Stephen Carver, The Author who outsold Dickens The
Life and Works of W. H. Ainsworth (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2020), ISBN
9781526720696, pp. 255, hardback, £25.
‘In the history of English literature, William
Harrison Ainsworth is the national treasure that most people haven’t heard of’.
So states Stephen Carver in the prologue to this fascinating book. The reader
can gather from the first sentence that the style is somewhat informal, and
none the worse for that, as it is aimed at a broad readership, rather than an
academic library, which was also true of his subject’s writings.
The eye-catching title is true and refers particularly
to Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard, published in 1839, which for a time was
more popular than Dickens’s Oliver Twist. The eponymous hero is
portrayed as a colourful rogue who effected some notorious escapes from
confinement in Newgate Prison. Indeed, the real Sheppard became an early
celebrity, with distinguished artists being admitted to his cell to capture his
likeness. Ainsworth’s novel was also adapted for stage performance with the
addition of song and dance numbers. The success of Jack Sheppard provoked
a feeding frenzy among the critical fraternity, who, led by Dickens’s friend
and biographer, John Forster, were queuing up to take the moral high ground and
heap opprobrium upon the author. Dickens himself escaped comparatively
unscathed, distancing himself, at least publicly, from the controversy. As
carver puts it, Boz ‘meanwhile kept his head down and his powder dry’,
eventually emerging, not to castigate Ainsworth but to defend his own work as
social realism, rather than criminal romance. Carver compares and contrasts the
two rival authors throughout the book, but is particularly effective in the
early chapters, covering the Manchester author at the height of his popularity.
There have been two major biographies of Ainsworth,
almost a century apart, one By S. M. Ellis (1911) and the other in 2003, by the
author of the present book. Carver does draw quite heavily upon his earlier
work, but with a number of significant differences. One thing the two works
have in common, though, is a persistent reference to R. H. Horne, a fairly
insignificant literary character and adventurer, who produced a pocket-sized
squib in 1844, in which he characterised Ainsworth’s novels as ‘generally dull,
except when they are revolting’, which Carver quotes, among others in the same
vein, to support his argument. Ellis, Ainsworth’s original biographer,
Edwardian gentleman that he was, declined to comment, merely to say that Ainsworth’s
work was ‘most unfairly criticized’ (William Harrison Ainsworth and his
Friends vol. ii, p. 69) The central thesis of the present book can be taken
from a blog written by the author in February, 2020 entitled ‘How the “Newgate
Controversy” destroyed Dickens’ Greatest Rival’, which argues the point very
concisely.
Ainsworth’s enormous early popularity was due in large
measure to two memorable characters: Dick Turpin who appears in the earlier Rookwood,
with the section on Turpin’s (fictitious) ride to York being so popular it was
also published separately, and Jack Sheppard. In between these two, the more
scholarly and thoroughly-researched Crichton was published to a lukewarm
reception. Carver opines; ‘Crichton himself was too remote, clean-cut, perfect
and invulnerable to appeal to fans of Dick Turpin. The novel therefore
ultimately failed to achieve the popular appeal of its predecessor, largely by
being too clever for its own good’
When Ainsworth was working on Jack Sheppard, his
(by then estranged) wife Fanny died, aged only 34, after 12 years of marriage.
In an astute piece of literary observation, Carver points out that the passage
Ainsworth was working on when he received the news, could be read as a rueful
piece of autobiography: he begins Epoch 2 of Jack Sheppard, which is set
twelve years after the first, as follows:
Twelve years ago! It is
an awful retrospect. Dare we look back upon the darkened vista and in
imagination, retrace the path we have trod … has not the loved one been
estranged by doubt, or snatched from us by the cold hand of death?
He continues in this vein for several paragraphs. The
point is well made.
In Chapter 9, we meet the bold statement, that ‘Jack Sheppard showed its author at the
top of his game: The scholarship of Crichton was still there, in the vivid
evocation of Georgian London, but now in balance with a crisply paced and
tightly plotted adventure; more realistic and emotionally deep than Rookwood,
while retaining some sensational Gothic features.’ Carver’s style is similarly
fast moving and he is not afraid of using down-to-earth language to make his
points. This is fine, except they can sometimes be confusing or ambiguous. For
example, the use of the word ‘flogging’, in its modern sense of selling, crops
up here and there, though in its original meaning it would not be out of place
in the grisly world of Ainsworth’s imagination. This style can occasionally be
confusing, for example: ‘Ainsworth loved her back’, but the book is
immaculately researched beneath this sometimes-casual throwaway style.
Carver correctly classifies the Negate novels as
‘popular as opposed to literary culture … dandy highwaymen rode on in penny
magazines and cheap theatres until revived by other means as pirates in
Stevenson’s Treasure Island, suggesting, perhaps, that if only Jack Sheppard
had been written earlier or later than it was, then it would not have attracted
the high Victorian moral censure.’ This dichotomy between popular culture and
the ‘serious’ social commentary which Dickens claimed as his moral high ground
surely is the nub of the problem, and the critics of the time created a lot of
heat by failing to recognise a harmless piece of entertainment for what it
undoubtedly was. His place in literary history is as the creator of popular Picaresque
heroes, as had Fielding and Smollett before him, and countless others after. He
was eventually hailed as the English Victor Hugo, which Carver explains as ‘an
indication of the vacuum left by Scott’.
