Lemon, Mark. "The Literary Gentleman." February 1842.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Illustrious scribe !

whose vivid genius strays

‘Mid Drury’s stews to incubate her lays,

And in St. Giles’ slang conveys her tropes,

Wreathing the poet’s lines in hangmen’s ropes.

You who conceive ‘tis poetry to teach

The sad bravado of a dying speech,

Or, when possess’d with a sublimer mood,

Show “Jack o’Dandies” dancing upon blood!

Crush bones–bruise flesh–recount each festering sore–

Rake up the plague pit–write–and write in gore !

Or, when inspired to humanize mankind,

Where doth your soaring soul its subjects find ?

Not ‘mid the scenes that simple Goldsmith sought,

And found a theme to elevate his thought ;

But you, great scribe, more greedy of renown,

From Hounslow’s gibbet drag a hero down.

Embue his mind with virtue ; make him quote

Some moral truth, before he cuts a throat.

Then wash his hands, and–soaring o’er your craft–

Refresh the hero with the bloody draught ;

And, fearing lest the world should miss the act,

With noble zeal italicize the fact.

Or would you picture woman meek and pure,

By love and virtue tutor’d to endure,

With cunning skill you take felon’s trull,

Stuff her with sentiment, and scrunch her skull !

Oh ! would your crashing, smashing, mashing pen were mine,

That I could “scorch your eye-balls” with my words,

My Valentine!

 

 

Notes on the Text

 

Important Phrases from the Poem

 

 

Drury’s stews:  This phrase may be alluding to Drury Lane in London, which, during the 1840s, was in state of decline. Though the Royal Drury Lane Theater enjoyed success in the world of high culture prior to this period, prostitution, drinking, and other immoral behavior was rampant overran the “culture” of this area by the time this cartoon was published. In light of this cultural context, the Oxford English Dictionary records that the word “drury” once meant “illicit love” as late as the fifteenth century. Also, the word “stews” can also refer to drunkenness as well as prostitution (OED). The significance of this word in the context of the poem suggests that the sensationalist writer taps into the most corrupt parts of society for inspiration.

 

St. Giles’ slang: Another term for a cockney slang, which could hint that “The Literary Gentleman’s” speech would give him away as a common man.

 

Jack o’Dandies dancing upon blood: During the 1840s, dandies were considered to be solely concerned with clothing and fashion to a point of absurdity (OED). However, by joining the word “jack” to the phrase “dandies,” this phrase suggests a kind of everyman who thinks he is can be a part of high culture without the right accruements to win access amongst such society. The OED lists that “jack” could mean “a lad,” “a low-bred fellow,” and so forth. Hence, by using this term, the unidentified author of this poem may be subversively calling “The Literary Gentleman” of the cartoon a mere imposter who uses fancy clothes to disguise that he is really a pauper within society.

 

Goldsmith: This literary reference may be referencing the Irish playwright Oliver Goldsmith who became famous from the works “The Deserted Village,” “The Vicar of Wakefield,” and “She Stoops to Conquer.” In the poem, Goldsmith is called “simple” as if the poem’s speaker is contrasting “The Literary Gentleman” as “overdone” or, perhaps, even “convoluted.”

 

Hounslow’s gibbet: Hounslow is a town in England that dates back to the medieval period. During the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the town set up gallows as warnings for highwaymen. Gibbet is another word for gallows (OED).

 

the bloody draught: The OED notes that “draught” can mean to “make a sketch of” as well as “pull.” Given this definition, the poem’s text may be alluding to the idea that the writer must dig in horrific pits of knowledge in order to craft his tales.

 

Important Images/Words from the Cartoon

 

Hangman’s noose: As the Newgate novels were inspired first and foremost by the tales of criminals hanged at Newgate Prison, the hangman’s noose is perhaps the most key image to the cartoon’s message. Note that, in addition to the gallows set up on the writer’s desk, the newspaper on his desk that features the “Dying Speeches” of the condemned also has an illustration of the Newgate gallows itself just below the headline.

 

Skull: Beyond the obvious and important connotations of death, the skull hints at the Newgate novelists’ interests (as well as their Gothic contemporaries) in anatomy, particularly as it relates to murder. Scenes of violence in Newgate novels almost invariably indulge in technically precise and florid descriptions of the damage done to the victim.

 

Murder, robbery, burglary: The crimes for which most of the criminals in the Newgate Calendars were hung, as well as those which the characters in the Newgate novels typically commit. These were the “high ticket” items in terms of sensational crime, with the kind of visceral appeal that sold newspapers and magazines.

