Penny Dreadfuls Research Articles

Houses of Terror, Castles of Despair: Nightmarish Necropoetics and Necropolitics in the Victorian Workhouse

This essay brings Achille Mbembe’s intellectually trenchant theory of necropower to bear on the early Victorian era’s most despised and iconic institution, known as the workhouse, arguably one of the most preeminent emblems of democracy’s nocturnal body located within Britain. Regarded by many of its critics as enacting the Utilitarian, inhumane, and ‘mechanistic’ treatment of the poor (Crowther, ‘Workhouse’ 194), the workhouse was frequently portrayed using the Gothic mode as a necropolitical institution, a death manufactory that monstrously combined prison, factory, asylum, slaughterhouse, and dead house – some of society’s most dehumanizing, disciplinary, and dreaded locales. Taking posters, illustrations, broadside ballads, penny dreadfuls, and novels as its primary sources – cultural productions with working and lower-middle class readerships for whom the workhouse and the Anatomy Act posed the greatest threat – this essay examines the workhouse through socio-political, economic, and theological lenses, and relevant scholarship in the rapidly expanding, interdisciplinary field of Thanatology Studies. It contextualises Workhouse Gothic in relation to Victorian Christian beliefs and attitudes towards death, dying, mourning, and memorialisation, phenomena and concerns that span both sides of the grave, and discusses what was at stake in those cultural narratives in relation to domestic and national values, and the development of working-class identity, subjectivity, and class consciousness.

Reappraising Penny Fiction

This Introduction to the Special Volume of Victorian Popular Fictions Journal titled “Reappraising Penny Fiction” defines penny fiction, surveys its prehistory, and reconstructs its emergence in the nineteenth-century British media and globally. The article then engages with the ongoing scholarly debate about “penny dreadfuls” and theorises how misconceptions about the genre developed and were circulated by critics and scholars. Finally, the article introduces the central questions and themes of the special issue, as well as the individual articles. Victorian penny fiction has long been considered disturbing yet compelling; we hope that our volume reveals why that is so.

The Evasion of Literary History

The Evasion of Literary History

‘Useful Knowledge’ versus ‘Wastes of Print’: Working-Class Education and Edward Lloyd

This article delves into the dismissal of penny bloods and penny dreadfuls as “wastes of print” (Oliphant 1858: 202) on the grounds of public concern for education, and relies on a close reading of an Edward Lloyd unstamped penny publication in order to reassess the relationship between education and the wider world of penny periodicals. The first part examines the upper classes’ attempts to establish an educational environment aimed at the working classes in the first part of the nineteenth century, among which the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and proposes to reconsider the reasons for the relative failure of such initiatives in relation to popular penny publications. I then draw on Edward Jacobs’s analysis of ‘industrial literacy’ and urban street culture to analyse the rejection of such publications as Edward Lloyd’s, by disentangling the mechanisms to which contemporary critics consistently resort. Finally, in keeping with Louis James’s statement that “periodicals are cultural clocks by which we tell the times” (1982: 365), I explore the various pieces contained in a full 1846 number of Lloyd’s penny publication People’s Periodical and Family Library contemporary to the failure of the SDUK, in order to understand the potential dialogue in place with publications and criticism advocating ‘useful knowledge’. This article aims to prove that Lloyd’s penny publications were, in fact, an undeniable point of contact between the working classes and education.

