If asked to pick a single day for the birth of mass culture in Britain, one might nominate the Saturday in November 1816 when William Cobbett first reissued articles from his shilling-halfpenny weekly the Political Register as a single oversized sheet for the cost of two pence. Cobbett's experiment, designed to avoid the stamp tax, set in motion a series of developments which forever altered the world of publishing and the public sphere more generally. The Stamp Acts, which existed in various forms from the early eighteenth century, taxed periodicals which provided news. They were intended to suppress seditious writing and were hated as symbols of a ruling-class monopoly on reading. Because the Stamp Acts regulated publications only two pages or longer, Cobbett's single page cleverly evaded the 4d. periodical tax, thus allowing a price accessible to the laboring poor. The Register's first inexpensive issue – labeled Twopenny Trash by conservative critics – sold an astronomical 200,000 copies over the course of a year, and the weekly paper averaged sales between 40,000 and 70,000 copies, an economy of scale previously unimaginable for the periodical press. By 1819, the government had amended the Stamp Acts to tax any periodical which included news and appeared more frequently than once-a-month, and Cobbett was forced to cease publishing his 2d. edition. But Cobbett's venture had already inspired a generation of radical journalists, who risked imprisonment by illegally publishing unstamped papers. Cobbett's colloquial and slashing style was also widely imitated, and his device of the editorial leader (an opinion piece on the first page) would become standard fare in the Times and elsewhere. As Elizabeth Miller's Reference Miller2013Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture documents, by the fin de siècle socialist and anarchist journalists had grown deeply suspicious of the mass-market press as capitalistic and homogenizing, but their predecessors earlier in the century had largely invented it.

Cobbett's publication was both an indictment of and inspiration for the mainstream press. Haywood's The Revolution in Popular Literature masterfully tells the story of the emergence of dissident print cultures and the way these cultures reconfigured the public sphere. From the Political Register, the Black Dwarf and Richard Carlile's Republican in the teens and twenties to Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper and the Northern Star at mid-century, Haywood focuses on the structure and rhetoric of journals themselves because “it was precisely the material agency of radical and popular print… its conspicuous presence as an expression of public opinion and popular taste, circulating with speed through the nation… which guaranteed the longevity of the literary revolution which began in the 1790s” (5).

The reaction the radical press provoked and the imitations it inspired best measure its continued importance throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Haywood reconstructs the dynamic interplay between the parallel traditions of the radical press and its conservative and liberal opponents: on the one hand, The Rights of Man (1791–92) and Jacobin miscellanies in the 1790s, radical weeklies in the postwar period, the unstamped in the 1820s and 1830s, and the Chartist press at mid-century; on the other, Hannah More's Village Politics (1793) and like-minded didactic fiction, Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34) and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge's Penny Magazine, and the liberal journals of “popular progress” which took up the “Condition of England” question in the 1840s. Ironies abound in the exchange between these mutually conditioning realms of print. To receive a hearing, opponents of the French revolution had to borrow the Jacobin format of the cheap pamphlet, necessarily engaging in written argument to prove that plebian readers should leave debates about politics to their literate betters (Haywood 48). In the 1830s, the unstamped press derided useful knowledge publications (explicitly designed to sap the former's audience) but confidently assimilated such surprising “elements of the dominant culture” as “biographies of Wellington and Nelson” into their “rapidly expanding counter-public sphere” (Haywood 114–16). The Revolution in Popular Literature shows the extent to which rival genres were not only key obstacles with which social movements contended, but at times were the forms from which they drew and which they influenced in turn.

Haywood's work also makes clear how deeply state repression shaped popular politics and literature. To paraphrase Stuart Hall, Stamp Act officials, police officers, and special constables – that is ad hoc, sometimes volunteer members of the police – have yet to assume the “honored place” they merit in literary history (Hall 228). The absence of the stamp office from accounts of nineteenth-century literature is especially problematic because the Stamp Acts exerted such a direct and obvious influence on the experience of reading. They divided the world of print along class lines. They defined reading itself as political and helped create an imagined community of outlaw readers in the audience of the unstamped. At the same time, the acts separated news from other kinds of writing (because publishers were eager to avoid the newspaper tax) and thus supported the emergent idea of literature as an independent sphere free from the realm of politics, the economy and whatever else counted as news. And finally they encouraged monthly serialization as a norm for middle-class readers. Not coincidently, it was after the final repeal of the newspaper stamp in 1855 that the sensation novelists, along with Dickens and others, exploited the weekly serial to such effect. When they did so, critics worried that they had made “the literature of the Kitchen the favourite reading of the Drawing-room” (to quote a review of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret from 1862 [qtd. in Hughes 42]).