 

Gallows heroism: Ironically, gallows heroism is not a particularly common feature of Newgate novel characters; they tend to go to the noose with either stoicism or repentance. Nevertheless, it was the idea of a criminal who dies smiling and cheerful – filled with “gallows humor” – that inspired the hanged-man ballads that were among the precursors to the Newgate genre.

 

Gallus literaturae: In literal Latin, “literature about chickens.” Though the provenance is uncertain, several possibilities arise. It could be a pun on “gallows literature,” with the intent of mocking the high-literary pretensions of the authors; similarly, it could be an attempt to ascribe poor scholarship as well as literary ambition to those authors. It could be a mistake on the part of the cartoonist. Finally, it could be a reference to Gallic (i.e., French) literature, in which case it might represent a commentary on French authors such as Victor Hugo, who wrote Le Dernier jour d’un condamné (1829) to great critical acclaim and likely influenced Charles Dickens, among others. Hugo’s story is about a man condemned to die for an unspecified crime, and his thoughts on his last day before his death, and could be seen as related to the Newgate genre.

 

Book of Dying Speeches: Though the use of the dying speech may be seen as a traditionally Shakespearean trope in literature, sensationalist literature thrived on beginning or ending murderous scenes with a powerfully dramatic final speech. Just as the poem alludes to the darkly comic use of this literary convention, the dying speech, given by the impassioned murderer, was also a place of emotional and sensational climax for many sensational novels during the 1840s to 1860s in both England and America. See other works by William Gilmore Simms, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and even in Herman Melville’s infamous novel Pierre.

 

Commentary on the Text: "The Literary Gentleman" and Its Many Cultural Influences

 

Adam Thomas-Brashier, 8 April 2008

 

"The Literary Gentleman" and Newgate Calendar

 

The inclusion of the Newgate Calendar (lower right-hand corner) and the Annals of Crime (just left of the Calendar) in this image clearly identify the subject of this cartoon as the author of what were and are known as “Newgate novels,” an English literary genre that flourished briefly during the first half of the nineteenth century. The “genre” – for it really did not deserve the label, having only a single theme in common – consisted of novels that featured bloodthirsty criminals as major characters; more importantly, these novels made the criminals into characters who were, if not exactly sympathetic, often eloquent and intellectual defenders of the monstrous acts they inevitably performed. Almost without exception, the brutal murders and robberies they commit are justified in some fashion by the text or the characters themselves. As one can imagine, this kind of characterization was extremely controversial; perhaps also not surprisingly, it was also very popular.

 

The exact dates of the Newgate novels’ prominence vary according to scholar, but Keith Hollingsworth argues for 1830-1847, and most other scholars’ suggestions are quite similar. To be sure, the genre's most popular works were published between 1830 and 1840. The genre took its name, or rather was given it by its critics, from what were known as “Newgate Calendars,” compilations of criminal biographies that detailed the misdeeds of various ill-doers, particularly those who were hanged at Newgate Prison. According to Hollingsworth,

The primary right to the name of Newgate Calendar for a book of criminal lives seems to belong to a work of 1773, The Newgate Calendar, or, Malefactors’ Bloody Register. In five volumes, it was the largest that had yet appeared. Three years later, the Ordinary of Newgate, John Villete, produced a similar collection, Annals of Newgate. The two were unrivalled in the market for more than thirty years. (6)

 

 

Obviously, the partially obscured Newgate Calendar and the Annals of Crime in the cartoon are veiled references to these two works.

 

The most popular parts of the Newgate Calendars were their transcriptions of criminal confessions (taken by the chaplain, or “Ordinary,” of Newgate Prison, such as the John Villete mentioned by Hollingsworth) and the speeches to the crowd of the condemned individuals. It was from these elements that the Newgate authors drew their inspiration when they began to craft their well-spoken and often confessional criminal characters.

 

Leading Figures and Major Works

 

The Newgate novel, during its brief heyday, was an extremely popular genre of entertainment, and indeed some of the key elements of their construction did not disappear when the genre began to fade, but were merely reinvented to create the sensation novel and eventually even modern detective fiction. Despite the breadth of entries into the field, scholarly work on the Newgate novels tends to focus primarily on four authors: Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray.

