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Affective Ethics and Democratic Politics in Sweeney Todd and the Victorian Penny Press

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jvcult/vcy054

1750-0133

Samantha Morse,

Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research

James Malcolm Rymer’s Sweeney Todd, first published as The String of Pearls: A Romance (1846–47), engages the melodramatic mode to represent encounters with the dreadful to immensely popular effect. Dread in ‘penny blood’ fiction is significantly differentiable from the ‘penny dreadful’ phenomenon later in the century. This essay begins by explicating the significance of dread in the late 1840s in order to illuminate Rymer’s vital use of this future-oriented and ethical affect in Sweeney Todd. The affective power of dread motivates the plot and crucially develops the protagonists’ gendered identities. Beyond these two characters, dread also works in the narrative to build an ethical community committed to truth and justice, one that Rymer suggests as a model for democratic reform. A closer look at the commercial profitability of this story and its progressive politics discloses a link between affective and capitalist economies. In Sweeney Todd, it is the affective potency of dread that moderates both melodrama’s excess and capitalism’s consumption. Rymer’s project, sanctioned by his publisher Edward Lloyd, is to represent the benefits of dreading well in order to precipitate a politics of enfranchisement and mindful appetite.