THE
MYSTERIES OF LONDON
by G.W.M.Reynolds
Foreword by Lee Jackson
Welcome to The Mysteries of London, one of the most famous 'penny bloods' (cheap sensational serials, published weekly, mass produced for working class readers, throughout the Victoria era). Best-sellers of their day — massively more so than now-famous Victorian novels, whose serial and novel formats were far too expensive for the working classes — Victorian moralists raged against these disreputable books, in much the same way that comics and video games have been condemned by latter-day guardians of law and order. Here's James Greenwood, for instance, querying the wisdom of allowing their sale in The Seven Curses of London (1869):
"What are the assured grounds of safety? Is it because it stands to reason that all such coarse and vulgar trash finds its level amongst the coarse and vulgar, and could gain no footing above its own elevation? It may so stand in reason, but unfortunately it is the unreasonable fact that this same pen poison finds customers at heights above its natural low and foul waterline almost inconceivable. How otherwise is it accountable that at least a quarter of a million of these penny numbers are sold weekly? How is it that in quiet suburban neighbourhoods, far removed from the stews of London, and the pernicious atmosphere they engender; in serene and peaceful semi-country towns where genteel boarding schools flourish, there may almost invariably be found some small shopkeeper who accommodatingly receives consignments of “Blue-skin,” and the “Mysteries of London,” and unobtrusively supplies his well-dressed little customer with these full-flavoured articles? Granted, my dear sir, that your young Jack, or my twelve years old Robert, have minds too pure either to seek out or crave after literature of the sort in question, but not un-frequently it is found without seeking. It is a contagious disease, just as cholera and typhus and the plague are contagious, and, as everybody is aware, it needs not personal contact with a body stricken to convey either of these frightful maladies to the hale and hearty. A tainted scrap of rag has been known to spread plague and death through an entire village, just as a stray leaf of “Panther Bill,” or “Tyburn Tree” may sow the seeds of immorality amongst as many boys as a town can produce." [click here for full text from The Seven Curses of London]
Are you, dear reader, amongst the 'coarse and vulgar'? If so, I hope you'll enjoy an insight into a fascinating aspect of Victorian literary life. You can start reading the Mysteries of London here.
If, however, you would first like to know a little more about the serial and it's author, then read on for an article by the erudite Dick Collins, who is in the process of editing an annotated print edition of this very text ...
George William McArthur Reynolds
A very brief introduction
by Dick Collins
G. W. M. Reynolds was born in Sandwich, Kent, on 23 July
1814. He was named George after his father; William after his uncle, from whom
he had 'expectations;' and McArthur after his godfather. His only brother was
born two years later, and named Edward Dowers Reynolds - the latter after his
mother's father, Purser Dowers.
Reynolds' father George was born in 1762, in Eastry,
Kent. In 1802 he was commissioned as a post-Captain in the Royal Navy: which
means he was a full Captain and Flag Officer. Unlike his father-in-law Dowers,
he wasn't a Lieutenant Commander who had the title as a courtesy. During the
Napoleonic Wars, Captain Reynolds commanded the Tribune, a 36-gun frigate
that plied the North Sea. He captured several enemy ships, and received the
prize money for them - though in one case he had to give it back, when the owner
of the (illegal) cargo successfully sued for its return. In 1813 he married
Caroline Frances Dowers (1789-1830) in Dover.
Purser Dowers (1751-1837) was a Londoner by birth, and
having joined the Navy, rose to be Commandant of the Royal Naval Hospital in
Walmer, just south of Deal in Kent. He was close friends with the local surgeon,
another Naval Commander, Duncan McArthur (1772-1855).
Shortly after Edward Reynolds was born, the family moved
to St. Peter Port, in Guernsey, where they had a house on the plush and
prestigious New Ground. George Reynolds senior may have been a Captain, but he
was not a gentleman by rank, and the boys probably played more with the local
children than their 'peers' in the Naval community. From this derives GWMR's
later bilingualism: he probably spoke Guernésiais, mis-called Channel Islands
French, from earliest childhood. There may be another legacy. That he hated the
upper-classes is shiningly clear from the Mysteries: but in 1841, he gave
a speech to a meeting of Tee-Totalers, claiming his father was Sir George
Reynolds, and had left him a large fortune on his death. Both statements were
lies, and it is significant that he felt the need to tell them.
In 1822 the family moved back to Kent, to Canterbury,
where Captain Reynolds died at the turn of 1822-23. He left the boys in the
guardianship of their mother, and, in the event of her death, in that of their
great-uncle Thomas Brown King, and Duncan McArthur. George went to school at Dr.
Nance's Academy in Ashford, twelve miles from Canterbury; and on 12 February
1828 entered the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst as a Gentleman Cadet. He did
not do well. His mother died in March 1830, having spent her last years running
a small school in Dover, and on 13 September that year George was 'removed by
his friends.' There are no records at Sandhurst saying why his career there was
cut short; but from hints in the Mysteries, it is possible he was
gambling too heavily with his comrades.