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 by Clare Pettitt

Reviewed by: Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 by Clare Pettitt Pete Orford (bio) Clare Pettitt. Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848. Oxford UP, 2020. Pp. xviii + 348. £65.00. ISBN 978-0-19-883042-9 (hb). The temptation when reviewing a book for Dickens Quarterly is to focus solely on the parts of the book that mention Dickens. But what Clare Pettitt's work on serialization offers is a much wider context, and a good thing, too. Frequently, as Dickens scholars, we celebrate the importance of serialization to his works, and the frequency with which we do so often leads to the implicit inference that Dickens is as central to serialization as serialization was to him; what Pettitt's book offers is a broader view of serialization that explores a much larger trend across several authors and generations. "At its most basic, seriality is about the relationship of the part to the whole and the relationship of the singular to the plural," Pettitt tells us; "seriality has therefore emerged as an important term for political theories of citizenship in the nineteenth century and since" (201). The book is the first of three planned monographs, aiming to examine serialization from 1818 through to 1918. While Pettitt acknowledges her book is "deliberately Eurocentric and metropolitan" her subsequent books will aim to expand to "Continental Europe and then to the technologically networked empire towards the end of the century" (22). In doing so, Pettitt is keen to explore serialization in its broadest sense, not limited to literature [End Page 209] but also in its wider social functions. In the introduction, for example, she points towards serialization as "a dangerously … flexible form," which "can be emancipatory, but it can also be regulatory and repressive" (6), pointing to its darkest form in the numbering of prisoners at concentration camps, which forcefully highlights how far serialization can differ from the cheery numbers of Pickwick. Though I've noted the broader range of this book beyond Dickens, that is not to say that Dickens does not make regular appearances. Sketches by Boz is his most referenced work in Pettitt's book, first alluded to frequently in the opening chapter, "Yesterday's News," in which the veracious devouring of the news by nineteenth-century readers as described is akin to modern day consumption of social media. A particularly illuminating chapter called "Scott Unbound" follows, in which Walter Scott – frequently upheld as the antithesis to serialization and the penny dreadfuls – is explored as a fragmented author through his various ballads and poems, subsequently collected. Pettitt uses the disparate nature of Scott's poetry and the illusion of cohesion in its bound form to segue into discussing "the importance of the scrapbook and the album in understanding nineteenth-century print culture" (83). The next chapter, "Live Byron," considers how Don Juan and Childe Harold intersect with contemporary news, and aims "to think about forms of performance that made innovative claims to 'liveness'" (109). This is then followed by a fascinating chapter, "Vesuvius on the Strand," which looks at how Pompeii and its neighboring volcano featured prominently in English print in the 1820s to become a familiar and omnipresent sight: "It must have been difficult to ignore the insistent process of Mount Vesuvius in London from the 1820s onwards. The volcano would pop up all over the place and erupt, often several times a day, in multimedia shows, spectacles, and plays across the city" (148). In this chapter and others, Pettitt argues persuasively for the background noise of print that has so often been ignored in our championing of Victorian novels, showing how something apparently distant such as Vesuvius can become a firm presence in nineteenth-century England through the repeated minor (and major) references occurring in the peripheral vision of the reader. This is something that needs further exploration in Dickens's work as we pay more attention to the paratexts around his monthly and weekly instalments, to better understand the wider context his readers were experiencing as they navigated through his stories via several pages of advertisements, competing serialized fiction and shorter articles. The next chapter devotes itself more fully to Dickens...

