Reading Reynolds: The Mysteries of London as ‘Microscopic Survey’

Abstract

George William Macarthur Reynolds: even to those with an interest in Victorian literature and culture, this is an unfamiliar name, but Reynolds’s obituarist in 1879 described him as the most popular writer of his time.¹ Described in the Dictionary of National Biography as ‘novelist, journalist and radical’, Reynolds presents an interesting case history in terms of the history of reading, with a prodigious written output produced and consumed over a relatively short period of time.² Anne Humphreys has estimated that he wrote between 35 and 40 million words over a 12-year period.³ E.F. Bleiler notes that though ‘[o]ther writers in the popular traditions of England, France and America have written comparable amounts’, this monumental word-count was usually accomplished over many more years.⁴ Jonathan Rose contrasts Reynolds’s legacy with that of a better-remembered contemporary: ‘It has been argued that the sensational novelist GWM Reynolds (1814–79) outsold Dickens in his day, but his books had no staying power.’⁵ Thus, Reynolds’s readership belonged to a particular time. Though there is some evidence of his cross-class appeal, he aimed his work largely at a working-class audience, and in terms of sales was hugely successful. Louis James has claimed that Reynolds’s serial fiction The Mysteries of London was ‘almost certainly the most widely read single work of fiction in mid-nineteenth century Britain, and attracted more readers than did the novels of Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton or Trollope.’⁶