
Les Misérables
Sally Minogue looks at Victor Hugo’s novel and Andrew Davies’ adaptation for BBC Television
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Feb
04
Feb
07
When considering an author as culturally monolithic as
Charles Dickens, it’s easy to forget that he wasn’t born the national author,
anymore than Shakespeare was. As a young journalist in the early-1830s,
although already possessed of considerable talent and ambition, he was just
another freelance writer in the Darwinian world of London publishing. As a
court reporter, Dickens covered debates in the Commons as well as following
election campaigns around the country and reporting on them for the Morning Chronicle. These travels became
the bases for a series of ‘sketches’ of everyday life in several periodicals,
written under the pseudonym ‘Boz’. And the rest is history, as they say. John
Macrone published Sketches by ‘Boz’
to considerable popular and critical acclaim in 1836, Chapman and Hall offered
Dickens the humorous sporting serial that became The Pickwick Papers, another hit; he assumed the editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany and began
serialising Oliver Twist, arguably
one of the most iconic English novels of the 19th century, multiply
adapted for stage and screen. In short, Dickens’ rise was meteoric. Or was it?
By the mid-1830s, Dickens’ star was
undoubtedly in ascendance, but since the death of Sir Walter Scott in 1832, no
obvious successor to the throne of English letters had yet been crowned,
although the smart money was on a colourful historical novelist from Manchester
called William Harrison Ainsworth, closely followed by the radical Whig MP
Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Both authors were hugely popular in the 1830s and both
were conceptually linked through the development of what came to be known among
reviewers as the ‘Newgate’ novel. As the term implies, the heroes of these
novels were criminals, often lifted from the pages of Newgate Calendars, lurid
accounts of crimes, trials and executions named after the infamous prison.
Lytton had originally
started writing to support a young family after his aristocratic mother stopped
his allowance because she did not approve of his chosen bride, Rosina Doyle
Wheeler, the daughter of the Irish feminist Anna Wheeler. His breakthrough
novel was Pelham: or The Adventures of a
Gentleman (1828), a fashionable or ‘silver fork’ novel about the dandy
lifestyle, social climbing and the philosophy of taste which kept readers and
reviewers guessing which characters were based on real public figures. Lytton
was adept at a variety of popular genres, including historical and gothic
romance, and in 1830 published a highly political and redemptive tale of a
fictional Georgian highwayman, Paul
Clifford. The title character was something an amalgam of several real
Newgate calendar villains and the brooding Romantic hero of Friedrich Schiller’s
1781 play The Robbers (Die Räuber), Karl von Moor. In the
novel, Clifford is imprisoned as a boy for an offence he did not commit.
Inside, he mixes with hardened criminals and emerges into the world apprenticed
in crime and ready to use these skills to survive, later explaining that, ‘I come into the world friendless and poor – I find a
body of laws hostile to the friendless to the poor! To those laws hostile to
me, then, I acknowledge hostility in my turn. Between us are the conditions of
war’ (Bulwer-Lytton, 1865: 219).
Through
his mouthpiece, despite a footnote stating that these sentiments are those of
character not author, Lytton is craftily paraphrasing the political philosopher
William Godwin, who in his Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice had written that:
The
superiority of the rich, being thus unmercifully exercised, must inevitably
expose them to reprisals; and the poor man will be induced to regard the state
of society as a state of war, an unjust combination, not for protecting every
man in his rights and securing to him the means of existence, but for
engrossing all its advantages to a few favoured individuals and reserving for
the portion of the rest want, dependence and misery (Godwin: 1993, 90).
In a preface to the 1840
edition of Paul Clifford, Lytton
confessed that his novel was ‘a loud cry to society to mend the circumstance –
to redeem the victim. It is an appeal from Humanity to Law’ (Bulwer-Lytton:
1865, x). A powerful novel in its own day, Paul
Clifford is now only remembered, if it is remembered at all, for it’s
opening line, which begins ‘It was a dark and stormy night’, but in moving
beyond the picaresque tradition into recent English history and political
allegory, spiced up with a bit of melodrama and adventure, Lytton had essential
created the so-called Newgate novel, the modern criminal romance.