The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood by Lucy Andrew

Reviewed by: The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood by Lucy Andrew Ashley Johnson (bio) The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood. By Lucy Andrew. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Lucy Andrew’s thorough research in The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature rivals even Sherlock Holmes’s detective work as she dives deep into the milieu of boys’ detective fiction in Britain from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. The volume offers archival exploration of an impressive number of periodicals, articles, and short stories by multiple authors featuring a range of boy detectives and their adult counterparts, filling a hole in the field of detective and children’s fiction in her analysis of a genre that is “mostly forgotten today and largely unexplored by critics—despite their widespread influence and popularity at the time of their publication,” and her discussion of boys’ detective fiction is an effective and detailed entry point into the subgenre (2). [End Page 224] Andrew traces the transformation of the boy detective in story papers aimed at working class boys in Britain, offering clues as to why the character morphed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her search begins with an analysis of the “penny dreadful” tradition and chapters 1 and 2 address middle-class worries about the detrimental effects of crime literature on adolescent boys. Using serials and newspaper articles, Andrew explains that middle class adults felt that the criminal protagonists in penny stories led to criminal activity in working class boys. To combat this, the boy detective was revised from a criminal protagonist to the likes of Ernest Keen, a moral alternative to the criminal heroes found in early penny dreadfuls. As one of the earliest British texts specifically aimed at children, The Boy Detective attempted to “steer boy readers away from the path of juvenile delinquency and towards an acceptance of middle-class behavioural codes and values” (23). Thus, the aim here was to police boyhood. However, Ernest Keen was too independent and successful for adult readers; thus, the boy detective character disappears from popular reading and, when he returns around thirty years later, morphs into an assistant to adults. Andrew picks up the boy detective’s trail in chapter 3 with an analysis of the Harmsworth Brothers’ story papers of the 1890s which featured detective Sexton Blake, with his Chinese assistant We-wee, and detective Nelson Lee, with his assistant Nipper. Pertinent in this chapter is an analysis of the ways that the detective stories address anxieties about adolescent misbehavior and how they serve as colonizing works with the goal of preparing boys to be useful for the preservation of the British nation. With the future of the nation in the hands of the youth, boys’ detective fiction morphed again into a more diversified genre at the beginning of the twentieth century. The genre flipped the detective/assistant hierarchy and readers saw the introduction of the boy assistant as savior, as well as a rise in stories featuring an independent, professional boy detective. Here, society’s emphasis was on preparing boys to be defenders. However, Andrew explains that these revisions did not provide adequate role models. Thus, in 1908, Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement rose to fill the gap which constructed “a new boy detective model that encapsulates the core values of scouting, such as active citizenship, patriotism and teamwork” (94). This shift created a place for the boy detective in children’s fiction and he would continue to serve in his role as amateur child detective. With the arrival of World War I, society shifted from thinking about boyhood as preparation for manhood to boyhood as a time for boys to be boys, making room for the schoolboy detective. In chapter 5 Andrew explains that educational and legislative reform helped this mutation of the detective story because society became focused on improving child welfare and implementing the school as a “safe haven,” separating childhood from adulthood. Here, Andrew offers example after example of boy detectives who fulfill the role of schoolboy detective and learn from their experiences [End Page...

“PENNY DREADFUL” И НЕОБАРОЧНАЯ ПОЭТИКА ТРАНСГРЕССИИ

The article is devoted to the poetics of the television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016, written by John Logan) as one of the original examples of contemporary neo-Victorian culture. Its eclectic intertext is reconstructed, including references to the sensational culture of the Victorian era (Penny Dreadfuls, Grand Guignol), the seminal texts (“Frankenstein”, “Portrait of Dorian Gray”, “Dracula”, etc.), biographies of individual historical fi gures (John Clare), contemporary neo-Victorian novels, fi lms and TV series. Th e artistic innovation of the creators of the series is revealed both at the level of textual self-refl ection and creative adaptation; and at the level of its Baroque poetics, which proves to be close to twenty-fi rst century sensitivity with its characteristic problematization of deviance, alterity, monstrosity, as well as the transgression of moral, physical, religious and cultural boundaries. Th e following neo-Baroque strategies are distinguished: theatrical tropes, and various embodiments of the idea of Th eatrum Mundi, ecstatic mood and dramatization, visual excess, images of the labyrinth, reduplication, intentional eclecticism.

Class, Crime, and Cannibalism in The String of Pearls; or, The Demon Barber as Bourgeois Bogeyman

Although the tale of Sweeney Todd is one with significant cultural resonance, little has been written about the text itself, The String of Pearls. This article argues that the text engages with anxieties about class conflict through a narrative that enacts exaggerated versions of various interactions. In the nineteenth century, critics objected to the cheap fiction pejoratively known as penny dreadfuls, asserting that the genre’s exciting tales of bloodshed, villainy, and mayhem would seduce readers to lives of debauchery and crime, but I argue that this concern about cheap fiction was not for the preservation of the souls of the poor and working classes but rather for the preservation of the middle classes' own corporeal bodies and the system that privileged and protected them. While there is no question that the narrative enacts extreme manifestations of problems facing the urban poor—among them, contaminated or even poisonous foodstuffs and the perils of urban anonymity—it also features an intractable and rapacious lower class and a subversion of the master-servant dynamic on which the comforts of the middle class were constructed, and so, in addition to adventure, detection, and young love, The String of Pearls offers a dark revenge fantasy of class-based violence that the middle-class critics of the penny dreadful were perhaps justified in fearing. tl;dr: Eat the Rich!

