Teetotalism Pamphlet by G. W. M. Reynolds Rediscovered

Abstract

GEORGE WILLIAM MACARTHUR REYNOLDS (1814–79) was a wildly popular penny dreadful author as well as an erratic, controversial social radical and political activist. His most famous and infamous work, The Mysteries of London (1844–8), was published in two series for four years without interruption, and for another eight years under the title The Mysteries of the Court of London (1848–56). The first series alone sold over a million copies in ten years.1 William Makepeace Thackeray made his first money as an author by writing for Reynolds.2 Charles Dickens despised him as an opportunist, and according to Henry Mayhew he was very popular with costermongers.3 As E. F. Bleiler relates, in 1840 a 26 year-old Reynolds by chance became engaged in a series of debates with the temperance speaker J. H. Donaldson.4 Being unable logically to prove that consumption of alcohol was necessary or salutary, Reynolds found himself converted to teetotalism. One of his first pro-temperance actions was to write a study of all aspects of alcoholism. Until now, no copies of this pamphlet, The Anatomy of Intemperance (1840) were known to survive.