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Full Description
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 (1814-1884). 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 wrote for and edited family magazines early in that genre's history, deployed Chartist domesticity to liberal ends, and collaborated with cheap publisher Edward Lloyd to define and popularise the domestic romance genre. In 1850s-1860s 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 change. 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.
Contents
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
