Unjustly Neglected: Four Early 20th Century British Texts

BETWEEN 1870 AND 1893, the British Parliament passed a series of acts that created compulsory education in England and Wales for children between the ages of five and thirteen. Also known as the Forster Act, the Elementary Education Act of 1870 began a fundamental change in the market for fiction, growing a new mass readership that became part of the general British culture before the First World War. The growth of literacy, along with new and cheaper methods of publication, and the prior abolishment of the “tax on knowledge” (which taxed advertisements, paper, and newspapers) contributed to a boom in popular fiction. In this environment emerged original voices that experimented with form and themes, sometimes continuing Victorian sensibilities but often challenging them. In recent years, most of this development has been invisible because these texts have been out of print.

But in 2005 James Jenkins and Ryan Cagle founded a small, independent publishing house called Valancourt Books that began publishing “rare, neglected, and out-of-print fiction” (www.valancourtbooks.com). They took the name of their publishing house, Valancourt, from a comment by William Makepeace Thackeray in 1862 about the hero of Anne Radcliffe’s fourth novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho. Thackeray, while lamenting the rapid disappearance of memorable, popular fiction, asked:

“Valancourt? And who was he?” cry the young people. Valancourt, my dears, was the hero of one of the most famous romances which was ever published in this country. The beauty and elegance of Valancourt made your young grandmammas’ gentle hearts to beat with respectful sympathy. He and his glory have passed away. Ah, woe is me that the glory of novels should ever decay…. Inquire at Mudie’s, or the London Library, who asks for “The Mysteries of Udolpho” now? Have not even “The Mysteries of Paris” ceased to frighten? Alas! our best novels are but for a season….

(“On a peal of bells,” Roundabout Paper No. XXIV. Cornhill, September 1862)

In response to Thackeray’s lament, publisher Jenkins explains that Valancourt Books began publishing “works, mostly British, with a small smattering of American and others, from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries that we feel are unjustly neglected; these can be broadly classified as literary classics, gay interest, and speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, supernatural, and weird tales)” (email). Currently Valancourt Books is located in Richmond, Virginia, having moved in June 2013 from Kansas City, Missouri.

The most recognizable author among this group of four books is Mary Elizabeth Braddon, who continues the traditions of the Victorian sensation novel into the Edwardian era with Dead Love Has Chains (1907). Although Braddon is known primarily for her classic best sellers Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863), she went on in her career to write eighty-five books under her own name, including Thou Art the Man (1894), also published by Valancourt Books and also edited by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas. This new edition of Dead Love Has Chains includes notes (but no editorial information indicating the novel’s textual history) and a detailed introduction that contextualizes the novel as part of a discourse circulating in the early twentieth century on insanity. The introduction shows this novel as continuing the sensation novel traditions of mysteries and double identities. The plot rivals anything appearing on a modern soap opera: Lady Mary Harling, on an ocean voyage, meets seventeen-year-old Irene Thelliston, pregnant and unmarried, a young woman being sent home in disgrace. The older lady pities the girl and promises...