Mysteries Of London Research Articles

“Founded on Fact”: Paratextual Politics in Penny Fiction

In the preface of James Malcolm Rymer’s The Night Adventurer (1846), the writer claims that, contrary to popular opinion, the “masses” were attracted to stories on “account of their truthfulness” rather than “wild, romantic literature” (1846: Preface). Indeed, the ‘factual’ basis for penny serials was so marketable that numerous prefaces, author notes and newspaper advertisements emphasised how these serials were “founded on fact.” While there were sensationalist purposes for using factual biographies of criminals, the use of non-fictional sources has, I argue, a far more philanthropic social purpose which outlines the radical politics of the authors. For penny fiction, which was often deemed as harmless and derivative content, the authority the paratext proffered was vital in demonstrating its active engagement with social and political issues. Penny fiction authors used paratextual space to create authority, establishing affinity between author and reader in order to disseminate and support the moral of the fictional narrative in a more effective way. Writers exploited the unique, composite style of penny fiction, pioneered by George W. M Reynolds in The Mysteries of London (1844–6), to disseminate their political agendas, educate their readership and assert themselves as writers of serious literature.

The Evasion of Literary History

The Evasion of Literary History

‘Blest’ or ‘t’othered’: Alternative Graveyards in Bleak House, Reynolds, and Walker

This article proposes an alternative reading of Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–3), by attempting to recreate the reading experience of the first audience of this now well-studied novel. A comparison is made between key scenes in Bleak House and similar scenes in the first volume of George William Macarthur Reynolds's The Mysteries of London (1844), to demonstrate the differing literary styles of these two popular writers. The article draws on contemporary non-fiction, including George Alfred Walker's Gatherings from Grave Yards (1839) and several news articles, as well as more recent scholarship on Dickens to place the representations of graveyards in the novels of Reynolds and Dickens within the larger discussion of the necessity of sanitary reform in London at the time. The article argues that a proper consideration of this context enriches our understanding of the thematic structure of Bleak House.

Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Victorian Reading Experience ed. by Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini

Reviewed by: Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Victorian Reading Experience ed. by Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini Jennifer Phegley (bio) Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini, eds., Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Victorian Reading Experience (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 241, $99.99 cloth; $69.99 ebook. Reading is the stubbornly resistant element of book history's triumvirate of reading, writing, and publishing. It is notoriously difficult to study and, as a result, has often been neglected or circumvented. Given that most nineteenth-century readers left no trace of their interaction with texts, how do we come to understand their reading practices or responses? Most records of reading come from professional writers whose perspectives are not necessarily representative of the majority. Likewise, our information about who belonged to a particular reading audience comes largely from the potentially biased claims of editors and publishers. Neither of these sources is very effective at enlightening us about the mass reading public. While this is a continuing challenge for scholars, the essays in Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited by Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini, provide new evidence of how readers bought, shared, and responded to written materials. Rooney and Gasperini explain that they hope to offer studies that "turn their attention to the wider nineteenth-century media climate in order to shed light on the ways in which Victorian" readers "were conditioned by contemporaneous contact with cultural content countered in other media" (8). While the editors do not explicitly declare the working-class reader as the focus of the book, the evidence of reading practices offered by many contributors compellingly highlights the common reader. [End Page 825] Isabel Corfe, Anne Humpherys, Ruth Doherty, and Marie Léger-St-Jean devote their attention to deciphering the reading choices of members of what Wilkie Collins famously labelled the "unknown public." Corfe focuses on the lasting power of oral culture in her interrogation of why the consumption of half-penny street ballads remained strong even as the marketplace for higher quality and more diverse penny-press publications thrived. Corfe maintains that while many scholars contend that street ballads were attractive because they were cheaper than newspapers, the archival record shows that ballads remained popular beyond mid-century when the newspaper tax was eliminated. Furthermore, the most popular ballads "were ordinary song sheets rather than sheets pertaining to the gallows," as is often assumed (133). Corfe concludes that ballads were more "portable" as well as more widely available since they were carried to town and country by peddlers. Perhaps most importantly, they remained useful as "songs to be sung" by a semi-literate population looking for a cheap and productive way to spend their free time (140). Humpherys complicates notions of the popular and the canonical in her study of the advertising lists for John Dicks's reprint series. This numbered list of books, including novels priced at sixpence and dramas for a penny, were advertised in all of Dicks's publications including Reynolds's Miscellany (1846–69), Bow Bells (1862–97), and Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper (1850–1967). Humpherys sets out to determine what a "shrewd publisher thought his audience might want access to in cheap reprint editions" by examining the advertising lists (95). She notes that while working-class autobiographies often emphasized highly regarded literary works, Dicks's reprints created a counter-canon "of standard texts, not one organized by the classics, not one organized chronologically, but one of a heterogeneous mixture of all types from all periods" (104). Thus, Humpherys convincingly argues that Dicks offers us a "broader publishing and cultural context" in which to make sense of what the "'unknown public' wanted and would buy" (105). Doherty delves into the genre of the penny dreadful to determine how its narrative form kept readers engaged over an extended period of time, which, in the case of G. W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London, lasted more than a decade (1844–55). Doherty explains that Reynolds kept his massive serial both fresh and familiar by alternating between microscopic and telescopic points of view, which allowed him to "create...