The role of the special constable in literary history is only rarely as direct as that of the Stamp Acts, but Haywood's study suggests that the boundaries of the nineteenth-century public sphere were policed not only by ideological formations and internalized discipline but by the power of a repressive state. From the Crown and Anchor and like societies which helped stir up anti-republican mobs in the 1790s to the Six Acts of 1819 to the mobilization of soldiers and police in London 1848 to parry the Chartist challenge, propaganda worked in tandem with state violence or its threat to marginalize radical politics and suppress forays into the public spheres of print and speech. “If there was a Victorian ‘equipoise,’” Haywood writes, “it was hardly organic” (Revolution 226). Haywood's emphasis on the continued use of force through mid-century modifies Raymond Williams's influential narrative from The Long Revolution (1961) that “from the 1830s onwards it was State policy to fight radical ideas with commercialism rather than censorship or repression” (Haywood 173). Increased competition in the popular market was one dimension of the decline of a rebellious cultural politics, but the government's actively violent role remained crucial.

State repression, however, did not always have the intended effect. Not infrequently, the restriction of reading only stimulated an illegal market. The radical journalist John Thelwall described how in the wake of anti-Jacobin censorship people looking for Paine's Rights of Man would ask for the “book we maunt read” (qtd. in Haywood 38). Louis James's classic Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–1850: A Study of the Literature Produced for the Working Classes in Early Victorian Urban England (Reference James1963) describes a similar reaction to the Seditious Publications Act of 1820 which set the newspaper stamp at 4d: “If the Whigs feared cheap literature, it was something for which to strive” (13). There were business as well as political reasons that the Poor Man's Guardian featured on its masthead the legend that it was “published in defiance of ‘law,’ to try the power of ‘right’ against ‘might.’” The Guardian brashly bore its own black stamp displaying a printing press surrounded by the motto “Knowledge is Power.” A parody of the official red government stamp, the Guardian's non-stamp was a sophisticated speech act authorizing its own utterance and prefiguring a truly free press brought about in part by the act of reading. Yet, at other points, policing the world of print proved more successful. Haywood's book concludes with an account of the commercial and propagandistic efforts “to exorcise” the memory of the Chartist movement “from the literary and historical record” (Revolution 221). These efforts took two forms: the ironic dismissal of the upheavals of the 1830s and 1840s and broader meliorist accounts of social and political change. The military mobilizations and jailing and transportation of hundreds of political prisoners were elided, so that the fact that England weathered 1848 without revolution (unlike many nations on the continent) appeared as evidence of the superiority of the British constitution and its guarantee of political liberty.

In terms of G. W. M. Reynolds, the effects of the campaign Haywood describes reverberate down to the present. A pioneering publisher, prolific novelist, and key figure linking radicalism and popular fiction, Reynolds has until recently been largely absent from literary history, even though his monumental books The Mysteries of London (1844–46) and The Mysteries of the Court of London (1846–56) were among the most widely read fiction of the century, and his novels regularly outsold Dickens's by several times. “A tantalizingly shadowy presence in mid-Victorian culture” (Humpherys and James 1), Reynolds hailed from an upper-middle-class family; both his father and maternal grandfather were officers in the Royal Navy. Although Reynolds eventually became quite wealthy due to the astronomical success of his literary and publishing ventures, his radical politics as much as his scandalous fiction written for a working-class audience excluded him from Victorian respectability. He joined the Chartist movement in 1848, chairing large outdoor meetings at Kennington Common and Trafalgar Square, where he asserted the link between Chartism and the recent revolution in France. As Ellen Rosenman points out, Reynolds interpolated “polemics throughout his sprawling sensational novels,” making porous the border between politics and literature (in Humpherys and James 213). In part because of his affiliation with radicalism, however, Reynolds has proved harder to assimilate into literary history than many other writers, including the sensation novelists whom he in several respects anticipated.

