Edward Lloyd and His World

Popular Fiction, Politics and the Press in Victorian Britain

Sarah Louise Lill, Rohan McWilliam, Sarah Louise Lill, Rohan McWilliam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367206147
• eBook ISBN: 9780429557613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The publisher Edward Lloyd (1815-1890) helped shape Victorian popular culture in ways that have left a legacy that lasts right up to today. He was a major pioneer of both popular fiction and journalism but has never received extended scholarly investigation until now. Lloyd shaped the modern popular press: Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper became the first paper to sell over a million copies. Along with publishing songs and broadsides, Lloyd dominated the fiction market in the early Victorian period issuing Gothic stories such as Varney the Vampire (1845-7) and other 'penny dreadfuls', which became bestsellers. Lloyd's publications introduced the enduring figure of Sweeney Todd whilst his authors penned plagiarisms of Dickens's novels, such as Oliver Twiss (1838-9). Many readers in the early Victorian period may have been as likely to have encountered the author of Pickwick in a Lloyd-published plagiarism as in the pages of the original author.

This book makes us rethink the early reception of Dickens. In this interdisciplinary collection, leading scholars explore the world of Edward Lloyd and his stable of writers, such as Thomas Peckett Prest and James Malcolm Rymer. The Lloyd brand shaped popular taste in the age of Dickens and the Chartists. Edward Lloyd and his World fills a major gap in the histories of popular fiction and journalism, whilst developing links with Victorian politics, theatre and music.

1 In for a Penny

The Business of Mass-Market Publishing 1832–90

Sarah Louise Lill

In August 1832, Edward Lloyd published his first periodical: the Weekly Penny Comic Magazine; or, Repertory of Wit and Humour. The serial lasted for only eighteen issues, but it was the catalyst for a long and incredibly successful career in popular publishing. The youngest son of a labourer and serial bankruptee, Lloyd rose to become the bestselling publisher of his day. After graduating from the London Mechanics’ Institute, he climbed the ranks until he was elected to the prestigious Reform Club. On his deathbed he left a publishing empire worth £565,000 (over £46 million in today’s money).¹ His is a rags-to-riches story, but it is also one that charts the growth of mass publishing and the expansion of the working-class press. This is an examination of the economics of that business, the shillings and pence that enabled Lloyd to dominate the market.

Over the course of the next twenty years Lloyd published a plethora of works, including The Pickwick Posthumous Papers, which became commonly known as The Penny Pickwick (1837–39); the Penny Sunday Times and People’s Police Gazette (1840–50); Lloyd’s Penny Weekly Miscellany (1843–46); and, of course, his infamous ‘penny dreadfuls’ or ‘penny bloods’. These works incorporated a range of literary styles, with influences as diverse as Thomas Hood, Charles Dickens and John Cleave, but they retailed for one penny each – an important factor that was emphasised in their titles. This purchase price remained constant throughout Lloyd’s career (although he raised the price of his Sunday paper between 1842 and 1855 to cover the costly stamp duty).

These pennies are the defining feature of Lloyd’s career: he carved out a position in the market precisely by appealing to readers who could afford (if only by living beyond their means) a penny per week in disposable income, he utilised the advantages of cheap production and distribution methods, he challenged the contentious ‘taxes on knowledge’ and those pennies soon proved to be as lucrative as pounds. By examining the inner workings of Lloyd’s business, we learn a lot about his openness to innovation. The way in which he responded to the challenges of popular publishing, with both his and his readers’ purses in mind, ultimately paved the way for a new truly mass-market periodical.

Turn an Honest Penny

Lloyd’s publications were aimed primarily at a working- and lower-middle-class audience. Perhaps best understood as ‘workers’ (as Louis James has categorised them), this was a group of people who readily understood the need to keep on top of the balance sheet.² As Lloyd’s manager famously told the journalist Thomas Frost,

our publications circulate amongst a class so different in education and social position to the reader of three-volume novels, that we sometimes distrust our own judgement, and place the manuscript in the hands of an illiterate person – a servant or machine-boy, for instance.³

There is some evidence of pomp and ceremony here. A working-class lad made good, Lloyd might have sought to group himself among the readers of Sir Walter Scott – many of whom had cultural aspirations beyond their means. But, crucially, he wished to address his publications to readers who did not. In comparison to Scott’s great tomes, which reached 31s. 6d. for Kenilworth in 1821, Lloyd’s literature seems cheap at a fraction of the price. But what demands was Lloyd making on his readers? What did the penny equate to in terms of wages and costs? Was his literature actually in comfortable reach of the ‘servant or machine-boy’? And what must they sacrifice for their weekly dose of titillation?

Exact figures about the take-home pay of workers in this period are hard to come by, but it was a bleak situation. As one might expect, much of the country’s wealth was in the hands of the few. Taking a census of almost ten million people in the mid-century (approximately half of the population), the statistician Dudley Baxter calculated that 96% of the population were working or lower-middle class, by which he meant that they earned less than £300 per annum.⁴ This is shocking, but the truth of the matter is even more severe. In his groundbreaking The English Common Reader, Richard Altick outlined that ‘a family was thought to be “respectable” if it had a weekly income of 48s. or roughly £125 a year’.⁵ In 1850, he explained, there were just 110,000 families with an annual income over £150 and those wages were incremental.⁶ He records that ‘of these, by far the greater portion belonged to the middle or lower-middle class: 39,500 families reported a taxable income of £150-£200, 29,400 an income of £200-£300, and 14,400 an income of £300-£400’.⁷ By Altick’s calculations, less than 0.001% of the country earned more than £300 per year.

