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by Rob Breton (Author)
Penny politics offers a new way to read early Victorian popular fiction such as Jack Sheppard, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London. It locates forms of radical discourse in the popular literature that emerged simultaneously with Brittan's longest and most significant people's movement. It listens for echoes of Chartist fiction in popular fiction. The book rethinks the relationship between the popular and political, understanding that radical politics had popular appeal and that the lines separating a genuine radicalism from commercial success are complicated and never absolute. With archival work into Newgate calendars and Chartist periodicals, as well as media history and culture, it brings together histories of the popular and political so as to rewrite the radical canon.
Back Jacket
Penny politics examines the way Victorian popular literature from the 1830s and 1840s attempted to appeal to working-class audiences by including overtures to radical and at times explicitly Chartist politics.
The book challenges the approach to 'low life' or crime literature that sees it as merely rejecting polite, respectable culture. Rather, this book argues that the authors of Jack Sheppard and Sweeney Todd, for example, sought to augment the size of their audiences by making entertainment out of the languages of class and class conflict popular in the radical or Chartist press. Cheap, popular literature, however sporadically and casually, looked to the popularity of Chartism and its republican energies to help define its place in the market. Penny politics reads this fiction's representations of workplace grievances, martyrs and underdogs, and dissonant crowds in search of a purpose as radical acts in themselves, feeding public resentment and making the case for extreme forms of political remediation. Though the image of working-class agency and fantasy of social vengeance that popular literature would sell for cheap was not always explicitly lending support to the radical politics of the day, Chartism, early Victorian popular literature made social anger available to its audiences - potentially the same audience reading the Chartist papers - so as they might do whatever they wanted with it. With its grounding in Chartist studies and theories of radical culture, Penny politics offers an essential re-reading of Victorian popular fiction.Author Biography
Rob Breton is Professor of English literature at Nipissing University
