The Author Who Outsold Dickens : The Life and Work of W H Ainsworth by Stephen Carver

Publisher: Pen & Sword
RRP: £25
ISBN: 9781526747433


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.

Highlights

• A new biography of an unjustly neglected Victorian novelist, with original research

drawing on his unpublished correspondence, and his work as both a journalist and a
novelist.

• An accessible study of the rise of the modern English novel, from the 18th century

gothic romance to Victorian realism.

• Includes rare illustrations from Ainsworth’s serial romances by George Cruikshank,

Hablot K. Browne (‘Phiz’) and Sir John Gilbert, and early sketches by Daniel Maclise.

• Explores the Newgate Controversy in context: Its 18th Century antecedents, the

politics of rebellion, and the schism it created between Ainsworth and Dickens.

• Demonstrates how Ainsworth’s historical fiction invented myths that became so

ingrained in the British psyche that they are nowadays unproblematically considered
to be true stories.

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