ABSTRACT
The preface to the tenth thousand of Edward Jenkins's polemical novel about drunkenness, The Devil's Chain (1876), begins with a statement of perplexity about the novel's function, which is hardly expected from an experienced novelist whose first novel Ginx's Baby (1870) had just reached its thirty-sixth edition. ‘One is rather at a loss to know what sort of a book one had written’, Jenkins comments with a mixture of surprise and complaint. Yet not only Jenkins was unsure of what kind of book he had written, as the successive prefaces to his more famous Ginx's Baby suggest. In these prefaces, Jenkins prints or comments on repeated criticisms by others of his work, criticisms which clearly exemplify the way in which his works confused and confounded conventional expectations. To a large extent it is not Jenkins who is unsure of his role, but the reading public, and Jenkins's insecurity develops more out of hostile criticism than from any lack of confidence in his published work. The closeness of Jenkins's relationship with his readers is clearly established by his need to take their complaints seriously despite his enormous sales figures.
