G.W.M. Reynolds & Me

A new post for the G.W.M. Reynolds Society... As a child, I possessed a morbid passion for nineteenth century gothic literature. I had inherited this trait from my mother, a Catholic turned Spiritualist with a taste for true crime and horror film and fiction. My parents had me late in life and my grandparents were…

Work in Progress

Hi Everyone You might have noticed that this blog has gone a little quiet lately, though if you're interested I recently did a piece on the ghost stories of Oliver Onions for Wordsworth Editions which you can find here. Anyway, I'm still around, but not posting right now because I'm currently working on this project…

Writing the Underworld: Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard and the Newgate Controversy – PART TWO

II. Vagabondiana: Jack Sheppard and Social Exploration (9) With regard to the licentiousness of the underworld of Jack Sheppard, Keith Hollingsworth observes that Ainsworth ‘does not realize how fast times have changed’ (Hollingsworth 138). If we recall the high Victorian analysis of the pompous and patronising J. Hain Friswell, it is immediately apparent that what…

‘Beaks, buzgloaks, and knucks in quod’: Romance, Realism, and the Language of the Nineteenth Century Underworld

It was the London-Irish Regency sporting journalist Pierce Egan who first made the flash the fashion - the linguistically deviant slang anti-language of the Daffy Clubs, the Fancy, the street-folk, and the criminal underworld, which he had acquired ringside and used to great effect in his coverage of illegal bare-knuckle boxing matches for the Weekly…

Life in London from Egan to Dickens: Regency Innocence versus Victorian Experience

If you do not want to dwell with evil-doers, do not live in London (1) I. Innocence: Pierce Egan’s Life in London. When the Victorians wanted to attack an author, they would invariably draw comparisons with the Regency writer Pierce Egan (1772 – 1849).  John Forster, for instance, in a damning Examiner review of W.H.…