Fiction for the Working Man 1830-50 ― A Study of the Literature Produced for the Working Classes in Early Victorian Urban England

Literature for the masses appeared on an unprecedented scale in the first half of the 19th-century. This was the earliest response to new and voracious demands for cheap books of all kinds. This famous and innovative book enquires as to the nature of this new material, the responses to it, and its audiences amidst the new reading public which it illuminates. The technological advances in printing, and the urbanisation of the population were key influences. So, too, were new entrepreneurial energies amongst author and publishers. Professor James shows what were the realities and the resonances of this new culture. He examines the effects of a new urban culture, its complicated class relations, the difficult history of the radical press, and the relationships between popular fiction and ‘literature'. His is a detailed and engaging, well illustrated study of the growth of literacy and the vivacious and enormously varied popular literature of both entertainment, improvement, and instruction which was published.

Louis James is Emeritus Professor of Victorian and Modern Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He began his academic career in the University of Hull adult education Department, followed by a lectureship at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. In 1966 he left to join the newly established University of Kent at Canterbury, from where he took years out to teach at Universities in the United States, Africa and the Far East. His publications on Victorian and postcolonial literatures include Fiction for the Working Man (1963); The Islands in Between (1968); Print and the People (1976); Jean Rhys (1978); Caribbean Writing in English (1999), and The Victorian Novel (2006). More recently he edited, with Anne Humphreys, G.W.M. Reynolds. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics and the Press (2008).