From the Sublime to City Crime ed. by Maurizio Ascari, Stephen Knight

Maurizio Ascari, and Stephen Knight, eds. From Sublime to City Crime. Monaco: LiberFaber, 2015. Pp. 297. 20 [euro]. From Sublime to City Crime comprises twelve essays--not including editors' co-authored introduction--covering a period in development of British, American, and European crime fiction that snugly overlaps what we conventionally style period of international Romanticism. Several of these were originally published in a thematic issue of Italian journal La Questione Romantica, co-edited by Maurizio Ascari and Stephen Knight under title Crime and Sublime. Among British writers, volume ranges from William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft through Thomas De Quincey and James Hogg to G. M. W. Reynolds, author of sprawling serialized novel The Mysteries of London, whose first weekly number appeared in October 1844. Their American cohort is represented by Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe, while Honore de Balzac, Eugene Sue, and a handful of pioneering Scandinavians draw our attention to continental developments. The editorial intention ostensibly embracing all of these essays, aside from their shared generic and historical focus, is to reveal gradual precipitation of what came to be called a subgenre of crime fiction epitomized by whodunnit and traditionally distinguished by its foregrounding of investigator's (inevitably successful) problem-solving abilities, out of a vigorous but more heterogeneous category of popular fiction founded on compelling--i.e., sublime--power of sheer mystery and terror of crime itself. The ideological underpinnings of this literary-historical understanding are not, in themselves, new, and can be traced back to Foucault's Discipline and Punish and its critical progeny, like D. A. Miller's The Novel and Police. In words of editors Ascari and Knight, Out of disciplinary procedures came a hero. He, at times she, resolved threats through skill, application, and occasionally courage.... Fulfilling ideological destiny of classic bourgeois fiction ... detective knotted loose ends of individualistic anxiety for isolated cerebral workers of late capitalism (9-10). What Ascari and Knight add to this by-now standard account of detection's disciplinary impact is an eye for persistence of as the underground river of later detective fiction that despite--or, perhaps more accurately, because of--its repression by Enlightened forces of rational investigation enduringly remains dynamo of excitement and anxiety that both drives narrative of crime and insistently demands its euphemisations (10). That, at least, is announced thesis of this collection, and while it is not, for various reasons, consistently realized by contributions that follow, it does provide a useful vade mecum. The contributions themselves--by scholars spanning globe from Slovakia to Canada and Italy to Australia--are uneven in rigor as well as depth, but all provide useful entrees for Romanticists looking to engage with ever-growing body of criticism on crime fiction and its governing poetics. The essays are arranged in roughly chronological order from 1790s to 1840s, moving at same time from Anglophone trans-Atlantic sphere to continent and back at last to England. Among those scholars familiar to British Romanticists, Maurice Hindle, editor of Penguin's groundbreaking 1988 edition of Caleb Williams, kicks things off with a close examination of Godwin's debts to Edmund Burke's Sublime and Gothic tradition, setting loose parameters for discussing these topics in essays that follow. Here sublimity under investigation is almost invariably of Burkean variety, linked to terror and largely interchangeable with the Gothic. The contributors following Hindle include Alessandra Calanchi on Brockden Brown's aural sublime, Ascari examining element of power (104) that co-inhabits De Quincey's writings on murder and his Gothic revenge fiction, Struan Sinclair on Poe's superperceivers, Giacomo Mannironi on Balzac's debts to British Romanticism, Heather Worthington on Blackwood's fictions of physician/lawyer Samuel Warren, and Anna Kay on mid-century popular reception and sublime interpretation of real-life murderess Maria Manning. …