War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars ed. by Mischa Honeck and James Marten

Reviewed by: War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars ed. by Mischa Honeck and James Marten Elizabeth N. Goodenough War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars. Edited by Mischa Honeck and James Marten. Cambridge, UK, and Washington, DC: Cambridge University Press, 2019. x + 199 pp. Cloth $99.99. Anthropologist Pamela Reynolds declared in 2008 that narratives of children’s experiences in war “have barely entered the archive” (Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War, eds. Goodenough and Immel). In their ground-breaking volume, Honeck and Marten seek to supply missing research around a crucial paradox: How could adults barely a century ago seek to protect children while mobilizing them for political sacrifice? War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars compiles accounts of children’s crises locally, nationally, and across borders against the backdrop of the military buildup and scarring aftermath of two world wars. From Manchuria to Poland to Turkey to the American Midwest, the global reach of these essays reminds us of the present. The collection includes government reports, news articles, school curricula, and Holocaust drawings, all offering fresh evidence of the indoctrination and recruitment of children during times of war. Together these fourteen chapters skillfully conjure up and dissect what growing up felt like during 1914–45, a period Winston Churchill called “another Thirty Years War” (3). The compelling introduction, “More than Victims: Framing the History of Modern Childhood and War,” stakes out topics that historians must address. The co-editors establish “five bodies of scholarship,” including Dominic Sachsenmaier’s “global history trend,” the “total war” paradigm, and children as “the true missing link” for understanding modern warfare (7–10). Shedding light on the complexity of youthful attitudes and socialization, they emphasize diversity in the “intergenerational tugs-of-war” (16) ranging from peace pedagogy to war toys. Whether as eyewitnesses, future defenders, or ideal constructs over which wars are fought, boys and girls portrayed in this book will unsettle the reader’s notions of childhood. Penny Dreadfuls in World War I Germany and patriotic handicrafts from Republican to Communist China promote propaganda through leisure on the home front as well as skills on the battlefield. Examining families and individual children, this book avoids fictional formulations and sociological abstraction. How could public horror also spark happy memories and such “primitive excitement” (11), as Anna Freud defined? [End Page 330] Part I smartly addresses transnational themes alongside ethical questions. The introduction to part I, “Inspiring and Mobilizing,” mentions age and culture-specific responses to wartime involvement of youth. For example, the contention that children should be children (whatever that means) competed with arguments for defense service training in Swedish schools during World War II. Learning to shoot at age eleven gained ascendancy when boys were placed between Home Guard units and an advancing enemy. Though consensus was never reached in this neutral nation, Swedish girls joined in as air surveillance personnel. How the making of these “model citizens” influenced their adulthoods remains a living question. How do we integrate personal details with geopolitical rivalries and genocides? Comparing youth movements and early reading, including alphabet books from the USSR and US during World War II, one must consider how “children were reinventing the meaning of childhood for themselves and the societies they inhabited” (11). The final essay of part I, Honeck’s “Good Soldiers All? Democracy and Discrimination in the Boy Scouts of America, 1941–1945” describes youth fervor, setting the stage for part II, “Adapting and Surviving.” Part II thus surveys a dialectic—how adult decision-makers organized and then reacted to the mobilized young. The “alternative sources, produced by children rather than for or about them” (171) expand on ways this next generation altered the nature of war. Giving voice—or space—for “Drawing the Great War” in France, Germany, and Russia illuminates children’s pivotal, first-time role in public life. Youthful enthusiasm confronting conventional ideals acquired agency in “the trope of the patriotic child” (15). Statistics and interviews dramatize childhood as a “relational category,” one played out as sensitive innocents “eagerly sought to participate in—or resignedly submitted to participating in” (7)—the...

