Resisting print-culture norms: Charles Dickens’s “Hunted Down” in the anglophone periodical press

Abstract

Charles Dickens’s 1859 serial “Hunted Down” was the first work by Dickens initially published in the U.S. and later in the U.K. “Hunted Down” was published in Robert Edwin Bonner’s New York Ledger, the most popular U.S. story paper of the mid-nineteenth century. In this article, I examine the anglophone press’s sensationalization of “Hunted Down’s” publication and what this reveals about nineteenth-century print culture. “Hunted Down,” I argue, resists correlative cultural links between a publication’s monetary value and its intrinsic literary value, i.e., its quality, length, word count, originality, and creativity. Bonner’s publication of Dickens’s story was momentous in the anglophone press because it broke away from the nineteenth-century publishing norm of unauthorized reprints, generating a global conversation concerning the value of periodical fiction. In the cultural imagination of newspaper readers, “Hunted Down’s” resistance to print-culture norms became more important than the serial itself. Examining the anglophone press’s sensationalization of “Hunted Down’s” publication offers scholars a look at how the literary market place and international copyright law shaped literary taste and value in the mid-nineteenth century.