In the next few years, George and Edward were
technically under the guardianship of Duncan McArthur - King seems to have
played no part in their upbringing. A curious link arises between McArthur and
Reynolds' best creation, Anthony Tidkins, the Resurrection Man. Tidkins was born
in Walmer, and among his first body-snatchings is one done for 'the surgeon of
Walmer.' In real life, this was of course Duncan McArthur. Since the latter was
still very much alive when this episode was published in 1845, GWMR was accusing
his guardian of complicity in grave-robbing. Certainly, as Trefor Thomas has
said, the grave-robbing scenes in the Mysteries - among the most
memorable in literature - are very realistic, and seem to owe a lot to someone's
personal experience. Since most surgeons of the day used illicitly obtained
corpses at one time or another, this someone was surely Duncan McArthur.
In 1832, when he was just eighteen, GWMR published his
first book: The Errors of the Christian Religion Exposed, by a Comparison of
the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Reynolds turns his back on the Church of
England, and proclaims himself a Deist and a disciple of Tom Paine. The book was
printed by the infamous 'Infidel' Richard Carlile in London, and since Carlile
frequently used volunteers to take the blame for his seditious books, it is
likely that he was mostly the author of it. But Reynolds was now marked by the
authorities. It is alleged - on poor evidence - that stayed at the expensive
Long's Hotel, in Bond Street, and was arrested for trying to steal jewellery to
pay his bill. In 1833 he left England for Calais, where he claims to have
befriended the ageing Beau Brummel.
Although GWMR claimed to have been left a large fortune
by his father, it probably amounted to less than £2,000 by the time he finally
inherited it; and that was not until July 1837. In Calais he is alleged to have
been arrested, for using weighted dice; and it is also alleged that while in
prison he met Susannah Frances Pierson. Whether this story is true or not,
Reynolds moved on to Paris, where he lived at 18, Rue Royale: and on 31 July
1835 he married Susannah in the Chapel of the British Embassy in Paris. She was
not older than seventeen, was at least seven months pregnant, and had very
probably married before, at the age of fourteen, in the same Chapel. Despite
these ill-omens the marriage lasted, and there is no reason to believe it was
other than a love-match. Their first son, George, was born in Paris in 1835.
The couple found lodgings at no. 55, rue-neuve St.
Augustin, and George now began a series of business ventures, mostly on the
promise of paying when he got his inheritance. He opened a bookshop, the
Librairie des Etrangers, and started a newspaper, the London and Paris Courier.
It is doubtful whether this latter ever got off the ground, although he applied
for a licence for it. But soon he was bankrupt. He fled with Susannah and
Edward, who had joined him, to Calais; was arrested, and brought back to Paris;
lodged at no. 12, rue Mont Thabor, and made to work off his debt in the
enlightened French way. By the end of 1837 he was back in London, in poverty.
They lived at first in Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury,
but by November 1837 Reynolds was bankrupt in England as well - within four
months of gaining his 'large' inheritance. They found lodgings at 10, Upper
Stamford Street, in the Borough, and then to no. 36; soon they had to move on,
to 193 Blackfriars Road, where their first daughter Blanche was born in February
1839, and then very soon after that to no. 8 Bedford Place. George found work
editing the Monthly Magazine, and made a great success of a failing
enterprise. He produced several books on the French language and culture - for
example The French Self-Tutor in 1839, The Modern Literature of
France, and a translation of Hugo's Dernier Jour d'un condamné - but
he quarrelled with his employers, who didn't like his rather racy stories, and
he was soon out-of-work again. In May 1839 he was back in the Bankruptcy Court,
and spent from then until November in the Queen's Bench Prison, for debt - under
the less enlightened English system. He attempted to use his experiences in jail
as a source for his writing; but his main success at this time was a plagiarism
of The Pickwick Papers, called Pickwick Abroad, which came out in
the Monthly. His 'jail novel,' a mishmash of plots called (absurdly) Grace
Darling, failed badly, and deservedly.
In May 1840, Reynolds had a sudden, dramatic and very
public conversion to Tee-Totalism. He was soon a member of the London United
Temperance Association and, more importantly, gainfully employed as editor of
its journal, The Tee-Totaler. Though such journals usually just
chronicled meetings and speeches, Reynolds included a lot of quite sensational
fiction, directed against drinking, which didn't please everybody. What also
probably didn't thrill many, he booked weekly meetings at the Enon Chapel, off
Clare Market, where thousand of bodies were buried, and sometimes not even
buried, beneath the rickety floor-boards. At this time he was living at no. 11,
Suffolk Place, just opposite the churchyard at Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal
Green, where Tidkins snatches another corpse. He went into business with the
Secretary of the Association, Henry Williams Weston, and was soon bankrupt
again. His job with the Tee-Totaler went, and he was forced into jail
again. Weston got away almost scot-free, but Reynolds was an undischarged
bankrupt for several more years.
