education and [was] determined by class” (James, “Time” 182), which made them models of social melodrama. Theatrical melodrama was especially successful in imparting radical ideology because it could so easily educate the masses who could not read. As Cawelti asserts, social melodrama, which has always been employed for subversive purposes, “synthesize[s] the archetypes of melodrama with a carefully and elaborately developed social setting; it exploits the emotional and moral appeal of the stage form, while at the same time drawing on the interest inherent in a detailed, intimate … analysis of major social … phenomena” (James, “Time” 181). Thus, Pixerecourt recognized that emotional appeal was the best way to reach audiences of low literacy and informal education. “Hack” authors possessed a similar preoccupation with, and distaste for, the kind of class and privilege that Pixerecourt denounced. Consequently, it is natural that they were highly influenced by Pixerecourt’s deft use of social melodrama, and used it to spread their own radical beliefs to the same low-literate demographic. The fact that penny dreadfuls emulated Pixerecourt further stigmatized the texts in mainstream England, due to the middle and upper class prejudice against melodrama. Prim British nobles deemed the genre, and its dependence upon emotional stimulation, inferior to the era’s “intellectual” Realist and bildungsroman texts. Aristocratic discrimination did nothing, however, to lessen the appeal of social melodrama amongst the working class audience. Such readers craved realistic sensation, and so “the spirit of melodrama and terror persisted unsubdued” (Haining 14). Reynolds and Rymer understood the needs of their readership, and fulfilled those needs time and again through disseminating radical politics. They recognized that “great opportunities for directing the radical movement with [cheap literature] lay open” (James, Fiction 12), and like Pixerecourt, took full advantage of the opportunity to educate the marginalized masses.

PICKWICK IN FRANCE With a healthy dose of theatrical vigor and zest, Reynolds uses melodrama in Pickwick Abroad as a platform to alert the working class to the social inequities of the British class system. Daniel S. Burt compares reading Pickwick Abroad to “the experience of sitting in a mid-Victorian working-class theatre” (James, “Time” 181), in that Reynolds carefully

25 chooses middle and upper class traditional facets of Victorian society and destabilizes them to create an environment of incertitude and vulnerability. The primary way in which Reynolds accomplishes this in Pickwick Abroad is by physically transporting the beloved Pickwick crew out of England into France. Through this process of reverse Otherization, which is another melodramatic device laced with social implications, the characters are forced out of their figurative boxes to meet a new set of challenges abroad for which their British cultural values have not necessarily equipped them to undertake. It is in part due to this dexterous use of social melodrama that Anne Humpherys and Louis James call Reynolds’s work a “‘considerable achievement’ of mid-Victorian working- class culture, whose quality the pulp press that followed it ‘can hardly understand’” (11). Like Varney the Vampire, how Pickwick Abroad can be viewed as meritorious comes back to authorial intent and function. Let it be understood that Reynolds’s primary intention in writing Pickwick Abroad was not to recreate the Pickwickian Realism that Dickens had so finely crafted. For Dickens, Realism functioned as a means of eliciting social reform, his primary authorial intention. Reynolds’s chief purpose in writing Pickwick Abroad was entirely different. Instead of social reform, Reynolds wished to transfer to the working class an understanding of and appreciation for the French and their revolutionary ideals, hoping it would lead to their own empowerment. Such an ideal is evident from Reynolds’s passionate appeal in the text’s introduction: I hope that the contents of the ensuing pages will help to clear away from the minds of my untraveled fellow-countrymen a few of those prejudices, in reference to the French, which are still so tenaciously adhered to, and place the character of our great and gallant neighbors . . . in a new and better light than they have ever yet been viewed in . . . and I venture to assert, without fear of contradiction, that there is no nation in the universe where a citizen or foreigner enjoys more real liberty than in France . . . The English have generally formed their opinions of the French after a very superficial glance at their institutions, manners, commerce, literature, morals, etc; but I sincerely hope [this will change]. (Pickwick Abroad vii-viii) Since social melodrama functions as the ultimate appeal to one’s emotions, it makes sense that Reynolds employed the genre to alter the skewed perceptions of the French. The “simplified morality of melodrama melded seamlessly with the social conflicts of a turbulent era, transforming the [Realist] struggle of ‘evil’ and ‘good’ into that between ‘Oppressor’ and ‘Oppressed,’ between ‘rich’ and ‘poor” (James, “Time” 183). Realism, with its overworked

26 moralism and strict adherence to reality, would be incapable of facilitating the same message. George Levine states that the goal of social reform authors like Dickens – who blatantly rejected the romantic dramatization and idealization of various societal relationships that are staples of social melodrama – was to first and foremost to “establish [their] credentials as a Realist, hence, a reliable social critic” (6). But “hack” authors like Reynolds, who were just as marginalized as their readership, had no need to establish themselves in this fashion. Instead of being bogged down with proving themselves, they could instead give themselves over to all that social melodrama had to offer as a form of sociopolitical commentary.

WHEN IN ROME … The function of social melodrama in Pickwick Abroad, like all Dickens “plagiarisms,” was to alter certain aspects of the original work’s characterization, plot, or tone in order to present a tale that more accurately reflected the realistic living and working conditions of working class readership. For instance, James notes that Edward Lloyd’s plagiarism Oliver Twiss was twice the length of Oliver Twist, and twice as popular with the working class, due solely to the heightened melodrama in the text: “[Twiss] gives much more information and includes horse-play [and] more violence … The sexuality of the world is more explicit, as well” (“The View” 90). In comparison, “Oliver Twist … attracted very little interest by the lower-class press, probably in part because the theme of a small boy of respectable parentage being victimized by the London underworld was too middle class to appeal to its readers, especially when they could draw on so much more germane literature,” like the Dickens plagiarisms (James, Fiction 60). The key word here is “germane.” Dickens’s desire to establish his credentials for a middle class readership precludes the descriptions, language, and action that create the most palpable type of story for working class readership. Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers chronicles the adventures of the Pickwick Club, an elite association founded by the wealthy Samuel Pickwick, which includes his well-off companions Mr. Snodgrass, Mr. Winkle, and Mr. Tupman. Pickwick, a curious man with a bit of wanderlust, forms the club for the purpose of traveling by coach to remote areas of the English countryside essentially in order to experience how “the other half” lives whilst having a bit of fun along the way. During the club’s series of adventures, they naturally encounter a variety of colorful characters, all of which fall into a very distinct, very British

27 system of class hierarchy. They first encounter Alfred Jingle, a charlatan and scalawag who causes numerous snags in the Pickwickians’ plans. By lineage, he is considered a gentleman, albeit a tier below the Pickwickians. Jingle’s sycophantic servant, Job Trotter, only appears briefly in each chapter before Jingle’s narrative, and then immediately disappears. Job is more or less on the same low tier as Cockney Sam Weller, Pickwick’s valet, who Dickens provides as comic relief. It is clear who is admired, and who is in charge. However, Pickwick Abroad disrupts this caste system as the members of the Pickwick club gradually accept the egalitarian views of the French upon their arrival. This fact in and of itself was cause for alarm amongst the British middle and upper classes. As Reynolds well knew, the adoption of French revolutionary values by British aristocrats articulated one of their worst possible fears, and he exploits this to the best of his power. For example, even though Sam remains Pickwick’s valet in Pickwick Abroad, the club’s members treat him with notably more equality in France. At the very beginning of the serial, as the Pickwickians deboard the train in Paris, each of them fearfully examines his foreign surroundings. Sam, rather exasperated with their trepidation, assures them all is well, to which Mr. Winkle replies shakily, “’You don’t say so, Sam!’, edging behind Mr. Tupman and trembling violently – with cold, as he subsequently informed his companions” (Reynolds, Pickwick Abroad 3). Just as early on in the serial, Reynolds dramatically reverses the ideological roles of working class Sam and aristocratic Pickwick for shock value. Sam remarks dolefully of France: ’Tis a lost country … a nation without principle, Sir … there’s no sich thing as a gen’lmen among ‘em – a servant is as good as his mas’er, Sir – for they air all equal, as the nobleman said, when he give the chimbly-sweep a chair, and told him to make his-self at home. (10) But instead of heartily agreeing with such an assertion as Dickens’s Pickwick certainly would, Pickwick counters, “I am afraid, Sam, that your account is rather exaggerated” (10). Sam resolutely answers, “Quite impossible to be incorrect, Sir – The French is greatly to be pitied … they don’t know the walley o’ liberty … since they’ve a-made their-selves all equal,” to which Pickwick responds doubtfully, “Well, we shall see” (10). Pickwick does not change his mind on this issue, and to show as much, he defers to Sam to lead them confidently through the foreign land.

