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, 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, author of The Punch Brotherhood