Humpherys's and James's collection begins to remedy this exclusion. The volume includes essays on relatively better known works like Pickwick Abroad (1837–39), Wagner the Wehr-Wolf (146–47), and The Mysteries of London as well as analysis of more obscure novels including the alluringly-titled Pope Joan, or The Female Pontiff (1850–51). Several pieces explore periodical culture and take up questions of serial publication, highlighting how various and complex were the formats in which Victorian readers encountered fiction. Many of Reynolds's short stories appeared in newspapers, and the capacious but fragmented plots of the novels drew their energy from that medium. The collection's attention to international and colonial contexts represents another important trend in recent studies of radical culture. French literature influenced the republican Reynolds throughout his career, and his writings also extensively explored the British empire, which were disseminated in turn across its global networks. Sucheta Bhattacharya provides a stimulating study of late nineteenth-century Bengali adaptations and plagiarisms of Reynolds's work, and Antony Taylor counters Bernard Porter's suggestion that newspapers directed towards working-class readers largely ignored colonial issues. Taylor shows instead how Reynolds News consistently propounded “an anti-imperial vision rooted in a traditional critique of domestic government” (in Humpherys and James 104).

Critics familiar with middle-class social problem novels from the 1840s and 1850s will find the landscape of Reynolds's fiction both recognizable and strange. Reynolds's reliance on paired figures and scenes to represent such ideological oppositions as the corrupt rich and honest poor resembles the antitheses and diptychs which structure much of the “Condition of England” genre. The totalizing ambition and formal diversity of Reynolds's fiction also call to mind the great multi-plot novels of Dickens (not surprising, given that Reynolds launched his career with the success of the larcenous Pickwick Abroad). Anne Humpherys describes how The Mysteries of London and The Mysteries of the Court of London are “encyclopedic” in multiple senses. Extending together to nine million words in weekly parts from 1844 to 1856, these series attempt “to portray a national culture” by representing “the social… range” of the nation (127). They also incorporate a huge variety of styles and forms, enfolding “examples of nearly every popular genre from gothic melodrama to sentimental romance, from journalistic leaders to scientific processes” (123). At the same time, as Humpherys underlines, Reynolds's social maps are singular: to sharpen the opposition between the aristocracy and the poor, his plots largely exclude the middle classes, an omission unimaginable in canonical Victorian fiction.

A closer approach to Reynolds's fiction helps fill in other key episodes in literary history. Graham Law's essay provides detail and nuance to the idea that sensation fiction, which startled the middle-class literary establishment in the 1860s, drew heavily from working-class forms. Although both contemporary and Victorian critics frequently invoke “penny dreadfuls” and working-class “bloods” as forerunners to the sensation novel, “in neither era”, as Law remarks, “has there been much inclination to come to cases” (Humpherys and James 203). In particular, Law contends that Reynolds's “memoir” series served as a precursor to the sensation novel. This series, which comprised four novels in 104 weekly parts, achieved wide popularity when it appeared in the early 1850s – perhaps hundreds of thousands of readers. It was consistently reprinted over the next three decades (thus outlasting the sensation fad which was already tapering off in the 1870s). Like more familiar fiction by Braddon, Collins, and Ellen Wood, Reynolds's novels combine “commonplace domestic settings” with the “outlandish” events of the Gothic or romance; they intercalate various “documentary” media such as letter and diaries to fracture and destabilize the narrative voice; and they obsessively treat sexual misconduct and trouble traditional gender roles (in Humpherys and James 203).