Spoken Word and Printed Page: G. W. M. Reynolds and ‘The Charing-Cross Revolution’, 1848

In March 1848, the radical writer and editor G. W. M. Reynolds came face-to-face with some of the very people he hoped were his readers, when he took a step out of the editor’s office and onto the speaker’s platform. Reynolds stood up in front of a protest meeting in Trafalgar Square, and turned the issue of the day away from taxation and towards revolution. In that critical year of Europe-wide revolutions, Reynolds praised the recent French uprising and declared solidarity with the French republicans. Reynolds’s actions on that spring afternoon earned him immediate prominence in the Chartist movement, a place on the platform at the ‘monster meeting’ at Kennington Common on 10 April, the status of a radical celebrity, and a government file. The disorder after the meeting continued on and off over several days. This article considers Reynolds’s accounts of his own speech as printed in the pages of his best-selling serial narrative, <em>The Mysteries of London</em> (1844–48). Reynolds’s sprawling tale mixed melodrama with radical polemics in the belief that fiction was a legitimate means of promoting radical politics. This article argues that the insertions of his 1848 speeches attempted to connect imagined readers of urban fiction to real protestors on London’s streets, by linking the printed page of urban fiction to oratory within urban space. Reynolds’s speech-making on that March afternoon projected his outbursts in his London fiction out onto the London streets; he hoped that the combined work of both would push forward his political agenda. His experience of writing <em>The Mysteries of London</em> gave melodramatic wings to his oratory on the platform. Setting Reynolds’s speech within the context of his debt to popular melodrama and its roots in oral culture, and the oral effects within <em>The Mysteries of London</em> as a whole, this article argues that Reynolds’s actions declared printed matter to be indelibly linked with the street theatre of political demonstrations. Trafalgar Square offered Reynolds the possibility that urban space could present the continuation and implementation of radical demands made in print, and could bring radical print vocally to life.

Illustrations and Text: Storyworld Space and the Multimodality of Serialized Narrative

Illustrations permeated and arguably defined Victorian print for much of the nineteenth century. Just as technological advances facilitated the proliferation of printed materials due to the reductions in costs produced by high-speed steam presses, Patricia Anderson demonstrates how similar improvements made high-quality mass reproduction of diverse imagery both possible and profitable (2). Consequently, the Victorian reading public expected illustrations as a central print component in everything from advertisements and news reports, to poetry, printed books, and serialized stories. Perhaps no form of publishing was affected more by the use of images in the nineteenth century than that of serialized narratives. Beginning with Dickens's Pickwick Papers (1836-1837), the inclusion of illustrations played a significant role in the serial's distribution and reception. Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge have argued that appeals relevant to all illustrated Victorian fiction apply with particular force to serial novels, in which the placement and prominence of illustrations made images an essential part the Victorian reading experience as they became key aspects of every (66). Similarly, while J. R. Harvey acknowledges that Victorian book illustrations were accessories after the fact that not belong to the novel in the sense that without them the novel would not be complete, he singles out serialized novels as an important exception (2). For Harvey, it is precisely in this respect that the serial novels are so unusual: they do show text and picture making a single art (2). Thus, rather than acting independently, the visual illustrations included in Victorian serialized work in tandem with the verbal words on the page as one narrative text in its evocation of the storyworld. Previous scholarship concerning illustrations in this context focuses on how the dual perspectives provided in each mode subvert plot and character construction in the storyworld and speak to issues of reliability. For example, Robert Patton suggests illustrations in Dickens's works often offer alternative perspectives and contradictory voices to those described in the narrative discourse, creating a polyvocality that is everywhere present in illustrated narratives (92). However, scholars of this period often neglect how the multimodal aspect of serial also affects the construction the space of the narrative, typically relegating the spatial component to background or scenery in favor of interpreting the focal characters and their actions. This essay, therefore, examines the role illustrations play in the construction of the storyworld space in two widely popular early Victorian serials: William Harrison Ainsworth's Tack Sheppard (1839-1840),1 originally published as monthly installments in Bentley's Miscellany, and George W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London (1844-1845), originally published in weekly eight-page penny-parts. Specifically, I examine the importance of opening illustrations in establishing a reader's spatial entrance to the storyworld and how each individual installment establishes a unique re-entry for the reader into the storyworld due to the serial's enforced interruptions. Secondly, I also consider how the material placement of the visual image on the printed page relative to the corresponding verbal discourse potentially affects the reader's construction of particular interior spaces within the storyworld. This relationship is important to understand for two reasons. First, while the enforced interruptions present in the original illustrations are erased when compiled into bound forms, the narrative patterns dictated by the conventions of serialization remain present in the structure of the storyworld and its spatial components. Secondly, my focus on the structure and interaction of illustrations and printed text in the original installments as opposed to later compiled editions acknowledges arguments previously made by Leighton and Surridge concerning how changes in the physical arrangement of the text from installment to bound novel changes the configuratory process of the reader. …

