This study centres on the hypothesis that, as first claimed by historian Louis Chevalier, Eugene Sue's "Les Mysteres de Paris", through pressure from Sue's reader-correspondents as he wrote and published the novel in serial form, was a collective production.

Along with Alexandre Dumas "pere, Eugene Sue (1804-57) was the most successful popular French novelist of the first half of the nineteenth century. The present study engages with a problematic (emerging forms of popular literature), centered on a particular case (Sue's most famous novel, "Les Mysteres de Paris), and is underpinned by a specific hypothesis: the claim first advanced by the social historian Louis Chevalier that "Les Mysteres de Paris, through pressure of Sue's reader-correspondents as he wrote and published the novel in serial form, was a collective production ('written for the people by the people'). Prendergast opens lines of inquiry, identifies blockages, entertains speculations and poses questions to illuminate a range of larger issues in the sociology of literature and the history of the book.