‘Unblessed by Offspring’: Fertility and the Aristocratic Male in Reynolds’s The Mysteries of the Court of London

Boucher, Abigail

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-41141-0_3

Abigail Boucher⁵

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

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Abstract

The quotation which titles this chapter is found, in some form or another, in reference to nearly every aristocratic couple in the Chartist writer G.W.M Reynolds’s 1840s–1850s serialised radical Chartist penny fiction, The Mysteries of the Court of London. Silver fork fiction considered how the complex performances of aristocratic illness or functions of the body morphed through the generations as fashionable ideals evolved. Here, in Reynolds’s working-class literature, those functions are given a much more definite, if no less complex, treatment. Reynolds still very much associates the aristocracy with ill health, but in the targeted (and ideologically charged) realm of fertility. In his biopolitical critique of the aristocratic system’s ability to function, Reynolds’s text frankly and bluntly places the blame for infertility upon the male partner, that it is ‘the miserable husband [who] is impotent’. This chapter analyses the manifestations of endemic aristocratic infertility in Reynolds’s Chartist penny fiction and explores Reynolds’s triangulation of contemporary understandings of reproductive biology, the socio-political limitations of primogeniture, and the supposed medicalised immorality of gender and sexuality non-conformity. Reynolds, I argue, uses his own frequently patriarchal and strangely conservative readings to undermine the very patriarchal and often politically conservative class system he ostensibly loathes.

