ABSTRACT
The recent surge of interest in working-class writing has alerted scholars to some of its distinctive features, especially the close interrelation between fiction and politics. Melodrama infused political writing with a keen, Manichaean sense of right and wrong, powerlessness and power, distributed along class lines, while Chartist fiction vividly depicted the plight of workers through the frustration, despair and resistance of its characters. As Ian Haywood writes, ‘the supposed barrier between the fictional and the political was highly permeable’1 in working-class publications. As a Chartist activist, journalist and novelist, G.W.M. Reynolds traversed this barrier professionally and pioneered forms of politically relevant literature, interpolating polemics throughout his sprawling sensational novels. His phenomenally popular Mysteries of London (1844-48) reported annual statistics on poverty, for instance, while The Seamstress (1850) analysed the system of middlemen that depressed the wages of seamstresses through the speeches of a starving seamstress turned wellheeled prostitute with an impressive grasp of political economy. In these instances, permeability is achieved in the manifest content of the text, through direct reference to economic exploitation.