As their French journey progresses, Pickwick comes to view Sam as a trusted equal, at times valuing his opinion over the club’s other members. This embodies one very important value of the working class, the idea of community and comradery. As Priya Joshi explains, “the interconnectedness that Reynolds’s characters constantly encountered as they traversed the … urban environment of [France] … underscored the essential, albeit paradoxical, community of a world that, despite its enormity, was small enough for characters, treasures, reunions … to meet and remeet over and over again, as in a village square” (James, “Time” 183). In other words, by removing the Pickwick crew from London’s confining, aristocratic atmosphere, the characters gain a broader understanding of humanity. Their displacement into France was also necessary in terms of gaining perspective and expanding their mores and values. When in England, the main purpose of the club’s travels was to validate their own feelings of superiority by ogling the strangeness of the rural population. In France, this sense of superiority faded as they relied upon one another, and the classless members of the French community who they meet along the way. As such, a true belief in egalitarianism forms amongst the crew. It is unsurprising, then, that Reynolds would be largely despised in Britain. Though Reynolds was an easy target of mass derision due to Pickwick Abroad’s relatively straightforward endorsement of French values, other “hacks” were equally ridiculed for their disloyalty to hegemonic British values. Rymer was among the scorned, as he combined melodrama with horror to parody the numerous fears of the British gentry in Varney the Vampire.

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION While some skeptics may question the use of horror and melodrama as an effective means of educating readership, as Franco Moretti asserts, “The more a work frightens one, the more it edifies” (83). In the case of Varney the Vampire, edification arrives in the form of revolutionary political enlightenment. At first glance, the text may seem little more than an adolescent horror tale. It is, however, a profoundly political text. Through the deft use of horror and melodrama, Rymer not only criticizes the innate social inequities of Victorian culture but also incorporates into the plot the political contentions of the English civil wars and the subsequent Restoration. In addition to radical political commentary, there are other

reasons why Varney emerges as a compelling specimen of functional literature designed for the

29 working class. Firstly, Sir Francis Varney, a former nobleman turned vampire resides in the liminal space between life and death; sustenance and starvation; and dependence and autonomy. He is at once genial and detestable, and at times he arouses as much sympathy in the reader as he does revulsion. Varney’s ambiguous presence between these binaries is a melodramatic tactic – it significantly heightens tension and perplexity. Yet it also represents the desperation of the working class’s existence. The tale destabilizes any notion of permanence or stability in its plot; characters are confronted by a ceaseless torrent of problems that threaten to topple their lives – a grave reality of working class life. Secondly, unlike the morally defined, idealistic tale of the working class protagonist in the middle class Realist novel, the line between integrity and depravity in Varney is blurred. The villains in penny dreadfuls were designed specifically to “[disrupt] any easy category of virtue and vice” (Hackenberg 73), and as such, there is no clear distinction between the ethical and unethical. Moral judgments are situation-specific and unpredictable throughout the serial, just as they are in life. One clear case of this is how Rymer fluctuates between heroicizing and demonizing Varney. For example, the tale begins with a ghastly, inhuman Varney preying upon the chaste and beautiful Flora Bannerworth, daughter of the family that he terrorizes throughout the story. Varney appears to Flora as tall and gaunt with a face that is “perfectly bloodless … the eyes look like polished tin; the lips are drawn back, and the principal feature next to those dreadful eyes is the teeth – projecting like those of some wild animal, hideously … fang-like” (Rymer 3). As he proceeds to sink his fangs deep into the horrified Flora’s neck, he is a flagrant example of moral degeneracy. Yet at different junctures in the story, Rymer sympathizes with Varney. For instance, he writes, “Varney had suffered numerous injustices put upon him by those who failed to understand his torments … persons of worse repute had been offered more sympathy than he” (58). His keen attention to these melodramatic devices suggests Rymer was strongly attuned to the needs and desires of his working class readership, so much so that he ingeniously constructed a tale predicated upon parodying the various socioeconomic anxieties of the wealthy class. Varney satirizes the fears of the gentry in two distinct ways. Firstly, the story mocks one predominant fear of the declining Victorian aristocracy: loss of wealth and property. Deteriorating capital, a somber topic of discussion in middle class texts by authors like Jane Austen and George Eliot, is ridiculed in Varney. Secondly, Rymer

30 derides the aristocracy’s panic over the encroachment of French radical ideology upon British soil. Such mockery is most obvious in the melodramatic encounters between Varney and the Bannerworths. Confrontations between the two are over-the-top and sensationalistic – as primarily evidenced by the whole vampire storyline – but such interactions never happen independently of Rymer’s specific political message to the working class. This is one significant difference between working-class and middle-class horror fiction. As Dick Collins notes of the horror penny genre, “The [melodrama] of the narrative combine[d] with Sensationalism … create[s] an immediacy seldom found in the [middle-class] Gothic. The distance between the reader and the horror is diminished, if not abolished” (5). By heightening the immediacy and removing the distance between audience and horror in Varney, Rymer greatly enhances the authenticity of the reading experience, which in turn strengthens his political position.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN BANNERWORTH HALL Varney’s plot, while discursive at times, is relatively straightforward. The story is centered upon the lives of siblings Flora, Henry, and George Bannerworth, heirs to a once- affluent English country estate. The Bannerworths are described as “well known in the part of the country where they resided” but due to the siblings’ deceased father’s “vices … and extravagancies,” the family property was now “of little value, on account of the numerous encumbrances with which it was saddled” (Rymer 26). The family is well aware of their dwindling estate, and they cling desperately to their house, which is the only remaining piece of their fortune. The pathetic tenacity with which the Bannerworths cling to their fortune, and keep up airs in spite of their financial decline, is the first point that is melodramatized. At the start of the novel, Sir Frances Varney, who operates under the façade of a foreign nobleman of unspecified origin, purchases Bannerworth Hall’s neighboring estate and wishes to make the Bannerworths’ acquaintance. Yet Henry is so ashamed of his family’s pecuniary condition that he refuses. He confides to his brother, “I do not wish to make any new acquaintance, George. We are very poor – much poorer indeed than the general appearance of this place, which I fear, we shall soon have to part with” (19). George answers hopefully, “Do not regret, Henry … we shall be able to go to some other country and there live like princes of the land” (19), a sardonic allusion to the era’s uneasy British aristocrats who

31 would rather secure their financial position abroad than suffer the stigma of a dwindling fortune in their native land. Throughout the text, Henry is not only obsessed with maintaining an affluent veneer, but is also concerned with the social status of his acquaintances. For example, before he finally agrees to meet Varney, he inquires of George, “Do you know if [Varney] be a baronet or a knight merely?” (61). Henry clings to social ties with his prosperous and highly respected uncle, Admiral Bell, as well as the aristocratic Charles Holland, Flora’s fiancé. His only colloquial “friendship” is with Mr. Marchdale, an obsequious country laborer who nobly executes the difficult tasks of which Henry is incapable. For instance, it is Marchdale, not Henry, who is the first to pursue Varney after the family learns of Varney’s attack upon Flora. Likewise, Marchdale appoints himself leader of the angry mob that attempts to extinguish Varney, while Henry trails behind. Henry’s overdependence upon Marchdale highlights the aristocracy’s feebleness and docility, a point Rymer further elucidates through the gentry’s obsession with property and ownership.

