George W. M. Reynolds Explained

George William MacArthur Reynolds (23 July 1814 – 20 June 1879) was a British fiction writer and journalist.

Reynolds was born in Sandwich, Kent, the son of Captain Sir George Reynolds, a flag officer of the Royal Navy. Reynolds was educated first at Dr. Nance's school in Ashford, Kent, and then attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He was intended for a career in the British Army, but his parents died during 1829 and, with his subsequent inheritance, he decided to quit the military and devote himself instead to literary pursuits. He left Sandhurst on 13 September 1830 and for the next few years he traveled a great deal, particularly in France, and became a naturalised French citizen.[1] He began residence in Paris in 1834, where he started a daily English newspaper. The venture failed, and Reynolds returned bankrupt to England in 1836.

Reynolds served as editor of The Teetotaler (a weekly journal advocating teetotalism) beginning in 1840.[2]

Writing

Reynolds was a prolific writer of popular fiction starting from The Youthful Imposter, published in 1835 which was then republished later as The Parricide; or, The Youth's Career of Crime. After the publication of his first novel Reynolds then assumed the editorship of The Monthly Magazine, a position which he held between 1837 and 1838 and wrote articles under the pseudonym of "Parisianus."[3] Almost forgotten now, during his lifetime he was more read than Dickens or Thackeray; in his obituary, the trade magazine The Bookseller called Reynolds "the most popular writer of our times" ("Obituary" 600). His best-known work was the long-running serial The Mysteries of London (1844), which borrowed liberally in concept from Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris). It sold 40,000 copies a week in penny instalments and more than a million copies cumulatively before it was issued in bound volumes, enjoying an international circulation in French, German, Italian, and Spanish translations. Although it was outlawed by the authorities, the German version achieved the status of a cult favourite on the Russian black market.

The Mysteries of London and its even lengthier sequel, The Mysteries of the Court of London, are considered to be among the seminal works of the Victorian "urban mysteries" genre, a style of sensational fiction which adapted elements of Gothic novels – with their haunted castles, innocent noble damsels in distress and nefarious villains – to produce stories which instead emphasized the poverty, crime, and violence of a great metropolis, complete with detailed and often sympathetic descriptions of the lives of lower-class lawbreakers and extensive glossaries of thieves' cant, all interwoven with a frank sexuality not usually found in popular fiction of the time.

The Mysteries of London, like most of Reynolds' works, was published first as a weekly penny dreadful, or "Penny Blood", illustrated with lurid engravings and circulating mainly among readers of limited means and education. Although Reynolds was unusual in his religious skepticism (one of the main characters in The Mysteries of London was a clergyman turned libertine) and political radicalism, his tales were intended for his mostly middle- and lower-class readers; they featured "hump-backed dwarves, harridans and grave-robbers [who] groped past against a background of workhouses, jails, execution yards, thieves' kitchens and cemeteries. His readers could depend on him to bring in the theme of maiden virtue rudely strumpeted as often as possible."

Reynolds' Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf was a gothic novel which described how the title character became a werewolf after making a pact with the devil.[4] Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf was republished in 1975 by Dover Books with anintroduction and bibliography of Reynolds by E. F. Bleiler.

Reynold's novels remained in print on both sides of the Atlantic longer than those of many of his contemporaries. An 1875 edition of Reynolds's Ciprina, published in Philadelphia, lists 40 novels including Mysteries of London under the heading "George W. M. Reynolds' Great Works", priced between 50 cents and $1.00. The Mysteries of the Court of London, translated into Marathi as well as Urdu, remained a best-seller in India well into the twentieth century. The Marathi translation was done by K.B. Mande in the early 20th century and was titled The Secret Deeds of the Elites of London. It was very popular in the Marathi-speaking area, as is evident by numerous references to the text in early 20th-century Marathi literature.

Chartism

Reynolds was also a major figure in the Chartist movement. In 1846, he founded two magazines, Reynolds' Miscellany (RM) and The London Journal (LJ). In 1849, he founded Reynolds's Political Instructor, which in May 1850 became Reynolds Weekly Newspaper, the leading radical newspaper of the post-Chartist era. It long survived him, ending publication in 1967 as the Sunday Citizen. Edwin Brett, a fellow chartist and publisher of penny dreadfuls, became a lifelong friend.[5]

For both Reynolds's Political Instructor and Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper, between 1849 and 1856, he would write a signed editorial every week in which he gave his opinion on the pressing political matters of the day.

In 1854, he relocated to Herne Bay in Kent, where he became one of the town's Improvement Commissioners. Reynolds was an advocate of British Republicanism; much of his journalism, especially during the 1870s, "promoted a levelling agenda against traditional social hierarchies and accentuated the difficulties of the British throne".[6]

Works

A prolific novelist, the list of Reynolds's works is long; matters are made more complex by the fact that American publishers often attributed the authorship of various anonymously written books to Reynolds as well. Furthermore, although he is known as a penny blood author, not all of his works appeared as serialised penny instalments. The following works have, as a result of research by E. F. Bleiler, been confirmed to have been definitely authored by Reynolds:

Novels

Shorter fiction and short stories

Translation

Poetry

Miscellaneous works

Journalism career

Further reading

Reviews and literary criticism

Notes and References

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01k9t7k "The Other Dickens"
  2. 25 July 1840 . The Teetotaler . I . 5 . London . United Temperance Association . George W. M. . Reynolds . George W. M. Reynolds . 18 December 2011 . DEVOTED TO TEMPERANCE, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE. EDITED BY GEORGE W. M. REYNOLDS .
  3. Book: Bleiler, E.F.. "Bibliography". in G. W.M. Reynolds, Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf.. Dover. 1975. 9780486799292. New York. 158.
  4. Fisher, B. F.; "Wagner, the Wehr-Wulf",in: Frank N. Magill, ed. Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, Vol 4. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, Inc., 1983. (pp. 2049–53) .
  5. Springhall . John . A Life Story for the People"? Edwin J. Brett and the London "Low-Life" Penny Dreadfuls of the 1860s . Victorian Studies . 1990 . 33 . 2 . 223–246 . Indiana University Press . 3828357 . 2 February 2021.
  6. Andrzej Olechnowicz, The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present. Cambridge University Press, 2007., (p. 190).

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