PARTISAN REVIEW
79
readership of Sue and Reynolds and Lippard must have been drawn
from this class--out of which, indeed, came those critics who in
middle age disavowed what in their youth they had enjoyed, though
even then (they were to claim at least) only as an unworthy in–
dulgence, a minor vice.
It was not, however, primarily to or for such readers, that Lip–
pard and his colleagues wrote. He may have managed to earn be–
tween three and four thousand dollars a year with their help, but his
books (like Sue's or Reynolds's) do not represent a purely commercial
response to opportunities opened up by advances in technology and
new developments in bookselling; they are also, in a deeper sense,
"popular," which is to say, aimed at educating the working-class
elements of their audience to live better lives and even to make for
themselves a better world. Lippard lived through difficult times as a
youth, but is not himself of working-class origin, any more than were
Sue and Reynolds and Gerstacker; yet he was a convinced socialist,
and,
like his contemporaries, got into trouble because of
his
political
activism. His revolutionary doctrine was pre-Communist Manifesto
socialism: not the "scientific" theory developed, with appropriate sta–
tistics
and
"laws,"
by Marx and his followers, but the sort of utopian,
idealistic, sentimental dream expressed, with appropriate rhetoric and
poetry,
by Fourier and others, only to be mocked and belittled by Marx.
Whatever the lack in precision and sophistication of its social
doctrine, the 1840's was a period in which for the first time it had
become possible to speak of a "working class" rather than of "the
lower orders" or "the JX>Or"; and in which it was therefore possible
to
imagine a kind of literature appropriate to a group thus redefined.
Condescension had not disappeared entirely with the invention of
a new nomenclature (any more than it disappears entirely among
us
now that we have learned to say "Black" rather than "darky" or
"colored man" or "Negro"), since men like Sue and Reynolds were
quite remote from their readers in
social
origin. Yet, unlike the kind
of literature written at "the lower orders" and "the poor," fiction for
the "working class" mostly eschewed advice to its audience about
knowing their places and accepting their lot. Rather it held out to
them the possibility of imagining (perhaps someday creating) a world
in
which they would fare better; or at least one in which the cor–
ruption of 'their masters would be exposed to scorn.
