"He looked up at the rich and great with a fierce, a sarcastic aspect, and a threatening posture, and his outcry, or challenge was: 'Ye rich and great, look out! We, the people, are as good as you.'" Thus wrote W. M. Thackeray in the London Times, five years after the death of his colleague and friend Douglas Jerrold. Others may have been more eloquent than Jerrold in treating the social and economic inequities that surfaced in the wake of the Industrial Revolution-and others were certainly more systematic about proposing solutions--but few wrote more prolifically or persistently about the problems. With his popular success as a dramatist supplemented by his widely read work as a journalist, Jerrold preached his reform sermons to a large and varied audience.

Douglas William Jerrold was born on 3 January 1803, the child of a theatrical couple, Samuel Jerrold and his second wife, the...