An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction
Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel

Explores the journalism and fiction appearing in the early Victorian working-class periodical press and its influence on mainstream literature.

Gregory Vargo (Author)

9781107197855, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 December 2017

298 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.8 cm, 0.61 kg

'Vargo's book enlarges our understanding of the topics addressed in Chartist discourse while also describing the self-consciousness and self-presentation of Chartist print culture, its ways of designating itself within the public sphere. In this regard, it does for the Victorian radical press specifically what Kevin Gilmartin did for the radical press of the early nineteenth century in his Print Politics (1986).' Catherine Gallagher, Modern Philology

How does the literature and culture of early Victorian Britain look different if viewed from below? Exploring the interplay between canonical social problem novels and the journalism and fiction appearing in the periodical press associated with working-class protest movements, Gregory Vargo challenges long-held assumptions about the cultural separation between the 'two nations' of rich and poor in the Victorian era. The flourishing radical press was home to daring literary experiments that embraced themes including empire and economic inequality, helping to shape mainstream literature. Reconstructing social and institutional networks that connected middle-class writers to the world of working-class politics, this book reveals for the first time acknowledged and unacknowledged debts to the radical canon in the work of such authors as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell. What emerges is a new vision of Victorian social life, in which fierce debates and surprising exchanges spanned the class divide.

Introduction: can a social problem speak?
1. Social inheritance in the New Poor Law debate: William Cobbett, Harriet Martineau, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry
2. Books of (social) murder: melodrama and the slow violence of the market in anti-New Poor Law satire, fiction, and journalism
3. A life in fragments: Thomas Cooper's Chartist Bildungsroman
4. Questions from workers who read: education and self-formation in Chartist print culture and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton
5. Revenge in the age of insurance: villainy in theatrical melodrama and Ernest Jones's fiction
6. 'Outworks of the citadel of corruption': the Chartist Press reports the empire
7. Two nations revisited: the refugee question in the People's Paper, Household Words and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literature: history & criticism [DS]