ESSAYS ON 19TH CENTURY LITERATURE & THE GOTHIC
New post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… Sometime between 1845 and 1846, the literary journalist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) drafted a few short pieces entitled Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society (illustrated by himself), which he hoped would constitute the opening chapters of an as yet unspecified longer work. ‘The truth forces itself upon me,’ he… Continue reading Vanity Fair
THE AUTHOR WHO OUTSOLD DICKENS: The Life and Work of W.H. Ainsworth By Stephen Carver Published by Pen & Sword History, January 2020 Now available from Pen & Sword here William Harrison Ainsworth (1805 – 1882) is probably the most successful 19th Century writer that most people haven’t heard of. Journalist, essayist, poet and, most… Continue reading The Author Who Outsold Dickens
As a child growing up in the 1970s, I possessed a passion for morbid nineteenth century popular literature. I had inherited this trait from my mother, a Catholic turned Spiritualist with a taste for gothic film and fiction. I was thus always dimly aware of the name ‘Jack Vincent’ through the cheap paperback anthologies of… Continue reading Finding Jack Vincent
I. ‘A sort of Hogarthian novel’ By 1838 it was all starting to unravel. Despite the consistent sales of Rookwood (which went to five editions within the first three years of publication), Ainsworth’s aristocratic lifestyle had left his private finances seriously depleted. The death of his estranged wife in early March had also plunged him… Continue reading Writing the Underworld: Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard and the Newgate Controversy – PART ONE
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… Continue reading Writing the Underworld: Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard and the Newgate Controversy – PART TWO
III. The Storm: The Newgate Controversy (17) Four months after Jack Sheppard began its serial run, the first part of Catherine, A Story appeared in Fraser’s, credited to the pen of ‘Ikey Solomons Esq. Jr.’ Ikey Solomons Esq. Snr. was a notorious fence based in Islington in the 1820s, and whose criminal empire made Jonathan… Continue reading Writing the Underworld: Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard and the Newgate Controversy – PART THREE
Ainsworth & Friends 