Edward Lloyd and His World: Popular Fiction, Politics and the Press in Victorian Britain, edited by Sarah Louise Lill and Rohan McWilliam

Abstract

Reviewed by: Edward Lloyd and His World: Popular Fiction, Politics and the Press in Victorian Britain ed. by Sarah Louise Lill and Rohan McWilliam Carolyn Vellenga Berman (bio) Edward Lloyd and His World: Popular Fiction, Politics and the Press in Victorian Britain, edited by Sarah Louise Lill and Rohan McWilliam; pp. xix + 240. New York and London: Routledge, 2019, $160.00. A gripping book, Edward Lloyd and His World: Popular Fiction, Politics and the Press in Victorian Britain makes visible a massively important presence in Victorian literature that has gone unrecognized for too long: the publisher Edward Lloyd. Lloyd is best known today as the proprietor of Lloyd’s Newspaper (1842–1931), which reached a circulation of one million copies soon after his death in 1890. He is also known for publishing Charles Dickens knock-offs in the 1830s and 1840s. As Sarah Louise Lill and Rohan McWilliam comment in a thoughtful introduction, “Lloyd systematically plundered his way through Dickens’s repertoire” with a set of works written by Thomas Peckett Prest, including The Sketch Book by Bos (1836), The Pickwick Posthumous Papers (1837), The Life and Adventures of Oliver Twiss (1838–39), Nickelas Nickelbery (1838), and Martin Guzzlewit (c.1842) (7). This book takes the rip-offs seriously, establishing these “illegitimate literary doppelgangers” as a mode of fan fiction, a phase of Victorian publishing that extended Dickens’s cultural impact by making his work accessible to working-class readers (16). As Anthony Trollope wrote in an obituary, Dickens “knew exactly how to tap the newly-growing mass of readers as it sprang up among the lower classes. He could measure the reading public—probably taking his measure of it unconsciously—and knew what the public wanted of him” (“Charles Dickens,” [St. Paul’s Magazine 1870], 371). But others tapped the inchoate desires of these readers as well—with more affordable works. In this respect, we may view Lloyd himself as a doppelganger for Dickens and other literary eminences, selling down-market versions of all kinds of publications. This book complements important scholarship on W. S. Reynolds, radical print culture, and Dickens’s journalism. It offers another angle, however, by focusing on the efforts of a publisher whose interest in working-class readers was almost exclusively commercial. It thus gives us access to a [End Page 465] wide range of cheap fiction from the 1830s to the 1850s along with myriad connections to popular culture, industrial history, and the rise of a liberal consensus. If a collection always resembles Frankenstein’s monster, this one is notably lifelike. More fun to read than is usual, it approaches a monograph in its careful unfolding of the question: “In what sense can a publisher be viewed as an auteur?” (4). (One imagines Dickens rolling in his grave.) It opens with a preface by the novelist Stephen Jarvis, reflecting on his Death and Mr. Pickwick (2015), and is framed by helpful examinations of mass-market publishing by Lill and of nineteenth-century innovations in printing technology by Matt McKenzie, an expert in letterpress printing. The central chapters, attending more to fiction than nonfiction, make a powerful case for serious consideration of the texts and images purveyed by Lloyd. Helen R. Smith’s knowledgeable introduction to his key authors (Prest and James Malcolm Rymer) lays the groundwork for a multifaceted examination of their work. First, we examine Rymer as the creator of the “penny dreadful” in a chapter by Louis James, author of the seminal Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–1850 (1963) (54), then the publications that “recycled” Dickensian characters, plotlines, and titles from different angles (98). Ian Haywood studies the illustrations; Adam Abraham considers the author (Prest) as “the man who would be Dickens” (96); and Marie Léger-St-Jean places Prest’s adaptations in the context of the theater world he occupied. This leads beautifully to Brian Maidment’s excursion into Lloyd’s performance and song books, before we return to Rymer with Anna Gasperini’s chapter on medicine, radicalism, and his Manuscripts from the Diary of a Physician (1844–47), followed by Sara Hackenberg’s comparison of Rymer’s Varney the Vampire (1845–47) with Reynolds’s Wagner, the Wehr...