The Author who Outsold Dickens

The Author who Outsold Dickens
Author: Stephen James Carver
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781526720696

William Harrison Ainsworth (1805 - 1882) is probably the most successful 19th Century writer that most people haven't heard of. Journalist, essayist, poet and, most of all, historical novelist, Ainsworth was a member of the early-Victorian publishing elite, and Charles Dickens's only serious commercial rival until the late-1840s, his novels Rookwood and Jack Shepherd beginning a fashion for tales of Georgian highwaymen and establishing the legend of Dick Turpin firmly in the National Myth. He was in the Dickens' circle before it was the Dickens' circle and counted among his friends the literary lions of his age: men like Charles Lamb, J.G. Lockhart, Leigh Hunt, W.M. Thackeray and, of course, Dickens; the publishers Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley; and the artists Sir John Gilbert, George Cruikshank, and 'Phiz' (Hablot K. Browne). He also owned and edited Bentley's Miscellany (whose editorship he assumed after Dickens), the New Monthly Magazine, and Ainsworth's Magazine. In his heyday, Ainsworth commanded a massive audience until a moral panic - the so-called 'Newgate Controversy' - about the supposedly pernicious effects on working class youth of the criminal romances on which his reputation was built effectively destroyed his reputation as a serious literary novelist.

G. W. M. Reynolds and His Fiction

G. W. M. Reynolds and His Fiction
Author: Stephen Knight
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2018-12-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429018231

George Reynolds is arguably the most prolific of all nineteenth-century English novelists, reaching an enormous audience through his thirty-six novels. Often selling in very large numbers in weekly one-penny installments, his works were known as by the most popular English novelist ever. Yet today, he remains almost unknown in the canon of English Literature. A serious radical, strongly pro-woman, and a leading Chartist seeking the vote for all men, Reynolds’ vigorous heroines differ notably from the Victorian novelists’ timid norm. He was strongly pro-Jewish and pro-Gypsy, very interested in French and Italian society, but wrote for ordinary English working people. Dickens thought him a dangerous leftist: for all these reasons, he was excluded from the elite literary world. G. W. M. Reynolds: The Man Who Outsold Dickens reestablishes Reynolds as a major figure of mid-nineteenth-century fiction and an author of European range and status. This book examines his massive popularity and notable concern with the problems of ordinary people, especially women, in the complex and often dangerous new world of the modern city. With the support of his wife Susannah, Reynolds’ enormous influence would also make a contribution to the cause of mass political education through his role in the development of popular fiction and journalism. This book is a major innovation in the field of Victorian literary studies, with relevance to popular cultural studies, the politics of literature, and publishing history, presenting properly a much overlooked major English novelist.

Jack Sheppard

Jack Sheppard
Author: William Harrison Ainsworth
Publisher:
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1870
Genre: Brigands and robbers
ISBN:

Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf

Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf
Author: George W.M. Reynolds
Publisher: Courier Dover Publications
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2015-12-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0486799298

The first important fictional treatment of the werewolf theme in English literature, this Victorian thriller traces Wagner's blood-soaked trail through 16th-century Italy in a gothic feast of murder and intrigue.

Rookwood

Rookwood
Author: William Harrison Ainsworth
Publisher:
Total Pages: 448
Release: 1878
Genre:
ISBN:

Windsor Castle

Windsor Castle
Author: William Harrison Ainsworth
Publisher:
Total Pages: 366
Release: 1843
Genre: Children's literature
ISBN:

How I Became a Famous Novelist

How I Became a Famous Novelist
Author: Steve Hely
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2011
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 145962503X

A razor - sharp evisceration of celebrity culture and literary fame, How I Became a Famous Novelist is a satirical novel masquerading as a tell - all memoir. Sick of life as he knows it, Pete Tarslaw sets out to write a bestselling novel, armed with a formula for success cobbled together from previous bestsellers: he abandons truth, relies heavily on lyrical prose, creates a club with a mysterious mission, includes a murder and invokes ''confusing sadness'' at the end. Once the sales rankings for his novel The Tornado Ashes Club start their meteoric rise - thanks to a Christian evangelist, a recovering teen starlet and Law and Order: Criminal Intent - Tarslaw's inevitable decline looms, and his fall from grace will be nothing short of spectacular. How I Became a Famous Novelist is the hilarious tale of how Pete Tarslaw's ''pile of garbage'' became the most talked about, read, admired and reviled novel in America. It will change everything you think you know - about literature, appearance, truth, beauty, and those people out there who still care about books.