by George W. M. Reynolds
Foreword by Louis
James, Annotations by Dr.
Dick Collins
The
government feared him. Rival authors like Charles Dickens, whom he
outsold, despised him. The literary establishment did its best to
write him out of literary history. But when George W.M. Reynolds,
journalist, political reformer, Socialist, and novelist, died in
1879, even his critics were forced to acknowledge the truth of his
obituary, which declared that he was the most popular writer of his
time. And The
Mysteries of London,
which was published in 1844 in the "penny dreadful" format
of weekly installments sold for a penny each, was his masterpiece and
greatest success, selling 50,000 copies a week and over a million
more when published in volume form.
The
Mysteries of London
is a sprawling tableau, seeking to depict life as Reynolds saw it in
mid-Victorian London and expose what he viewed as gross injustice
toward the poor. Some of the notable storylines involve Richard
Markham and Eliza Sydney, two virtuous but ingenuous youths inveigled
into the fraudulent schemes of rogues; George Montague, a libertine
who appears literally out of nowhere and nearly overnight becomes one
of the richest and most powerful men in London; Anthony Tidkins, the
"Resurrection Man," a ruthless murderer and body-snatcher;
and Ellen Monroe, an impoverished girl forced to submit to the worst
degradations to earn money to feed her elderly father. The story
takes us from royal drawing rooms, offices of cabinet ministers, and
chambers of Parliament to the bowels of Newgate prison, the
workhouse, and the lowest of taverns and gambling dens as Reynolds
unfolds his thrilling plot, which never flags for an instant over the
course of nearly 1,200 pages.
This
edition, the first in over 100 years, includes the unabridged text of
the complete first series of The
Mysteries,
including its illustrations, more than fifty in all, and features a
new foreword by Victorian scholar Louis James and annotations by Dr.
Dick Collins.