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Notes

1.
G.W.M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of the Court of London (1848–1856). 10 vols (Boston, MA: The Oxford Society, 1920), I, p. 376; III, p. 102; III, p. 236; IV, p. 146; VI, p. 19; VI, p. 440; VI, p. 441; VII, p. 19; X, pp. 446–47.
2.
Reynolds, MoCL, IV, p. 392.
3.
Anne Humpherys and Louis James, ‘Introduction’, in G.W.M. Reynolds: Nineteenth Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press, ed. by Anne Humpherys and Louis James (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 1–15 (p. 6); ‘Obituary’, The Bookseller, 3 July 1879, pp. 600–01 (p. 600).
4.
Anna Gasperini, Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy: The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. ix.
5.
James Greenwood, ‘A Short Way to Newgate’, The Wilds of London (London: Chatto and Windus, 1874), pp. 158–172 (p. 158); p. 168.
6.
Diana Pérez Edelman, Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel (London; Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
7.
I will be using The Oxford Society’s privately-bound 10-volume edition of MoCL from 1920 and will cite references by volume and page number instead of by their original weekly publication date. It is ironic, given Reynolds’s stance on the inevitable destruction of the aristocracy, that the few bound volumes of his work produced for middle- and upper-class collectors had more physical longevity than the inexpensive weekly papers produced for lower-class citizens. There are few, if any, complete and surviving collections of MoL or MoCL in newspaper form.
8.
Reynolds, MoCL, III, p. 186.
9.
Robert Saunders, ‘God and the Great Reform Act: Preaching against Reform, 1831–32’, Journal of British Studies 53:2 (2014), pp. 378–399 (p. 379).
10.
Michael Diamond, Victorian Sensation (London: Anthem Press, 2003), p. 193.
11.
Trefor Thomas, ‘Rereading G.W. Reynolds’ The Mysteries of London’, Rereading Victorian Fiction, eds. Alice Jenkins and Juliet John (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 59–80, (p. 59).
12.
Michael H. Shirley, ‘G.W.M Reynolds, Reynolds’s Newspaper and Popular Politics’, G.W.M Reynolds: Nineteenth Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press, eds. Anne Humpherys and Louis James (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 75–89 (p. 75); Trefor Thomas, ‘Introduction’ to The Mysteries of London by G.W.M. Reynolds (1844–48), ed. Trefor Thomas (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), pp. vii–xxiv, (pp. xv–xvii).
13.
Thomas, ‘Rereading’, p. 59; Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Griffin, Bohn and Co, 1861–1862), p. 25.
14.
Rohan McWilliam, ‘The French Connection: G.W.M. Reynolds and the Outlaw Robert Macaire’, G.W.M. Reynolds: Nineteenth Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press, eds. Anne Humpherys and Louis James (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 33–49 (p. 46).
15.
Len Platt, Aristocracies of Fiction: The Idea of Aristocracy in Late-Nineteenth-Century and Early-Twentieth Century Literary Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2001), p. xiv.
16.
Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain 1880–1939 (Oxford Scholarship Online, January 2011). https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199280520.001.0001.
17.
David Rosen, ‘The volcano and the cathedral: muscular Christianity and the origins of primal manliness’, in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. by Donald E. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 17–44 (p. 21).
18.
Of George III’s fifteen children, only three produced any living, legitimate offspring, not counting George IV’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, who survived until adulthood only to die in childbirth.
19.
Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature, Or, The Origins of Society: A Poem, with Philosophical Notes (London: T. Bensley, 1803), N.P. [‘Additional Notes IX: Hereditary Diseases’].
20.
T.B. Curling, ‘Observations on Sterility in Man; with Cases’, The Lancet 82: 2079 (23 June 1863), pp. 11–13 (p. 12).
21.
Anon. ‘The Pathology of Genius’, The British Medical Journal, 1.399 (20 Feb 1892), pp. 400–01 (pp. 400–01).
22.
Stephen Halliday, The Great Filth (Stroud: History Press, 2011), p. 115.
23.
Reynolds, MoCL, III, p. 186.
24.
James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 15.
25.
John Ruskin, ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ in Sesame and Lilies (1865), 12th ed. (London: George Allen, 1897), pp. 87–143 (p. 107).
26.
Martin A. Danahay, Gender at Work in Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) p. 2; John Potvin, Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding, 1870–1914: Bodies, Boundaries and Intimacy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 2; Andrew Dowling, Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), p. 1; Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, ‘Introduction’ in Gender, Health and Popular Culture, ed. by Cheryl Krasnick Warsh (Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011), pp. vii–xvii (p. viii).
27.
Ying S. Lee, Masculinity and the English Working Class (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007; repr. 2013), p. 33.
28.
Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 11.
29.
Harry Brod, ‘Studying Masculinities as Superordinate Studies’ in Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory, ed. by Judith Kegan Gardiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 161–75 (p. 162).
30.
