Charley Wag, the New Jack Sheppard. A New and Intensely Exciting Romance (1860-1861)

The author of Charley Wag, the New Jack Sheppard. A New and Intensely Exciting Real Life Romance is unknown. Credit is given to “George Savage,” but that is known to be a pseudonym, and Charley Wag was in all likelihood written by Charles H. Ross. Ross (c. 1834-1897) was a prolific author of penny dreadfuls and plays who is best-known for his comic creation Ally Sloper.

Charley Wag begins when Charley, an unwanted baby, is flung into the Thames by his mother. Wag is rescued from the river by Theophilius Toddleboy, an eccentric “who spent his life in a fog of gin and tobacco.”¹ Toddleboy takes the baby to a nearby inn and decides to keep him. The baby laughs often and easily and is nicknamed Wag, and since at this time all the Charlies are called “Charley Wag,” the baby’s name becomes Charley Wag. Toddleboy tells the others in the tavern about how he found the baby, and within a few days Toddleboy is approached by a crooked lawyer, Mr. Leech, who pays Toddleboy five pounds to take care of the baby for the next five months. Toddleboy does care for Wag, and Toddleboy enlists the aid of the female owner of the tavern, but Toddleboy is a poor parent, and by the time Wag is thirteen he is uncontrollable. The thirteen-year-old Wag plays a trick on a policeman, steals a goose, and rescues a drowning woman, but the woman he rescues is not grateful and the policeman catches up to Wag and arrests him for stealing the goose. Charley is then kidnapped and brought to a house in the country. Charley is thrown in the cellar, where he finds a starving boy chained to a wall. The house is the home of Doctor Faversham, who experiments on and tortures runaway boys, and the cellars where the boys are kept is full of beetles which devour the boys who are too weak to resist them. Charley escapes from the cellar and meets a beautiful young woman, Lucinda, in the house. He flirts with Lucinda, but when the house catches on fire he leaves her and escapes from the house. (He is, however, unable to rescue the boy from the cellar, who dies during the fire). Charley wanders around the countryside and falls among bad company, joining a gang of burglars. The gang’s leader, George, puts Charley to work as a lookout during robberies. Charley eventually runs from them and returns to London, but once there he discovers that he is wanted by the police for his part in the gang’s robberies. Charley visits a dance-hall and sees a soldier attempting to kiss one of the dancers, Julia Jenkini, who does not want the soldier’s attentions. Charley rescues Julia, and they hit it off so well that when Charley tells her that he is going to marry her, she accepts. The next morning they have breakfast together, and then Charley goes to tell his foster mother, the tavern owner, about his marriage. But on the way to the tavern he sees a number of wanted posters bearing his name, and when he arrives at the tavern he finds his foster mother’s funeral procession leaving for the cemetery.

Mr. Leech finds Wag before the police do and kidnaps him, but George takes Wag away from Leech and forces Charley to help George’s gang in another burglary. The burglary goes bad and Charley is caught by the police and sent to prison on Spike Island. Charley is released a year later and resolves to start over and go straight. But he is unable to find honest work because of his time in prison. Charley succeeds in getting work with an honest, kindly man, but the workers in the man’s shop distrust Charley, and they get him in trouble, after which Charley’s employer fires Charley. Charley is unable to get any work, and rather than starve he returns to crime. Charley sets to with abandon and becomes a successful thief, even looting the Bank of England. Now rich from his crimes, Charley becomes a swell, spending a great deal of money on clothing and loose women. By accident he sees Julia again; when Charley disappeared her life became a series of setbacks, until she was forced to become the mistress of the Duke of Heatherland, the Premier of England: “he had suggested with his usual cheerful flippancy, some new and iniquitous scheme for oppressing and grinding down the already over-oppressed and ground down working classes."² Charley and Julia resume their friendship. Lucinda meanwhile moved to London after the fire at Faversham’s house, but she was unable to find any work and was eventually thrown out of her room for lack of rent. She is rescued by a woman and brought to her house, only to discover that the woman is a madame and her home a “house of ill-fame.” Lucinda is kept prisoner there and is eventually “debauched” by the Duke of Heatherland.

