For the past few weeks I’ve been researching all kinds of nineteenth-century popular literature, with an emphasis on magazine fiction. There is a lot of material out there, and there’s a lot to love – I especially liked reading about penny dreadfuls, the serial novels aimed at lower middle-class British boys and stuffed full of true crime and gruesome Gothic stories. Like American dime novels, penny dreadfuls were intended to be read to death; they were written quickly, by underpaid authors, and printed on cheap paper. Very few have survived, although there are various collections available in English libraries and museums.

Ephemera has always interested me, and I particularly like the idea that a writer could crank out a seventy-thousand-word novel in a month, knowing that it was destined to be read, forgotten, and ultimately lost. I started playing with the idea of a collection of surviving chapters, each by the same author but from a different story and genre. I thought this would be fun to try for Volume Two of The Absent Classic.

I always write the Foreword for each project first, before the text. Then I go back and re-write the foreword. So this one (by Dr. Phyllis deMorne, author of “The Displaced Victorian: A History”) is subject to change:

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As a scholar of Victorian literature, it is my honor to edit and introduce The Absent Classic’s latest contribution to the subject, this long-awaited anthology of JE Echwell’s fiction.

 J(amison) E(dgar) Echwell, 1819 – 1874, was a prolific writer best known for his “moral novels” such as Andrew of the Factory and Only a Fisherman’s Daughter. Late in life he also founded the Society for Improvement in Literature, whose aim was “to give all British subjects a moral ’vitimin’ in the easily-digested form of popular literature.” The Society published a magazine called “Morrison’s Moral Monthly”, which had the honor of printing Echwell’s later work as it first appeared in serial form.

Few fans of Victorian literature know anything of Echwell’s career prior to the Society. One would think, from the biographical material available to the modern reader, that Echwell sprang from the womb at the age of fifty, with a pen in one hand and a moral compass in the other. But the truth is that Echwell’s career began long before Andrew of the Factory was written.

In fact, Echwell’s first serial novel was published in 1841. Heavily influenced by the Gothic horror novels available to young Jamison at school, it was titled Cellar of Terror and printed in a penny magazine called “The Young Londoner”. To escape the attention of his relatives – Echwell was raised, educated and supported by his mother’s ’excessively pious’ cousins - it was published anonymously. Later stories appeared under pseudonyms such as “William Fairman”, “Mrs. Drusilla Clarke”, and “ENP Reed”. It was not until he gained some small prominence as the founder of the Society for Literary Improvement that he began to have stories published under his own name. Presumably, the surviving pious cousins raised no objections.

For the purpose of this anthology, which is intended as an introduction rather than a comprehensive overview of Echwell’s work, I have divided his career into three periods: 1841-1855 (selections from his Gothic stories), 1860-1867 (selections from Tales of Travel and Adventure), and 1865 – 1874 (selections from stories written for Morrison’s Moral Monthly). Unfortunately for the modern scholar, most of these stories survive only as fragments, due to the ephemeral nature of magazines. Yet even in these fragments, we can see the hand of the master – in the brooding atmosphere of a ruined abbey, in the minute descriptions of foreign cities and customs, and in the high moral ideals espoused by his characters.

It is my sincere hope that this volume will spark interest in a novelist who has too long been ignored in English literature.

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Next is the fun part – working on the fragments and a few accompanying illustrations. The Saints book took, what, three months? I am hoping to be done with this one by May, but that depends on how cranky Baby #2 is and how quickly Baby #1 can learn the art of copyediting.