1 New Readers and Alternative Culture: Rise of a Literary Monster
In 1874, social journalist James Greenwood published the collection of essays The Wilds of London, containing a series of pieces authored by him on lower class life in the burgeoning metropolis. About halfway through it, there is the essay āA Short Way to Newgateā. The ominous title suggests that he will discuss some disgraceful practice that culminates in reclusion in the famous prison. From his point of view, it was so. āThere is a plagueā he solemnly announces āthat is striking its upas roots deeper and deeper into the English soil [ā¦] bringing death and misery unspeakableā.1 As the page progresses, and Greenwood paints an increasingly murky portrait of this āplagueā, the reader may think that he is actually about to discuss a new and terrible disease propagated by some evil plague-spreader, until he dramatically announces that this plague is āpoisonous literatureā.2
He is talking about penny dreadfuls.3
With what reads almost like personal grudge, he fulminates for fourteen pages against them, declaring that the āvirulentā penny dreadfuls, made all the more dangerous by their cheap price that facilitates their āpropagationā,4 are āpoison[ing] the minds of boys and girlsā.5 He even aims a three-page vitriolic attack to G.W.M. Reynolds himself, one of the fathers of the genre, accusing him of corrupting innocent young minds.6 Greenwoodās perspective was biased, and understandably so: although, as a social reformer, he was interested in working-class life, his perception of penny dreadfuls was the quintessentially middle-class one of a man bent upon āimprovingā the lower class, on guiding them towards what he believed was healthy for them. Working-class readers, by contrast, resisted all middle-class attempts to āprotectā them from the penny bloods and penny dreadfuls. This literature was necessarily different: from the viewpoint of mainstream literature, which was for the exclusive use of the upper classes (who could afford books), its style and aesthetic were disgraceful; worst of all, it was tailored on working-class culture, which conceived a more violent and less restrained idea of entertainment.7 Indeed, the best way to understand the penny blood as a literary object is by looking at it as the product of working-class alternative culture combined with a set of historical coincidences.
Although unwittingly, the middle class played a part in the rise of this literary monster. After the 1790s Jacobin panic, they thought that it wise to provide the masses with just enough education as to make them more manageable.8 Initiating them to leisure reading was never the plan; yet, the introduction of basic literacy skills yielded an unexpected, but inevitable, result: the working class developed a taste for reading. Simultaneously, the book market, which the Napoleonic wars had severely impaired, was finding new life through serialized publications. āSerialā, as Graham Law and Robert L. Patten observe, is indeed a neologism from the 1830s that marks the momentous changes the invention of the rotary steam press and the paper-making machine triggered in the publication industry.9 It is 1840; the population has been steadily increasing since the beginning of the century, and so have literacy rates.10 From Salisbury Square, just off Fleet Street, down by the northern bank of the Thames, Edward Lloyd, publisher of cheap serialized literature and nemesis of ārespectableā authors and publishers, answers the demand created by the huge pool of new readers hungry for fiction: the first instalment of Thomas Peckett Prestās penny blood series Ela, the Outcast, or: the Gipsy of Rosemary Dell sees the light.
Initially, the serialized publication market was essentially middle class in nature. In the 1830s, Dickens, soon followed by other popular authors, made respectable the originally lower class monthly parts form, publishing his novels in monthly issues. Although cheaper than complete books, 1s. was still too high a price for working-class readers.11 A first form of serialized publication addressing them came from the religious tracts societies, who saw in this rising market a new tool to aid them in their mission: improving the masses. The religious tracts, mass-produced and distributed home to home for free by the volunteers of various evangelical societies, contained edifying pieces devoted to the enlightenment of the poor. While the role of religious tracts in promoting literacy among the working class must not be underestimated,12 the truth is that they were inadequate to meet their target audienceās tastes. Both the tracts and their distributors conveyed a patronizing message dramatically unsuitable to the political climate, they reinforced the traditional social hierarchy, and were often insensitive towards the reality of the poor readers.13 Evangelicals would offer the religious tracts to the poor as a relief against hunger or in view of cholera outbreaks, and preached frugality and diligence to a starving, jobless class.14 Dickens famously ridiculed this attitude in Bleak House with Mrs. Pardiggle, who behaves as āan inexorable moral Policemanā and distributes reading material so appalling that Mr. Jarndyce ādoubted if Robinson Crusoe could have read it, though he had no other in his desolate islandā.15 This last remark pinpoints one of the tractsā greatest shortcomings, from the intended readersā point of view, namely: they did not contain fiction. Evangelicals were deeply suspicious of fiction and preferred to distribute ādidacticā material or biographies of suitably āpious individualsā.16 A similar love for truth and facts, and therefore lack of fiction, characterized the literature with which the secular S.D.U.K. provided the libraries attached to the mechanicsā institutes, which, though plentiful, was strictly devoted to āuseful knowledgeā.17 In brief, societies bent upon the improvement of the masses refused to acknowledge the demand for fiction from their audience, whose tastes were ādiverse and encompassing, [ā¦] never exclusive, and embraced several cultural levels simultaneouslyā.18
The premises for developing fiction that specifically appealed to this public were already in place: Simon Eliot notes that the concept of cheap serialized publishing for the poor already existed in the eighteenth-century tradition of chapbooks, and in the early-nineteenth-century forms of the broadside ballad and the boxiana.19 Furthermore, the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Gothic mania, with its last outrageous offspring, the Minerva Press shilling publications, was slowly losing ground in middle-class culture; publishers of cheap serialized publications, conversely, were starting to realize its potential for thrill and sensationalism.20 Between the 1830s and 1840s, publishers Edward Lloyd and G.W.M. Reynolds flooded the literary market with cheap serialized literature, creating a market that was parallel to, and distinct from, the middle-class one, and whose products were āanathema to the established booksellersā.21 As Greenwoodās essay examined above shows, the word āanathemaā also describes very well how the middle class perceived the two publishers themselves. Lloyd and Reynolds were, first and foremost, two businessmen, and therefore the middle class openly doubted the genuineness of their support of the working classās self-improvement aspirations.22 Actually, although only Reynolds pursued an active political career, a radical message transpired from their publications, which covered a wide range of topics and a variety of forms, and addressed working- and lower middle-class readers of both sexes and all ages23; significantly, they included fiction. Unsurprisingly, they had a greater appeal for the working-class public th...