THE MYSTERIES OF LONDON
VALANCOURT CLASSICS
THE
MYSTERIES OF LONDON
by
GEORGE W. M. REYNOLDS
With a Foreword by Louis James and
Annotations by Dick Collins
VOL. I.
Kansas City:
VALANCOURT BOOKS
2013
The Mysteries of London, vol. 1, by George W. M. Reynolds
Originally published in weekly parts commencing in 1844
First one-volume edition, London: Geo. Vickers, 1845
First Valancourt Books edition 2013
Original aspects of this edition © 2013 by Valancourt Books
Foreword © 2013 by Louis James
Annotations © 2013 by Dick Collins
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.
ISBN 978-1-939140-02-9 (trade paper)
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FOREWORD
ONE mystery of Reynolds’s seminal and hugely popular masterwork for the modern reader is this—how could it have remained unknown to Victorian scholars for so long? It was almost certainly the most widely read single work of fiction in mid-nineteenth century Britain, and attracted more readers than did the novels of Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton or Trollope. Together with its continuation, The Mysteries of the Court of London, it contained twelve volumes of four and half million words, making it also the longest continuous prose fiction of its time. It influenced the ‘respectable’ English novel, setting the scene (literally) for Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847-8), and Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-3), while its intricate plots prepared the way for the ‘sensation novels’ of the sixties. It was read and imitated on the Continent, particularly in France. Overseas, readers in the colonies waited eagerly for the latest instalment of the work. In India Reynolds had a ‘classic’ status, valued as a teacher and reformer above Dickens.[1] Yet a recent standard study of literature in the period, Philip Davis’s volume on The Victorians (2002) in The Oxford English Literary History, gives Reynolds’s Mysteries nothing more than a six-line passing reference.
Before asking why the work has been largely airbrushed out of literary history, one must consider the reasons for its success. It was very much the product of its time. The Mysteries of London appeared when England was rapidly changing from a rural nation, with traditional beliefs and ways, into a predominantly urban one, in which town-dwellers outnumbered those in the country. The city of London had emerged as an international phenomenon, by far the largest city in the western world, the home of a third of England’s town-dwellers. The first impact of urbanisation had been numbing, but as legislation began to redress the appalling living conditions in the new sprawling towns, writers began to assess its seismic impact on everything from social relationships to public health to literature and religious belief. The social novels of Disraeli and Mrs. Gaskell aroused awareness on the ‘two nations’ in the north and south of Britain, while Dickens evoked the infinite variety of the London streets. While most middle class novelists were aware of the social inequalities in this new era, the emphasis in their fiction was on understanding and reconciliation.
Reynolds had a different perspective. Rebelling against his upper middle class family from the age of sixteen, and having lived a formative stage of his life in the radical world of Paris, his fiction and journalism stormed against the wrongs of privilege and wealth inflicted on the exploited poor. Briefly, he took a lead in the Chartist movement. In an age of revolutions taking place just across the channel, nervous Victorian middle class readers accused Reynolds of being a rabble-raiser, the ‘can on the mad dog’s tail’, a traitor to his class. According to one Home Office correspondent of 1848, he was ‘the most wicked and dangerous man in London.’[2] But radical working class leaders also had their reservations about Reynolds. Reynolds had no illusions about the dangers of untutored mob power, and declared in print that to give the people democracy without political education was as dangerous as offering a child an open razor. Ostracised by the ‘respectable’ Victorians as a dangerous radical on one hand, suspected by working class leaders as having middle class sympathies on the other, he scandalised both groups by writing sensational fiction that dramatised social and sexual conflicts in terms of high melodrama. Reynolds became studiously ignored by the public eminences that recorded the mid-Victorian period for modern historians. Even those who noted Reynolds’s popularity did him a disservice, as when Mayhew noted the delight with which costermongers read his works. Yet, to paraphrase Hilaire Belloc’s mock obituary, ‘if his views were scarlet, his books were read.’ Reynolds’s audience was very much wider than the semi-literate cited in Mayhew’s example. It embraced the great mass of lower middle classes and artisans, most of them intelligent, hard-working men and women, who, while they enjoyed their literature as entertainment, liked it to reflect matters of public interest, and shared Reynolds’s suspicions of power, authority and the moral hypocrisy. This was what Wilkie Collins was to call the great ‘unknown public’ of general readers, the ‘invisible’ common people on whom rested much of the true strength of the Victorian age.