Reynolds's fiction often explicitly took up political causes: he interrupted The Mysteries of the Court of London in 1848 to broadcast the welcome news of the February revolution in France. Further, as Ellen Rosenman argues, the “fantasy content” of his stories could be as politically charged as his more direct polemics (in Humpherys and James 214). Rosenman's “The Virtue of Illegitimacy” compares the disastrous revelation of bastardy in George Eliot's Felix Holt to Reynolds's Mary Price (1852) from the “memoir” series and James Malcolm Rymer's The Dark Woman (1861). The latter two novels, both directed towards working-class audiences, center on illegitimate and unrecognized sons of aristocrats who languish in poverty. In both stories, the discovery of illegitimacy is presented in a surprisingly positive light; it enables “worthy characters to ascend socially without leaving their working-class identities and virtues behind” (217). The expected reading of these denouements would consider them base wish-fulfillment, a pandering to a disenfranchised audience by allowing it to share vicariously in wealth and power. Rosenman, however, argues that Reynolds's and Rymer's plots are consonant with radical politics: “At the heart of this political message is the idea of ‘natural right’… [which] claimed that all members of society were entitled to political representation and economic security” (Humpherys and James 221).

The fact that two books about Chartism and literature could appear in the same year but analyze almost entirely different sets of texts is a striking indication of the diversity of writing the Chartists produced and the scope of its effect on the broader literary culture. Chris Vanden Bossche's Reform Acts and Margaret A. Loose's The Chartist Imaginary, both from 2014, share only one novel in common and have significantly different emphases. Loose explores how Chartist writers adapted Romantic poetry and popular fiction to fit the needs of the first national working-class movement in Britain. Vanden Bossche examines how middle-class fiction and parliamentary discourse responded to the Chartist mobilization for civil rights. These angles produce rather different interpretations of Chartism. Vanden Bossche focuses on the central planks of the Chartist program, the six points for democratic reform outlined in the national petitions of 1839, 1842, and 1848. These documents, as Patrick Brantlinger has described, were symbolic acts of mass literacy, as each registered over a million names (93).

Unlike Reform Acts, Loose's The Chartist Imaginary leaves suffrage reform mostly in the background. She instead draws attention to insurrectionary currents within the movement and emphasizes the variety of social and economic issues the Chartists sought to redress. Both perspectives are defensible, for Chartism's strength lay in its ability to subsume a variety of grievances – including endemic poverty and cuts to poor relief, the Stamp Acts, Irish coercion, and expanding police powers – into one unified vision of democratic rule. Although Vanden Bosshe's approach at times effaces the breadth of the Chartist critique, he remedies the tendency among literary critics to overlook the demand for political reform in favor of focusing on social issues, which were more easily dramatized by novelists and poets and have stood out for scholars. Vanden Bossche also provides compelling interpretations of such neglected aspects of the movement as the Chartist Land Plan, showing how it was consistent with the effort to obtain working-class political power rather than representing a tactical retreat or nostalgic longing for a lost rural idyll. The Land Plan, an incredibly ambitious effort to resettle urban workers in farming communities, and which included tens of thousands of subscribers, resonated with the suffrage debate as an effort to obtain “social agency for the working classes” at a time when voting rights were literally and symbolically tied to property ownership (79).

On other levels, Loose's and Vanden Bossche's studies are more complementary. They share a sense of the innovative ways radical authors utilized the literary forms they inherited, a tendency in recent criticism at odds with earlier scholarship which often viewed radical writing as derivative, its oppositional nature compromised by an embrace of middle-class formulas thought to embody hegemonic values. Haywood's monograph and several essays by Rob Breton have challenged this idea with careful reconstructions of the hybrid forms and experimental adaptations which defined the radical canon. Loose's book further enriches our sense of this literature. One striking argument builds on Anne Janowitz's account in Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (1998) of how Chartist writers grappled with the competing legacies of Romanticism. The Romantics utilized the collective form of the ballad and valorized political poetry, but they also glorified the contemplative, solitary individual, a persona which often seemed to transcend social life. Why then would radical poets and novelists at mid-century consistently turn to a Romantic idiom?