PRIDE (OF OWNERSHIP) AND PREJUDICE (OF THE FRENCH) The melodramatic attention paid to the issue of property – and more specifically, rightful ownership of said property – is pervasive throughout the thousand-page serial. Contentions over the rightful ownership of Bannerworth Hall mock similar concerns of the gentry in middle class novels such as Austen’s Northanger Abbey and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Such anxieties are present even in Dracula, fifty years after Varney’s publication. For example, much of the middle and upper class characters’ fear and outrage in Dracula derives from the fact that Dracula – a suspicious Eastern European – has settled in London and poses a monetary threat to British capital by purchasing numerous estates. Similarly, Varney is a “suspicious foreigner” concerned solely with usurping the Bannerworths’ property, a desire that is further emphasized by the fact he is surprisingly unconcerned with his “feeding” requirements. Instead, it becomes apparent through numerous interactions between himself and the Bannerworths that Varney’s ultimate predatory purpose is not to feed upon Flora, but to strip the family of their remaining aristocratic credentials and artifacts, starting with Bannerworth Hall. The melodramatic contentions over the rightful ownership of Bannerworth Hall begin with an eerie portrait of an unknown gentleman in one of the hallways. None of the

Bannerworths know exactly who the man is, but they all recall the portrait being there as long as they can remember. As such, they assume the man is an old relative, perhaps the founder of the Bannerworths’ wealth. But when Varney takes up residence next door, Henry and Flora begin to pay extensive attention to the portrait. Flora believes the portrait bears an uncanny resemblance to the vampire who is stalking her, and Henry, who becomes progressively uneasy with the painting, remarks to Charles, “How earnestly that strange portrait seems to look upon us” (Rymer 53). Henry’s anxiety is further inflated when Charles mentions that upon close inspection, the portrait’s frame appears to have sustained recent damage, probably as a result of having been moved. The two men undertake the arduous task of removing the cumbersome portrait from the wall, only to discover that no clues lie within or behind it. Placing the portrait back on the panel, Henry “could not get rid entirely of the feeling that had come across him, to the effect that the picture had some mystery or another” (54). The mystery is to some extent solved several days later when Henry, accompanied by Marchdale, finally agrees to meet Varney for the first time. When Varney enters the room, “a cry of surprise, mingled with terror” escapes from Henry as he realizes “the original of the portrait on the panel stood before him!” (Rymer 61). Varney, pretending to be stunned by Henry’s pallid, trembling frame, asks “Are you unwell, sir? You seem surprised … have you ever seen me before?” Marchdale rushes to explain that Varney resembles a portrait in the Bannerworth home, at which point Henry interjects, “A resemblance! God of Heaven! It is the face itself” (61). Although the point is never fully elucidated, the resemblance implies that Varney may very well be the rightful proprietor of Bannerworth Hall. Following this encounter, Varney pursues the ownership of Bannerworth Hall with reckless abandon, at one point breaking into Flora’s bedroom and nearly choking her to death. When she begs to know what he wants, he replies, “The house, and all within, I covet … I covet Bannerworth Hall. All I wish, maiden, of you is to induce these imperious brothers of yours to sell or let the Hall to me” (94). Flora, terrified for her life, has no choice but to coerce her brothers to turn over Bannerworth Hall to Varney. Sara Hackenberg points out that by Varney “continually attempting to destroy the wealthy by robbing them of their modes of entitlement … (their assets), he acts … as an underworld facilitator of radical political change” (71). In other words, Hackenberg insinuates that Varney’s desire to rob the Bannerworths of their

33 remaining fortune is not rooted in greed, but rather in the aspiration to equalize socioeconomic inequities. Given Rymer’s radical political agenda in writing the tale, this is not far off the mark. French xenophobia and the gentry’s dread of political radicalism lurk throughout Varney, and the fear originates with Varney himself. Though from where Varney hails is never clearly stated, it is highly probable Varney is a French nobleman, driven into exile after the Revolution. Varney’s first name, Francis, meaning literally “Frenchman,” is particularly meaningful when viewed in the context of his eloquent speech and mannerisms. For instance, instead of saying good-bye, he always bids “adieu,” and is described as well refined with an easy sophistication, exiting the room by “ma[king] one of the most elegant bows in the world” (Rymer 63). Despite his reclusiveness, he is tolerant of those who endeavor to enter his home and remains polite and mild-mannered whenever engaged in conversation; Rymer takes great care to portray him as nonjudgmental and self-contained. Varney’s refined mannerisms and status as ex-nobility seems to evoke a Frenchman not in the spirit of a proletarian radical, but of an exiled aristocrat who fled to England after the revolution. Yet because he is a “facilitator of radical political change,” he is even more terrifying to the British elite; his radicalism implies that even the French aristocrats have succumbed to the proletarian revolution. In stark contrast to Varney’s pristine social mannerisms, his British peers are peevishly arrogant and prejudiced, another melodramatic approach Rymer employs to enhance the appeal of the French. For example, Marchdale condemns his wealthy cousin’s unjustified hatred of the French: “How he hated the French, and quite a baby, too … [He would always say,] ‘When I’m a big man, I’ll go in a ship, and fight all the French in a heap” (Rymer 68). On that same trajectory, Rymer mocks the intense paranoia with which the English view the encroachment of French radicalism upon British soil. For instance, when Charles invents an intricate plan to exterminate Varney, he “worked himself up to a kind of enthusiasm by which he almost succeeded in convincing himself that, in attempting the destruction of Sir Francis Varney, he was the champion of human nature” (106). Charles’s belief mirrors the conceited fallacy of the British aristocracy: that by dehumanizing and exterminating the French, they could avoid revolution and radicalism in Britain.

In a direct challenge to this ideology, Rymer attempts to humanize the besmirched Varney. After Varney takes control of Bannerworth Hall, Flora has a frank discussion with him wherein he divulges to her that he has been a victim of numerous injustices and hatred. Such examples range from being abused as a child to watching his father die to being ejected time and again from various towns for being “different,” all of which arouse her sympathies. Rymer says of the interaction, “No doubt the interview she had had with Varney … dispelled a host of imaginary terrors with which she had surrounded him” (163). These kinds of “imaginary terrors” directly parallel those of the fearful aristocracy in relation to French revolutionary principles. Flora, who feels badly for her prior lack of empathy for Varney’s plight, admits to her brothers, “I could almost pity Sir Francis Varney, rather than condemn him” (163). Rymer contends that the heartfelt conversation “show[ed] her that about him there was yet something human” (163), which further admonishes the aristocracy for their mischaracterization of the French as malignant catalysts of disruption and disorder. While Rymer’s allegiance to Varney eventually dwindles toward the serial’s end, his devotion to working class radical ideals does not. After approximately the first third of the serial, the Bannerworth storyline ends, and Varney moves on to preying upon other wealthy families. As he does so, he grows exceedingly greedy and odious; his vampire persona falls almost completely away, and from then on he is a figurative, not literal, vampire. At this point, it becomes obvious that Varney has embraced the philosophy of the British aristocracy and abandoned any radical ideals. But Rymer does not let Varney go unpunished for his traitorous behavior. At the serial’s end, in a most bizarre and unexpected turn of events, Varney decides to end his own life by jumping into Mount Vesuvius – only after confiding in a priest his life story. In this “confession,” we discover that in Varney’s original life, he worked as a shady double agent for both Oliver Cromwell and the royalists. His allegiance ultimately lay with the royalists, however, and he died fighting Cromwell’s men; as traitor to republicanism, he is “cursed with vampirism” (Hackenberg 70). Although outrageous, Varney’s death is the strongest of Rymer’s political messages, and it gives closure to a sinuous plot of virtue and vice; there is no ambiguity as to where Rymer’s true allegiance lies. Varney is used to first unsettle British ruling class assumptions, and then punishes himself for belonging to this class.