Teetotalism Pamphlet by G. W. M. Reynolds Rediscovered

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.

Vampires and Resurrection Men: The Perils and Pleasures of the Embodied Past in 1840s Sensational Fiction

This essay examines embodied representations of the past in two of the most popular penny serials of the 1840s, G.W.M. Reynolds's "The Mysteries of London" and James Malcolm Rymer's "Varney the Vampyre; or, The Feast of Blood." The cadaverous "Resurrection man" of "The Mysteries" and Sir Francis Varney the Vampire -- both villains figured as irrepressible, resurrected corpses -- corporealize the inescapable return of personal and political history. Functioning as shadowy doubles of their serials' virtuous heroes, these corpse-villains trouble melodramatic distinctions between virtue and vice, and their own deeply contradictory histories disrupt their novels' engagements with historical presence and historical agency.

Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation ed. by Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore (review)

Reviews to consider transgressing the boundary between them," she calls for a reconsideration of how ideas about bodies and their abilities inform approaches to the analysis ofVictorian literature (31). She also describes the achievements ofher own text. Pointing to new arenas for study, contributing to the development ofnew methodologies and redirecting the critical gaze towards bodies and identities that have received inadequate critical attention, both Martha Stoddard Holmes and Maria Frawley make contributions to the fields ofliterary criticism, disability studies and nineteenth-century studies, not least among them their focus on and reappraisal ofthe historical and cultural valuation ofhuman bodies. Vanessa Warne University ofManitoba DDDDDDDDDDDD Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore, eds. Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation. (Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2004), xii + 259 pp. Over the last few decades, critics have been devoting more attention to the previously overlooked sensation writing ofthe nineteenth century. Somewhat surprising, then, is how the scholarly work in this field has been rather limited in its scope. Critics have focused mainly on the most popular or prolific sensation writers, the sensation novels ofthe 1860s, and the foregrounded theme ofthe female criminal in these novels. However, a new collection ofessays, Victorian Crime, Madness, andSensation edited by Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore, shows sensation writing to be a much wider field with more literary value and social influence than previously thought. This collection explores how sensation writing tapped into historically specific anxieties in ways that, until now, were not immediately obvious. Victorian Crime, Madness, andSensation is part of a substantial series of texts on the nineteenth century published by Ashgate. This series aims to embrace a "broad scope in chronology, approach and range ofconcern, and ... to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations 'Romantic' and 'Victorian'" (vii). This collection certainly fulfills that aim, as its essays focus on the writers and 96volume 32 number 2 Reviews readers throughout the Victorian period who were increasingly interested in domestic crime and social deviance, an interest that was exemplified by the emergence ofthe popular sensation novel in the 1860s. The significance of this broad approach is made clear in the introduction to the essays: "By surveying a diverse range ofcrimes, criminals, detectives, modes ofdetection and reportage, we chart the development ofcrime writing as a genre and the growing dialogue between fact and fiction throughout Victoria's reign" (1). Both canonical and liminal texts are represented in this collection, such as Ellen Wood's East Lynne, M. E. Braddon's LadyAudleys Secret, Margaret Oliphants SaUm Chapel, Charlotte Yonge's The Trial, James Thomson's The City ofDreadfulDelight, AnthonyTrollope's The Way We Live Now, R. L. Stevenson's The Strange Case ofDr. fekyllandMr. Hyde, Wilkie Collins' BlindLove, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. The essays examine not simply the most salacious crimes, such as murder, but a wide variety oftransgressions, such as child abduction, bigamy, stalking, infanticide, poisoning, sex crimes and crimes against property. Furthermore, the essays are interdisciplinary in that they move beyond literary fiction to explore Victorian journalism, the penny blood serial, urban trade and industrial consumption, the evolutionary debates, science and technology, sexual deviance, the growth ofa police force, criminal psychology and sensational court trials. There are 15 essays in total, arranged in chronological order to offer a comprehensive survey ofsensational events in fact and fiction throughout Victoria's reign. John Plunkett opens the collection with an innovative essay, titled "Regicide and Reginamania: G. W. M. Reynolds and The Mysteries ofLondon." In this chapter, Plunkett traces the sensation engendered by Victoria's enthronement, the political value in making Victoria's image available to her subjects and the trope ofan individual and collective madness that was used to describe subjects who became the most fervent "consumers] ofher image" (18). Plunkett explains that these stalkers, who came to be known as "The Queen's Lovers," were "taken up as a trope to demonstrate the collective ardour surrounding Victoria. Those who were literally insane became symptomatic ofa more general condition of madness through excessive loyalty" (18). The media-constructed sensation around Victoria and one stalker's obsession with her are given an interesting political twist in G. W. M. Reynolds' series TheMysteries ofLondon. Plunkett argues that...