By choosing to focus on readers at the bottom end of the social scale, Lloyd had secured a sizeable audience for his works. But the buying power of a readership is entirely dependent on its level of disposable income and for Lloyd’s readers that was extremely limited. In Wages and Earnings of the Working Classes, Leone Levi calculated that the average male worker earned 19s. a week in this period, while the average woman earned just 11s.⁸ This ‘average worker’ was an unskilled or manual labourer with a low-paid, but high-intensity role. By contrast, Altick tells us that ‘a skilled London worker in the thirties earned 30s. or 33s. a week’.⁹ Both unskilled and skilled workers – at approximately £50 and £80 per annum, respectively – were a long way from ‘respectable’.

Reading material was a frivolity and in the first instance these wages had to be offset against the cost of household essentials. The diet of the working man serves as a good case in point. If we take Anthony S. Wohl’s assertion that the ‘average national weekly food basket’ for the working man consisted of ‘butter, bread, tea, milk and meat’, then we soon see that these weekly shillings did not go far.¹⁰ The price of these staple items varied according to locale but for the London worker, who made up the bulk of Lloyd’s readership, costs could be extortionate.¹¹ R. M. Hartwell records that the price of the ‘London four lb. loaf fluctuated from 6.8d. to 11.5d. between 1820 and 1850’, while we know from the records of the Lord Steward’s Department (recounted in Sir William Beveridge’s exhaustive Prices and Wages in England) that butter cost 17s. per pound and the price of milk reached a whopping 6s. per quart (two pints) in 1830 – figures that were, understandably, higher in urban areas.¹² Meat ranged from 1d. for offal or 4d. for cheap cuts to 8d. for a pound of bacon or 9d. for a small joint, while cheap tea cost 3s. 4d. a pound (including duty) in the mid-century.¹³

These costs put a terrific strain on workers. Wohl asserts that ‘roughly 60 per cent of the working-class income was spent on food at the turn of the century’, while Altick argues that ‘except for certain favored groups of skilled artisans, especially in London, industrial workers, the victims of a glutted labor market, lived constantly on the edge of starvation’.¹⁴ This says nothing of the other essential costs incurred by the average worker: rent, taxes, transport and fuel to name but a few. Most British workers lived hand to mouth. If they had any money to spare, it was a matter of pence rather than shillings. In order to follow the latest literary trends, workers had to go without other luxuries; and there were plenty to choose from.

If we put essential costs aside, there was much to tempt the worker to loosen their purse strings. Literature was far from the only amusement on offer. Simon Eliot reminds us that

the Victorian period was one in which a whole host of new pastimes and entertainments became available to a much larger section of society: day trips (on new railways), tourism, theatres, music halls, concerts, pubs, pleasure gardens […] in choosing to buy and read a book you were in practice giving up some of these alternative pleasures.¹⁵

As Rosalind Crone chronicled in Violent Victorians, the spread and consumption of cheap amusements (particularly of a violent nature) grew tenfold in the nineteenth century.¹⁶ From Madame Tussaud’s and Punch and Judy shows to the penny gaff theatre, there was no shortage of material to amuse the tired workman. Publishers, curators, dramaturges and street performers alike were all vying for their share of these hard-earned pennies.

Other entertainers had the distinct advantage that their income was not dependent on the ability to read. In the absence of a standardised education system, which was not introduced until the Elementary Education Act of 1870, literacy was far from universal. W. B. Stephens has calculated that the national rate stood at just 58% in 1840.¹⁷ The ability to read, however, was more widespread than this suggests. A common complaint about literacy statistics of this time is that they are invariably based on the number of signatories on a marriage register. This comes with its limitations. Literacy is understood to be the ability to both read and write – and the marriage register provides evidence of both – but reading and writing were taught as separate skills in the first half of the nineteenth century. David Vincent explains that ‘reading was seen as integral to the process of religious instruction’ while ‘writing was associated with the manual arts, which only those children destined for particular occupations needed to master’.¹⁸ In reality, R. K. Webb argues that there was ‘a proportion of two to one or three to two for the ability to read and the ability to write’.¹⁹ From this he calculates that between 67% and 75% of the working class were l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Edward Lloyd, Eminent Victorian
• 1 In for a Penny: The Business of Mass-Market Publishing 1832–90
• 2 Edward Lloyd and His Authors
• 3 ‘I Am Ada!’: Edward Lloyd and the Creation of the Victorian ‘Penny Dreadful’
• 4 The Importance of ‘Phis’: The Role of Illustration in Lloyd’s Imitations of Dickens
• 5 ‘The Man Who Would Be Dickens: Thomas Peckett Prest, Plagiarist’
• 6 Thomas Peckett Prest and the Denvils: Mediating between Edward Lloyd and the Stage
• 7 ‘Will You Walk into the Parlour?’ Lloyd’s Song Book and the Domestication of the Popular Lyric
• 8 ‘Nicely Boiled and Scraped’: Medicine, Radicalism, and the ‘Useful Body’ in a Lloyd Penny Blood
• 9 Romanticism Bites: Quixotic Historicism in Rymer and Reynolds
• 10 A Radical Relationship: Douglas Jerrold and the ‘Workmen and Wages’ Series in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper
• 11 Sweeney Todd and the Chartist Gothic: Politics and Print Culture in Early Victorian Britain
• 12 Afterword: Edward Lloyd and Nineteenth-Century Innovations in Printing Technology
• Index