It is obvious, given the complexity of a seemingly trite adolescent horror tale, that the morality of the work differs entirely from the simplistic ethical positions of Gaskell and Dickens. Jem Wilson and Stephen Blackpool have no place in the penny dreadful; the working class consciousness shaped by “hack” authorship prevents the compartmentalization of right and wrong. Instead, penny dreadful characters mimic reality in terms of their depth, awareness, and even in their missteps. Varney exemplifies the working class agony involved in the pursuit of identity and a sense of place, while the Pickwick Club’s relocation to France demonstrates the ease with which that place and identity could be made possible, if the aristocracy was willing to accommodate it. Functionally speaking, Varney and Pickwick Abroad emerge as superb examples of literature that satisfied the needs of working class readership. The texts’ ease of reading, political values, and thrilling plot transported readers from their lives of confined squalor into possibilities of advancement. Additionally, the heavy integration of illustrations into the texts were a key component of the penny dreadful’s success. Without the assistance of images for a low-literate audience, the functionality of the texts would have certainly been reduced by at least half. The following chapter explores the notion of intertextuality – the critical connection between image and word – and its widespread effect on literature, beginning with the penny dreadful. Illustration progressively became a staple of cheap publications, and with it, an entirely new mass reading public in Britain materialized.

CHAPTER 3

THE NARRATIVE OF ILLUSTRATION, OR CULTURAL CAPITAL IN THE PENNY DREADFUL

As Patricia Anderson correctly notes, the printed image transformed nineteenth century British mass media and popular literary culture. In particular, it changed the way in which literature was consumed; audiences were presented with a visual narrative that challenged the homogeneity of the traditional approach to reading only text. Prior to the technological printing advancements of the nineteenth century, images only appeared sporadically in lavishly bound novels, chapbooks, or in newspapers and satirical pamphlets circulated solely amongst the middle and upper classes. To such audiences, illustrations in stories were appreciated only for the aesthetically pleasing complements that they were; never would the printed image be considered something that could, or should, operate as narrative in and of itself. This belief reinforced the prejudice against the widespread incorporation of illustrations into literature as an unsophisticated, “low” cultural practice. Yet by the early 1830s, illustrations in literature were virtually inescapable, regardless of “high” or “low” subject matter. To be sure, the predominance of images was largely engendered by the publishers’ appeal to a new faction of the consumer demographic – the low-literate working class. However, illustrations not only adorned the pages of “cheap” literature and penny dreadfuls, but were also prevalent in the serialized novels of Dickens, Ainsworth, and Thackeray; in reissues of moralizing classics such as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; and even in reprints of the Bible. The omnipresence of illustration in literature created an unprecedented intertextual dialogue between image and manuscript because low-literate working class readers relied heavily upon the images to tell the story. From an analytical perspective, it became increasingly difficult (and imprudent) to treat the image as separate from, and subordinate to, the printed word. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo cautions against the “myth of facility,” referring to the long-held, erroneous assumption that illustrations are easier to

37 understand than words (4). To Stam’s point, illustrators, just like authors, possess their own sets of values that are embodied in the images they create. Therefore, the printed image tells its own story, one that is not always evident by a cursory glance. For example, even though to the undiscerning eye many nineteenth century sketches and woodcuts may appear similar regardless of the text in which they appear, a close analysis reveals significant ideological nuance. The way an image is physically situated within the text, for instance, is a conscious choice on the part of both author and illustrator, as are the scenes and characters selected for illustration and how they are visually depicted. That is to say, because imagery often supplants imagination, readers of pictorial narratives – especially readers of low literacy – are likely to have their interpretation of a text shaped by the scenes selected for illustration. Anderson substantiates this, asserting that working class individuals “actively chose to buy pictorial magazines and, in doing so, consented to the values embodied in these publications” (6). As such, determining exactly what these values are and how they are disseminated when situated alongside text deserves thorough consideration. In other words, how does the printed image alter, substantiate, or subvert the textual message? Since the influence of imagery is so powerful, do the values embedded in an image overshadow those of the written word? How does one distinguish the values between one image and another? Finding definitive answers to these questions is a complex process, but one that is feasible and worthwhile. In the following chapter I examine the values embedded in the images of nineteenth century literary publications. More specifically, I differentiate between the ideals in the artwork of serialized novels and in penny dreadfuls by using two distinct means of qualification: selection and depiction of subject matter; and intertextuality, or how the images are situated within the text and, therefore, interpreted. I argue that the images contained in the serialized novels are either extensions of eighteenth century satire or social realism, both of which tend to reinforce cultural hegemony, while the artwork in penny dreadfuls relies upon sensational realism to express the radical political values that are central to “hack” authorship. The origins of these genres have much to do with the function of the images and the values spread.

HIGH-CLASS LOW LIFES: ANTECEDENTS TO THE VICTORIAN PRINTED IMAGE In the beginning, there was light. And raucous laughter, bawdy illustrations of aristocratic men and women, and sardonic depictions of royalty. This description would not likely conjure up an image of eighteenth century London; however, this was nonetheless the period that Vic Gatrell defines as the city’s golden age of graphic satire. For the first time, many British citizens breathed an air of social liberation due to the cultural shift from the austerity of the Restoration into the secular progressiveness of the Enlightenment. Domestic political upheaval was at a brief standstill, and despite the unnerving spread of French revolutionary ideology, British aristocrats did not yet feel the threat of their own proletariat. As such, the elite snapped to life from their stations of staid repose. As private societies, gentlemen’s clubs, and coffeehouses sprung up like springtime daisies, so did the typical consequences of extensive socializing; salacious laughter, mockery, and gossip defined the elite and middle class social circles of the late Georgian era. And, since satire is more vividly depicted through illustration than words, there existed a high demand for satirical artwork that would embellish the hilarity. William Hogarth, possibly the era’s most recognized British illustrator, pioneered such artwork. His catalogue spans from caricature to ornate engravings to moralizing oil paintings; his earliest works, which propelled him into fame, consisted of relatively innocuous, cartoonish sociopolitical commentary. Figure 1 shows one of these early caricatures, The Enraged Musician, which depicts an aristocratic musician infuriated by the din and clatter of the common masses outside his window. The crowd is oblivious to the angered musician and go about their everyday routines, an allusion to the common masses’ dwindling regard and respect for aristocratic culture. The drawing itself is cramped, almost claustrophobic, with a tremendous amount of action and is representative of what Gatrell deems the “congested, labored, literal iconography” of the eighteenth century (11), an important topic to which we will return later on. Hogarth’s social observations opened the floodgates for the era’s later, edgier caricaturists such as James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and Issac Cruikshank, grandfather of the famed nineteenth century illustrator, George Cruikshank. Such artists followed in Hogarth’s footsteps, but took things a step further to mercilessly deride fellow aristocrats and

Figure 1. Hogarth, The Enraged Musician. Source: University of Otago. “Cabinet 01: Hogarth.” A Quick Stab at the Eighteenth Century. University of Otago, n.d. Web. 7 Aug. 2013.

parliament members. One example is Gillray’s mockery of politician Sir Richard Worsely and his wife, both of whom were rumored to be notorious philanders; Worsely’s wife allegedly had close to thirty affairs while married to Worsely. Figure 2, Sir Richard Worse- than-Sly Exposing His Wife’s Bottom, O Fye!, depicts a coquettish Mrs. Worsely and an emasculated Mr. Worsely, who offers perfect strangers a peek at his nude wife. This image is a superior example of the more traditional, neoclassical satirical depiction that was also popular during the era – and which appears again in the serialized novels of the nineteenth century. In this same neoclassical manner, Figure 3, A Parliamentry [sic] Toast by Rowlandson, depicts a parliamentary meeting wherein the officers are bantering on the price they paid to get their commissions. The recipient of their bribes was the Duke of York (to whom they are toasting), or rather, his mistress Ms. Clarke, who was proven to have worked

Figure 2. Gillray, Sir Richard Worse-than-Sly Exposing his Wife's Bottom, O Fye! Source: Gillray, James. Sir Richard Worse-than-Sly, Exposing His Wife’s Bottom, O Fye! 1782. Hand-colored etching. National Portrait Gallery, London.

