Victorian England's Bestselling Author: The Revolutionary Life of G. W. M. Reynolds

Victorian England's Bestselling Author: The Revolutionary Life of G. W. M. Reynolds
ISBN-10
1399015753
ISBN-13
9781399015752
Category
Biography & Autobiography
Pages
298
Language
English
Published
2022-11-17
Publisher
Pen and Sword History
Authors
Stephen Basdeo, Mya Driver

Description

George W.M. Reynolds (1814–79) was one of the biggest-selling novelists of the Victorian era. He was the author of over 58 novels and short stories and his “penny blood” The Mysteries of London, serialised in weekly numbers between 1844 and 1848, sold over a million copies. A controversial figure in his lifetime, Reynolds’s Mysteries, and its follow-up The Mysteries of the Court of London (1849–56), contained tales of crime, vice, and highly sexualised scenes. For this reason Charles Dickens remarked that Reynolds’s name was one “with which no lady’s, and no gentleman’s, should be associated.” Yet Reynolds was much more than just a novelist; he was lauded by the working classes as their champion and campaigned for universal suffrage. To further the working classes’ cause, he established two newspapers: Reynolds’s Political Instructor and Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper. The latter newspaper, as Karl Marx recognized, became the principal organ of radical and labour politics. This book provides a biography of Reynolds and reproduces his editorials from Reynolds’s Political Instructor as well as excerpts from his fiction.

Other editions

Similar books