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Down and out in London: 'Hack' Authorship and Penny DOWN AND OUT IN LONDON: ‘HACK’ AUTHORSHIP AND PENNY FICTION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITAIN _______________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of San Diego State University _______________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English _______________ by Sarah Elizabeth Redden Summer 2013 iii Copyright © 2013 by Sarah Elizabeth Redden All Rights Reserved iv DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to my family, in particular to Jeanne, who always knew I had it in me. v 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 vi TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE 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 vii WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................................64 viii LIST OF FIGURES PAGE 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 ix 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. 1 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
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