 

 

Edward Bulwer-Lytton was perhaps the first of the Newgate novelists, achieving initial prominence in the genre with Paul Clifford (1830), a reform-minded story of a man with a criminal boyhood who eventually manages to alter his situation and redeem himself once crime is no longer his only means of survival and his only experience of the world. Bulwer-Lytton’s purpose, as with many other penal reformers of the time, was to argue that society should not blame criminals for circumstances that leave no option but a life beyond the law. In order to make his piece realistic, however, Bulwer-Lytton drew heavily on the Newgate Calendars of the time, in particular, the infamous Dick Durbin. (Paul Clifford is still remembered at least partially for its infamous opening phrase: “It was a dark and stormy night.”) Bulwer-Lytton followed the success of Paul Clifford with Eugene Aram in 1831, and the novel’s title character became the archetype for the sympathetic, eloquent, intelligent murderer that so disturbed the genre’s many critics. Aram’s crime is told, in a confessional flashback that further highlighted the novel’s technical debt to the Newgate Calendars, in such a way as to make the murder seem almost morally justifiable; the victim is in every way reprehensible, and Aram suggests that his rational judgment found the murder to be worthwhile. That Aram is ultimately found out, convicted, and hanged does not alter the novel’s apparent redemption of his misdeed, and raised great concerns among the novel’s critics. Eugene Aram was intensely popular, and – despite the similar elements in Paul Clifford – can be said to have truly begun the Newgate genre.

 

 

Harrison Ainsworth was the next major inheritor of the genre, producing two significant works: Rookwood (1834) and Sam Sheppard (1840). Rookwood featured the significant presence of Dick Durbin, arguably the most famous and sensational criminal of the eighteenth century. Durbin, though not in reality a major criminal figure, was nevertheless a character of some mythological standing in the early nineteenth century, a dashing antihero with a Robin Hood-like flair. Ainsworth picks up on and further embellishes these elements in his novel, rendering a common highwayman into a clever, witty, honorable (in his way) maverick, who provides much if not all of the novel’s engaging characterization. The later Sam Sheppard was also based on a famous eighteenth century criminal; unlike Rookwood, however, Sam Sheppard is the novel’s hero as well as its title character. Sheppard was a thief of little note but an escape artist of great renown; he escaped from Newgate itself twice, as well as from two other prisons. Ainsworth, in both these novels, creates likable, charming, clever antiheroes whose criminality is glossed over and whose exploits are cast in adventurous, exciting ways. Probably as a result of this, it was his novels that received the lion’s share of critical assault.

 

Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1837) was another reform or “social” novel in the tradition of Paul Clifford, but like Paul Clifford it also featured major characters who were ruthless criminals, some of whom are even redeemed over the course of the novel’s action. As with Eugene Aram, the novel lingers, with a certain horrified relish, over scenes of brutal murder and destruction, though these occur in the present rather than a revelatory flashback. (The lines in the poem above in which the author takes a "felon's trull, / stuff[s] her with sentiment, and scrunch[es] her skull" might well refer to the murder of Nancy by Sikes.) Many of the major villains, including the monstrous Sikes and the conniving Fagin, are allowed time in the novel to experience grief, regret, and a desire for repentance in the novel’s pages, and in fact the final scene between Fagin and Oliver takes place in Newgate Prison, on the night before Fagin’s hanging. Some arguments have been made for the idea that Fagin’s character was based on the real-life criminal Ikey Solomon; while I can find no references that specifically point to Solomon as a figure in the Newgate Calendars directly, his story was widely written up in pamphlets of the time, and the Newgate genre can be said to include not only those characters that were drawn from the Calendars, but who could have been.

 

Despite his prominent place in the genre, William Makepeace Thackeray considered his entrance into the field a failure, because he had originally intended to satirize the Newgate novel when he first published Catherine (1839). Like Ainsworth’s novels, Catherine is based on an historical figure, this time the adulteress and murderess Catherine Hayes, who was burned alive at the stake in 1726. Thackeray had a deep dislike for the ennobling of criminals, particularly those of Bulwer-Lytton (whom he despised) and Ainsworth; though Bulwer-Lytton never wrote another Newgate novel after Eugene Aram, Thackeray repeated attacked Bulwer-Lytton in his public writings throughout the 1830s. When Ainsworth began to publish Sam Sheppard, it appears that the release constituted the “last straw” for Thackeray. He began to publish a novel of his own, planning to feature both a character and a murder that would be completely without redeeming qualities and thus reveal the true depravity of the criminal state. (Interestingly, he did so under the nom de plume of Ikey Solomons Jr., which might have been an attack on Dickens as well.) Unfortunately, Thackeray did his job too well; not only did his satire go unnoticed by many, or too many took the satire as straight humor and sidestepped Thackeray’s message, but in Catherine Hayes Thackeray creates a fairly clever and even at times plucky antiheroine who greatly prefigures the later Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. Thackeray himself seems to have been seduced by the guilty pleasures of the Newgate genre.

