| The Author Who Outsold Dickens: The Life and Work of W H Ainsworth Contributor(s): Carver, Stephen (Author) |
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ISBN: 1526766442 ISBN-13: 9781526766441 Publisher: Pen and Sword History OUR PRICE: $26.96 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: March 2025 This item may be ordered no more than 25 days prior to its publication date of March 31, 2025 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | European - General - Literary Collections | European - General - History | Europe - Great Britain - General |
| Physical Information: 264 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |