Chapter 3 contends that the crime novels of the Newgate school stage the emergence of novelty, spectacle, and celebrity in the everyday lives of the low-born and ordinary. Newgate novels of the 1830s and 1840s examine how, in an emergent mass media culture, notorious figures and extraordinary actions reverberate through the collective consciousness. I argue that Newgate novelists develop a notion of demotic celebrity, showing how the criminal’s talents and achievements might capture the public’s imagination and bring celebrity within reach of insignificant individuals. Reading W. H. Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830) in relation to William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–38), the chapter shows that the criminal in these novels is a figure aware of his own visibility and conscious of how best to present himself to an audience. The Newgate novels interest in the production of celebrity reflects the permeation of fashion’s logics of contingency and spectacle into quotidian experience across the social spectrum.

Though the history of sexuality has diversified and enlarged our understanding of Victorian culture and practices, literary criticism, influenced by the courtship plots of canonical novels, has lagged behind. Even as we denounced a generation of historians and scholars for thinking Victorians were repressed, we canonized a literature based on heteronormative courtship narratives and traditional gender roles. We then critiqued that literature for adhering to – or championed it for subverting – those traditional narratives. In fact, Victorian fiction was always wilder and woollier than we gave it credit for being. Drawing on multiple novels, including examples by Wilkie Collins, William Ainsworth, and George Meredith, as well as the history of sexuality, including texts by Elizabeth Blackwell and Havelock Ellis, this essay surveys instances in which non-reproductive sexuality – pre- and extramarital flirtations, same-sex eroticism, desirous ephebes, and other kinds of non-genital or unconsummated sexual activities – are presented as typical behaviors within the novel. Just as conventional marital plots provide form for instances of what scholars have understood as managed desire, these texts suggest other formal possibilities and properties – rather than arcs of crisis and resolution, they may offer more episodic structures of sustained, oscillating, or unresolved tensions.