Loose takes up this conundrum in terms of the poetry and fiction of Ernest Jones. Jones was a struggling barrister who threw in his lot with the Chartists to become one of the movement's most important writers, editors, and publishers. He was a committed internationalist and was elected to Parliament on the left fringe of the Liberal party after passage of the Reform Bill of 1867. The paradox of Romantic individualism, as Loose uses Jones's case to elucidate, is that the self, unmoored from inherited identity, does not necessarily become solipsistic; rather, such individualism can “clear the path to the writer's transpersonal membership in communities different from those of his or her own birth” (14). In this way, Romantic individualism came to underwrite Jones's “internationalism and working-class solidarity” (14). At the same time, Jones pushed late Romanticism in new directions. His The Romance of a People (1847–48), a historic novel about the Polish Revolution of the 1830s, uses the Romantic mode and includes “high adventure, formidable quests, and unlikely triumphs” (Loose 31). But Jones also “transmogrifies the hero of the adventures from an exalted individual to a collective of semi-enslaved people: the serfs of Poland” (31). Loose concludes her penultimate chapter with the reflection that the Chartists, though defeated, were not simply historical victims but actively formed their culture: “‘Writer’ and ‘citizen’ [became] contested identities shaped also by the uneducated and disenfranchised who left their imprint on the terms of their own exclusion” (150).

Vanden Bossche looks at little-studied historical novels by Harrison Ainsworth and Pierce Egan as well as more familiar social problem fiction like Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845) and Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1850) to discern the ways that early Victorian novelists reacted to the Chartists' reimaginings of social agency and power. He shows that middle-class authors frequently subsumed working-class radicals into mainstream political discourse: both Whigs and Tories cast Chartists as the dupes of the other party or simply as the causal effect of the bad policies of their political opponents. Sally Ledger's Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (Reference Ledger2007) offers a very different account of the relationship between middle-class fiction and working-class politics. By demonstrating how a diversity of political material flowed into and shaped Dickens's writing, Ledger situates Dickens's corpus itself within the radical tradition. Dickens's efforts to integrate high-and-low aesthetic forms, his use of nicknaming and Biblical parody, and his alternation between satirical and melodramatic modes all affiliate his fiction with an aesthetics developed by Regency radicals like William Cobbett and the satirist William Hone. Ledger's understanding of the radical tradition will be explored in more depth below, but it should be mentioned at the outset that she conceives of this tradition in different terms, especially concerning its class politics, than Haywood and several other authors in this review.

George Cruickshank, one of Dickens's early illustrators, served as an important link between Dickens and the world of the regency radicals. While still a teenager, Cruikshank came to prominence for woodcuts in radical pamphlets, which lampooned the monarchy, the government, and the Anglican Church. His collaboration with William Hone on The Political House that Jack Built (1819) brought him fame and notoriety. This rollicking attack on George IV in the wake of the Peterloo massacre near Manchester, in which yeomanry cavalry killed about a dozen protesters and injured hundreds, mixes high and low cultural forms. It refashions a popular nursery rhyme and deploys bawdy humor while also utilizing sophisticated verse patterns and “complex satire” (Ledger 21). In Ledger's account, two decades later Dickens would similarly combine elevated and demotic forms, incorporating “Shakespearean and classical allusions” with “melodramatic narratives, comic humour… [and] tropes from folktales” (21). From G. K. Chesterton and George Orwell onward, critics have wrestled with Dickens's contradictory and ambivalent political commitments: Ledger's book represents a breakthrough in this vexed debate. Looking beyond the issues Dickens championed, Ledger makes clear how radical aesthetics were intertwined with the formal strategies of his prose.

Ledger argues that Dickens should be seen as emerging from a radical intellectual and political milieu, and furthering the commitments of that tradition through his novels and publishing ventures alike. This framework, she suggests, offers the best way to understand his distinctive vision and politics. Leaning on Gareth Stedman Jones's Languages of Class: Studies of English Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (1983) and Patrick Joyce's Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848–1914 (1991), Ledger affiliates Dickens with a popular radical tradition dating back to the eighteenth century which came to prominence in the Regency era in the writings of such figures as Hone and Cobbett. Like Stedman Jones and Joyce, Ledger argues that this tradition was not bound by class, that it is better understood as a populist politics, in which “the People” encompassed the working- and middle-classes but excluded the aristocracy, reviled as a parasitic force of “old corruption.” Dickens used the language of “the People” not as “a vague or all-inclusive term but… as a specific force in contradistinction to those who rule” (Ledger 4).