Lytton followed Paul
Clifford with another exploration of guilt and the moral conflict between
violence and visionary ideals, Eugene Aram
(1832), this time based on a real eighteenth century murderer. The original
Eugene Aram was a schoolmaster of humble origins from Yorkshire who had taught
himself Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Aramaic and Arabic. In 1744, while Aram was
living and working in Knaresborough, a close friend and business associate
called Daniel Clarke disappeared after obtaining a considerable quantity of
goods on account from local tradesmen. Some of this produce was found on Aram’s
property, but there was not enough evidence to link him either with Clarke’s
fraud or his disappearance. Nonetheless, Aram thought it prudent to leave
Yorkshire (and his wife), and after a stint in London he ended up teaching at
King’s Lynn Grammar, where he started writing a book entitled A Comparative Lexicon of the English, Latin,
Greek, Hebrew and Celtic Languages. With his ground-breaking theory of the Indo-European
origins of the Celtic languages, Arum could have been a major etymologist, his
research pre-dating that of J.C. Pritchard’s Eastern Origin of the Celtic Traditions by decades. Instead, a
skeleton believed to be that of Daniel Clarke was unearthed in a cave outside
Knaresborough in 1758 and suspicion once again fell on Aram. He was arrested
and tried, conducting a spirited defence on his own behalf against the
fallibility of circumstantial evidence. Convicted and condemned, Aram finally
confessed, his motive being an affair between Clarke and his wife. He was
hanged at Knavesmire (‘York’s Tyburn’) on August 16, 1759.
Aram’s duality as a brilliant scholar and homicidal
cuckold was a rich source for writers, and in addition to appearing in numerous
Newgate calendars (his story ideally fitting the chapbook model of sensational
violence and morality tale), he had been the subject of Thomas Hood’s ballad The Dream of Eugene Aram, published in
his annual, The Gem, in 1829. In the
poem, Aram relates his troubling dream of a murder to a schoolboy before his
arrest and the revelation that the crime was his own. Hood presents Aram as a
tormented, conflicted and guilt-ridden man who is both thoughtful and
articulate. The poem was immensely popular and was reprinted in a slim volume
of its own by Charles Tilt in 1831, the year before Lytton’s novel was
published. Interest in the case was reopened, and the opportunistic Lytton was
quick to capitalise. This time there was no call for social reform. Instead,
Lytton turned a real killer into a broadly sympathetic protagonist and
attempted a deeply psychological character study, making Aram a Faustian seeker
after knowledge laid low by poverty and foreshadowing Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov,
also making use of the codes of gothic romance as had William Godwin in Caleb Williams. As with Paul Clifford, Lytton used footnotes to
distance himself from his hero, but whether by accident or design his narrative
voice can be read as once more siding with a criminal.
Although Eugene
Aram garnered a massive readership, critical opinion was more divided. Regency
icons like Harriette Wilson and Pierce Egan loved it, while the Athenæum hailed the book as a work of
genius which probably should not have been written, and the Spectator reminded its readers that
Bulwer’s novel was closer to Byron’s Manfred
than the Newgate Calendars. William Maginn, who Lytton had caricatured in Paul Clifford, unsurprisingly took the
most strident view among the voices of disapproval, writing in Fraser’s Magazine that, ‘We dislike
altogether this awakening sympathy with interesting criminals, and wasting
sensibilities on the scaffold and the gaol. It is a modern, a depraved, a
corrupting taste’. He further suggests, citing copy-cat murders for profit
supposedly inspired by Burke and Hare, that a criminal romance like Eugene Aram may similarly incite
violence, because the author ‘little dreams of the lurking demons he may thus
arouse’ (Maginn: 1832, 112).
Perhaps paradoxically, the next Newgate novelist was,
like Maginn, one of the founding ‘Fraserians’. William Harrison Ainsworth was
the son of a Manchester lawyer who had been publishing in Regency journals since
the age of sixteen, much preferring literature to the law, despite his father’s
wishes. He had moved to London under the patronage of Charles Lamb in 1825,
married and set himself up as a writer, publisher and bookseller after passing
the bar. By 1830, he had three books under his belt – a collection of poems, an
anthology of essays and short stories, and a historical novel written in
collaboration with an old school friend which had caught the attention of Sir
Walter Scott, though not for the best of reasons (Scott thought him an
‘imitator’). But despite cutting quite a dash in the small world of literary
London, he had yet to make that much of a splash as an author, and with a
growing family he was desperate for money and had begrudgingly returned to
legal practice. Writing around the day job, he produced a jaunty gothic
adventure entitled Rookwood: A Romance,
which was published by Richard Bentley in three volumes in 1834.
