ABSTRACT
The Introduction began by remarking how Ouida would have hated the title of this collection. ‘Ouida and Victorian Popular Culture’ is deliberately contentious not only for that reason. It has been a commonplace for half a century now that the ‘popular’ is always open to tactical and strategic redefinition. Indeed, the battles to claim it may seem old-fashioned in our post-postmodern age of austerity and functionality. Nonetheless, definitions from 20 years ago can still be useful to rethink Ouida and what she stands for.1 Synthesising the British left tradition of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall with the then newer work of the Australian Colin Fiske, Colin Sparks suggested that for the purpose of analysis the ‘popular’ be split into the quantitative, aesthetic and political, concluding pessimistically in terms of the latter that the popular is ‘necessarily a reactionary category’.2 It is his triple breakdown of the popular that has chiefly prompted the thinking behind this chapter. I offer a literary and biographical survey intended to help the reader contextualise the individual essays in this collection both in terms of Ouida’s life and works but also in terms of what the wider issues are in the study of literary historical figures such as she.That Ouida was ‘popular’ in the first, quantitative, sense offered by Sparks is hard to contest: the ‘Introduction’ above showed how she shifted a lot of copy during and after her lifetime. But numbers sold comprise only one side the ‘quantitative’ aspect of popular culture: how much did Ouida earn from her work? That the quantitative interacts with the aesthetic and political aspects of the popular will hardly surprise either: the question here is how exactly the three categories will engage in a conversation that makes up Ouida’s life and popular art.
