The Ragged of Europe

Abstract

Chapter 3 suggests that the most important serial category of 1848 was ‘the ragged’. The terrible human effects of the economic depression were visible in the want and despair on the streets of every city in Europe. And a new media culture was representing this ragged majority not only to their increasingly frightened rulers, but also to the poor themselves. Chapter 3 starts with the chiffonnier, or rag picker: a highly politically charged figure in France in the 1840s. Raggedness becomes newly visible in the city-mystery serial novels of this period too. Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842–3) took the poorest quarters of Paris as its subject and was cited as one of the causes of the 1848 revolution. Sue’s novel copied itself across Europe, in translation and in adaptations written about city-localities as diverse as Hamburg, Melbourne, and St Petersburg. The city itself became a serial category.