The ‘Wicked City’ Motif on the American Stage before the Civil War

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the characterization of the big city as evil incarnate – a veritable latter-day Sodom – had achieved the status of national myth in both the United States and Britain, and had become a popular theme for journalists, novelists, and playwrights alike. John Frick examines this phenomenon – what came to be known as the ‘wicked city motif’ – as it manifested itself on the antebellum American stage. Originating in the urbanization of the eighteenth-century gothic novel and the French feuilleton roman and coalescing in Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris and G. W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London, the city mysteries narrative successfully negotiated the unstable border between the public and private spheres to examine the depravity and danger of the modern metropolis. Disseminated through populist politics, sensationalized journalism, popular fiction, and – the focus here – dramatic renderings, the apocalyptic vision of the modern city with its inexplicable and impenetrable secrets became commonplace in the 1840s and 1850s. John Frick is Professor of Theatre and American Studies at the University of Virginia and teaches in the M.Litt. program at Mary Baldwin College. His most recent book, Theatre, Culture, and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003.

Rereading Victorian fiction

Foreword J.Sutherland List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: A.Jenkins and J.John Victorian Realistic Prose and Sentimentality: P.Davis Having the Whip-hand in Middlemarch D.Karlin Two Kinds of Clothing: Sartor Resartus and Great Expectations B.Beatty Re-reading G.W.Reynolds' the Mysteries of London T.Thomas The State of Dracula: Bureaucracy and the Vampire G.Day The Godhead Regendered in Victorian Children's Literature J.M. Labbe Alice: Reflections and Relativities M.Irwin Place. Identity and Born in Exile R.Pite Stages of Sand and Blood: the Performance of Gendered Subjectivity in Olive Schreiner's Colonial Allegories S.McCracken Sexual Ethics in Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman Writers J.Larson Don Pickwick: Dickens and the Transformations of Cervantes A.Easson Using the Victorians: the Victorian Age in Contemporary Fiction R.Gilmour Women, Spiritualism and Depth Psychology in Michele Robert's Victorian Novel S.Rowland Index

Attic Windows and Street Scenes: Victorian Images of the City on the Stage

In 1843, during a decade marked by political and cultural recognition of the industrialization and urbanization of Britain, a number of plays concerned with city life and the representation of the city were produced on the popular stage in London. These plays were variously called The Bohemians of Paris, The Scamps of London, The Mysteries of Crime, The Mysteries of London or The Mysteries of Paris. Arguably the first and most influential play about the city in the nineteenth century was William Thomas Moncrieff's Tom and Jerry; or Life in London (first performed in 1821). Imitated and adapted throughout the century (Nicoll 96–97), Moncrieff's play was itself an adaptation of Pierce Egan's book, Life in London, which was illustrated by the brothers George and Robert Cruikshank. This particular combination of writers and illustrators is a powerful one, as, collectively and individually, these artists had much to do with the activity and energy of urban popular culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. George Cruikshank, especially, is important in the modernization of the popular art of this period, while William Moncrieff was a prolific dramatist and notable for his use of topical material. Not only was Moncrieff one of the first dramatists to adapt Egan's Life in London for the stage, but his interest in the theatricality of the city and its richness as theatrical source material continued in later melodramas, particularly The Heart of London and The Scamps of London. It is in the Scamps, Bohemians, and Mysteries plays that early century representations of the city assume their most powerful form, and it is William Moncrieff's version which will be my specific focus here.