Figure 3. Rowlandson, A Parliamentry [sic] Toast. Source: Lichanos. “Mrs. Clarke’s Preferences.” Journey to Perplexity. N.p., 16 May 2011. Web. 7 Aug. 2013.

her will on him to corrupt the military promotion process. Of course, it was speculated that there was more than just money involved, as the standing officer proffers with the phallic pun: “Here is the lady that can raise five hundred members!” Considering the insulting nature of these illustrations, it may be tempting to argue that Gillray and Rowlandson were in fact attempting to subvert dominant culture by humiliating the elite, but such a conclusion is inaccurate. Since both artists hailed from upper class backgrounds, and their intended audience was also the upper class, it is obvious that their illustrations were designed to do nothing more than indulge the cliquish amusements of the elite. Rather, caricature was not oppositional because it in no way criticized the hierarchical class system itself, nor addressed the serious social consequences it produced. Instead, the popular subjects of caricature remained blithe, ranging from sexual taboo – depictions of

42 naked women, men, and sexual encounters – to the puerile, such as flatulence, drunkenness, and senseless ridicule. The frenzy surrounding the printed image swept all of London, and copies of illustrations were scooped up at print shops by the dozens to be circulated at social gatherings. There is one caveat to this proclamation, however – the printed image was still a far cry from egalitarian. As mentioned before, the prototypical eighteenth century illustration was created solely by, and for, the elite and educated middle classes, price and subject matter being the two limiting factors. For example, the typical illustration sold for one shilling in black and white, or two shillings in color (Gatrell), making it an impossible purchase for the common laborer. Additionally, the topics of salacious aristocratic scandal and political mockery were not particularly germane to a working class audience. One serious implication associated with the purposeful exclusion of the working class as consumers of the printed images is that it reinforces the notion that the aristocracy ultimately owned print culture. The printed word and image are preserved indefinitely; they are the cultural relics that survive the ages and continue to be taken as historical truths. The humor of the poor, on the other hand, is ephemeral. Their humor was just as boisterous, if not more so, than that of their upper class counterparts, but since they could not tangibly document it, their satire took place in the form of theatricality. As Gatrell notes, in alehouses, artisan taverns, or simply in the streets, the common citizens’ take on London “was experienced as a stage … human comedies, absurdities, or misfortunes were enacted in public and received with either sympathy or malice” (42). In lieu of working class illustration, our scope of understanding their humor is limited to the accounts of middle and upper class writers and depicting either their sympathetic or malicious responses to such humor.

THE NOT-SO-COMICAL IMPLICATIONS OF SATIRE The eighteenth century satirical image functioned largely as means of entertainment for the upper class; most of the illustrations were stand-alone and sold as pricey full-page prints in pamphlets or as postcards. It makes sense, then, that the values in such artwork would reflect the values of the middle and upper classes. Peter Wagner asserts that satirical artists of the time were simply repeating a stereotype “that had already been in vogue around

1710 and was [originally] used [to critique popular culture] by Swift and Fielding” (104). Wagner’s point is important because it suggests that satire grew out of a desire to debase popular culture and the emerging diversity of the public sphere; Swift and Fielding can hardly be considered proponents of “common” culture. Thus, by Hogarth, Gillray, and Rowlandson continuing to produce satirical images in the vein of early eighteenth century satirists who only had in mind the middle and upper classes as audience, they fall directly in line with reinforcing cultural hegemony. Wagner further asserts that Hogarth’s satire: is part of the bourgeois discourse in early eighteenth century England that first conquered [texts] policing public taste (The Tatler and The Spectator) and then launched an attack on particular forms of entertainment in modern mass culture. The guardians of the rising bourgeois aesthetics were especially concerned with what Pierre Bourdieu terms “la distinction,” that is, the attempt of social groups to create distinctions by trying to prove the superiority of (their own) specific tastes over other, and especially neighboring, ones. This usually works through the establishment of highly exclusive canons [as a means of trying] to define what separated high from low culture. Putting down popular entertainments is another [way of doing so]. (104) Many implications reside in this paragraph that are apropos to our examination of the values in nineteenth century images. First and foremost, we are faced with the problematic bourgeois nature of satire. By Wagner stating that Hogarth’s artwork was one of the pillars upholding bourgeois values, one must in turn be cautious when examining the values of the subsequent satirical images of the nineteenth century serialized novel – in particular, those of George Cruikshank, who was a staunch admirer of the eighteenth century caricaturists. Secondly, when comparing the images in the serials by Dickens, Thackeray, or Ainsworth with those in the works of Reynolds or Rymer, one must keep in mind that the former works were written for middle class audiences and, therefore, eventually canonized while the others were virtually forgotten. This speaks to Wagner’s point regarding social groups attempting to establish hierarchies in order to prove the superiority of their own work; it also implies that the images in the serialized novels were unconcerned with addressing working class readership. To this point, Wagner’s idiom “neighboring tastes” is of literal interest here, given the fact that serialized novels and penny dreadfuls were often physical neighbors inside print shop windows. And, as neighbors, they fought to compete for sales and market share. It would make sense, then, that using the printed image to establish a visual difference between

“high” and “low” culture would be a tactic used not just on the publisher’s end, but in the minds of both author and illustrator.

THE 19TH CENTURY ARTISTS There is no question that Dickens’s principal illustrators – George Cruikshank, Robert Seymour, and “Phiz” – were heavily influenced by, and had deep admiration for, Hogarth and his entire portfolio. As Leigh Dillard, Patricia Okker, and Nancy West confirm, “[Hogarth’s] richly allegorical and satirical techniques prove influential in … illustration well into the nineteenth century as evidenced in the works of Dickens, Thackeray, Cruikshank, and Phiz” (367). P. J. Keating corroborates that all the “great English engraver- caricaturists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century” greatly admired Hogarth, and sought to reproduce their own images in his style (12). This point is critical because Hogarth, as Louis James posits, is credited with “establishing the line of English graphic satire [and] also [has] been seen as establishing a realist tradition” (“Cruikshank” 108). It is reasonable, then, to draw a parallel between the ideological intention of Hogarth’s work and that of Dickens’s artists, who sought to model their work after him. After all, Hogarth’s artwork is centered upon “the emergence of the middle classes: he embodies the essential values of the new bourgeoisie” (“Cruikshank” 108); as satirists or social realists, Dickens’s artists expressed these same essential values. Since satire and social realism are genres that are rooted in traditional culture and reinforce hegemony, Dickens’s choice to depict London life through the lens of either satire or social realism implies he is reproducing a middle and upper class tradition that catered to the same elite audience in the Victorian era. Figure 4, Cruikshank’s illustration from Oliver Twist, is a primary example of social realism. Cruikshank in particular deserves unique attention, as he is quite possibly the most well known British artist of the early 1800s. He, like Dickens, “went to school on the streets” of London ( James, “Cruikshank” 107). Thus, he experienced London through the eyes of someone who, by all accounts, might be expected to align himself with the progressive political values of the working class. But, like Dickens, going to school on the streets of London was clearly not enough to arouse a desire to subvert tradition. Cruikshank embraced middle and upper class artistic tradition by modeling his artwork after Hogarth, and also Gillray, whom Cruikshank especially admired. After Gillray’s death, Cruikshank purchased

Figure 4. Cruikshank, Oliver Claimed By His Affectionate Friends. Source: University of Missouri Department of English. “Image Files: Oliver Twist, vol. 1.” Dickens & Visual Culture. University of Missouri, 22 Feb. 2008. Web. 7 Aug. 2013. .

