scholarly journals Class and Complex Transmedia Character in the Early Victorian Period: Jack Sheppard (1839-40)

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-96
Author(s):  
Erica Haugtvedt
Keyword(s):  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Cross Media ◽  
Penny Press ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

The reception of William Harrison Ainsworth’s novel, Jack Sheppard (1839-1840), was contemporaneously deemed a mania and has been described by critics today as a moral panic over the influence of fiction. Several adaptations of Ainsworth’s novel across media ambiguously depict Jack’s hanging, and the adaptations that most clearly show his survival occur in those versions that are least legally defensible and most clearly targeted toward the labouring classes. In this essay, I analyse Buckstone and Greenwood’s melodramas at the Adelphi and Sadler’s Wells, respectively, in autumn 1839; two penny press novelisations of Jack Sheppard published in 1839 and 1840; and an anonymous melodrama staged at the City of London Theatre in 1845, which was shut down due to violating the licensing ban on Jack Sheppard titles. From contemporary accounts of the mania, I argue that audience members treated historical and fictional accounts of Jack as describing the same entity, which created the space for specifying new facts and thus claiming new meaning. I therefore see Jack Sheppard as a transmedia character. For the labouring classes, claiming new meaning sometimes inhered in Jack’s defiance of capital punishment. This transmedial extension of Ainsworth’s character by working-class audiences in the penny press and cheap theatre pointed to the inadequacies of Victorian copyright law to protect the creative property of originating authors across media, and thus disturbed Victorian middle and upper-class literary critics because they saw the lower class’s celebration of a criminal as threatening to undermine their social order. Using the concept of transmedia in this period allows us to see how enthusiastic audience members in the working classes created what I term character complexity as they built a palimpsest out of the panoply of cross-media character representations. This transmedia character complexity matters because it is an avenue for oppressed communities to reclaim their dignity through narrative meaning-making.

scholarly journals THE CASUAL POOR AND THE CITY OF LONDON POOR LAW UNION, 1837–1869

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREA TANNER
Keyword(s):  
The Elderly ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Local Union ◽  
Civic Pride ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Rate Base ◽  
Poor Children ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

The City of London Poor Law Union in the early to mid-Victorian period was the richest and least populated of all the metropolitan Poor Law districts. A wide range of parochial, livery, and other charities within the City not only attracted vast numbers of applicants for assistance, but influenced the quality and nature of the care given by the local union. This not only meant that provision for the outdoor poor, children, and the elderly tended to be more liberal than elsewhere in the capital, but that vagrants, many of whom took up winter residence in the City, also experienced a higher standard of pauper treatment than that offered by the surrounding unions. The combination of high Poor Law receipts from a low poor rate base, civic pride, competition from City charities, and the willingness of neighbouring unions to off-load this most troublesome class of pauper on to their rich neighbour gave an unparalleled level of choice to those who were truly at the bottom of the heap in Victorian London.

All for the Union

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifton Hood
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
The Social ◽  
Democratic Nation ◽  
The City

For all the social chaos that phenomenal economic growth and heavy immigration had produced earlier in the century, upper-class New Yorkers had generally been optimistic that hoi polloi possessed enough self-control and independence to take direction from their betters and accept their proper place in the body politic. But the New York City draft riots of 1863 – the worse urban disorder in American history – seemed to show that entire communities lacked the self-discipline and orderliness required of the citizenry of a democratic nation and instead were prone to a savagery that had ripped the city apart. Drawing on their memories of the draft riots and on Victorian cultural values, the upper class utilized the Civil War to counter the blurring of class boundaries and social credentials caused by urban growth of the first half of the century. They came to classify came to classify many workers and immigrants as dangerous classes that threatened the social order- and themselves as a community of heritage and feeling that provided leadership in government, the economy, and society. At bottom these representations involved social control, and upper-class people used them to help harden class lines and gain an understanding of themselves and the rest of urban society that was coherent and compelling.

Presbyterianism in the City of London, 1645–1647

1979 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Mahony
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City ◽  
Church Government

The importance of presbyterianism in London politics during the 1640s has long been recognized, but only recently have its secular aspects received their proper emphasis. The burdens and uncertainties generated by prolonged warfare found expression in a rising tide of moderation and concern for property and social order. ‘City shopkeepers and merchants’ saw in a presbyterian system of church government the means of reimposing discipline upon parochial life through the offices of vestrymen and ruling elder. Of course, London presbyterianism was not merely an expression of economic and social dislocation. Indeed, this study will be very much concerned with the activities of a group of religiously committed presbyterians who were able to secure considerable political influence by exploiting the more amorphous presbyterian sentiment of many of the propertied citizens.

Fifty years ahead of its time? The provident dispensaries movement in Manchester, 1871–85

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
General Scheme ◽  
Professional Status ◽  
Comprehensive System ◽  
Social Reformer ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Hospital Reform ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Martin Hewitt’s chapter on the history of the provident dispensary movement, initiated in the 1870s by the social reformer, Dr John Watts asks why provident dispensaries, unlike the Hospital Funds movement, have been largely neglected in the scholarship of medical philanthropy although, as Hewitt argues, those in Manchester were central to national debates over hospital reform and served as a model for similar initiatives in other parts of the country. The establishment of provident dispensaries in the city encapsulated many of the challenges which impeded the development of medical provision for the working-classes, as in the tensions which Hewitt illustrates in relation to the professional status and expectations of medical men, concerned about the movement’s threats to their fees and status. Watt’s scheme of provident dispensaries, which aimed to promote ‘a general scheme of medical insurance’, was ahead of its time, symptomatic, Hewitt argues, of the pitfalls which faced those committed to the establishment of a comprehensive system of healthcare in the late-Victorian period.

Afterword II

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kamran Asdar Ali
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
Therapeutic Process ◽  
Working Women ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Space ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Labor Activists ◽  
Cultural Healing ◽  
The City ◽  
Everyday Living

The second afterword to the book by Kamran Asdar Ali returns us to the city, and to the lives of Karachi’s working women and working classes. He draws on women’s poems, diaries, and memoirs to capture some more ephemeral qualities of everyday living and dying. These contrast with the violent suppression of an underclass of trade unionists and labor activists by a coalition of the state, military courts and industrialists, since the fifties. Given the long, progressive erosion of peace in Karachi how, he asks, might we imagine a therapeutic process of social, economic and cultural healing? Through an image of citizens “at work” creating citywide networks and connections, we are offered finally some possibilities of dreaming. Namely, through increased understandings, not of conflict, but also of each other’s intimate everyday lives, the dream emerges of a new political space or public where even intractable disagreements can be managed through gestures of kindness, compromise, and fresh vocabularies of how to carry on and get by.

Francis Woodleke’s Window

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shannon McSheffrey
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Drainage Channels ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

A royal enquiry was commissioned in the mid-1530s to investigate the boundaries of the sanctuary of St Martin le Grand. This enquiry was precipitated not by a problem with felonious sanctuary seekers, but instead by a conflict between the City of London and Dutch-born shoemakers making and selling their wares in St Martin’s precinct despite prohibitions against immigrant labour. The testimony in the enquiry uncovers the complexity of jurisdictional rights woven into the idea of sanctuary: battles over labour, trade, and immigration were conflated with asylum for accused felons in both attacks and defences of sanctuary privilege. The witnesses’ statements also reveal how the boundaries of the sanctuary—often marked only by convention or by drainage channels in the street—functioned in the urban environment.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document