TWO HUNDRED FACES OF A VAMPIRE: LORD RUTHVEN’S INFLUENCE ON VAMPIRE CULTURE

Being born in the same monstruous night that witnessed the rise of Frankenstein monster, the vampire Lord Ruthven celebrates in 2019 two hundred years influencing vampire culture. As it happens in literature, John William Polidori’s creature spread his curse through the centuries creating attractive, aristocrat, sexually ambiguous and immoral male and female vampires. From Victorian penny dreadfuls, novellas and novels such as Varney, the Vampire, Carmilla and Dracula, to present novel as Interview with the Vampire, the short story “The Vampyre” established the character who walk among human beings as a predator who chooses his prey. Ruthven was directly shaped on Lord Byron personality and, similar to the famous English poet, was an elegant figure of high culture and refined manners who hid a wild, libertine, profoundly narcissist nature and irascible behaviour, traits that paradoxically became Byron and his literary counterpart, delightfully fascinating beings. Reflecting the Romantic esthetic of its time, Polidori’s short story instituted the vampire as a rebel beyond bourgeois social norms. Lord Ruthven was an undead and, threfore, was not bound to the concepts that rule the living ones. In this way, the vampire appeal to humanity hidden desires related to the anguish of death, to the perspective of the transcendence and to the fear of the consequences of this act abandoning human nature. These elements help understanding the cultural impact John William Polidori’s creation keep on exercising two hundred years after 1819 through “The Vampyre”.

Cultural History: Where It Has Been and Where It Is Going

The very meaning of “culture” has gone through so many transformations over the last sixty years that it is necessary to take stock of developments in this field of cultural history before suggesting—with an eye to the promises and perils of earlier practices—what new possibilities might exist for the future of the field. The post-1945 period witnessed a powerful impulse to understand culture as something more pervasive than just literature and the arts—and as something more socially and politically reverberant than the shibboleth of “art for art's sake.” In 1957, at the very beginning of the modern practice of cultural history, Richard Hoggart'sThe Uses of Literacyfound the high and low hierarchies embedded in it. It focused on working-class culture (e.g., glossy magazines, films, “penny dreadfuls”), and on how reading was changing under the impact of mass media. By 1976, Raymond Williams needed to draw attention to the complexity of the wordculture, so extended had its purview become over the previous two decades. Linda Nochlin asked why they were no great women artists, and T. J. Clark, using a Marxist framework, sought to understand aesthetic modernism by interrogating the historic circumstances that had led to the breakdown of the academic system.The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt, came out in 1989. Its “models” for cultural history were the work of Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Natalie Zemon Davis, E. P. Thompson, Hayden White, and Dominick LaCapra, and its “new approaches” came from Mary Ryan, Roger Chartier, Thomas Laqueur, and Randolph Starn. These scholars were legislators of discourse and narrative, of popular and working-class culture, of gender, epistemes, and thick description. With many other tendencies, often defined by their focus on theoretical explication and elaboration, these approaches had the effect of deterring scholars from reengaging with the traditional interests—even theraison d'etre—of cultural history, namely, art, architecture, theater, dance, music, and literature. This turning-away also affected the very composition of humanities and interpretive social science departments, which added many new subjects of study but, inevitably perhaps, let others wither away.

The Transformed Beast:Penny Dreadful, Adaptation, and the Gothic

After only one eight-part season, the television series Penny Dreadful, a Showtime/Sky Atlantic co-production, had already become an international success with an active and vocal fanbase. Yet the relationship of the show (which was created and written by John Logan) to the Victorian serial fiction genre, penny dreadfuls, is an oblique one, and worth unpicking. The first part of this article focuses on the task of teasing out the connections between Penny Dreadful and the penny dreadful genre, arguing that the show's title performs significant cultural work in positioning itself in relation to Victorian fiction and in relation to modern television. In the second part of the essay, I explore how Penny Dreadful works as an adaptation, using Kamilla Elliott's insights into the contradictory and overlapping concepts of adaptation in Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Finally, the essay considers Penny Dreadful as a reflection – and, it is argued, an appropriation – of contemporary media fandom.