46 many of Gillray’s prints, and even his writing desk, on which he created his own illustrations. As such, Cruikshank’s earliest work was satirical in the style of Gillray when he worked with Pierce Egan on Egan’s monthly Life in London journal – a collection of humorous and lighthearted vignettes and anecdotes depicting London’s “real” (i.e., working class) life. However, this is problematic because Gillray’s artwork so often was a reflection of his own “bourgeois terror of Radical change” (James, “Cruikshank” 110). In other words, Gillray’s illustrations dwelled far away from any subject matter or depiction that could possibly be construed as oppositional. Since Cruikshank derived much of his influence from Gillray, James is right to point out, “Both Cruikshank and Dickens were praised for their [depictions of] ‘reality,’ ‘life as it is’ … but what ‘reality’ was Cruikshank portraying?” (“Cruikshank” 107). Because satire and social realism are relatively “safe” genres, in that they invoke sentimentalism and a fondness for tradition, the reality that Cruikshank portrayed is one seen through the eyes of the middle and upper classes. In fact, Cruikshank’s eventual rejection of anything egalitarian corroborates this. By the 1840s, just as the craze of sensational realism in the penny dreadful swept the nation with The Mysteries of London, Varney the Vampire, and Sweeny Todd, Cruikshank’s work proved totally anachronistic. He became a Teetotaler and fully regressed into creating archaic, moralizing artwork to support the Temperance movement. His satirical images regarding Temperance mirrored that of Hogarth’s Gin Lane – a moralizing commentary upon the evils of drunkenness, featuring all working class citizens – one hundred years earlier. Cruikshank, who had transformed into “a pillar of Victorian respectability, commented on working-class movements such as Chartism and Owenism only to deride” (117). On the other hand, the penny dreadful artists never used satire or social realism to disseminate their message. They rejected both, instead opting for sensational realism, which draws heavily upon the revolutionary principles of social melodrama and, as such, evokes an air of the mysterious underground and those who inhabit it. Sensational realism absolutely proved the most effective for a progressive, radical message. As Matthew Buckley explains, sensational realism: fostered, more specifically, the powerfully modern feeling ‘that the everyday might be transformed into the shocking and sensation,’ that ‘ordinary people’ might be ‘lifted from the anonymity of urban life and into the world of spectacle.

Just as the French Revolution had ‘swept ordinary man into the stream of history,’ the [revolutionary values in the penny dreadful] had the possibility of similar significance. (436) In other words, sensational realism was both politically and socially progressive, something that is particularly illuminated by Buckley’s parallel between the motives of the genre and of the French Revolution. The satire and social realism of eighteenth century artists had none of the “powerfully modern feeling” that sensational realism conjured and, as such, it failed to function as a means of moving the populous forward. Instead, it only kept society rooted in the past, tied to a hierarchical class system that had been celebrated for centuries. Furthermore, as Buckley rightfully notes, the working class’s “heightened interest in the authentic depiction of sensational reality marks one of the fundamental elements of the decade’s shifts [into] modernity” (436). Obtaining the correct artists to portray this shift into modernity, and away from the archaic folds of old Britain, was a conscious choice on behalf of “hack” authors. Reynolds, for example, employed relatively unknown artists such as Bonner, Crowquill, and Phillips – all sensational realists – to illustrate Pickwick Abroad, The Mysteries of London and his other numerous serials. In fact, not much is known about these artists; they were dismissed as “hacks” in the same way as their “hack” author counterparts. What is obvious, however, is that none of the artists are famous, and some of them were actually credited in their drawings as “anonymous.” But this seems to have been a deliberate strategy on the part of the penny dreadful authors, which strongly suggests that Reynolds was aware of the traditional ideological values that both satire and social realism embraced. By the mid-1840s, he had experienced quite a bit of success from Reynolds’s Miscellany and other publishing ventures; money was certainly no impediment to his potential hiring of well- known artists. Yet it was clear that Reynolds had no desire to follow in the footsteps of Dickens and the other serial novelists. For example, in Pickwick Abroad, Reynolds deliberately chose a more subdued and sensational style instead of mirthful satire, a decision that showed he was “unwilling to pursue the course followed by Dickens in The Pickwick Papers” (Maidment 233). Subject matter, and how those subjects were portrayed, were the other ways in which Reynolds rejected the course of action used by the serial novelists.

SUBJECT MATTER AS DETERMINANT OF VALUES When examining subject matter and depiction for the values in serialized novels, we return to Gatrell’s earlier point regarding Hogarth’s “congested, labored, literal iconography.” This same technique in depicting subject matter was reproduced in the illustrations of Cruikshank, Phiz, and Thackeray. In examining Figure 4, for example, one can see that Cruikshank’s own artwork was quite cramped and packed with people – mostly working class – alluding to the notion of a confused, uncomfortable, and even frightening London. There is much activity taking place, and no focus on the individual; everything and everyone is lost in the haze of a crowd, which is the main attraction – there is little focus on London itself. The people are drawn in the quintessential Dickensian style of eliciting sympathy, each of them in tattered clothes with hopeful expressions, and full of unrest; the light contrast of the drawing reflects the lighthearted tone. In contrast, the sensational realist portrayal of a crowd in Figure 5, an image of French sensationalist writer Eugene Sue’s melodramatic serial Les Mysteres de Paris – from which Reynolds drew much of his own energy for The Mysteries of London – it is obvious that they are represented much differently. Unlike Cruikshank’s congested and literal drawing, this image is quite spacious and placid. Although the focus is still upon the crowd, the frame of reference is expanded to include the minutiae of the surrounding city, which alludes to the ideas of liberation and opportunity. In other words, the members of the crowd are free to move about at their will whereas Cruikshank overwhelmingly confines his crowd members to a specific time and place. Even more interestingly, it depicts a faceless crowd, with only their backs facing us. This technique is used to maintain the mystery of the genre, but it also serves a distinctly French political purpose: it shows the crowd physically moving forward into the future, untethered to the circumstances of the present. That is to say, the possibilities of change and upward mobility are very tangible. Cruikshank’s drawing, on the other hand, stops time and suggests that the conditions of the working class are immutable. Figures 6 and 7, by Thackeray and Phiz, demonstrate the reproduction of the classical and realist beliefs of Hogarth. For instance, in Figure 6, Thackeray’s illustration from Vanity Fair, two middle or upper class young lovers sit together, the man admiring the woman and she sitting in traditional demure repose. Figure 7, an aristocratic social event drawn by Phiz, reinforces this same kind of cultural hegemony. All of the illustrations in the serialized

Figure 5. Anonymous, Les Mysteres de Paris. Source: OBI Scrapbook Blog. “Photo.” Old Book Illustrations, n.d. Web. 7 Aug 2013. . novels uphold traditional values; people are good-natured and harmonious, romantic relationships are endearing, and conflict is always depicted satirically. In other words, the cut-and-dry, black-and-white “certainties” of realism that are so evident in the works of middle class novelists are visually reproduced in the accompanying artwork. Yet the social

Figure 6. Thackeray, A Fine Summer Evening. Source: Thackeray, William Makepeace. A Fine Summer Evening. The Victorian Web. N.p. 23 Nov. 2009. Web. 7 Aug. 2013. . melodrama principles of “hack” authorship destabilize such convictions; as the previous chapter discussed, penny dreadfuls reside in a liminal space between virtue and vice, and moral judgments are never universal. These liminal precepts of sensational realism include images such as two lovers in the midst of an argument, a brawl amongst the elite, and finally,

Figure 7. Phiz. Source: Phiz [Hablot K. Browne]. Conviviality at Bob Sawyer’s. The Victorian Web. N.p. 13 Dec. 2011. Web. 7 Aug. 2013. . the uncanny similarities between the covers of Varney the Vampire and Les Mysteres de Paris (Figures 8 & 9). All of this provides compelling evidence that the progressive values in the illustrations of penny dreadfuls have a firm connection to French radicalism. Perhaps David Glover says it best: “Sue’s juxtaposition of urban poverty, criminal subcultures and upper-class decadence produced a narrative formula that was copied [in British penny dreadfuls] throughout the 1840s and beyond” (21).

Figure 8. Varney the Vampire. Source: “Varney the Vampire.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 16 Jul. 2013. Web. 7 Aug. 2013.

Figure 9. Les Mysteres de Paris. Source: “The Mysteries of Paris.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 7 Jun. 2013. Web. 7 Aug. 2013.

