The penny politics of Victorian popular fiction

Rob Breton, Anna Barton, Andrew Smith

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526156372
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Penny politics offers a new way to read early Victorian popular fiction such as Jack Sheppard, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London. It locates forms of radical discourse in the popular literature that emerged simultaneously with Brittan's longest and most significant people's movement. It listens for echoes of Chartist fiction in popular fiction. The book rethinks the relationship between the popular and political, understanding that radical politics had popular appeal and that the lines separating a genuine radicalism from commercial success are complicated and never absolute. With archival work into Newgate calendars and Chartist periodicals, as well as media history and culture, it brings together histories of the popular and political so as to rewrite the radical canon.

1

The old, new, borrowed, and blue Newgate calendar

This chapter argues that the criminal biographies or Newgate calendars of the Chartist period need to be reassessed in terms of their radical content and in light of their popular appeal. Because Newgate calendars are so often used only to introduce the Newgate novel, much of the criticism tends to sum up all eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions as one and the same.¹ Without doubt, the formal and generic properties remain roughly constant from one volume to the next, and the calendars themselves seem to invite audiences to lump them all together by repeatedly reproducing cases from earlier editions. However, with the rise of Chartism in the 1830s and early 1840s, calendars became politicised in such a way as to make themselves available to an audience aware of, interested in, and even sympathetic with ‘seditious’ acts and class-based activism. That textual content would reflect the age in which it was produced should not come as a surprise. But by continuing and perhaps even amplifying the notorious ambivalence of the criminal biographies – the way they accommodate readers seeking a moral authority while at one and the same time accommodating readers who seek to thumb their nose at moral authority – in an atmosphere dominated by political upheavals, or simply by taking up the argument from reform, the calendars assembled in the Chartist years at the very least make political engagement as exciting as a highway theft.

Often in an eighteenth-century calendar, criminals are almost gleefully represented as folk heroes – scoundrels, but brave and talented or clever – and the law just as incapable, clumsy, or corrupt, though a morally didactic frame heavy-handedly informs readers that crime is bad and justice will be served. Despite borrowing material from Knapp and Baldwin’s popular 1819 and 1824–28 calendars, Martin’s Annals of Crime in 1838 and Camden Pelham’s Chronicles of Crime in 1841 shift emphasis away from individual criminals towards distinctly political acts. The Chronicles, for example, adds multiple cases of riots, sedition, and treason. In doing so, it maintains an ambivalent attitude towards the subject matter, ostensibly condemning the rioters as earlier entries would have denounced a thief, while allowing readers to feel the frisson of the riot and celebrate the daring or skill – this time verbal – of the leader and his dedication to the cause. Martin’s Annals is more explicitly radical, mixing essays on the rights of labour, including one by the Chartist J. R. Stephens, together with stories of intrepid pirates and highwaymen. As the number of violent demonstrations and sedition trials increased in the 1830s and early 1840s, notwithstanding the turbulence of the 1820s, more reports of social unrest might be expected; it was an established practice for calendars to include riots and politically oriented cases in their catalogues. But the way these calendars transpose a tradition of using affective discourses and hybrid utterances into an unstable social context creates potentially heroic narratives of political action. The ambivalent response to social unrest may simply illustrate commercial interests, a strategy to capitalise on what was seen as a popular, people’s movement. But even if that were the primary reason for continuing with the dialogism of the earlier crime journals, it nonetheless demonstrates a readiness to be part of the changing political course of Britain.

The history of Newgate calendars has been well documented and I will only briefly sketch out some of the salient features here. All the calendars are compilations, composites, written by anonymous contributors. Not all the represented criminals served time or were executed at Newgate, but naming a collection after the prison could function as a convenient way to tell audiences what was being sold, while also acting as part of the moral frame, a quick lesson in the probable destiny of the criminal. The very first reports were written by the chaplain or Ordinary of Newgate Prison in London. These seventeenth- and eighteenth-century broadsides, essentially single-page pamphlets that might later be collected into books, such as Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1665), focused on the criminal’s confession, uttered just prior to the scaffold. Maximillian Novak suggests that the ‘first systematic collection of criminal accounts to be published in England was Captain Alexander Smith’s History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen’ in 1714.² Novak says that Smith’s innovation was in recounting the personal history of the criminal, that Smith ‘specialised in the brief account of the criminal’s life, trial, and end: the pattern to be that of the Newgate Calendar’.³ The Newgate Calendar; or, Malefactors’ Bloody Register from 1773, the first to use the Newgate name, is widely thought of as the next most significant calendar until The New and Complete Newgate Calendar by William Jackson in 1795, which was issued in weekly parts to make up five volumes, with supplements later added. Knapp and Baldwin’s 1819 New Newgate Calendar and their later four volume 1824–28 edition called The Newgate Calendar (the New Newgate is published prior to The Newgate Calendar, suggesting that the editors considered the latter volumes definitive) is an important milestone in the history of criminal biographies because, as Stephen Knight argues, citing Struan Sinclair, Knapp and Baldwin drop the religious language dominating earlier calendars and replace it with more legal and statistical frames of reference, ushering in a new legal and reformist perspective.⁴ Novak calls this edition ‘the most popular and enduring of the series’,⁵ in part because the authors of the Newgate novel – Bulwer, Ainsworth, and Dickens – used it as a source for their novels.