Numerous plot complications follow. Julia is cast off from the Duke and forced to move from nobleman to nobleman, each keeping her briefly and then dumping her. Lucinda discovers that she is the daughter of the Duke of Heatherland. The Duke discovers that his wife died while he was visiting a brothel. Charley discovers that he is the son of the Duke of Heatherland. The Duke attempts to kill Charley, but Julia takes the bullet meant for Charley, and Charley’s group of friends, the Cocks’ Lot, then kills the Duke, tearing him “literally...limb from limb.” At a party for the aristocracy Charley is arrested for the Duke’s murder. Charley is sentenced to death, but Lucinda, now the Duchess of Heatherland, pleads for Charley’s life with the Home Secretary, and Charley’s life is spared. He is given the dukedom and estates of Heatherland and passes the rest of his life in strict retirement abroad.

Charley Wag, the New Jack Sheppard is the type of penny dreadful which provoked a backlash against the dreadfuls (see: The Boy Detective)–John Adcock calls Charley Wag “the Ur-text of the boys penny dreadful so notorious to the press in the 1860s.”³ Charley Wag may be the most sensationalistic of the depraved dreadfuls. It is much more sensationalist than The Wild Boys of London, which was actually suppressed by the police in 1872. Charley Wag is a long attempt at finding new depths to plumb in the dreadful medium. Charley Wag has a father (the Duke) raping his daughter (Julia); the Duke attempting to rape Lucinda, who is rescued at the last minute by Charley Wag; the Duke tying Faversham up and making him watch the rape of his wife by the Duke, after which the Duke sets Faversham’s wife on fire; Faversham hiring the criminal “Handsome Jack” to rape the Duke’s wife, the Duchess of Heatherland, who gets pregnant and dumps her child (Charley Wag) into the Thames; Faversham beating the Duke of Heatherland to death with an axe; boys in Faversham’s dungeon being eaten alive by beetles; Faversham stealing the corpses of newly hanged criminals and experimenting on them, to bring them back to life; and illustrations featuring demons and evil spirits.

The modern reader, more jaded to graphic content than the moralists of the 1860s, may or may not find the excess of Charley Wag offensive. But the modern reader will not find the novel dull. Ross tells the story in a light style, complete with conversational asides to the reader: “I left Charley Wag under the bed.”⁴ There is a substantial amount of melodramatic dialogue and turgid text, but Ross’ seemingly appalled comments about the horror of “MURDER!” quickly take on an almost facetious air, and the reader becomes convinced that, as in Fanny White, Ross’s editorial comments and breathless denunciations of the evils that men do are tongue-in-cheek. Although not a story of the supernatural, Charley Wag has several passages which feint toward horror, as in Faversham’s experiments on the corpses of criminals, and one long passage about the non-supernatural and sadly realistic horrors which surround one unfortunate character. The novel’s illustrations are among the better of the medium; the illustration of one character’s nightmare, and the devils within it, is striking.

Like other authors of exploitation penny dreadfuls, Ross makes a pretense at social relevance. He describes in detail the difficulties that convicts face once they leave prison. Charley Wag, though well-meaning, is unable to find work because of his criminal record, and Ross stresses the consequences of society’s rejection of these men and women. Ross lectures the reader about the appalling conditions in which the destitute of London live and the horrendous places in which the homeless are forced to stay. Modern readers, more honest about the shortcomings of Victorian society than the moralists of Ross’ day, will find these passages compelling even while acknowledging that Ross didn’t mean them and included them solely as a fig leaf.

Charley Wag has several other elements which keep the reader’s attention. The second issue has a long footnote boasting about the sales of the first issue of Charley Wag. Ross includes several long digressions, including an almost wholly irrelevant (but informative) discussion of the history of the hangman, Jack Ketch. The dreadful includes the lyrics and music to the Charley Wag song. One of the policemen investigating Charley Wag is a stout detective named Bucket, undoubtedly a reference to Dickens’ Inspector Bucket (see: Bleak House). The characterization in Charley Wag is one-dimensional, if vivid. The character of Doctor Faversham–insane, evil, melancholic, and tormented–is memorable and is deserving of more respectable surroundings than Charley Wag.

Faversham is interesting because he represents a typical example of the Victorian mad scientist in a very untypical milieu. “Untypical,” because penny dreadfuls like Charley Wag, though accustomed to making use of fantastika (see: Broad Arrow Jack), rarely made use of mad scientist figures. (Lord Manningtree in Fanny White is another, rare, example of the penny dreadful mad scientist). Much more common were supernatural occurrences and items.