EVERYTHING IN ITS RIGHT PLACE In order to comprehensively examine the values embodied in the images of either the middle-class or “hack” nineteenth century serials, an understanding of intertextuality, or the relationship between word and image is essential. Wagner with his adoption of the term “iconotext,” meaning “images that generate multiple layers of meaning in their allusions across different media” (Dillard, Okker, and West 367), explains the intimate interdependence between image and text. In other words, because word and image are inextricably linked, when reading an illustrated text, it is impossible for audiences to isolate the values from one to the other. Many current popular culture scholars support Wagner’s view on intertextuality. For example, John Caughie asserts that understanding “pictorial language” is just as important as understanding text, especially when the two are heavily integrated: “the drawing is an aspect of the writing, and the writing is an aspect of the drawing” (57). Dillard, Okker, and West agree, encouraging us to think of the multitudinous images within nineteenth century serials and periodicals as “visual narratives” or “pictorial translations” rather than illustrations (368). In terms of determining the values within an image, Dillard, Okker, and West urge readers to examine “a range of visual and verbal considerations – illustrations, page design, paratextual features, and competing textual content” (367) when assessing what it is that illustrations “do” within a text. It is these specific points – page design, paratextual features, and competing textual content – that will drive our determination of the values in nineteenth century images. The relationship between text and image in the serialized novel is very similar to that of the eighteenth century publications in that the image was detached from the printed word and lacked thorough textual integration – something that can be largely attributed to Dickens and his very specific instructions for his illustrators. Despite the ample talent of his principal artists, Dickens was reticent to relinquish any kind of control over the printed image; much correspondence exists between himself and his illustrators wherein he specifically delineates how scenes, characters, and actions should be depicted, as well as their placement in the text. By doing so, he indisputably set the precedent for the format of 1830s serialized novels, given the wild success of The Pickwick Papers, Sketches by Boz, and Oliver Twist. Admirers of his work, such as Thackeray and Ainsworth, scrambled to mimic their serial parts after him. In terms of page design, this model often included an introductory page with

55 a quarter-page image, and the text beginning directly underneath, a strategy meant to capture the reader’s initial attention. However, going forward throughout the serial, image and text were situated as two practically separate entities; the written text appeared in traditional columned fashion while the corresponding image existed as a full or half-page detached entity on the next page. This was not simply due to the discretion of the publishers, but very much a judgment call on the part of the authors themselves. For example, the idea for the Pickwick serial actually originated with Seymour, not with Dickens. Seymour approached publishers Chapman and Hall with the idea to publish in monthly installments a series of engravings depicting Cockney sporting life, with the idea that text should accompany the images. The publishers readily accepted and set about the task of finding a writer, but were turned down by several. They finally asked Dickens to provide the text; he accepted, but successfully argued that the text should be foremost and the engravings should merely supplement the story. As John Harvey notes, Dickens “had no intention of writing up anyone else’s pictures … to Seymour himself he was alternately peremptory and patronizing, and he had no qualms about telling him to redraw a design” (11), or to inform him as to where it should be situated within the text itself. For instance, Figure 10 is Seymour’s depiction of Pickwick giving a speech, an image that Seymour originally suggested positioning between two paragraphs of text. Dickens disagreed, stating unequivocally it should be single-page artwork, detached completely from the text (Harvey). Seymour was understandably unsettled by the direction in which the then-upstart writer was taking his project, and also with Dickens' requests for changes to the illustrations. Dickens continued throughout his career to maintain this kind of sovereignty over the illustrations in his texts. While he certainly felt that they enhanced his writing, he believed them to be subordinate to the written word. This is a case in point that Dickens was in no way a proponent of intertextuality, which also confirms he was unconcerned with appealing to a working class audience. By maintaining that image and text should be kept more or less separate, and that the sole purpose of the former was only to add comical embellishment, he reinforced the values of eighteenth century elite audiences, to whom the image meant little more than folly.

Figure 10. Seymour, Mr. Pickwick Gives a Speech, The Pickwick Papers. Source: Rahim, Sameer. “Mr. Pickwick: My Favourite Charles Dickens Character.” The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group Limited, 16 Feb. 2012. Web. 7 Aug. 2013.

On the other hand, smooth cohesion between word and image is one of the foundations upon which the penny dreadful was designed. Intertextuality was always a critical component of the penny dreadful, and just like Dickens, was a purposeful tactic on behalf of the author. Publishers, authors, and illustrators of penny dreadfuls well recognized that their working class readership was low-literate (if not illiterate) and as such, readers required numerous illustrations in order for the material to be consumable. For example, Brian Maidment asserts that Reynolds’s work, in comparison to that of the serialized authors, is instantaneously recognizable due it its “double-columned paged held within discrete double rules, and with wood-engraved vignette illustrations, often highly finished and tonally complex, forming an immediately familiar first page to each of the serial parts” (228). The illustrations embedded within the double-columned pages and discrete double rules are a perfect example of intertextuality. The image is neatly contained within the physical

57 boundaries of the text, and therefore makes it unquestionably part of it. Figure 11, a series of pages from Rymer’s Sweeney Todd, or The String of Pearls, is an especially pertinent example of the dialogic relationship between word and image. A large, beautifully engraved wood-cut is planted directly in the center of the text and unambiguously draws the reader’s attention to it. There is no way around the image; one is forced to read: text – image – text, in that order. It is clear that images are meant to be part of the narrative. They hold the audience’s attention throughout the work, and do not just serve as an immediate attention- grabber. Conversely, authors such as Dickens and Thackeray “tended to use separate page illustrations to invoke an older, more stringent kind of gentility and thus established a subordinate role for illustration against the primacy of the text” (Maidment 228). Stringent, old-fashioned gentility was, of course, the last thing in which penny dreadful authors like Reynolds were interested. Such a genre of illustration would hardly support or spread the progressive, radical ideals that they wished to put forth. Those progressive, radical ideals inherent in “hack” authorship are made apparent through intertextuality in the penny dreadful, something that was pioneered by Reynolds, just as Dickens pioneered the serial novel genre. As Maidment notes, “Reynolds seems to have been acutely aware of, if not always all that concerned about, the proximity between the visual and verbal” (239). To use Wagner’s term, the iconotext first emerged to the mass public in Britain via Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London; however, it existed in France several years before that. For instance, in Les Mysteres de Paris, image and text had long worked together, one being embedded within the other. It is no secret that Reynolds modeled The Mysteries of London after Les Mysteres de Paris, and intertextuality is another way in which Reynolds pays homage to the French. But what is perhaps most interesting about Reynolds’s decision to imitate Sue is the egalitarian way in which Les Mysteres de Paris was published in France. Unlike the stand-alone British penny dreadful sitting behind the print shop window, Les Mysteres de Paris was printed twice weekly in a newspaper as a roman-feuilleton, an insert placed directly in the center of the newspaper between politics, news, and entertainment sections (Anderson). As such, Sue’s material was disseminated to a much

Figure 11. Anon, Sweeney Todd, or The String of Pearls. Source: Adock, John. “Sweeney Todd Gallery.” Yesterday’s Papers. N.p., 21 Sep. 2010. Web. 7 Aug. 2013.

wider audience; as long as they purchased a newspaper, proletariat, middle class, and aristocracy were all equal recipients of his work. More importantly, the physical placement of Sue’s work within the newspaper says a lot. It being wedged between the most relevant daily news – politics and current events – further demonstrates the appreciation for and acceptance of these kinds of texts in France. The widespread dissemination of Sue’s texts was enticing to Reynolds, and was something he wished to emulate in his own work. As Rymer, Lloyd, and Thomas Prest followed suit, an organic intertextual “movement” ensued. Some scholars have argued, however, that this intertextual movement of the penny dreadfuls was merely a strategy for commercial success, and that publishers such as Reynolds and Lloyd used images to their advantage in order to increase sales. After all, the sales of penny dreadfuls were almost entirely dependent on intertextuality, unlike that of the serialized novels. For this reason, Reynolds has been perhaps unfairly indicted as disingenuous and greedy, with skepticism surrounding the sincerity of his commitment to a working class readership. Juliet John, for instance, writes that Dickens is so often praised for his ability to “negotiate and frequently transcend the boundaries between popular and radical

59 culture” and break down “the high/low cultural divide”; on the other hand, “distrust of Reynolds has arisen from the suspicion that the people were less important to him as people than they were as consumers,” and that his radicalism was simply a façade for commercialism (164). Yet it is difficult to treat such opinions as little more than a glaring reflection of exclusive, canonized culture. Dickens’s ability to “negotiate” and “transcend” cultural barriers may very well be the estimation of the middle class. But as this thesis has pointed out time and again, the working class did not necessarily respond to Dickens’s work, prompting one to question how well he did, in fact, transcend and negotiate cultural boundaries en masse. Ironically, if anyone seems to have had pecuniary motivations for using images within his written work, it was Dickens, as evidenced by the subordination with which he treated illustration to text. As Harvey theorizes, the illustrations in serialized novels “mattered so much partly because they were a good advertisement” (8), and they needed to compete with penny dreadfuls that were issued on a weekly, rather than monthly, basis. But simply because competition between the two existed is not enough to generate suspicion regarding Reynolds’s motives. One problem with such suspicion is the fact that authors did not have control over how the images were interpreted, a very interesting point regarding the power of intertextuality and strategic placement of images within text.