Rookwood has a
Cain and Abel motif, as two brothers, one legitimate and one not, battle over an
inheritance and the same girl against a backdrop of plots, counter-plots,
supernatural events, ill-omens and ancient prophecy. There are some
similarities to the plot of Scott’s novel Saint
Ronan’s Well (1823), and the influences of revenge tragedy and the
eighteenth century gothic novel abound. What makes Rookwood nonetheless unique was the inclusion of the Georgian
highwayman Dick Turpin as, along with the rival half-brothers, a point of view
character. Despite their political differences (like Maginn, Ainsworth was a
Tory), the young novelist admired Lytton and had taken a leaf out of his book
by fictionalising a notorious criminal. ‘Dauntless Dick’, he later admitted,
had also been a hero since boyhood, when his father had thrilled him and his
brother with tales of the daring outlaw. Perhaps because of these childhood
associations, Ainsworth made explicit what Lytton had been accused of in both Paul Clifford and Eugene Aram, and positively romanticised criminality, writing: ‘Look
at a highwayman mounted on his flying steed, with his pistols in his holsters,
and his mask upon his face. What can be a more gallant sight? England, sir, has
reason to be proud of her highwaymen’ (Ainsworth, Rookwood: 1880, 52). The novel was further enlivened by vivid
illustrations by George Cruikshank, the use of ‘Flash’ (underworld slang), a
band of gypsy outlaws, and thirty original comic songs and morbid ballads, many
of which celebrated illegal behaviour; the most popular, ‘Jerry Juniper’s
Chant’, having a chorus that went ‘Nix my dolly pals, fake away’, which meant
‘Never mind, mates, carry on stealing!’
Rookwood
was an overnight sensation, catapulting its young author onto the literary
A-list and turning the renewed public interest in Georgian outlaws inaugurated
by Lytton into a full-on fashionable craze that bridged the social classes. As
far as Ainsworth’s massive audience was concerned, Turpin was the hero of Rookwood, to the extent that the section
entitled ‘The Ride to York’ that focuses entirely upon him was often
republished separately, while many of the Turpin legends (like the famous
overnight ride to York to establish an alibi) were actually invented by
Ainsworth in the pages of his book, the original Dick Turpin being an extremely
nasty piece of work, none too bright and not at all gallant. With Scott two
years dead, Lytton making too many political enemies, and Dickens still a
journalist, some reviewers dubbed Ainsworth ‘the English Victor Hugo’.
Critical acclaim was virtually unanimous – even Thackeray
praised the novel – with only John Forster (destined to become Dickens’ closest
friend and biographer), going against the trend in an Examiner editorial, in which he wrote:
Turpin, whom the writer is pleased with loving familiarity to call
Dick, is the hero of the tale. Doubtless we shall soon see Thurtell presented in sublime
guise, and the drive to Gad’s Hill described with all pomp and circumstance.
There are people who may like this sort of thing, but we are not of that number
¼ The author has, we
suspect, been misled by the example and success of ‘Paul Clifford’, but in
‘Paul Clifford’ the thieves and their dialect serve for illustration, while in
‘Rookwood’ the highwayman and his slang are presented as if in themselves they
had some claim to admiration (Forster: 1834, 308).
(John Thurtell had
murdered the professional gambler William Weare in 1823 and had received a huge
amount of press.) But for Ainsworth there was no such thing as bad publicity,
and through the endorsement of Lytton, he gained entrance to the exclusive
literary soirees of Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, joining the
cultural elite. On the proceeds of Rookwood,
Ainsworth bought Kensal Lodge, a large house on the Harrow Road, and began his
own literary salon. One of the people he invited was Charles Dickens. It was
through Ainsworth’s famous parties that Dickens really became professionally
connected, meeting Forster (whom Ainsworth always considered a friend despite
the reviews), Lytton, Thomas Talfourd, Benjamin Disraeli, and the artist Daniel
Maclise. Ainsworth also introduced him to John Macrone, the man who would go on
to publish Sketches by ‘Boz’, and
George Cruikshank, who would illustrate it.
For
both Ainsworth and Dickens, the dice were rolling…
Dr Stephen Carver is the author of 'The 19th Century Underworld', and 'The Author Who Outsold Dickens', both published by Pen & Sword , and which we can recommend highly.
WORKS CITED
Ainsworth, William Harrison. Rookwood,
A Romance. Works. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1880. (Original work
published 1834).
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. (1865). Paul Clifford. New York: George Routledge and Sons. (Original work
published 1830).
Forster, John. (1834). Editorial. Examiner, May 18.
Godwin, William. (1993). Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, London: Penguin. (Original
work published 1793).
Maginn, William. (1832). ‘A good Tale badly Told’. Fraser’s Magazine, Vol 5, No 25, February.