The mysteries of Paris and London

In this study, Richard Maxwell uses 19th-century urban fiction - in particular the novels of Hugo and Dickens - to define a genre: the novel of urban mysteries. His title comes from the mystery mania that captured both sides of the channel with the runaway success of Eugene Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris and G.W.M. Reynold's Mysteries of London. He argues that within these extravagant but fact-obsessed narratives the archaic form of allegory became a means for understanding modern cities. Dominant among allegorical figures were labyrinths, panoramas, crowds and paperwork, and it was thought that to understand a figure was to understand the city with which it was linked. Novelists such as Hugo and Dickens were able to use such figures without necessarily mirroring ideology. Drawing from an array of disciplines, ideas and contexts, the book examines allegorical theory from the Renaissance through to the 20th century, journalistic practice, the conventions of scientific inquiry, popular psychiatry, illustration and modernized wonder tales (such as Victorian adaptations of the Arabian Nights). It explores the ability of the written word to produce and present social knowledge.

The View from Brick Lane: Contrasting Perspectives in Working-Class and Middle-Class Fiction of the Early Victorian Period

How far can we identify a genre of literature with a particular section of the reading public? In the modern period, where we have 'mass' rather than 'class' literature, this is often difficult. In the nineteenth century the task is easier. By I813, when the first recorded use of the term occurs, the 'working classes' were emerging as an identified group.1 This coincided with a massive increase and diversification in the field of popular literature. Working-class literacy rapidly rose, at a time when cheap paper and faster printing methods were making reading matter readily available.2 This literature circulated largely unknown to the middle-class reading public, although from time to time it was noticed in articles asking 'what do the working classes read?' with the kind of interest shown 'in the peoples of Lapland or California'.3 Because the reading matter bought by the middle and the working classes during this period differed in appearance, style, and content, a comparison of the two offers a useful basis from which to investigate literature in its context of audience. In this essay I will compare four works published roughly within a decade of each other: Dickens's Oliver Twist (1837-39) and the working-class plagiarism, Oliver Twiss (1837-39); G. W. M. Reynolds's immensely popular penny-issue romance, The Mysteries of London (I844-47); and Thackeray's Vanity Fair (I847-48). One should first point out some difficulties of methodology. If we examine isolated examples, we can misleadingly assume that the qualities of a specific author are those of a genre. This essay draws on a wider spectrum of reading than can be always directly referred to.4 Secondly, the two literatures are so different, in the expection of the reader, the styles and literary qualities, that the comparison is complicated. We should not judge literature against

G. M. Reynolds, Dickens, and the Mysteries of London

ETWEEN The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Mysteries of London (1845-1848), secrets became entangled with an idea of city life. It is possible to observe this trend in process, emerging during the 1840's in the tales of George W. M. Reynolds, authoritatively present shortly after 1850 in Bleak House. Reynolds began to experiment with the Gothic secret; he perceived how this intolerable weight could express the terrors of the city. Dickens's adaptation of the convention, while in the same spirit, has a new sophistication. The urban intriguer, the incriminating document -essential motifs in The Mysteries of London-are used to suggest the contradictory movements of society. London can be perceived as the center of progress, the place where rationalized techniques of government and business gradually evolve. Household Words often adopts such a perspective. Yet the means of rationalization (above all, writing) push the city back towards Gothic mysteries. Bleak House is an account of this terrifying and unexpected regression. One pleasure of Ann Radcliffe's novels is that secrets are always changing status. First they are carefully guarded, then they begin to get out, then they are no longer secrets. What starts as a mystery is divested of exclusiveness, shared among author, reader,

G. M. Reynolds, Dickens, and the Mysteries of London

G. M. Reynolds, Dickens, and the Mysteries of London