5 Distant friends of the people
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Rob Breton
Abstract
The final chapter examines a number of reformist periodicals of popular progress and improvement that were concomitant with both the heyday of the popular and the Chartist press. In competition with those presses for working-class audiences, they tended to reject the image of their audience that emerges in them as interested in either cultural or political confrontations, or both. Focusing on Mary and William Howitt’s Howitt’s Journal (1847–48) and Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine (1845–48), the chapter looks at the way they cautiously responded to the radical canon but flat out rejected popular or ‘low-life’ literatures. The chapter makes clear that what the liberal periodical press feared most was the slippage of cultural and political confrontation between popular and radical genres. The acceptance of radical, and specifically Chartist, grievances by these papers, however reluctant, was contingent on the rejection of cultural challenges, as if the conflation of the radical and popular too dangerously offered a model for the conflation of moral- and physical-force Chartism.
Abstract
The final chapter examines a number of reformist periodicals of popular progress and improvement that were concomitant with both the heyday of the popular and the Chartist press. In competition with those presses for working-class audiences, they tended to reject the image of their audience that emerges in them as interested in either cultural or political confrontations, or both. Focusing on Mary and William Howitt’s Howitt’s Journal (1847–48) and Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine (1845–48), the chapter looks at the way they cautiously responded to the radical canon but flat out rejected popular or ‘low-life’ literatures. The chapter makes clear that what the liberal periodical press feared most was the slippage of cultural and political confrontation between popular and radical genres. The acceptance of radical, and specifically Chartist, grievances by these papers, however reluctant, was contingent on the rejection of cultural challenges, as if the conflation of the radical and popular too dangerously offered a model for the conflation of moral- and physical-force Chartism.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- Acknowledgements viii
- Introduction 1
- 1 The old, new, borrowed, and blue Newgate calendar 19
- 2 Jack Sheppard, the Newgate novel 47
- 3 Penny radicalism? 86
- 4 Mysteries and ambiguities 134
- 5 Distant friends of the people 175
- Select bibliography 222
- Index 230
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- Acknowledgements viii
- Introduction 1
- 1 The old, new, borrowed, and blue Newgate calendar 19
- 2 Jack Sheppard, the Newgate novel 47
- 3 Penny radicalism? 86
- 4 Mysteries and ambiguities 134
- 5 Distant friends of the people 175
- Select bibliography 222
- Index 230