The Gothic ideology: religious hysteria and anti-Catholicism in British popular fiction, 1780-1880

Table of Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: Anti-Catholicism and the Gothic Ideology: Interlocking Discourse Networks Chapter Two: The Construction of the Gothic Nun: Fantasy and the Religious Imaginary Chapter Three: The Spectre of Theocracy: Mysterious Monks and Priestcraft Chapter Four: The Foreign Threat: Inquisitions, autos-da-fe, and Bloody Tribunals Chapter Five: Ruined Abbeys: Justifying Stolen Property and the Crusade against Superstition EPILOGUE: Penny Dreadfuls and the (Almost) Last Gasp of the Gothic

“The Squire of Boyhood”: G. A. Hutchison and the Boy’s Own Paper

First published by the Religious Tract Society in 1879, the Boy’s Own Paper was created in an attempt to combat the negative influence of penny dreadfuls on young male readers. This essay examines how George Andrew Hutchison produced one of the most successful juvenile papers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, highlighting the inherent struggle he faced in trying to distance his publication from the ephemerality associated with periodical publishing.

Gothic: New Directions in Media and Popular Culture

Gothic: New Directions in Media and Popular Culture

<em>Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism</em>, by Deaglán Ó Donghaile

Reviewed by: Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism by Deaglán Ó Donghaile Sarah Cole (bio) Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism, by Deaglán Ó Donghaile; pp. 272. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011, £65.00, $10.00. Of all the great divides that have shaped literary criticism, perhaps none is so intransigent as the one separating Victorian from modernist studies. Despite several decades of work which has queried, defied, or simply ignored the old periodizations, a concerted effort among scholars to question and historicize modernism’s formulations about its exceptionalism, and a pervasive sense that literary and historical boundaries cannot withstand the pressures ushered in by transnational and global perspectives, there remains something genuinely surprising about work that makes a strong case for continuity, rather than breakage, across the century’s turn. As its title suggests, Deaglán Ó Donghaile’s study, Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism, stakes its claim on this kind of assessment of the persistence of cultural forms from the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries, in this case in the resonance of dynamite explosion and the appeal of sensational political violence as a subject for fiction. Blasted Literature illuminates a fascinating and underappreciated chapter in cultural history, when the idea of the exploding bomb came to organize a sweep of radical political activism, conservative panic, and all manner of fiction, in a historical sequence that spans from the late 1860s through to the First World War. It should be said, at the outset, that the “modernism” of the book’s title is a fairly circumscribed one, which might not speak to all modernist scholars, abiding primarily in the book’s culminating chapter on Wyndham Lewis, whose short-lived manifesto BLAST (1914–15) makes to [End Page 365] perfection Ó Donghaile’s argument about the ongoing attraction of late nineteenthcentury radical thought and the fetishization of explosion in modernism (readings of several modernist novels are also integrated into chapters examining urban spaces, anarchist writings, and imperialism). What is at stake is less an expansive account either of modernism or of Victorian literature than an assessment of the resonance of the bomb as a major feature of imaginative life across a half century. Blasted Literature makes this case with gusto. Its argument is that terrorist bombs, from the moment they arrived in England and Ireland, courtesy of anarchist and Fenian insurgents, became an integral feature of popular as well as elite literature, and as such provided a thematic underpinning for much that was sensational and shock-oriented in works of the period. The appeal of dynamite as a magnetic center around which plots and characters revolve went unabated, Ó Donghaile argues, driven in large part by market forces (these market forces are at times assumed in this study, based on the fact that dynamite-themed writing was continually produced, and at other times analyzed, as in the very interesting discussion of several bizarre advertising schemes). Ó Donghaile is adamant about what he calls the “entertainment value” of terrorist themes, writing that “many late Victorian readers found having their ‘nerves’, or political-conceptual faculties, shattered a very thrilling experience, as proven by their eager consumption of popular narratives of revolutionary violence. … Fenian bombs entertained as much as they terrified and appealed to sensation-hungry readers of penny dreadfuls and popular magazines” (3). One aspect of this appeal, Ó Donghaile’s study suggests, is that it is politically elastic, with dynamite novels ranging widely in their support or condemnation of radical causes. Thus what might seem a passing infatuation of popular writers—the excesses and intrigues of plots against the city, public officials, and the public itself; the effects of dynamite when it explodes—in fact cut across the culture and eventually found a home in one strand of modernism: Vorticism’s brash and aggressive challenge to bourgeois values of liberalism and complacency. It seems unquestionably right that the bomb entered the gritty life of urban modernity in this period, and to account for the role literature played in this major turn of consciousness is significant. Nevertheless, claims about the “thrill” of dynamite literature, or easy elisions of the meaning of “explosion,” made repeatedly...

