Dickens: Publisher made fortune from book imitations

23 June 2019

 
LOUIS JAMES COLLECTION/GETTY 
As well as producing parodies of Dickens, Lloyd also published popular horror book Varney the Vampire which is thought to have inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula

A Victorian publisher who made a fortune from imitations of Charles Dickens' novels, which "outraged" the author, is the subject of a new book.

In the 1840s Edward Lloyd published Oliver Twiss, Nickelas Nickelbery and Martin Guzzlewit soon after Dickens wrote the books they were based on.

Prof Rohan McWilliam of Anglia Ruskin University has co-edited the book on Lloyd.

Lloyd also published the first novel featuring the barber Sweeney Todd.
GETTY IMAGES
Edward Lloyd (right) published Oliver Twiss, Nickelas Nickelbery and Martin Guzzlewit soon after Dickens (left) wrote Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewit

Although the novels were produced quickly to "cash in" on Dickens' soaring popularity, they were not flimsy works with Oliver Twiss longer than the original Oliver Twist, said Prof McWilliam, who specialises in the history of Victorian Britain, and has published Edward Lloyd and His World: Popular Fiction, Politics and the Press in Victorian Britain, co-edited by Sarah Louise Lill.

"Dickens was outraged that other authors and publishers were making money from his creations, but he was unable to get a judge to ban them," he said.

"What's particularly interesting is that many Victorian readers may have first encountered Dickens not through his own work, but through one of these imitations.

"There were many titles produced, which indicate that they were incredibly popular. And in some ways the plagiarisms could be seen as the original form of fan fiction."GETTY IMAGES
Lloyd also published the first novel featuring the demon barber Sweeney Todd, which was later turned into a musical by Stephen Sondheim

From his publishing house just off Fleet Street, Lloyd helped create the first mass readership for popular fiction by issuing "penny dreadfuls" aimed at working class people including Varney the Vampire, which is thought to have influenced Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Lloyd was also the original press baron - Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper was a Sunday paper aimed at the working class, and went on to become the first newspaper to sell a million copies.


Edited by Sarah Louise Lill, Rohan McWilliam
Routledge
240 pages
Description
The publisher Edward Lloyd (1815-1890) helped shape Victorian popular culture in ways that have left a legacy that lasts right up to today. He was a major pioneer of both popular fiction and journalism but has never received extended scholarly investigation until now. Lloyd shaped the modern popular press: Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper　became the first paper to sell over a million copies. Along with publishing songs and broadsides, Lloyd dominated the fiction market in the early Victorian period issuing Gothic stories such as Varney the Vampire (1845-7) and other 'penny dreadfuls', which became bestsellers. Lloyd's publications introduced the enduring figure of Sweeney Todd whilst his authors penned plagiarisms of Dickens's novels, such as Oliver Twiss (1838-9). Many readers in the early Victorian period may have been as likely to have encountered the author of Pickwick in a Lloyd-published plagiarism as in the pages of the original author.


This book makes us rethink the early reception of Dickens. In this interdisciplinary collection, leading scholars explore the world of Edward Lloyd and his stable of writers, such as Thomas Peckett Prest and James Malcolm Rymer. The Lloyd brand shaped popular taste in the age of Dickens and the Chartists. Edward Lloyd and his World fills a major gap in the histories of popular fiction and journalism, whilst developing links with Victorian politics, theatre and music.