Faversham is a typical Victorian mad scientist because Charley Wag emphasizes his madness. Mad scientists go back centuries: the first version of the mad scientist was Faustus of Milevis (?-?), a ranking member of the Manichean religion in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. about whom a number of stories were told, implying or stating outright that he had sold his soul in order to gain heretical and damnable knowledge about God.⁵ A number of mad scientists appeared in seventeenth century plays and novels, including the Marquis de Sade’s Justine (1797) in which

De Sade is approached by a chemist, Almani, who shares de Sade’s enthusiasm for sadism and has discovered the secrets of nature’s destructive powers. Almani has spent twenty years duplicating causing artificial earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanoes, and killing ordinary people with him, and he offers to help de Sade. Together the two build artificial volcanoes on Sicily, eventually killing 25,000 Sicilians.⁶

In the nineteenth century the mad scientist transitioned from an occasional plot device to a widely-recognized trope, but the Victorian belief that genius was inseparably tied to mental illness:

The excesses of the Romantics created a backlash in the early 19th century, and the Romantics’ concept of genius was included in this. For post-Romantic authors, the genius was linked with monomania, what Daniel Pick, in Faces of Degeneration (1993), called the “idée fixe, a single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind” that could prompt “overweening ambition.” The Victorians shifted their focus from the poetic genius (the beau ideal of the Romantics) to the scientific genius. By mid-century the genius’ monomania was characterized as not just unbalanced but insane. As well, the cultural obsession with degeneration, so widespread in the mid- and late-19th century, was applied to intelligence. It was argued that the development of larger brains came at the expense of moral and physical strength and reproductive capability....

For the Victorians, scientific genius was innately linked with mental illness. The criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), in his landmark work on criminals, L’uomo delinquente (1875), included Isaac Newton and Blaise Pascal in his list of mad geniuses. The French psychiatrist Jacques Moreau’s Morbid Psychology (1859), the most influential work on mental illness in the 19th century, stated that “genius was essentially a ‘nervose’ or nervous affliction similar to idiocy,” that geniuses are “diseased victims of biological determinism,” and that “the idiot, the hysteric, the epileptic, the madman, as well as the genius, are¼branches growing from the same tree.”

The Victorians did not glorify the creative powers of the genius: they pathologized them. The evolutionary ideal, for the Victorians, was the common man. In 1835 the Belgian sociologist Adolphe Quetelet published the essay “A Treatise on Man and the Development of his Faculties,” in which he put forth the idea of the statistical “homme moyen,” or the average man. For Quetelet, and for the many Victorians influenced by him, the average man is the center of a bell curve of human traits, with anything outside the peak of the curve–including extraordinary intelligence–being an aberration verging on, if not leaping into, the pathological and the diseased.⁷

Faversham is a sterling example of this. He verges on being a Gothic Hero-Villain, but is more precisely a Victorian insane mad scientist with Gothic elements. His insanity is emphasized by the text.

Unfortunately, despite the violent sexual content, Charley Wag was popular with schoolchildren, to the point that “through the baleful influence of...Charley Wag...children began to speak of ‘playing the Charley Wag.’ In 1900 ‘Playing the Charley Wag’ or ‘Playing the Charley’ was described as the commonest expression of London Board School children.”⁸

Charley Wag is of interest historically, as perhaps the foremost example of the depraved dreadful, and the text certainly has an internal energy and is the expression of a single viewpoint, but that viewpoint is disturbing and disturbed enough, by modern standards, that modern readers are not likely to enjoy reading Charley Wag.

¹ Charles H. Ross, Charley Wag, the New Jack Sheppard (London: Vickers, 1861), 3.

² Ross, Charley Wag, 238.

³ John Adcock, “Charles Henry Ross (1835-1897),” Yesterday’s Papers, accessed Jan. 23, 2019, https://john-adcock.blogspot.com/2010/09/charles-henry-ross-1835-1897.html.

⁴ Ross, Charley Wag, 84.

⁵ Jess Nevins, “Alchemists, Astronomers, and Wild Men: A History of the Mad Scientist, Part One,” io9.com, accessed Feb. 11, 2019, https://io9.gizmodo.com/5805477/alchemists-astronomers-and-wild-men-a-history-of-the-mad-scientist-part-one/

⁶ Nevins, “Alchemists, Astronomers, and Wild Men.”

⁷ Nevins, “Organ Theft and the Insanity of Geniuses.”

⁸ Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (New York: NYRB, 2001), 371.