Victor E. Neuburg - Popular Literature: A History and Guide

[dem bones]

Victor E. Neuburg - Popular Literature: A History and Guide (The Woburn Press, 1977)

John Leech Reading below stairs

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction

From the beginning of Printing to 1600
1600 - 1700
1700 - 1800
1800 - 1897
The Oral Tradition: Some Notes on Survival
Appendix: Religious Tracts
Critical Bibliography
Index

Blurb:

The Mysteries of London, Ten Nights in a Bar-room, Varney the Vampire; or the Feast of Blood — these were best-selling nineteenth-century tales of the kind described by a contemporary as being "addressed to the lowest sentiments of our nature". Yet these novels, and their many precursors in the form of pamphlets, leaflets and illustrated broadsheets, transformed a whole oral tradition into a written culture. Not until recently, however has popular literature — both for its content and for the light it throws on its readers — been recognized and studied as a distinct social force.

In this book Victor E. Neuburg traces the development of that rich and fascinating literature and the impact upon it of social change, from the beginning of printing to the end of the nineteenth century. He discusses the enormous variety of forms — including broadside ballads, chapbooks, religious tracts and penny fiction — as well as the authors, the publishers and the methods of distribution. In this way he establishes the study of popular literature as a vital and invaluable means of communicating with an otherwise largely inaccessible past.

The text is illustrated with woodcuts and engravings, and includes an extensive critical bibliography.

Current non-fiction read, found among the £1 a book boxes at Slater Street early Sunday morning, a concise history of working man's fiction through to the advent of the pulps. Undisciplined as I am, found it impossible but to dive straight into the 1800s, though author's engaging, easy on the brain style has decided me to begin from scratch, take notes, eventually attempt some kind of appraisal beyond trademark "this book is wonderful!" Until then, a brief dip into the bibliography.

" ..... Also valuable is SIR WALTER SCOTT, The Lives of the Novelists (Everyman's Library, undated). See also ALISON ADBURGHAM, Women in Print, (1972)

Very much more scholarly than either is J. M. S. TOMPKINS, The Popular Novel in England 1700-1800, (1932)

EDITH BIRKHEAD, The Tale of Terror (1921). A somewhat earlier book on the subject which is still worth reading.

Superbly opinionated and Compulsively readable, Q. D. LEAVIS, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932, 1965) remains essential reading.

E. S. TURNER, Boys Will Be Boys (new and revised edition, 1957; Penguin, 1976), is a much lighter account of popular fiction. Although, as the title suggests, it is mostly about boys’ papers, it is nonetheless worth reading, and the illustrations are remarkably evocative of a lost literature.

MARGARET DALZIEL, Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago (1957), is critical in intent and has a list of mid-nineteenth-century cheap periodicals....."

Glad to see him receiving praise for a change.

P. HAINING, The Penny Dreadful (1975), offers a selection of extracts from cheap sensational fiction. Although not a scholarly work, it does have the great merit of making available a good deal of material which is otherwise hard to find. There are a number of illustrations.

[The Thing in the Vacuum Valve]

Jul 27, 2021 5:49:47 GMT dem bones said:

Glad to see him receiving praise for a change.

P. HAINING, The Penny Dreadful (1975), offers a selection of extracts from cheap sensational fiction. Although not a scholarly work, it does have the great merit of making available a good deal of material which is otherwise hard to find. There are a number of illustrations.

Dem-- do you mean to say that such base creatures exist, that would cast aspersion onto Peter H. the Great?

I'm sure I haven't been all the way round the block, but this seems to me most baffling and outré! 
 
--TVV 

[dem bones]

Jul 27, 2021 14:46:46 GMT The Thing in the Vacuum Valve said:

Dem-- do you mean to say that such base creatures exist, that would cast aspersion onto Peter H. the Great?

I'm afraid so, Mr. Thing, often with justification, it has to be said, so I was truly pleased that Mr. Neuburg should overlook the flaws and praise The Penny Dreadful for all that is great about it.

Another quote from Popular Literature, and one I'm sure Mr. Haining would have appreciated.

