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

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.

Finale

In “The Future City and The Female Marine,” I set Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography against The Female Marine, a pamphlet narrative written in three overlapping installments and published in nineteen different editions between 1815 and 1818 by Boston publisher Nathaniel Coverly. I contrast the Autobiography’s version of US urban space as a replicable franchise city to the transgressive city constructed in The Female Marine. The Female Marine’s protagonist, Lucy Brewer, seduced, abandoned, and working as a prostitute in Boston, disguises herself as a young male sailor to serve on the USS Constitution during the War of 1812. Easily read as political allegory for Boston’s shifting wartime loyalties, The Female Marine also marks a critical transition in US urban literature. Coverly rewrites the seduction tale to allow for female urban success, foreshadowing the racy female libertines of the 1840s sporting press. Virtually untouched by literary critics, The Female Marine is a remarkably rich text. Coverly quotes from and revises Charlotte, offers us a newly graphic version of the city’s geography that evokes the phantasmic cities of Edgar Allen Poe and George Lippard, previews the rise of urban serials in the penny press, and delivers a more triumphant outcome than the equivocal endings of Kelroy or Ormond. As it picks up on earlier urban forms, The Female Marine operates as a fantastic, subversive, and funny precursor to the urban genre fiction that would become immensely popular in the second half of the century.

Victorian penny press plagiarisms as transmedia storytelling

The Victorian period saw the proliferation of penny press plagiarisms—that is, transformations of middle-class narratives, typically for a lower-class audience. Authors of these often anonymous transformations performed labor by expanding existing narratives in ways that resonate with today's understanding of fan fiction and transmedia storyworlds. Penny press plagiarisms illustrate the methodological challenges of studying the historical reception of literary and popular culture events that might be characterized as fannish, as the constitutive elements that describe a fan must be traced backward in the absence of living communities and with ephemeral evidence of engagement with popular culture texts. Application of insights from media and periodical studies shows that the penny press contributes to the long history of fandom. The Victorian period's literary markets, social class politics, and copyright paradigms defamiliarize these concepts in the field of studies of fans and fandoms, revealing how a history of Victorian fandom is also a history of for-profit transmedia storytelling.

Chin-Chun-Chan:Popular Sinophobia in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico City

This article looks at popular responses to the zarzuela Chin-Chun-Chan and the issues that surfaced around its timely subject in early twentieth-century Mexico City. The principal source is the Mexico City satiric penny press for workers, supplemented by somewhat less polemical broadsides, both sold on the streets of the capital. Aimed mostly at working-class Mexicans, these sources offer a glimpse at popular attitudes circulating in a public sphere otherwise dominated by the perspective of educated elites. The article has four sections. First, it briefly reviews social commentary on the democratization of musical theater. Second, it examines Chin-Chun-Chan as a political symbol that crystalized around working-class complaints about the Porfirian regime, especially its alleged disregard for Mexican workers and Mexican national identity. Third, it analyzes the ways in which the phrase “Chin-Chun-Chan” entered popular language as a racial signifier for a range of things, some of which bore little relation to its theatrical origins. Finally, it links popular Sinophobia in late Porfirian Mexico City to the virulent anti-Chinese campaigns in northern Mexico, which played a key role in defining national identity after the 1910 Revolution, and to the “hemispheric orientalism” that has characterized anti-Asian sentiments throughout the Americas.

Defending Amelia Norman

This chapter introduces Amelia Norman, a twenty-five-year-old woman that was born in New Jersey and known as a servant, seamstress, and sometime prostitute. It recounts how Amelia failed to kill thirty-one-year-old Henry Ballard, a prosperous merchant and her lover in the spring of 1841 during the depression that followed the economic collapse known as the Panic of 1837. It also describes Amelia's trial, which attracted the excited attention of the penny press, particularly Bennett's Herald, which thrived on sensation. The chapter explores what attracted the attention of the press, the public, and coterie of influential supporters to the would-be murderess. It mentions the American Female Moral Reform Society as one of Amelia's supporters, which had been working since the 1830s to criminalize “seduction.”