John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2005), p. 39.
31.
Reynolds, MoCL, VII, p. 11.
32.
Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, ‘Introduction: Mapping Embodied Deviance’, in Deviant Bodies, ed. by Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp.1–18 (p. 1; p. 12).
33.
Reynolds, MoCL, I, p. 175.
34.
The concept of transvestism did not even appear until the early 20^th century. Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, German sexologist, coined the term in his 1910 publication, The Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress (New York: Prometheus Books, 2003). His study was the first scientific work to conclude that the practice of cross-dressing was, in fact, divorced from the state of homosexuality. Previous to this definition, cross-dressing was viewed as a lewd and criminal act tied almost solely to the realm of male homosexual prostitution. See Vern L. Bullough’s ‘Transvestism: A Reexamination’, Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality, 4:2 (1991), pp. 53–67, (p. 53).
35.
Reynolds, MoCL, I, p. 170.
36.
Ibid., I, p. 134.
37.
Reynolds, MoL, I, p. 7.
38.
Reynolds, MoCL, I, p. 24.
39.
Ibid., I, p. 135.
40.
Ibid., I, p. 134.
41.
Ibid., I, p. 135.
42.
Ibid., IV, p. 205.
43.
Ibid., I, p. 194.
44.
Ibid., VI, p. 440.
45.
Ibid., VI, p. 441.
46.
Susanne Davies, ‘Sexuality, Performance, and Spectatorship in Law: The Case of Gordon Lawrence, Melbourne, 1888’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7:3 (January 1997), pp. 389–408 (p. 393).
47.
Jennifer Terry, ‘Anxious Slippage between “Us” and “Them”: A Brief History of the Scientific Search for Homosexual Bodies’ in Deviant Bodies, ed. by Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp.129–69 (pp. 132–33).
48.
Reynolds, MoCL, IX, p.327.
49.
Ibid., III, p. 93
50.
G.E.C. (George Edward Cokayne), ‘Desmond’, in The Complete Peerage, 4^th ed., ed. by Vicary Gibbs, 13 vols (London: St Catherine Press, 1916), pp. 232–58 (pp. 254–58), IV.
51.
Reynolds, MoCL, II, p. 103.
52.
Ibid., I, p. 378; III, p. 93; IV, p. 458.
53.
Shirley, p. 87 (italics mine).
54.
Reynolds, MoCL, I, pp. 380–81.
55.
Ibid., I, p. 382; I, p. 377.
56.
Ibid., III, p. 30.
57.
Dominic Janes, ‘Back to the Future of the Body’, in Back to the Future of the Body, ed. by Dominic James (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), pp. 1–16 (p. 7).
58.
Reynolds, MoCL, III, p. 28.
59.
Ibid., II, p. 200.
60.
Ibid., V, p. 269.
61.
Ibid., I, p. 134; I, p. 377; V, p. 376.
62.
Christopher Hibbert, George IV (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 127; Christopher Hibbert, ‘George IV (1762–1830)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Online ed., ed. by Lawrence Goldman (January 2008). http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10541 [accessed 2 April 2023].
63.
Adams, p. 21.
64.
Danahay, p. 6
65.
Reynolds, MoCL, VII, p. 142.
66.
Weber, p. 13.
67.
Danahay, p. 7; Adams, pp. 7–8.
68.
Gwen Hyman, Making a Man, Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2009), p. 77.
69.
Reynolds, MoCL, I, p. 253.
70.
It is unknown whether any illustrations were created of the undressed Prince in his introductory scene, so a comparison of his illustrated depiction with those of female characters shown ‘in dishabille’ [sic] is unable to be reached. Each volume of the Oxford Society’s edition of MoCL contains only a single illustration in the frontispiece, though several dozen (perhaps hundred) more illustrations were published along with the text during the serial’s run. Of the ten volumes in this edition and their respective ten illustrations, eight depict examples of undress or other lascivious behaviour.
71.
Reynolds, MoCL, I, p. 159.
72.
Ibid., I, p. 162.
73.
Ibid., I, p. 162.
74.
Ibid., VII, p. 204.
75.
Ibid., II, p. 422.
76.
Ibid., X, p. 434.
77.
Ibid., VIII, p. 211.
78.
Ibid., II, p. 189; III, p. 136; III, p. 369.
79.
Ibid., I, p. 290.
80.
Ibid., III, pp. 142–43.
81.
Ibid., III, p. 145.
82.
Hibbert, ‘George IV (1762–1830)’ in Oxford DNB.
83.
Ibid., IV, p. 305.
84.
Ibid., IV, p. 325.
85.
Ibid., II, p. 319; II, p. 326; III, p. 56.
86.
Ibid., VI, p. 19.
87.
Ibid., VII, p. 328.
88.
Ibid., VII, pp. 332–33.
89.
Ibid., VI, p. 156; VI, p. 20.
90.
Ibid., X, p. 21.
91.
Ibid., VII, p. 455.
92.
Though hardly an accurate biographer, Reynolds stays true to the broad strokes of history, especially as they concern his more well-known, real-life characters. While this restrains him from disciplining villainous characters with the severity Reynolds vocalises that they deserve, it also allows him to claim that his work is more truthful than it actually is—a privilege Reynolds takes advantage of many times (e.g. III, p. 145; IX, p. 434; X, p. 107 etc.).
93.
Reynolds, MoCL, X, p. 248.
94.
Ibid., III, p. 145.
95.
Thomas, ‘Rereading’, p. 60.
96.
Reynolds, MoCL, IX, p. 434.
97.
K. Corbet, ‘The Degeneration of Race’, The Lancet, 78: 1981 (17 Aug 1861), p. 170.
98.
Antony Taylor, ‘“Some little or Contemptible War up on her Hands”: Reynolds’s Newspaper and Empire’, G.W.M. Reynolds: Nineteenth Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press, eds. Anne Humpherys and Louis James (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 99–119 (p. 105).

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Boucher, A. (2023). ‘Unblessed by Offspring’: Fertility and the Aristocratic Male in Reynolds’s The Mysteries of the Court of London. In: Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41141-0_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41141-0_3
Published: 01 September 2023
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