G. W. M. Reynolds in Paris 1835–6: A New Discovery

Abstract

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY recalled of his days in 1830s Paris that ‘the first money he every received in literature was from G. W. M. Reynolds’, for his contributions to the Paris Literary Gazette, of which Reynolds was the editor.1 Reynolds’ generosity stood him in good stead: in the 1850s, Thackeray was among few Victorian writers to defend Reynolds against contemporary criticism of his radical politics and sensationalist, often lurid, fiction.2 Reynolds was a polarizing figure who angered elite politicians and writers as much as he did working-class socialists. In 1830, at age sixteen, he quit Sandhurst for then-revolutionary Paris, where he published his first novel, edited the Gazette, and launched an Anglophone newspaper and library. By 1837, these successive investments had left him bankrupt. Returning to England, he published fiction in the Monthly Magazine, foreign news analysis in the Weekly Dispatch, and a two-volume study of French literature. In 1845, he assumed editorship of the London Journal, where he clashed with the proprietors over politics (he later became a Chartist) and left to start his own magazine, Reynolds’s Miscellany. His various publications—the Miscellany, the Chartist Political Instructor (1848–9), its successor Reynolds’s Newspaper (from 1850), and his many novels—combined literary and political content and dominated the cheap print market until his retirement in 1869.3