“Penny Poet” Chaucer, or Chaucer and the “Penny Dreadfuls”

“Penny Poet” Chaucer, or Chaucer and the “Penny Dreadfuls”

Lives of the novelists: a history of fiction in 294 lives

This is the most complete history of fiction in English ever published. The world's greatest authority - arguably the only person who could have written it, John Sutherland - provides the lives of some 294 novelists writing in English, from the genre's seventeenth-century origins to the present day. Arranged in chronological order the novelist's lives are opinionated, informative, frequently funny and often shocking. Professor Sutherland's authors come from all over the world; their writings illustrate every kind of fiction from gothic, penny dreadfuls and pornography to fantasy, romance and high literature. The book shows the changing forms of the genre, and how the aspirations of authors to divert and sometimes to educate their readers, has in some respects, radically changed over the centuries, and in others - such as their interest in sex and relationships - remained remarkably constant.

GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA: A VISUAL APPRENTICESHIP

This article traces Sala’s journey from childhood blindness through to the restoration of his sight and his immersion into the expanding nineteenth-century illustrative world as an engraver, illustrator and scene painter and to his eventual rejection of the visual for the written word. Using Paul de Man’s definition of modernity – that it involves ‘a freshness of perception that results from a slate wiped clear’ and that the human figures ‘that epitomise modernity are defined by experiences such as childhood or convalescence’ – the chapter will argue that Sala’s relationship to print culture was affected by this loss of sight and on its restoration he was endowed with a fresher, more modern and dynamic way of observing Victorian culture. The chapter goes on to work through Sala’s inner ideological struggle between pen and pencil, an ideological struggle that was mirrored within wider Victorian culture.It will highlight the influence that Sala’s early reading of the Illustrated London News and Punch had on his relationship to the visual and to his later satirical writing style. His early meetings with Charles Dickens and Mark Lemon, and his apprenticeship to the miniature painter Carl Schiller are highlighted, as is his illustrative work for The Man in the Moon, which led to his satirical attack on the Punch brotherhood, A Word with Punch. Sala’s work for The Lady’s Newspaper is discussed and the way this influenced his passion for clothes and clothing, as is his work for penny dreadfuls with their emphasis on sensation. His work for these two very different productions underlines his ability to transcend high and low culture.

The investment value of the value premium

Value investment strategies are premised on research that value stocks outperform growth stocks. However, the research findings are dependent on the portfolio classification method that is used to sort stocks using the attributes of size and book-to-market ratios. Different stock markets contain different distributions of stocks, and in many markets, illiquidity concerns combined with a lack of investment scale, effectively create barriers to practical portfolio formations that align with the research. This study conducts a case study on one such market (Australia) and demonstrates that different methods of portfolio formation lead to different conclusions. For example, previous studies in Australia find evidence of the value premium only being present in the largest stocks, in contrast to the results from the US market. However, we find a value premium that is systematic across all size categories and generally increases inversely with size. Further, we find the well-documented size premium largely disappears once portfolios are formed that better represent feasible investment sets and once ‘penny dreadfuls’ are removed. Finally, asset pricing tests support the existence of a value premium in Australian stock returns when a more appropriate portfolio formation method is employed.