 

 

Jennifer Fenton, 8 April 2008

 

Analysis of the Position and Significance of the Cartoon and Poem

 

The cartoon of "The Literary Gentleman" appears amongst an array of twelve other cartoons that poke fun at “unsuitable” persons within British society, such as the sniveling mother or the conniving lawyer. These cartoons are then meant to be caustic valentines that satirize the most ridiculous “professions” of society, for this cartoon appears in the February edition of Punch magazine. Thus, if the readers read this cartoon “laterally” as Deborah Wynne suggests in her work The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine, this particular cartoon is just one more opportunity to jeer at the morally bankrupt parts of the sensational writer’s profession.

 

Perhaps, what is the most interesting part of the set up of this cartoon is the fact that it plays with idea of whether or not sensational writers should be valued as “literary” persons rather than working class persons who write to simply appease the masses. For, the writer is indeed surrounded by books and an assortment of other materials to increase his knowledge within his craft; however, the writer has also accrued items that suggest immoral behavior like a hangman’s noose, a skull, daggers, and other kinds of weaponry. Also, the writer is given almost androgynous clothing in which he has a long flowery overcoat, pointy shoes, and loosely worn vest. This writer sports a haircut of dangling curls and with an intensely contemplative expression, he puffs on his pipe so much that clouds of smoke appear like howling faces over him.

 

The poem that accompanies the cartoon then digresses on the many “literary” attributes of the sensationalist writer. According to the poem, the writer revels in describing the goriest scenes of his text in the anticipation that such scenes will then titillate his readers. Also, based on the sardonic tone of the poem, the unidentified author seems to think that such writers are not only lowly writers within the political hierarchies of the literary world but also morally degenerates in society who promote corrupt behavior in order to sell books. Interestingly enough, the author of the poem is not identified. However, in John Timbs’ Characteristics of Eminent Men from 1872, the author is identified as Mr. Mark Lemon. In this book, Timbs lists various respectable people in society and commends them for their various contributions to the greater population. Mr. Lemon is indeed listed as one of these men due to Lemon’s perceptive abilities as an editor for Punch magazine from 1842 to 1870. Timbs comments that the poem “has in it a spice of Churchill’s muse; it needs no finger to tell where its withering satire is pointed” (26). Due to Lemon’s own standing in society, his commentary in the poem about what makes a writer and how he or she fits in the class ranking of Victorian England spills over with incredible significance due to the fact that class, in this case, plays a huge role in who is allowed to be deemed literary.

 

Searching For the Unnamed Sensationalist Writer

 

Another similar and striking part of the cartoon is the unknown identity of “The Literary Gentleman.” Despite the fact that the man depicted in this cartoon could be almost any male or even female sensational writer on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the unnamed writer looks and is described much like three writers that sprung up during the height of the sensationalist movement in both American and British literature. For instance, the writers closely resembles American sensational writer George Lippard in appearance. Compare the cartoon to these pictures of George Lippard from circa 1850-1854:

 

 

 

George Lippard became a successful writer prior to when these pictures were made. By the beginning of the 1840s, Lippard began publishing in various journals. In 1844, he published his infamous sensational novel The Quaker City; or the Monks of Monk Hall, which earned him instant success. Yet, like the lurid characters in his novels, Lippard was also notorious for a melodramatic lifestyle. In fact, he could be described much like the sensational writer of the Punch cartoon. In a recent article about Lippard’s literary career, Edward Pettit explains that “[a]t the peak of his fame in the late 1840s and early 1850s, Lippard strolled the city as a kind of Byronic hero. His black hair hung to his shoulders. He wore a blue velvet cape and carried a sword-cane. Lippard looked the part of a novel's dashing hero. When he married his wife, the couple scorned a church ceremony, choosing instead to wed by moonlight, on a rock overlooking Wissahickon Creek” (par. 6). Though the Punch cartoon did appear prior to Lippard’s literary success, a reader cannot help but wonder if Lippard may have modeled his own appearance after some of the androgynous and dramatic conceptions that both American and Britain had for the sensational writer.

