The Author Who Outsold Dickens

History Hit, 2020

As a child growing up in Regency Manchester, William Harrison Ainsworth had his head filled with tales of highwaymen by his father. His favourite was Dick Turpin. Expected to join the family law firm, the young Ainsworth was already writing poems, plays and short stories as a schoolboy. He started publishing in literary journals from the age of sixteen, and by twenty-one he had moved to London, published a book of poetry, a collection of short stories and his first novel. But literary success still eluded Ainsworth, and he reluctantly passed the bar. He loathed the work but having married young he had a growing family to support. He continued to write; contributing to the new Fraser’s Magazine, joining a set that included Thackeray, Southey, Carlyle, D’Orsay and Coleridge. In 1831, he began writing a novel entitled Rookwood, intended to bring new life to the gothic romance by setting the story not in medieval Europe, as was the convention, but in Georgian England. As gothic novels must have a brigand, Ainsworth’s chose his boyhood hero, Dick Turpin. Three years later, the publication of Rookwood by Richard Bentley turned Ainsworth into a celebrity virtually overnight, creating a fashionable craze for highwaymen fed by penny dreadful knock-offs and unlicensed theatrical adaptations. Although Turpin was not the novel’s protagonist, he was adapted as such by Ainsworth’s massive readership, and many of the Turpin legends (like the famous ride to York) were invented by Ainsworth. With the exception of John Forster in the Examiner, who thought Rookwood vulgar and socially dangerous, critical acclaim was unanimous and a new genre was spawned, the so-called ‘Newgate Novel’. A second edition was soon published, this time with illustrations by George Cruikshank. With Scott two years dead and Dickens still a relatively unknown journalist, reviewers dubbed Ainsworth the natural heir to the throne of letters recently vacated by Scott. Finally, aged twenty-nine, the world was at his feet.

Post45: Peer Reviewed, 2017

Interlitteraria, 2011

2003

The advent of the short story in the nineteenth century highlights the fact that writers needed other channels of expression different from the novel in order to pour into them a vision of experience which does not "novelise" life into a chaptered biography of forward (or backward) movement. In America, authors such as Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Harte, Twain or Sarah Orne Jewett looked at brevity as a condition of coherence, a model of intelligibility at odds with the notion that life is a long path which only the novel can fully represent.

isara solutions, 2021

Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognized him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.

English Literary History 63.1 (Spring 1996) 171-201. , 1996