Abstract
The reception of William Harrison Ainsworth’s novel, Jack Sheppard (1839-1840), was contemporaneously deemed a mania and has been described by critics today as a moral panic over the influence of fiction. Several adaptations of Ainsworth’s novel across media ambiguously depict Jack’s hanging, and the adaptations that most clearly show his survival occur in those versions that are least legally defensible and most clearly targeted toward the labouring classes. In this essay, I analyse Buckstone and Greenwood’s melodramas at the Adelphi and Sadler’s Wells, respectively, in autumn 1839; two penny press novelisations of Jack Sheppard published in 1839 and 1840; and an anonymous melodrama staged at the City of London Theatre in 1845, which was shut down due to violating the licensing ban on Jack Sheppard titles. From contemporary accounts of the mania, I argue that audience members treated historical and fictional accounts of Jack as describing the same entity, which created the space for specifying new facts and thus claiming new meaning. I therefore see Jack Sheppard as a transmedia character. For the labouring classes, claiming new meaning sometimes inhered in Jack’s defiance of capital punishment. This transmedial extension of Ainsworth’s character by working-class audiences in the penny press and cheap theatre pointed to the inadequacies of Victorian copyright law to protect the creative property of originating authors across media, and thus disturbed Victorian middle and upper-class literary critics because they saw the lower class’s celebration of a criminal as threatening to undermine their social order. Using the concept of transmedia in this period allows us to see how enthusiastic audience members in the working classes created what I term character complexity as they built a palimpsest out of the panoply of cross-media character representations. This transmedia character complexity matters because it is an avenue for oppressed communities to reclaim their dignity through narrative meaning-making.
Highlights
Victorians deemed the reception of Jack Sheppard (1839-1840) a mania, and later literary scholars have described it as a moral panic over the influence of fiction
Audience members treated historical and fictional accounts of Jack Sheppard as describing the same entity, which creates the space for specifying new facts and claiming new meaning
Transmediality occurring in the early Victorian period, as I argue that we can consider the Jack Sheppard mania to be a part of, is an emergent phenomenon where story elements extend across media organically, by the hands of multiple creative agents
Summary
Victorians deemed the reception of Jack Sheppard (1839-1840) a mania, and later literary scholars have described it as a moral panic over the influence of fiction. Courvoisier later confessed that the idea of the crime had come to him upon while reading William Harrison Ainsworth’s novel Jack Sheppard (Hollingsworth 1963: 145). I propose that, after the publication of Ainsworth’s popular novel, the spread of Jack Sheppard across different media, such as drama in the cheap theatre and print in the penny press, provided a space for transforming a historical figure into a contested character where class-based conflicts about crime and its punishment played out. In adapting the novel for his intended middle-class audience, Ainsworth had refined Sheppard’s criminal past by first making him primarily a victim of the villain and lending him a noble lineage Such revisions softened the radical potential of valorising a criminal, because that criminal is an aristocrat – reifying class hierarchy by implying that Jack is a suitable object of admiration since his goodness derives from his hidden true nature. I will argue that this proliferation of potentialities affords the character a complexity that parallels the psychological depth often attributed to traditional realist characters
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