 

The cartoon’s image of the sensational writer could also prefigure Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensationalist and comic character Sigismund Smith from The Doctor’s Wife. Braddon’s popularity arose during the height of the sensation novel’s popularity in the 1860s. Though the cartoon appeared nearly twenty years prior to Braddon’s fame, its cultural impact may have helped Braddon construct her own description sensationalist writer: Sigismund Smith. For instance, Braddon even states that “the terror of romancers [the sensational novel] in the fifty-second year of this present century; but the thing existed nevertheless in divers forms” (11). Perhaps, such “divers” forms appeared in the form of cartoons like the image above.

 

In Braddon’s novel, Sigismund Smith is described as a working class sort of man who can maneuver through society based on the connections of the more well to do persons around him. For instance, Smith writes in “weekly numbers” and dreams of writing “the archetype of his magnum opus [Braddon’s italics]” (11-12). Smith is able to aspire to such ideas due to his conversations with people of a greater station than him (such as Lord Roland in the novel) who indulge his literary dreams. However, though he is the son of an attorney, Smith also lives in filth; specifically, he lives as a boarder in a dirty apartment and appears, while at work, with “a smudge of ink upon the end of his nose, and very dirty wrist-bands” (10). In fact, Lyn Pykett notes that often sensational writers were of the middle class, yet they would novels derived from “penny magazines, street literature, and stage melodrama” (9). Smith’s physical appearance can be likened to the unnamed writer of the cartoon, for Smith too has curly hair. However, Smith differs from this writer for he does not have “a tumbled mass of raven hair” or “a long black-velvet dressing gown, and then tapering hands” that Braddon describes for an imagined sensation writer (13). Braddon even refers to this imagined writer as a kind of Byronic hero (13). Smith, in contrast, is just a meek gentleman. It is as if Braddon is suggesting that sensation writers could look like any person of any rank rather than how dramatic the earlier depiction suggests a writer who craves sensations might look like. This technique then obscures class or gendered distinctions between various writers. Despite this difference, Smith uses plots just as bloody as his Punch counterpart.

 

The subject matter of Smith’s writing is also filled with as much gore as the cartoon and poem allude to. Smith specifically writes about suicides, the cutting of throats, and “dumb girls” as well as other violent and suggestive subjects (12). In fact, a line in the above poem criticizes the depicted writer for having characters “quote some moral truth, before he cuts a throat” (line 19). The titles of Smith’s work also suggest a kind of sensational appetite; some of them include The Smuggler’s Bride, Lilia the Deserted, Colonel Montefiasco, or the Brand upon the Shoulder-blade, and other colorful titles. Based on the bulk of Smith’s work, he also seems to shape his tales based on plots guaranteed to cause some sort of sensational feeling rather than, perhaps, focusing on strategies for syntax or classical allusion. As noted, this literary technique seems to reflect the suggestive practices of “The Literary Gentleman.” The speaker of the poem criticizes such a technique when he or she denigrates “[y]ou [the depicted writer] who conceive ‘tis poetry to teach, [t]he sad bravado of a dying speech” (ll. 6-7). For this speaker, “literary” work cannot come out of scenes of blood and gore. Interestingly, the poem ignores Braddon’s sentiment that such violent and sensational topics can be found in other classical genres, like the revenge tragedies of Seneca, Euripedes and even Shakespeare. Again, the speaker must divide between absolutes; in this case, he or she classifies the work of “the literary gentleman” as weak and inartistic. However, given the many parts of this genre that cross over into other fictions and images, a critic may find it harder to pigeon-hold the literary merit of the depicted author as merely a working class tradesman with tastes for the dirty and trashy.

There are numerous writers that this cartoon could be referencing. The latter two examples are meant to be further illustrations of how much the ideology behind this Punch cartoon can be mirrored in other literary works of the time. However, during the 1840s, other genres of literature, such as the Newgate Calender, seem to be a source for Punch’s depicted literary gentleman.

 

“The Literary Gentleman” and The Sensation Novel

 

As noted, the above cartoon and poem was published in 1842. By the 1860s in Britain, a fully developed ideology of the sensational writer was molded. According to Pykett, the sensational novel of this period had many features, but some of the more important ones include the plots filled with various amounts of “duplicity, deception, disguise, the persecution and/or seduction of a young woman, intrigue, jealousy, and adultery;” also, many of these novels dealt with heinous crimes like “illegal incarceration (usually of a young woman), fraud, forgery (often of a will), blackmail and bigamy,” as well murder in a domestic setting (4). Pykett sees this literary form as less of a pure genre and more as a mixture of different influences and themes aimed at creating some kind of uncommon emotional response (4). In the 1860s, Punch mirrored this assertion by publishing a mock-cartoon that categorized this genre as being “‘devoted to the Harrowing of the Mind, making the Flesh Creep […] Giving Shocks to the Nervous System, Destroying Conventional Moralities, and generally Unfitting the Public for the Prosaic Avocations of Life” (Pykett 3). The cartoon of “The Literary Gentleman” seems to further illustrate these points though it appears before this statement. Hence, given how early this image appears within this literary movement, its powerful depiction seems to be setting up what will later be norms in the sensational genre by producing a new kind of framework for judging sensation in a public forum.

