ABSTRACT
This chapter provides examples from three stages of Edward Lloyd early career: his use of popular printed ephemera in The Penny Pickwick, the adaptation of earlier popular fiction in Thomas Peckett Prest’s Ela the Outcast and the emergence of a new fictional heroine in James Malcolm Rymer’s Ada the Betrayed. Rymer’s concerns become clear in the serial he wrote to launch The Penny Weekly Miscellany. The success of Ada the Betrayed helped establishes the fortunes of both Rymer and Lloyd. The imagined memoir of a housewife’s misadventures with her servants, the novel includes an account of the maid Betsy’s obsession with Lloyd’s penny serials. For many, Lloyd’s romances would have brought relief from their rigid routines and restricted lives, and Ela and the gypsy life would have offered relief to many a real-life Betsy. Moving from Wych Street to Shoreditch in 1839, Lloyd took advantage of the latest developments in the printing industry.