"Vice was always a particularly saleable ingredient in mass publishing — particularly when framed by admonitions to virtue. The preoccupation of nineteenth-century readers with violent crime is well-known; The Newgate Calendar, together will newspaper reporting of 'Jack the Ripper' crimes, laid hold upon public imagination in a way that reprints of Shakespeare and Milton never could."

[The Thing in the Vacuum Valve]

Jul 27, 2021 17:27:00 GMT dem bones said:

Jul 27, 2021 14:46:46 GMT The Thing in the Vacuum Valve said:

Dem-- do you mean to say that such base creatures exist, that would cast aspersion onto Peter H. the Great?

I'm afraid so, Mr. Thing, often with justification, it has to be said, so I was truly pleased that Mr. Neuburg should overlook the flaws and praise The Penny Dreadful for all that is great about it.

Ah... well I suppose I must believe you good Mr. Bones. In fact, The Penny Dreadful is the last one I consider to be still missing from my collection of his tomes. I must have about 30 of them now, but admittedly have read only less than probably one quarter of that stack. 
[creeps stealthily back into glass tube.] 

[dem bones]

Victor Neuburg - The Batsford Companion to Popular Literature (Batsford, 1982)

Blurb:
In this pioneering work, Victor Neuburg has assembled a wealth of information about popular literature, from the invention of printing to the present. The field is potentially vast and still in the process of definition: the present guide thus makes no attempt to be comprehensive but instead, by judicious selection, to give a vivid picture of the range and variety of popular literature and its producers.

As a broad principle of selection, 'popular literature' is here taken to include three main categories: what unsophisticated readers choose to read for pleasure; what one group feels another ought to be reading for its own good — such as tracts, temperance literature and pamphlets; and the literature of self-improvement, including cheap reprints of the classics and manuals of self-instruction.

The entries concentrate on Great Britain and the USA and range from the history of early ballads and chapbooks, through the popular novelists, tracts and ephemeral writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to modern developments such as westerns, strip cartoons and thrillers. However, as well as describing the main genres, the author has been equally concerned to sketch in the social, cultural and commercial background to the production of popular literature, factors which were so crucial in influencing the forms it took. Browsing through this book, the reader will come away with a lively awareness of the world of booksellers, publishers, magazines and religious and cultural institutions within which popular authors worked.

The book is intended to be read and dipped into for pure pleasure, as befits the subject, but it will also be a valuable source of reference for the growing number of students and scholars working on various aspects of popular culture.

Found a companion volume to the above at this morning's market, Sample entries. Barbara Cartland ("an interesting, and perhaps embattled author"), Catnach Press, Chapbooks, Catherine Cookson ("she has a powerful narrative style, and her work is characterised by human warmth, pathos, comedy and tragedy"), comic books, Marie Corelli ("Best selling British writer whose most famous novel, The Sorrows of Satan, was published in 1895 and sold more copies than any previous English novel"), Catherine Crowe, Denis the Menace, Dick Tracey, Dick Turpin, Dime novels, J. T. Edson, fairies, Faust, Frankenstein, Girly magazines, Sydney Horler ("Horler for excitement!"), M. G. Lewis ("... known as 'Monk' Lewis because of his novel, The Monk (3 vols., 1796). It was enormously popular and is one of the most famous of gothic novels."), "literature on a string", H. P. Lovecraft ("the best of his work has a nightmarish quality, although some of it is repetitive. He is remembered, however, less for his fiction than for the influence he has had upon subsequent science fiction writers"), Medieval Romance, Mickey Mouse, Mills and Boon, Mother Shipton, Newgate Calendar, paperbacks, Penny Bloods, pulp magazines, Ann Radcliffe ("excelled in describing brooding, macabre landscapes in Italy"), Radio Times and TV Times, Religious tracts, G. W. M. Reynolds, James Malcolm Rymer, Sexton Blake, Sweeney Todd, Bram Stoker, Eugene Sue, Tarzan, Temperance literature (" ... a vast popular and propagandist literature, much of which seems to have been lost to posterity ..."), Edgar Wallace ("His popularity was tremendous - it is said that during the 1920s and 1930s in England one in four of all books read was written by Wallace"), H. G. Wells, Dennis Wheatley, Women's magazines, Cornell Woolrich, Dornford Yates, and Yellow-backs. In short, an A-Z of lowbrow delights!