The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction by Rob Breton (review)

Reviewed by: The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction by Rob Breton Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton (bio) The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction, by Rob Breton; pp. vii + 234. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021, £85.00, $130.00, $29.95 paper. The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction rethinks the interactions among popular, commercial, and radical approaches during the 1830s and 1840s, including "the way penny literature pinched political content from radical papers" (2). Case studies include Jack Sheppard (1839–40), Sweeney Todd (1846–47), Varney the Vampire (1845–47), Mysteries of London (1844–46), and the Newgate Calendars, as well as journals including Howitt's (1847–48) and Douglas Jerrold's Shilling Magazine (1845–47). The penny press of this period has often been seen as cashing in on working-class readers' demand for violence and melodrama, while at the same time ultimately reinforcing middle-class ideology. Rob Breton, however, contends that the penny press engages with, and helps to create, broader and more ambivalent cultural and political confrontations than critics have hitherto recognized. The introduction subtly dissects generic strands and interpretive differences, while tracing connections among the various modes of writing. Breton's articulation of his own critical position is admirably precise, although readers less familiar with the history of the penny press would benefit from a more broad-brush overview of the genre and the current debates surrounding it. Here and in chapter 1, there is a tendency to assume an [End Page 344] in-depth knowledge of early Victorian commercial, popular, or political writing (a gap that the rest of the book addresses admirably). The trend for publishing across a spectrum of popular and radical journals creates a complex picture, and this perspective complements recent work by Alexis Easley (New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer, 1832–1860 [2021]) on women authors' engagement with new modes of literary production during the 1830s and 1840s. Breton writes authoritatively on cultural and political contestations, and provides a meticulous examination of where the party line is drawn both across and within journals. The combination of wide survey with sustained analysis of particular titles makes for some unexpected findings. While Sweeney Todd remains one of the most notorious serials of the period, it transpires that penny journals often depended for their success on irreproachably moral tales, with stories of improbable violence providing little more than occasional seasoning. Meanwhile journals such as Howitt's seemingly refereed their authors, including radical voices familiar from other publications, but only allowed them to assume a modified political stance. But notwithstanding these checks and compromises, shifts in Howitt's's editorial position over time can be seen in the journal's strategic "multiplication of audience" (182). Breton also notes that publications such as Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany of Romance and General Interest (1843–46) allowed readers to shape the direction of the journal through its high acceptance rate of unsolicited contributions. While "popular writing is not experimental beyond its tendency to conflate genres," this is a conflation that the book works hard to unpack (118). To demonstrate this point, the first chapter addresses the "steady slipperiness of the [Newgate] calendars, a deflation of the didactic message that allows for and encourages interpretive work." While the so-called Newgate Novel comprises only a small body of work, publications such as Martin's Annals of Crime (1837) in the 1830s reflect "the politically charged atmosphere of the age" in new ways (30). This wider context creates some unexpected connections, as when the Annals include provocative attacks on the naval practice of flogging that bring it into alignment with the Chartist press. Ultimately the Newgate Calendar was able to capitalize on its reputation for sensationalizing crime, depicting government abuses and official practices, including the use of child labor, as essentially criminal. Breton makes a convincing case for the need to look beyond a model of influence—which literary mode is exploiting which—to focus attention instead on the opportunities texts can offer when written and read against each other. New interpretive possibilities emerge from the juxtaposition of different modes, when they are seen as interactive and mutually revealing rather than simply...