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Lady Clara Cavendish: Reynolds and Rymer’s Political Hoax
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Journal Article
Lady Clara Cavendish: Reynolds and Rymer’s Political Hoax
2022
Overview
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.
Publisher
Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée,Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3,Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