Along these lines, Ledger reconstructs continuities between radical visual and print culture in the era of Peterloo and satirical attacks against the New Poor Law in the 1830s. She documents how Oliver Twist (1837–39) and The Chimes (1844) borrow from this long-established, recently re-enlivened iconography. For later periods, the relationship between Dickens and radical politics becomes more complex. Following Raymond Williams's The Long Revolution (Reference Williams1960), Ledger describes the 1840s and 1850s as the period when popular culture and radicalism largely separated as a result of the rise “of the mass-market commercial newspaper press” (Ledger 144). Dickens, however, sought to transcend this emergent divide and reconcile his enterprises with “a political and cultural embrace of ‘the People,’” a commitment that for Ledger bespeaks Dickens's popular radicalism (191).

The framework of popular radicalism offers a greater sense of fluidity to our understanding of early Victorian print culture. Claiming Dickens's journalism and magazines were consistent with the aims of the radical press, Ledger takes issue with Haywood and others for setting too

While Ledger is right to emphasize the instability of terms like “popular” and “radical,” her study itself sometimes suppresses how messy the political contestations to define these terms actually were. She tends to gloss over or ignore the way Dickens's departs from radical politics: his hostility to strikes, his denigration of working-class organization, especially Chartism, his deep-seated fear of political crowds, his contempt for working-class newspapers, and his rejection of many forms of collective action. Compounding this problem, Ledger analyzes little writing, apart from Dickens's work, from the 1840s onward in terms of radicalism's class-based or populist discourse and a slippage sometimes occurs between Dickens's sensibilities and the broader cultural and political currents of the early Victorian period. Nor does she engage the substantial debate Stedman Jones and Joyce provoked, including Dorothy Thompson's compelling rebuttal, “Who were ‘the People’ in 1842?” which argues that populist language had itself become class-based by the 1840s.

In affiliating Dickens with an earlier radical tradition, Ledger fails to take cognizance of how profoundly fractured that tradition had become in the post-Reform Bill era. For example, as evidence of a shared print culture, Ledger highlights how the Northern Star, the most important Chartist newspaper, pronounced in 1844 that it was confident its readers also enjoyed Punch (Ledger 150). Yet within two years, the Star had soured on the satirical magazine, which had turned increasingly hostile to Chartism, lamenting it had become “little better than a mere illustrated copy of the [Anti-Corn Law] League, and just about as witty… as that delectable organ of the millocrats” (Northern Star 6 June 1846). Ledger also points out that various Chartists contributed to a number of journals superintended by Dickens's close friend Douglas Jerrold, who often served as a conduit between activists and writers. The participation of working-class radicals in middle-class publications is notable, but it must also be stressed that such participation often occurred on unequal terms. Even though the Chartist William Lovett, who had served a prison term in Warwick Gaol for seditious libel, worked as editor for William Howitt's People's Journal, the magazine excluded mention of him in the magazine and never publicly acknowledged his position.

Lovett's imprisonment raises the issue of state repression, which also drastically qualifies Ledger's assertion that “notwithstanding the caution with which [Dickens] approached the Chartist movement… [he] was writing in precisely the same cultural landscape and publishing environment… as the many hundreds of Chartists who took up the pen to further their cause” (140). Indeed, the “publishing environment” for many radical journalists included time spent in prison. The Northern Star's founder Feargus O'Connor, like William Cobbett before him, wrote editorials from confinement. From May 1839, the Western Vindicator's masthead proclaimed that it was “Edited and Conducted by Henry Vincent, Now Resident in Monmouth Gaol” (Western Vindicator 8 May 1839). As the paper regularly printed letters from the soon-to-be-condemned John Frost, a not inconsiderable amount of the paper's copy was written behind bars (following a massive protest campaign Frost was spared death, but he was transported to Australia where he spent nearly two decades).