Generally speaking, each new edition would include a selection from earlier editions, sometimes edited and sometimes not, with additions from contemporary cases. The first volume of the Chronicles of Crime is almost entirely taken from Knapp and Baldwin’s 1824 edition –approximately 250 of 275 cases are derived from the earlier calendar, though interestingly with more than a third of the new cases describing riots and other political ‘crimes’. (Most of the first volume of the 1824 Knapp and Baldwin edition is taken from the earlier 1819 edition.) As the Chronicles, like most other calendars, proceeds chronologically, the second volume includes most of the new material, with only 46 of 203 cases derived from Knapp and Baldwin. In other words, individual volumes of a calendar are self-historicising, with a distinct character reflecting either the period represented in that particular volume or a new source for material used for that volume. Volume V of the 1819 Knapp and Baldwin somewhat strangely includes multiple cases of crime and conditions around Botany Bay, not to be found in the other volumes. Finally, it should be noted that the index of a volume might give a false impression that a particular kind of crime was increasing at a particular time: editors were in the habit of listing all the individuals involved in the same crime separately. Volume III of the 1819 Knapp and Baldwin, for example, seems to represent a huge spike in the number of riot cases, but only because the index lists one by one the many convicted individuals involved in the Gordon Riots.

Editors could also shape the overall meaning of their collections by the order they chose to reproduce the cases. Immediately following the story of a murderer born to a ‘most respectable’ family with the story of farmers executed for thievery (the cases of Mary Blandy and John McCanelly/Luke Morgan), the editors of the Chronicles of Crime, for example, potentially change the way both stories were read when they appeared pages apart in Knapp and Baldwin, though there is little chance of knowing if readers proceeded from first case to last. Certainly by the nineteenth century editors understood the collections as continuations and that their function was to select the most significant cases from earlier collections, adding in the most important present-day cases for the next generation of the collections. The calendars distinguished themselves from cheaper broadsides and contemporary newspapers – by the 1830s, many dailies and weeklies, appealing to many different audiences, were stuffed with crime reporting⁶ – by promising to be shelf-worthy. Though George Borrow wanted to make a distinction between his collection of Celebrated Trials (1825) and the calendar genre, he says in his Preface to it that:

One object was to form such a series as might serve for the basis of future continuations; for the cases recorded by the present activity of the ephemeral press and of society will be sufficient hereafter to fill a volume similar to one of the present in every seven or ten years; and partly with a view to such a series, this fundamental collection has been formed. A new volume as often as interesting cases have arisen sufficient to fill one, will confer on the present collection a perennial value, and in another century the remarkable trials assembled in this British work may be expected to occupy as large a space on the shelves of our libraries as the French Causes Celebres.⁷

The main similarity of the calendars is structural. Many of the cases are represented straightforwardly, especially if the crime is violent, and the criminal is condemned both by the reporter and by the evidence or confession. In these cases, the calendars call for anger against the criminal, often representing the fury of the victim’s community. However, framed by sermons on the ineluctable path of malfeasant crime to justified gallows and explicit denunciations of the criminal and the crime, ambiguity often emerges when the criminal is represented as an ingenious adventurer or a likable rascal, or pathetically repentant, or when the law is presented as inept or overly severe. Here editors often attempt to produce indignation against a restrictive or unfair social system or a flawed criminal justice system. Scholars have often recognised the double-voiced design of the calendars and in this way are justified to group them together.⁸ Though the content cannot be ignored – the story of Jack Sheppard is terrible fun and the law could really be an ass – the frequent mixing of moral instruction and entertainment notoriously leads to a mixed message. This was well known before the Newgate novel popularised the debate over the representation of crime. Borrow states in 1825 that the ‘Newgate Calendars as chroniclers of roguery and of vulgar depravity, in their various forms, have usually been compiled in language, which sympathised and accorded with their subjects.’⁹ The calendars, that is, for all their high-handedness and higher-mindedness, regularly engage in less than subtle forms of cultural confrontation, undressing polite society by admitting a subculture of deviance and unruliness commonly or most easily associated with the working class. That William Campion in 1824, ‘considering it to be an imperative duty of every man to resist oppression and uphold the oppressed’,¹⁰ would use the title The Newgate Monthly Magazine (1824–26) to publish not a cale...