 

Sensation novel writers tend to be depicted in extremely feminized terms. George Lippard, though married to a woman, wore his hair in long curls, a cultural trend often associated with women’s fashion. In The Doctor’s Wife, Smith tends to hang around women and easily speak to them, especially in the case of the lead character Isabel. When gazing at the image above, the writer too has long dark curls as well as a long robe and pointy shoes. Though the speaker of poem does not critique the dress of “The Literary Gentleman,” the speaker does emphasize the use of melodramatic language, a kind of language often associated with female writers in 1860s Britain. For instance, Winifred Hughes writes that “[e]ven the sensation novels written by men focus on the feminine point of view” (30). Conjointly, the image of a mixed gender hints towards a kind of androgyny, as if implying that the writer’s gender is unsettling just as the writer’s “literariness” is also unnervingly questionable. Pykett notes that often this genre worked to mix normative tropes with terrifying images (4). Given this idea, the lack of a concrete gender in this image may allude to the darker themes that “The Literary Gentleman” supposedly manipulates.

 

Also, sensational writers commonly had women who could easily be degraded by the evils of society. As mentioned, the seduction of a woman tended to be a major crime in these novels. Smith even states: “[t]he penny public likes dumb girls” (12). Lippard too begins his novel with a preface that cautions against the sin of seduction. This convention spookily relates to the poems’ lines: “Or would you picture woman meek and pure, By love and virtue tutor’d to endure, With cunning skill you take felon’s trull, Stuff her with sentiment, and scrunch her skull!” (ll. 24-27). These lines connote that this genre depends on the depiction of flat female characters that are easy to kill. Or, in the sensational genre, these women can appear as femme fatales. Commenting on this phenomenon, Anna Maria Jones suggests that “(f)allen women, no matter how sympathetically rendered or how ultimately repentant, rarely come to good ends” (44). It seems that by the advent of the sensation novel, women, who are pure and innocent, cannot be easily killed off like the poem suggests. This kind of feminine shift seems to occur somewhere between this genre between the 1840s and 1860s. Commenting on this change in Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Ann Cvetkovich decides that “[t]he fantasy of the beautiful woman as evil has its dividends for men as well as men” (49). Cvetkovich’s comment seems to suggest that the image of fallen woman served as an opportunity for artistic rendering for both female and male writers. Thus, the only commonality between the sensational woman of the 1840s and the 1860s does not lie in ethics, but in their premature and often bloody deaths constructed through a kind of stylized feminine language.

 

All of these parts of the sensation novel create a major historical link between what “The Literary Gentleman’s” crafts and what sensation novel writers will later craft. Due to how closely this gentleman in image and texts resembles the genre of the sensation novel, a reader can read each “text” as counterparts to social, class and gender issues of the rising Victorian period in British literature. Once again, the features of this cartoon point at cultural forces beyond its perimeters while also creating a new space for discussion of what constitutes as “real” literature.

 

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Roscoe, William Caldwell. “From ‘W. M. Thackeray, Artist and Moralist.’” Victorian Criticism of the Novel. Ed. Edwin M. Eigner and George J. Worth. Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press, 1985. 119-147.

 

 “Thackeray, William Makepeace." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 4 Apr 2008 <http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-9071898>.

 

Timbs, John. Characteristics of Eminent Men. Oxford, 1872.

 

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

 

Tyson, Nancy Jane.  Eugene Aram: Literary History and Typology of the Scholar-Criminal.  Hamden, CN: Archon, 1983.

 

 ---. “Thackeray and Bulwer: Between the Lines in Barry Lyndon.” English Language Notes 27.2 (1989): 53-56.

 

Victorian Sensations: Essays On A Scandalous Genre. Eds. Fantina, Richard and Kimberly Harrison. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.

 

Wynne, Deborah. The Sensational Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

 

 

 

Project Group Members

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Member Name	! University	! Course
Jennifer Fenton	UMKC	ENG 5555D
Adam Thomas-Brashier	UMKC	ENG 5555D

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Project Completed:

Spring 2008

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