Best-Selling Author Who Outsold Dickens: The Life and Works of W.H. Ainsworth | Historical Fiction & Victorian Literature for Book Collectors and Literary Enthusiasts
$17.99
$32.72
Safe 45%
Best-Selling Author Who Outsold Dickens: The Life and Works of W.H. Ainsworth | Historical Fiction & Victorian Literature for Book Collectors and Literary Enthusiasts
$17.99
$32.72
45% Off
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Description
William Harrison Ainsworth was a best-selling 19th-century historical novelist whose tales of highwaymen captivated readers before a moral scandal damaged his reputation.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.
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Reviews
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Verified Buyer
5
I thoroughly enjoyed reading "The Man Who Outsold Dickens." I am a fan of Ainsworth's Gothic works, although I have only read a few of them. I wanted to better understand this man who helped to start a Gothic revival and is part of the bridge between Romanticism and the later Victorian novel. Carver's narrative does not disappoint. In what is a relatively short biography, he has an incredible amount of information. Besides the details of Ainsworth's personal life, and summaries of the novels and the reception of them, there is much here of interest to anyone who wants to know more about the world of Victorian publishing. We see how authors like Ainsworth, Dickens, George W. M. Reynolds, and Thackeray were rivals and friends, criticizing and learning from one another. We learn how Ainsworth himself struggled with the Brontes' fame, although Carver doesn't mention the influence Rookwood had on Charlotte Bronte in writing her earlier Angria tales. We also realize how popular Ainsworth remained throughout the 19th century just by listing how often his books were checked out in the Manchester library. Another omission is that The Tower of London is mentioned in Little Lord Fauntleroy, more than 40 years after its publication, showing its long-lasting effect. I feel anyone who reads this book will come away with a much greater appreciation for Ainsworth, who painstakingly researched many of his novels, as well as a greater understanding of English literature, especially from the 1830s and 1840s. Thank you, Stephen Carver, for this in-depth look at an author who hopefully will not be forgotten much longer.
