Douglas Jerrold: A Life (1803-1857) (review)

Douglas Jerrold (1803-57) was regarded by the mid-Victorians as part of a triumphant comic triumvirate. Now known only to the most committed of Victorian scholars, Jerrold was, in the 1840s and 1850s, regarded as the satirical equal of two of the most successful novelists of the period: Charles Dickens and W. M. Thackeray. He is a greatly underestimated literary figure, one to whom Michael Slater's richly detailed biography does ample justice. The son of strolling players, Jerrold started out in life as a boy-sailor on The Naumur, a ship captained by Jane Austen's younger brother Charles. In the early 1840s Jerrold became the driving force behind the newly established Punch, and in this role had a sometimes fraught relationship with Thackeray, the genteelly bred younger man apparently objecting to Jerrold's propensity to eat peas off his knife. A key player in Dickens's amateur dramatics troupe, and broadly sharing Dickens's social vision, Jerrold fell out with his illustrious friend over the issue of hanging: whilst Jerrold would countenance nothing less than abolition, the more famous novelist was willing to settle for the banning of public executions as an interim measure. A prolific playwright who made so little money from his theatrical endeavours that he sometimes ended up absconding to Boulogne to escape his creditors, Jerrold was imprisoned for debt. Ending his life as the highly successful editor of Lloyd's Weekly News, Jerrold, like Dickens, regarded his chief journalistic rival, George Reynolds, as a "ruffian," neither man admitting to a niggling frustration that the sensational style and content of Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper sold better than their own journalistic enterprises.

All these details about Jerrold's life, and many more, are put to the reader in a lucid and engaging way. But this is a biography that is much more than a sum of its parts. Much more, in fact, than a biography: Slater has in fact produced a cultural history of the theatre and the newspaper press, two of the key components of the popular and radical cultural landscape of the first half of the nineteenth century, in both of which Jerrold played a major role.

Jerrold's theatrical and journalistic career had its roots in the Regency period. Jerrold's early career as a printer's apprentice finds him in London during what E. P. Thompson has described as the heroic age of popular radicalism, the years between 1815 and 1820 that witnessed the Spa Fields riots, the Cato Street Conspiracy, Peterloo, and the Queen Caroline Affair. The dominant generic modes within which Jerrold worked both as a dramatist and as a journalist were melodrama and satire, cultural modes that dominated popular radical culture of the Regency period and that Jerrold would later transplant into his mid-Victorian writings. The inheritance of radical melodrama and satire is identifiable not only in Jerrold's Victorian writings, but in those of his better-known contemporaries, not least Dickens. Slater's book does valuable service in illuminating these popular and radical trajectories in nineteenth-century literary culture, trajectories that have until recently been relatively obscured by a critical preoccupation with the aesthetics of Romanticism and realism in the nineteenth century.

Jerrold set out as a young writer with determinedly theatrical aspirations, his first play performed as early as 1821 when he was a boy of eighteen. He enjoyed huge popular success with his nautical melodrama Black-Eyed Susan (1829) and, in the politically fraught year of the Reform Bill, The Rent Day (1832), written in response to the agricultural distress that propelled the Swing Riots. For all his success, Jerrold made very little money from his theatrical endeavours. Dramatists were badly rewarded in the first half of the nineteenth century: inflated salaries were paid to star performers on the stage and a great part of a theatre's income also had to be used to fund the spectacular kind of theatre (aquatic dramas, hippo-dramas, and so on) favoured by the...