James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family

James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family is the first monograph focusing on Sweeney Todd and Varney the Vampyre's creator James Malcolm Rymer (1814-84) and an essential contribution to Victorian, Gothic, and working-class literary studies. It argues that Rymer wrote his so-called 'penny bloods' and 'dreadfuls' for and about British urban working families. In the 1840s, the notion of the family acquired unprecedented prominence and radical potential. Raised in an artisanal artistic-literary family, Rymer responded by writing for and about urban working families. Editing family magazines early in that genre's history, he deployed Chartist domesticity to liberal ends and collaborated with cheap publisher Edward Lloyd to define and popularise the domestic romance genre. In 1850s-60s penny serials published by George W.M. Reynolds, John Dicks, and Lloyd, Rymer showed how families might sustain Empire and advocated for patriarchal family dynamics in response to literary and political challenges to patriarchy. During the fin-de-siècle, Rymer's penny fiction was demonised as hyper-masculine 'bloods' and 'dreadfuls', a reputation it retains today. Reading Victorian penny fiction's most indicative author's works as a corpus and with attention to their original textual, cultural, and political contexts reveals it as the family-oriented phenomenon it in fact was.