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How Victorian novels imagined the idea of social agency. Reform Acts offers a new approach to prominent questions raised in recent studies of the novel. By examining social agency from a historical rather than theoretical perspective, Chris R. Vanden Bossche investigates how particular assumptions involving agency came into being. Through readings of both canonical and noncanonical Victorian literature, he demonstrates that the Victorian tension between reform and revolution framed conceptions of agency in ways that persist in our own time. Vanden Bossche argues that Victorian novels sought to imagine new forms of social agency evolving from Chartism, the dominant working-class movement of the time. Novelists envisioned alternative forms of social agency by employing contemporary discourses from Chartism's focus on suffrage as well as the means through which it sought to obtain it, such as moral versus physical force, land reform, and the cooperative movement. Each of the three parts of Reform Acts begins with a chapter that analyzes contemporary conversations and debates about social agency in the press and in political debate. Succeeding chapters examine how novels envision ways of effecting social change, for example, class alliance in Barnaby Rudge; landed estates as well as finely graded hierarchy and politicians in Coningsby and Sybil; and reforming trade unionism in Mary Barton and North and South. By including novels written from a range of political perspectives, Vanden Bossche discovers patterns in Victorian thinking that are easily recognized in today's assumptions about social hierarchy.

In 1858, G. W. M. Reynolds’s (1814–79) popular penny periodical Reynolds’s Miscellany introduced a new ‘authoress’, Lady Clara Cavendish. Reynolds bragged that Cavendish’s novels would reveal Hanoverian court corruption—for a great price, which he happily paid. However, as some Victorian critics speculated, Cavendish was herself a fiction. She and her novels are in fact the inventions of Reynolds and his regular employee James Malcolm Rymer (1814–84), who in the 1840s created ‘Sweeney Todd’ and ‘Varney, the Vampire’ for the penny blood publisher Edward Lloyd. This essay contends that Reynolds and Rymer’s Cavendish is not a random collection of pieces united merely by a byline. Instead, Cavendish’s supposed productions combine with paratextual material such as Reynolds’s advertising to articulate a consistent personality. Reading the Cavendish phenomenon as a holistic literary corpus reveals that in creating it, Reynolds and Rymer advance a didactic and political mission. In keeping with their involvement in Chartism, the Cavendish hoax enlists the rhetoric of ‘Old Corruption’ to support Chartist ideals, especially the political awakening of the ‘industrious millions’. By presenting Cavendish as an aristocrat and court insider, Reynolds and Rymer invest their political critique with authority they could not otherwise have achieved. For Reynolds and Rymer, therefore, the hoax did not constitute a departure or escapist fantasy, but a potentially more persuasive affirmation of the ideological commitments that they shared. Reading it today throws into bold relief those shared perspectives, which critics are only beginning to recover and re-appraise.

This paper discusses the study of Chartist and working-class literatures, noting that the pronounced development of aesthetic criticism in these areas uncomfortably corresponds with the rejection of “aesthetics” in other fields. Chartist, working-class, and laboring-class scholars have broken free from monolithically sociological or political readings that only a generation ago too often dismissed artistic endeavors as, at best, merely a re-accenting of the mainstream. Current studies focus on the aesthetic innovations that emerged out of working-class entanglements with mainstream counterparts. The paper argues that the rejection of “aesthetics” generally fails to recognize marginalized and group aesthetics (including the critical work done on marginalized and group aesthetics) and specifically what it meant for a political cohort—the Chartists are my example—to think aesthetically.

In March 1848, the radical writer and editor G. W. M. Reynolds came face-to-face with some of the very people he hoped were his readers, when he took a step out of the editor’s office and onto the speaker’s platform. Reynolds stood up in front of a protest meeting in Trafalgar Square, and turned the issue of the day away from taxation and towards revolution. In that critical year of Europe-wide revolutions, Reynolds praised the recent French uprising and declared solidarity with the French republicans. Reynolds’s actions on that spring afternoon earned him immediate prominence in the Chartist movement, a place on the platform at the ‘monster meeting’ at Kennington Common on 10 April, the status of a radical celebrity, and a government file. The disorder after the meeting continued on and off over several days. This article considers Reynolds’s accounts of his own speech as printed in the pages of his best-selling serial narrative, The Mysteries of London (1844–48). Reynolds’s sprawling tale mixed melodrama with radical polemics in the belief that fiction was a legitimate means of promoting radical politics. This article argues that the insertions of his 1848 speeches attempted to connect imagined readers of urban fiction to real protestors on London’s streets, by linking the printed page of urban fiction to oratory within urban space. Reynolds’s speech-making on that March afternoon projected his outbursts in his London fiction out onto the London streets; he hoped that the combined work of both would push forward his political agenda. His experience of writing The Mysteries of London gave melodramatic wings to his oratory on the platform. Setting Reynolds’s speech within the context of his debt to popular melodrama and its roots in oral culture, and the oral effects within The Mysteries of London as a whole, this article argues that Reynolds’s actions declared printed matter to be indelibly linked with the street theatre of political demonstrations. Trafalgar Square offered Reynolds the possibility that urban space could present the continuation and implementation of radical demands made in print, and could bring radical print vocally to life.

The novels form and interests, plot devices, and authorial choices derived from a conscious desire to use fiction as a medium for debating the issues at stake in deciding the future path of the workers' movement.2 For Wheeler, the desirability of revolution is the point of departure-not a regrettable illusion to be corrected by the hero's acquisition of wisdom-for a plot which then goes on to a frontal assault on the problem of how. From these plot elements the novel derives the political conclusions which set it apart both from other social problem novels and from earlier notions of how to carry on liberation struggles: its contention that laboring men and women must break from reliance on the middle class, seek revolution and not simply reform, and organize themselves in a tightly cohesive party for the greatest effectiveness in achieving that aim.

The political correlative to the aesthetic critique usually maintains that by employing melodramatic conventions Chartist and working-class writers put entertainment before principle, lowering themselves to popular, market expectations rather than radicalizing those conventions and expectations. Here, Breton challenges this line of criticism by examining the special circumstances and meanings in the Chartist and working-class ideologeme of the deus ex machina.