ed in the project of creating the conventions, style, and subject matter of the Victorian novel), Thackeray declared that Sue was a "quack" and questioned the propriety of committing narrative and characters of questionable morality to serialized fiction: "We have no right to be interested with the virtues of ruffianism," he says (Thackeray 235), and cautions against being "led to a guilty sympathy for villany, by having it depicted to us as exceedingly specious, agreeable, generous, and virtuous at heart" (236). But Thackeray also declared Sue's Mysteries of Paris to be quite readable, much in the manner of a guilty pleasure.
An uncredited notice published in the Southern Quarterly Review, an American journal, acknowledged "the benevolence of his philosophy," or good intentions, on one hand, but was suspicious of his point of view as actually expressed in Mysteries of Paris: "we are not so sure that [his opinions] are then either true or wholesome" (257). The review cited--without labeling as such--the naturalistic details of Sue's text as presenting a range of human squalor experienced in and by the lowest of the lower classes of Europe. It also cites Sue's "frequent exaggerations of revolting pictures" of Paris as well as his evocation of "startling and terrible events,--its strong contrasts,--its scenes equally strange and picturesque,--sometimes horrible and revolting" (258). But precisely on account of its ability to evoke the "sinks and stews of Paris" (259), Mysteries of Paris was to be hidden from the children. "We would as religiously exclude it," declared the Review, "as we would exclude the gross pictures of similar histories, addressed to the eye, which issue from the same prurient regions" (259).
That general attitude was embedded in literary opinion some 25 years after the first publication of Mysteries of Paris. The work was seen as evidence of the intractability of social inequities, or "evils," that were no one's...