Reynolds claimed that he became a political Radical at
'college' - presumably he meant Sandhurst - and his writing had always had a
distinct Left-wing edge to it. He was the political correspondent of the Weekly
Despatch, the leading Chartist newspaper in the South of England, though he
also wrote for another paper - which he refused to name. Was it a Right-wing
print? We don't know. In 1843, the French novelist Eugène Sue started to
serialise his Mystères de Paris, and in October 1844 Reynolds began his Mysteries
of London. Though doubtless influenced by Sue, the book nevertheless soon
became independent of its model, and quickly became the best-selling story of
its day. It made Reynolds financially stable, for the first time in his life,
and he was able to move his family to a nicer area of London: they took rooms
above a grocer's shop in King's Square, Goswell Road.
As you read The Mysteries of London, it will
become clear just how much of Reynolds' own life went into his fiction.
* * *
The Mysteries of London came out in penny weekly
numbers, and was published by George Vickers. When the first series ended in
1846, Reynolds hinted at a continuation. Why it never came about, at least from
his pen, is a story worthy of anything in the Mysteries.
Neither man was particularly scrupulous; Vickers
probably had the edge over Reynolds in dishonesty. They quarrelled, almost
certainly over money, and Reynolds left Vickers. In his place he found a young
printer, John Dicks, with whom he began a life-long friendship. Still, Vickers
and Reynolds appear to have remained on cordial terms for the moment, and
Reynolds appears to have done some work for Vickers after the Mysteries.
Probably feeling he had some control over the Mysteries, Vickers paid two
other writers, Thomas Miller and E. Leman Blanchard, to write continuations.
They never reached the standard of Reynolds' own work. Reynolds, on the other
hand, started a new series of his own, The Mysteries of the Court of London,
set in the time of George III and George IV, which ran for nearly a decade, and
was in its way almost as much a sensation as the original Mysteries of
London.
To return to our theme: in June 1847 Reynolds and Dicks
started a new project, to be called Reynolds' Miscellany. He arranged for it to
be printed by George Stiff, who worked mainly for Vickers, and on Wednesday 14
June they sent some advance copies to Vickers' shop in Holywell Street, off the
Strand, to be sent on to Scotland. The publication date proper was fixed for 28
June. On Monday 26 June, Reynolds was appalled to see, in shop windows all over
London, a brand new magazine, Reynolds' Magazine, carrying almost exactly the
content of his own Miscellany, with slight changes to the tiles: thus The Corral
Island instead of The Coral Island, and so on. It was printed and published by
George Vickers. Reynolds demanded an explanation, and Vickers easily provided
one: it was pure coincidence. There was nothing Reynolds could do but issue a
long, rambling editorial consigning Vickers and Stiff to the lowest pouches of
hell; which just gave their joke publicity, and made Reynolds look quite a fool.
The war was not over. In March 1848, Reynolds addressed
a mass-meeting in Trafalgar Square, that promptly turned into a three-day riot.
The next month he chaired the enormous Demonstration on Kennington Common, that
proposed the petition to adopt the People's Charter. A month or two later, he
was back in the Bankruptcy Court, but the provisional notice of his discharge
was soon published. It was open to objection; George Vickers objected. Reynolds
was back in Court. As Reynolds tells the tale, one evening, between hearings, he
was at his offices in Wellington Street, with John Dicks, when he was approached
by Mr. Moss, Vickers' solicitor. Insisting on speaking to him alone, Moss told
Reynolds that Vickers was willing to let him off his debt - if he henceforth
gave up writing and publishing for ever. Reynolds refused, and reported Moss to
the Court on 29 September. Although his action was deemed outrageous by the
judge, the Court settled Vickers' objection in Reynolds' favour: he got his
discharge from bankruptcy - implying that the story was almost certainly true.
Reynolds' Magazine didn't last, and the Miscellany went
on to be a huge success, making a fortune for both Reynolds and Dicks. Reynolds
died on 19 June 1879, in a luxurious house in Woburn Square, London, Dicks in
1884, in Menton, in the South of France. Reynolds' later career as a Chartist,
and proprietor of the leading Left-wing newspaper in Britain, is no part of this
story now. But his outrage on seeing Reynolds' Magazine produced a fascinating
outburst, that shows that, however much he had become a man of the people, the
old snob never really died:
"But upon what pretence did Mr. Stiff issue a work
entitled "Reynolds' Magazine"? He has a stoker in his employment of
the name of Abraham Reynolds, and this man, who is perfectly illiterate, and who
earns a pound or a guinea a week, lent his name to the spurious
publication!"