George William MacArthur Reynolds (23 July 1814 – 19 June 1879) was a British author and journalist.
He was born in Sandwich, Kent, the son of Captain Sir George Reynolds, a flag officer in the Royal Navy. Reynolds was educated first at Dr. Nance's school in Ashford, Kent, and then passed on to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He was intended for a career in the British Army, but on the death of his parents in 1829 and his subsequent inheritance, he decided to leave 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. He took up 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.[1]
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Reynolds was a prolific writer of popular fiction starting from The Youthful Imposter, published in 1835. Virtually forgotten now, in 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 installments and over a million copies cumulatively before it was issued in bound volumes, enjoying an international circulation in French, German, Italian, and Spanish translations. Although (or because) it was outlawed by the authorities, the German version achieved the status of a cult favorite 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 the Gothic novel - with its haunted castles, innocent noble damsels in distress and nefarious villains - to produce stories which instead focussed on the shocks of life after the Industrial Revolution: 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 first published 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 aimed squarely at the tastes of his mostly middle- and lower-class audience; 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."
Reynold's novels remained in print on both sides of the Atlantic much longer than 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 Urdu, remained a best-seller in India well into the twentieth century.
Reynolds was also a leading member of the Chartist movement in 1848. 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." In 1854, he moved to Herne Bay where he became one of the town's Improvement Commissioners.
| Wikisource has the text of the 1885–1900 Dictionary of National Biography's article about Reynolds, George William MacArthur. |
All titles marked (RM) and (LJ) above are available online at the British Periodicals website.
Mysteries of the Court of London (Dicks edition in 8 volumes; 4 series, 2 volumes each) online at books.google.com:
Mysteries of the Court of London (The privately printed edition of the "Mysteries" in 20 volumes (by a so-called "Oxford Society") was entitled "The Works of George W. M. Reynolds", online at www.archive.org (only 7 volumes of this edition):
| Media offices | ||
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| Preceded by New position |
Editor of Reynold's News 1850–1879 |
Succeeded by Edward Reynolds |
