📚 Have you ever heard of or read anything by Ainsworth? No? Me either. But now I really want to!

📚 He wrote in many genres and about many topics – gothic, historical romance, adventures with highwaymen, the Victorian experience, and more. He also owned and edited three magazines.

📚 The book details his failures and successes in life. It also provides critiques of his novels.

📚 I’m a huge fan of Dickens. I love his books and David Copperfield is my favorite book of all-time. Plus, I am an enormous fan of the Victorian period and the Victorian experience. So, I honestly can’t believe I was not aware of Ainsworth at all. But that will change. I can’t wait to read one (or more!) of his books now! I just can’t decide which one to pick first!

Thank you @netgalley and Pen & Sword History for an eARC of this book, which I have read and reviewed honestly and voluntarily.

William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882) was a massively popular author in his day and a key figure in literary and publishing circles. But his day came and went and he is now largely forgotten – certainly not the household name he once was. This meticulously researched and comprehensive biography aims to bring him back centre-stage and introduce him to a new readership. A worthwhile aim indeed, and I found much of this book informative and interesting, especially about Victorian publishing and Ainsworth’s social circle, which included just about everyone in the world of letters. So overall the book is well worth reading, although I have to admit to finding it tedious at times. Author Stephen Carver has chosen to tell the plots of many of Ainsworth’s novels – page after page of them – and I question why this was necessary. A brief summary would have sufficed. After all, if I am interested, I can read the novel in question by myself. Then I found some of Carver’s stylistic quirks irritating – why use slang like “flogged”, “kicking around the idea”, “it chucked it down” and my pet hate “back in the day”. This is a serious book of literary criticism, so surely the language used should be appropriate. Letters are quoted at great length, which I felt slowed the narrative, and towards the end of the book when there is a banquet in his honour, the full text of Ainsworth’s speech is given – and it’s really quite dull. This could have been put as an appendix for those readers who are particularly interested. The emphasis throughout is on the man and his work, and I got little impression of the man and his personal life, and I found this regrettable, as by the end I was no closer to finding out exactly who Ainsworth was. So yes, an important book, more for the serious student of literature rather than the casual reader perhaps, but overall a useful and valuable addition to literary biography and history.

An interesting look at another that was friends with Dickens. How he got into the industry and into writing. Mentions of works and what was happening at the time of writing. Good for those who like to look at the lives of authors/creatives.

Unfortunately this book got archived before I could finish it, but what an interesting story nevertheless! I have never heard about William Harrison Ainsworth before, so I found this book both intriguing and educational. When we think about the era in which Ainsworth lived, the first name to pop into our mind is most probably that of Charles Dickens, just as for the Regency era, it is Jane Austen. However, they were not the only popular writers in those periods, and learning about their peers can often be even more pleasant or exciting. I think I wouldn't have heard about this book if I had not seen it on NetGalley and I'm so glad I did!

Stephen Carver uses this new work to explore the publishing and minor bits of the private life of William H. Ainsworth in a thoughtful and informative way.
I was interested in this book because I had taken Victorian literature and Romantic literature classes while working on my undergrad and grad degrees, but I had not heard of Ainsworth before and wanted to know why.
Examining the life of a now much forgotten Victorian author gives readers insight into the way literature can be deemed important enough to be included in academic cannon and what we could gain for learning more about popular authors from each time period, and I was not expecting to gain this information when starting the book. Carver focuses predominantly on Ainsworth's work as an author, editor, and publisher and the relationships he built and lost because of his literary focuses. The book provides first-hand accounts from letters, book excerpts, and critical reception from the time period, which adds greatly to the discussion of Ainsworth's life in literature. The book also examines why a highly popular, and widely read author fell from grace with his literary colleagues due to a cultural shift in what was deemed enlightened rather than what was catering to the masses. I am glad I got to know more about Ainsworth and I look forward to reading some of his Gothic and Romanized works in the near future.
I believe anyone with an interest in the time period, understanding the rigors of maintaining serial publishing deadlines, cultural shifts, literary history, or anyone that wants to know more about one of the authors that outsold Dickens should read this book.


I thank NetGalley and the Publisher for the DRC of this work in exchange for my honest review.

How many authors outsold Dickens?
Quite a few, one would assume. George W. M. Reynolds was one of them, Marie Corelli another. And now cultural historian Dr. Stephen Carver presents us with another successful Victorian novelist that is very much forgotten these days: William Harrison Ainsworth.

Ainsworth was a publisher, editor and novelist. He was a friend of Dickens and quite a few other ‘big names’ in his time. He wrote gothic novels about Highwaymen (Rookwood) and Newgate prisoners (Jack Sheppard) and was hugely successful. And then a lot of his friends distanced themselves from him. So, what had happened?

A moral panic. Critics (e.g. Thackeray) boosting the fear that the upper class had of the industrial labour class. They took the high moral ground and accused Ainsworth of giving the destitute wrong ideas. They were terrified of an uprising or a revolution. The self-proclaimed leaders of the moral panic (who also claimed to be friends with Ainsworth) blamed his novels for inspiring criminal acts and demanded that only morally pure works should be published. Sounds familiar? Yeah, that’s today’s cancel culture for you. The press rather repeating false accusations and assumptions instead of fact checking stuff? Exactly. Nothing much changed, right?

Stephen Carver puts the focus on the publishing life of Ainsworth with short glimpses into his private life. In the first chapters Ainsworth remains a strangely distant figure but with the start of the moral panic he becomes a real human being. We learn a lot about the publishing industry in Victorian England, about clique-building and who’s who. Ainsworth’s letters give a good idea of how life was in the business as an editor (for Dickens among others) and as a serial writer with contracts to keep, while under pressure from all these hateful accusations.

Two things I learned from this book:
1) I want to know a lot more about forgotten Victorian authors
2) Thackeray was a dick