THE SUBVERSIVE POWER OF INTERTEXTUALITY Since the penny dreadful pioneered the iconotext, or fusion of text and word, the working class came to read all publications that were printed this way as a penny dreadful – a sensational and thrilling epic. This was, of course, very problematic for didactic publications that attempted to replicate the use of intertextuality in their own works, just as the penny dreadful had done, in order to appeal to a working class audience. There are two primary examples of such literature: the illustrated Bible and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’s (SDUK) reissue of Pilgrim’s Progress in their sanctimonious Penny Magazine. Since the publishers of these two texts were trying to recruit working class readership in an effort to moralize them, the fact that their readers were interpreting the publications as sensational thrillers was a problem for the publishers. Working class audiences immediately recognized the use of the iconotext as the primary means of differentiating a working class

60 text from a middle class one. Thus, they assumed the message of any text that resembled a penny dreadful was a radical, progressive one. This consensus was particularly pervasive amongst the readership of SDUK’s reissue of Pilgrim’s Progress. As Jonathan Rose explains, “though [Pilgrim’s Progress] was disseminated by the governing classes to make the working classes more deferential, [it] often had exactly the opposite effect, inspiring radicals like Samuel Bamford” (105), who read Pilgrim’s Progress purely as an illustrated adventure story. It is specifically the intertextuality of the printed image and word that inspired Bamford. Like Bamford, Harry West, the son of a circus escape artist, read the serial as a great heroic adventure instead of a spiritual journey; only much later in his life, after becoming self-educated and reading the likes of Freud and Jung, did he appreciate it as a religious allegory (Rose 104). Finally, Pilgrim’s Progress impressed a joiner’s son as a thrilling illustrated romance, asserting that the “wonderful woodcut illustrations … encouraged the exercise of my feeling and my imagination” (95). To be certain, the images in Pilgrim’s Progress seriously destabilized the intended moralistic message amongst working class readers, which further attests to the power of image embedded in text. The case of the illustrated Bible differs slightly from Pilgrim’s Progress simply because the intention of the book – to show that Jesus is good and Satan is evil – is quite clear-cut. But that did not prevent working class readers from giving themselves over to a world of fantasy and imagination while reading the Bible, instead of adopting a serious religious approach. Many readers of the illustrated Bible liken their experience to reading a heroic allegory. For example, a weaver’s son, Frederick Rogers, claims he made no distinction between any of the serials that heavily embedded images within text; he read both the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress as thrillers (Rose 104). Similarly, John Paton, raised in the slums of Aberdeen, consumed copious amounts of penny dreadfuls and “found similar thrills” in his copy of the illustrated Bible (Rose 103). He recalls skipping right over any boring parts in order to salivate over the “gaudy” illustrations imbedded in the text, something that suggested to him that the Bible could, and should, be read as a thrilling penny dreadful (Rose 103). Most illustrations in the Bible were highly sensational; they included scenes such as demons tempting saints, Satan challenging Jesus, and battles between David and Goliath.

The publishers meant for these illustrations to serve as frightful admonishments that would resonate with reader in the same way that James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus was stricken with fear by his priest’s interminable sermon. Yet just the opposite occurred. As Paton attests, in contrast to these thrilling images, Jesus “appeared dull,” his placidity and gentleness misconstrued for blandness (Rose 104). Paton adds that “narrative didn’t always come up to the quality of the illustrations … but when it did, you had a story which stayed in your imagination and gave it something to glow with” (Rose 103). This is important because it reinforces the assertion that when image and word are fused, it changes the whole gist of narrative discourse. Of course, while the altered narrative of the illustrated Bible was not overpowering enough for readers such as Paton to necessarily question Jesus’s role as protagonist, it does lead one to ponder if illustrations weren’t present, how would the Bible be read? It would have likely been read much differently, and more closely to its original intention of a somber, moralizing document – certainly not as an adventurous allegory. In the absence of illustration, readers would have been presented with only one option: to abide strictly by the printed word. By doing so, representations of evil would have been interpreted for what they were originally intended to be: nightmarish and fearful, not sensational and thrilling. Given the universally subversive power of image within text, the act of fusing the two cannot be so easily defined as either a “high” or “low” cultural practice. Independent of traditional or nontraditional subject matter, intertextuality clearly allows for a unique platform of literary interpretation. Working class readership was the first to be exposed en masse to this means of consuming literature, and it proved to be revolutionary. Such audiences were suddenly afforded a personal connection to, and presence, in literature. Unlike the traditional approach of keeping text and image relatively separate – as evidenced in the serialized works of Dickens – “hack” authors and illustrators anticipated the need to diversify literature in response to Britain’s rapidly shifting sociopolitical environment. In fact, the sensational narrative discourse of the penny dreadful, highly dependent upon the fusion of image and word, pioneered the visual dissemination of radical ideology on which our aesthetically-centered culture is dependent upon today. This same sensational technique is used to strengthen the oppositional messages in various forms of cultural media such as film, advertisement, novel cover art, the graphic novel, and comic books; word and image are

62 constantly incorporated to spread ideology. Ironically, the social realism that was a staple of the Victorian middle class serial illustrations are outdated despite the fact the works in which they appear remain canonized. This speaks to the importance of recognizing authorial intent and function in any literary text, as oftentimes the complexity of a work is skewed by its deceptively facile exterior. The aristocracy of nineteenth century Britain, in their enduring quest to protect hegemonic cultural standards, successfully excluded “hack” authors from any respectable critical, literary, or social circle. As Leigh Hunt correctly attested, the connections and opinions of an author took precedence over the merit of their work. Due to their embracement of French revolutionary values and commitment to engendering a working class consciousness, the “hacks,” like the Cockneys, faced a losing battle in terms of gaining mass respectability in their time. Yet, perhaps they instead gained something even more precious: The subsequent canonization of Hunt and Keats, however, reflects the capriciousness of literary standards and suggests there is hope for the likes of Reynolds and Rymer. Though historically disvalued, “hack” authorship now teeters on the edge of recognition and appreciation in Cultural Studies programs. “Hacks’” work possessed intrinsic value; it informed and energized a marginalized readership that previously had no voice or agency. Penny dreadfuls are, as this thesis has demonstrated, valuable texts that deserve far more attention than a footnote or afterthought in a popular culture seminar. Thus, their fleeting presence in the realm of Cultural Studies is problematic. Firstly, awarding merit and attention to popular fiction of only the past half-century erroneously implies that popular culture did not exist prior to the dawn of the twentieth century. Doing so excludes the study of indicators on the function and intention of popular fiction forms, why they exist, and what demographics they serve. Secondly, working class literature is still largely ignored in academia, often overshadowed by the lavish attention paid to studies of gender and race theory. In our exceedingly materialist and consumer-oriented culture where the corporatization of the university threatens the very existence of the Humanities; where “We Are The 99%” protests sweep our nation; where terrorism abounds in part due to backlash against the omnipresent effects of British imperialism; where the divide between rich and poor continues to grows greater, as Marx predicted; the focus of literary scholarship still remains distanced from the voice of the working class. In order to effectively address

63 class concerns of the present and future, one should begin with an in-depth examination of nineteenth century “hack” authorship.

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