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.
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Rymers: A Cockney Artistic-Literary Family, 1806-1842
Chapter 2: The Queen’s Magazine: A Spirit of the Age, 1842
Chapter 3: Ada the Betrayed: Chartist Domesticity, 1842-1843
Chapter 4: Rymer’s Domestic Romance: Varney and The String of Pearls, 1845-1850
Chapter 5: The Sepoys: Family Imperialism in India, 1858
Chapter 6: Rymer’s Highwaymen: Outlaws and Paterfamiliae, 1859-1866
Coda: Rymer the Betrayed: Penny Dreadfuls’, Panic, and “Boys’ Books, 1870-1960
Biography
Rebecca Nesvet, Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, earned her PhD in Nineteenth Century British Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2014.
"Rebecca Nesvet has played a critical role in the 21st century rediscovery and reinterpretation of a body of nineteenth-century fiction that has been suppressed, demonized, marginalized, and condescended to for over a century and a half, and is still known primarily from the dismissive labels of its critics: “penny bloods” and “penny dreadfuls.” The extraordinary range and depth of her research enables her to take us inside these forgotten works and the periodicals that published them, from Edward Lloyd’s wildly successful weeklies to the redoubtable G.W.M. Reynold’s Miscellany, to trace the arc of Rymer’s remarkable career and its roots in his own family connections. This insightful book will be a touchstone in scholars’ efforts to make sense of the enormous body of “cheap literature” that made up so much of the Victorian reading public’s engagement with print culture."
--Patrick Leary, Founder of the VICTORIA forum for Victorian Studies, author of The Punch Brotherhood
