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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Author Who Outsold Dickens: The Life and Work of W H Ainsworth

The Author Who Outsold Dickens: The Life and Work of W H Ainsworth

Carver, Stephen

Paperback

Literary CriticismFiction AnthologiesBritish History

Publisher Price: $29.95

PREORDER - Expected ship date April 28, 2027

ISBN10: 1526766442
ISBN13: 9781526766441
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
Published: Apr 28 2027
Pages: 264
Language: English
William Harrison Ainsworth was a best-selling 19th-century historical novelist whose tales of highwaymen captivated readers before a moral scandal damaged his reputation.

William Harrison Ainsworth (1805 - 1882) is probably the most successful 19th Century writer that most people haven't heard of. Journalist, essayist, poet and, most of all, historical novelist, Ainsworth was a member of the early-Victorian publishing elite, and Charles Dickens's only serious commercial rival until the late-1840s, his novels Rookwood and Jack Shepherd beginning a fashion for tales of Georgian highwaymen and establishing the legend of Dick Turpin firmly in the National Myth. He was in the Dickens' circle before it was the Dickens' circle and counted among his friends the literary lions of his age: men like Charles Lamb, J.G. Lockhart, Leigh Hunt, W.M. Thackeray and, of course, Dickens; the publishers Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley; and the artists Sir John Gilbert, George Cruikshank, and 'Phiz' (Hablot K. Browne). He also owned and edited Bentley's Miscellany (whose editorship he assumed after Dickens), the New Monthly Magazine, and Ainsworth's Magazine. In his heyday, Ainsworth commanded a massive audience until a moral panic - the so-called 'Newgate Controversy' - about the supposedly pernicious effects on working class youth of the criminal romances on which his reputation was built effectively destroyed his reputation as a serious literary novelist.

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