In the essay “Model Prisons” (1850), Thomas Carlyle claimed to envy Ernest Jones the leisure that solitary confinement in Tothill Fields prison afforded him to write, but the sage of Chelsea hardly experienced such confinement himself. Dickens, for his part, was so unconcerned about state restriction on publishing that in 1850 he refused to sign a petition for the repeal of the Stamp Acts – a radical lightning rod if there ever was one – because he thought they served as “a way of ensuring the quality of the press” (John 116). It goes without saying that the Home Office surveilled Chartist papers not Household Words to collect evidence for future prosecutions. Juliet John, who offers a nuanced and balanced appraisal of the cultural politics of Dickens's publications, shares Ledger's sense of Dickens's populism, but she justly points to its tension with Dickens's cultural paternalism, his consistent impulse to try to “raise… up [the working classes] through inclusion in a cultured community” (112).

Sambudha Sen's excellent London, Radical Culture, and the Making of the Dickensian Aesthetic (Reference Sen2012) is deeply informed by Ledger's work, both in its exploration of radical aesthetics and its analysis of the way Dickens “absorbed the language of radical politics into the expressive system of his novels” (15). But Sen takes issue with the way that Ledger groups “in a relationship of unmediated continuity” the fiction of Dickens with political writing of the previous generation (9). The shift from militant newspaper or pamphlet to “entertainment oriented” magazine or novel decisively alters how the audience is addressed, who is included in the audience, and the imagined political efficacy of the utterance (16).

At the same time, Sen, like Ledger, sees radical satire reverberating through the breadth of Dickens's corpus. For example, the linguistic register of Dickens's fiction, as well as its narrative focalization, remains consistently outside the world of the elite. This alignment allows Dickens to ironize the upper classes in ways different than Thackeray or J. S. Mill. Utilizing techniques similar to Cruikshank's graphic satire, Bleak House (1852–53) unmoors the emblems of power from their original context and resituates them in degraded settings: the “Lord Chancellor and the Court of Chancery” are consistently parodied by “the sordid figure of Krook and his rag and bottle store” (56). Little Dorritt (1855–57) likewise destabilizes learned and official language by entangling lofty rhetoric with the absurd in ways which call to mind Cobbett's ferocious attacks on the treatises of Malthus. Sen's account of Cobbett's satire is particularly insightful and will be valuable reading to anyone interested in the genre more generally. Sen's and Ledger's divergent readings of the same field of evidence make clear that the difficulty defining Dickens's complex and shifting politics will continue into the future. But together their work highlights how reckoning radicalism's turbulent effect on early Victorian culture can illuminate topics seemingly at a remove from radical culture itself.

Like Dickens's fiction, Punch magazine refashioned the radical idiom to create a new kind of satire intended for a “large, entertainment-seeking, and socially diverse group of consumers” (Sen 19). Rosalind Crone's Violent Victorians (Reference Sen2012), which looks at representations of interpersonal violence in nineteenth-century London, takes as a central topic such efforts to transform genres and media in order to appeal to new groups. As Crone delightfully recounts, the character of Punch – who served as the waggish impresario of the famous humor magazine – went through many changes over the course of the nineteenth century. In the opening decades, Punch began as the “comic buffoon” of fairgrounds; he then became “a murderous anti-hero” in the hands of travelling showmen performing on crowded London streets (40). There, his confrontations with authority figures continued to invoke “the carnivalesque spirit so prominent in early modern popular culture” (49). By the 1850s, however, a cleaned-up version of the puppet was invited into middle-class homes as a form of drawing room entertainment. In the 1860s, large companies offered Punch shows as one of several options for children's parties. This trajectory is one example of the way “the growing commercialisation of the leisure industry” changed the character of Victorian entertainment (Crone 65). But Crone makes clear that Punch's development cannot simply be understood as the domestication of the unruly elements of popular culture. Although Punch's violence diminished inside the drawing room, much sadism remained, leading a journalist in Harper's Weekly to lament (or revel) in 1872 that the “love of the horrible” must be “innate even in infantile nature” (qtd. in Crone 66).