However, the extent to which Ainsworth’s career
suffered from the critical onslaught is debatable. Carver notes that work
continued at a blistering pace:
… despite the Jack
Sheppard furore, Ainsworth was now at his creative zenith. January 1840 saw
the commencement of two original serials. Guy Fawkes and the Tower of
London, which were to be written and run concurrently throughout the year
while he continued to edit Bentley’s Miscellany.
The following
year Ainsworth resigned from the Miscellany, after a dispute with the
publisher over fees and writing commitments, and began his own journal, Ainsworth’s
Magazine in 1842. Ainsworth’s restraint in the face of the public
lambasting of his work was admirable. His reaction was muted to say the least,
except for a deserved take-down of Horne in Ainsworth’s Magazine. Carver
notes that ‘Ainsworth had by now learned the hard way that the best way to
profit by his writing was to sell it himself’. It is important to consider Ainsworth’s
activity as a writer and editor of magazines, in addition to his work as a
novelist, because often the two were inextricably linked, the one serialising
the other. Dickens of course did something similar in his Household Words
and All the Year Round journals. We get a good account here of Ainsworth’s
speculation in the magazine publishing business, for example, his rather
careless acquisition of Bentley’s Miscellany, which he ran alongside his
New Monthly Magazine, quietly seeing off his eponymous publication.
Following the trajectory of Ainsworth’s career, Carver
notes that The Lancashire Witches (1849, a full 10 years after Jack
Sheppard) was ‘his last major national success and marks the end of his
literary celebrity’. In a short but well-argued chapter, this novel is analysed
and seeds of ‘Victorian feminism’, and, surprisingly, modernism are found,
alongside the more familiar gothic and historical traits. Furthermore: ‘his own
position as a literary outsider might also be read allegorically in the pages
of this book’. But towards the end of this chapter, the real reason for
Ainsworth’s fall from favour and eventual decline, rather than critical excoriation,
becomes apparent.
Ainsworth, like his
beloved highwaymen, seems suddenly out of time and place; the last of a line, a
fantasist in an age of fact and the last of the original English Gothic
novelists, soon to be pensioned off by Palmerston … The Lancashire Witches
was to be Ainsworth’s last major national success and marks the end of his
literary celebrity, at least in the south of England.
The reference to Palmerston was to the fact that in
1856, the prime minister awarded a Civil List Pension of £100 per annum to the
struggling novelist.
The chapter entitled ‘The End of an Era’ charts
Ainsworth’s decline in popularity, in the face of changing tastes. The later
novels by the indefatigable author are romped through at a brisk pace, taking
in that group of ‘Lancashire novels’ set in that county, including the
semi-autobiographical Mervyn Clitheroe, (described here as ‘Ainsworth’s David
Copperfield’) which in 1851, failed to excite the public. This was, as
Carver puts it: ‘in commercial if not critical terms, his first real flop’,
which ‘pulled Ainsworth back into the clutches of the historical romance, at a
time when he appeared, along with his contemporaries, to be breaking into a new
creative area’. The final chapter, The Lancashire Novelist, covers the time when
Ainsworth had fallen into relative obscurity and was honoured by his native
city in the form of a civic dinner,
hosted by Thomas Baker, the Mayor of Manchester. This took place in 1881, at
the Town Hall, with ‘the great and good of Manchester, old friends, writers and
journalists’, most importantly including James Crossley, his lifelong friend
and provider of source material for many if not most of the novels. As Carver
succinctly states, ‘Crossley did the history, Ainsworth the creative writing’
The following year, the novelist died. The concluding
chapter: ‘L’envoi’ opens thus: ‘Failure is, of course always more interesting
than success’, though Ainsworth had a good share of both. He was not a wealthy
man when he died, but there were a number of factors involved in his decline.
He was a victim of changes in literary fashion, ‘as public tastes moved on’ and
many other novelists have suffered the same fate: who now reads G.P.R. James,
or Edward Bulwer-Lytton? However, Carver tends to emphasise the Newgate
Controversy over all other factors in Ainsworth’s declining career. He
summarises his argument as follows:
Throughout his life, the
memory of the Newgate Controversy allowed increasingly stiff Victorian Critics
to exclude Ainsworth from a literary history that he helped to build. True, his
novels were not great literature, but they commanded a massive influence on
popular and literary narratives, both in fiction and more importantly in
legend. And at his best, Ainsworth’s storytelling could be magical; at his
worst, he was usually fun to read.
This is a fitting epitaph and a good summary of
Ainsworth’s literary and historical value. Many critics, both contemporary and
more recent have fallen into the trap of over-estimating the author’s
seriousness and moral intent. Ainsworth himself pointed out this
misunderstanding when he said in his Town Hall speech: ‘I will freely confess
[I] had, throughout, an eye rather to the reader’s amusement than to his
edification.’
The publishers (Pen & Sword) have done their
author proud in the quality of production, with a fine set of illustrations
taking up 14 pages in the centre of the book. A selection of portraits (many by
Ainsworth’s friend Daniel Maclise), plates from some of the novels (mostly by
Cruikshank) plus photographs, portraits and line drawings of Ainsworth and his
associates. There is no doubt that the book is academically sound, and there is
no doubt that Stephen Carver, like Ainsworth, has one eye on a wider
readership. And why not? Carver is to be thanked for keeping his author in the
public consciousness, and pointing out that William Harrison Ainsworth despite
the vicissitudes of his career, played a singular role in the development of
English literature in the nineteenth century.
STEVE COLLINS
