The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People, 1790-1860 (review)

The basic premise of Ian Haywood's The Revolution in Popular Literature is implied by its punny title: that the (r)evolution of popular literature in the Romantic and Victorian periods was driven and shaped by the association of popular literature with radical political reform and the threat of revolution. Haywood thus envisions this literature as developing dialogically out of the contest between radicals bent on transforming the British political system and liberals and conservatives equally determined to stave off—or at least control—that process by "eradicat[ing], marginalis[ing] or regulat[ing] 'cheap' literature and the radicalised common reader" (4).

The literary manifestations and results of this struggle were a diverse array of new genres, textual strategies, and publishing formats—from the political Socratic dialogue and "pig's meat" miscellany to the female-authored didactic tale, the "family library," and the journal of popular progress. Haywood does an impressive job of carefully tracing the ways in which each of these emerged out of the contingencies of a particular moment only to be later appropriated, adapted, and subverted by individuals on both sides of the evolving battle for the hearts and minds of the common reader.

As Haywood demonstrates, however, questions about whether and how literature and politics did and should engage hearts (and bodies), on the one hand, and minds, on the other, were fundamental to the battles waged over, in, and through popular literature. One of his most original and potentially contentious arguments is that the "real challenge posed by . . . the radical tradition"—from Thomas Paine to George W. M. Reynolds—"was the yoking together of radical political analysis, popular enlightenment or 'useful knowledge' and literary pleasure" and, more generally, of reading and other forms of political activism (2). Conversely, Haywood argues, the popular literary campaigns of anti-radicals—from Hannah More to John Cassell and Charles Dickens—aimed to undo that synthesis, offering up versions of "enlightenment" and "improvement" and encouraging reading practices purged of "the corrupting sensationalism of radical politics" (105). Haywood's most original readings thus emphasize the precise ways in which particular radical texts and techniques envision and achieve that synthesis, evoking and "fus[ing] a range of intellectual and sensuous pleasures" (113). Collectively, these readings demonstrate that the overtly rationalist and radical literature of the Romantic era—from Paine's Rights of Man (1791–92) to the cheap miscellanies of Daniel Isaac Eaton and Thomas Spence—is more sensationalistic and carnivalesque than we have previously appreciated, while the obviously sensationalistic popular literature of the Victorian age—specifically, the work of Edward Lloyd and Reynolds—is more radical, rationalist, and respectable.

Divided into three chronologically distinct sections, the book begins with the 1790s. The first three chapters explore the emergence of, and contestation over, newly politicized notions of both the common reader and popular literature; they consider the work of "gentlemen reformers" from Joseph Priestley and Major John Cartwright to William Godwin and Samuel Coleridge, as well as Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Paine's Rights of Man, the cheap miscellanies of Eaton and Spence, and More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98). Turning to "the period between the repression of radicalism . . . and the emergence of Chartism" (6), chapters 4 and 5 examine both the "reconstitut[ion] and remobilis[ation]" of "the cultural forces of anti-radicalism"—via More's revised and new tracts, the Six Acts, the cheap book campaigns of Charles Knight and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, the penny magazines of William Chambers and Charles Knight, and Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34)—and the "merging of the 'jacobin' periodical tradition" with "paradigmatic new forms of popular cultural pleasure" (6) through the radical weeklies of William Cobbett and John Wooler, the unstamped periodicals and "cheap libraries" developed in the wake of the Six Acts, and (most interestingly) Richard...