By showing the persistence of violence in a great variety of genres, Crone revises the idea that a “civilising process” took hold at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Ranging over broadsides, penny bloods, journalism, and melodrama, Crone challenges the narrative that reformers (whether evangelical or secular) successfully curbed the excesses of popular culture: “The Victorian popular imagination was bloodier, much more explicit, and more angry and turbulent than historians have thus far been prepared to acknowledge” (7). Crone demonstrates that struggles over the nature of entertainment were ongoing throughout the century, that the results of these contests were often uneven, and that seemingly vanquished forms could reappear sublated into new genres.

Punch's journey from fairground to street corner to respectable residence troubles other commonly-held ideas about Victorian culture. Dickens's belief that art should be addressed to “the great ocean of humanity” continues to inform interpretations about the socially integrative nature of Victorian entertainment (qtd. in John from a letter to W. C. Macready in 1853[1]). Critics put forth both positive and negative interpretations of the increasingly cross-class character of popular culture, stressing either increasing literacy and cultural participation by the working classes or a new degree of homogenization and bourgeois cultural hegemony. Richard Altick offers an ironic version of Dickens's notion in Victorian Studies in Scarlet (Reference Williams and Boston1970) where he likens enthusiasm for writing about murder to evangelicalism as two “great and useful social leveler[s]” (41–42). Crone, however, insists we understand the varied locales in which Punch shows occurred as evidence of class separation rather than integration. Divisions along class lines marked the consumption of a variety of other media as well. Waxwork exhibitions, which featured scenes of famous murders, were popular throughout the nineteenth century. Although this popularity crossed class boundaries, the exhibitions “were increasingly enjoyed within socially segregated spaces” (Crone 86). Established in 1835, Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors was a case in point. It courted well-to-do visitors while “working-class patronage was alternately prevented, discouraged, or made awkward” (Crone 89). The “Chamber of Horrors” staked an improbable claim to respectability by avoiding erotica and offering a tincture of education with guidebooks that introduced patrons “to important historical and contemporary figures” (Crone 87). Outside of Tussaud's, waxwork displays for working-class consumers on fairgrounds or in temporary shops offered more sexually titillating and gruesome fare with little “[pretension] to moral purpose or respectability” (Crone 89). As Crone shows, even the audience of melodrama, long mostly working-class, began to shift in the 1860s (at the moment sensation fiction brought the “literature of the kitchen” into the parlor). In that decade, which also witnessed increased censorship of stage violence, several theaters eliminated half-price tickets and performances starting at 9 p.m., features that had catered to working-class people's budgets and schedules.

When Richard Altick wrote that “the history of the mass reading audience is, in fact, the history of English democracy seen from a new angle,” he meant in part that a mass culture oriented towards the common reader emerged from the cauldron of the French Revolution, British Jacobinism, and post-war radicalism, and the radical press these spawned (English Common Reader 3). Thanks in large part to books discussed in this essay, we know a great deal more about radical print culture and the mark it left on the early Victorian period than we did at the turn of the millennium. This body of work shares three attributes which represent important new directions in Victorian studies. First, these works all give significant attention to periodicals and treat them in innovative fashions, considering the way this media structured discourse, the various genres which defined the field, the dynamic relation between different parts of the publishing market, and how serialization and other aspects of this context shaped literature. As the scope of Victorian periodicals is vast, much remains to be learned about them and their relationship to popular literature and to radicalism. In particular, more attention could be paid to the radical press's competitors for working-class readers, especially useful knowledge magazines and religious publications. Cross currents between less politically-topical fiction for the working classes and canonical writing also merits further study. Second, these books forcefully take up the question of class. They approach it, though, from very different perspectives, which leads to substantial disagreements over such central topics as whether class identifications mobilized people politically and the extent to which middle- and working-class reading overlapped or diverged. Finally, this scholarship represents a major shift away from Foucauldian-inflected accounts which depict the unescapable disciplinary context of Victorian culture and also from more pessimistic Marxist interpretations, whether along Gramscian or Althusserian lines. This new scholarship grounds itself instead in a tradition of social history which emphasizes the agency of ordinary people and the way they reformulate hegemonic values in various contexts. Awake to the ideological onslaught and ferocious repression which greeted working-class social movements, these books nevertheless document those movement's creative energy and the ways they profoundly altered the world of print and Victorian literature.