The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction

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.