Many of Reynolds’s views had in fact been prefigured in a signally non-political work, Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1820-1). Egan’s work proclaimed that the new focus on the life of the city created a new subject for literature. The ascendancy of the natural world over the town was now overturned. ‘[The painter] Poussin never had a more luxuriant, variegated, and interesting subject for landscape’, wrote Egan. ‘There is not a street in London but what may be compared to a large or small volume of intelligence, abounding with anecdote, incident and peculiarities. . . . even the poorest cellar contains some trait or other. . .’[3] Egan showed London made up of many separate locales, communities each distinguished by different histories, class, dress, occupations, and ways of speech. Social hierarchies disappeared, for each individual had human secrets, tragedies and triumphs. This multifarious city was both fragmented and a quivering organism, a web of contrasts—‘the Extremes, in every point of view, are daily to be met with in the Metropolis’, wrote Egan. Piety and crime stood in sharp contrast: ‘the highest veneration for and practice of religion distinguish the Metropolis, contrasted with the most horrid commission of crimes: and the experience of the oldest inhabitant scarcely renders him safe against the specious plans and artifices continually laid to entrap the vigilant.’ Although Egan did not use the word, he showed city life as a world of mysteries, for ‘the next-door neighbour of a man in London is as great a stranger to him as if he lived at the distance of York.’
Egan’s work took a new form, part exposé journalism, part London guidebook, part human drama in which Jerry from the country was introduced to city life by ‘man about town’ Corinthian Tom. It took England by storm. Egan himself recorded over a hundred imitations and derivative works; dramatic versions dominated the London stage in the eighteen-twenties.
The plot pro
vided a template for ‘discoveries’ of other cities, and it was intermittently reprinted till towards the end of the century. Egan’s organising principle was to show the city as a pattern of contrasting ‘light’ and ‘shade’, a principle his successors were to develop as they looked for new forms with which to entertain a rapidly expanding mass market of readers. The materialism of city life rejected superstition and the occult world of the traditional gothic story, and as the dark castles and Italianate landscape of Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis lost their power to thrill, writers turned to the mysteries that lay all around them, hidden down darkened alleys, in the cellars and shuttered buildings of the city streets. Demonic monks were exchanged for thieves and footpads; the intrigues of the Inquisition were replaced by the dark secret forces, organised by both rich and poor, behind the web of city life.
Post-Egan, many novelists dramatised the city as a locale for crime. W. H. Ainsworth meticulously reconstructed life in the streets of eighteenth-century London for his novel of the thief and notorious escapee Jack Sheppard (1839). At the other end of the social spectrum, the ‘silver fork novel’ pioneered by Bulwer-Lytton in Pelham (1828) evoked exotic scenes of the voluptuous lives of the London rich inhabiting the spacious squares around Mayfair and the West End. From the 1840s the most significant urban writer was Dickens, revealing the romantic side of everyday London life in Sketches by Boz (1835-6), and shaping a new direction for urban fiction with Oliver Twist (1837-8). On one hand this novel startled its readers with its revelations of the London underworld, drawn with all the topographical detail popularised by Egan. But it is also seen through the eyes of Oliver, a terrified child, which gives the narrative a passionate, subjective, perspective. Dickens added yet another dimension. Drawing on the vision of Bunyan’s ever-popular Pilgrim’s Progress, Dickens made London the setting for a melodramatic conflict between spiritual good and evil, with Oliver as ‘the Principle of Good’, while Fagin, called ‘the Old ’Un’, (a soubriquet for Satan), acquired a demonic caste. The link with Bunyan is there in the book’s subtitle—‘the Parish Boy’s Progress’.
Reynolds’s Mysteries bear many traces of Oliver Twist—the alternating detailed objectivity and passionate subjectivity, the closely juxtaposed worlds of wealth and poverty, and the pulsating moments of high melodrama. Like Dickens, too, Reynolds intimated city life was a moral pilgrimage, and through the first two volumes of The Mysteries he traced the contrasting moral paths of the two Markham brothers—the ‘good’ Richard, and the ‘bad’ Eugene. There are, of course, great differences from Bunyan’s fable. The struggle is one worked out, finally, not in the Celestial City, but in the here and now of the London streets, and Reynolds sets his heaven and hell in the modern London that was beginning to be investigated by the new science of sociology, a metropolis controlled by social evolution and the laws of economics. Nevertheless he draws the city on an epic scale, and set within aeons of world history. Reynolds looks to the emergence of Civilization in Europe from the Dark Ages that took place between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, before his gaze comes to rest on London at a precise date, July 1831. London has become, not only the largest in Europe, but, through colonisation and Empire, the centre of the whole globe. Yet it is a city ‘in which contrasts of a strange nature abound’, for ‘the most unbounded wealth is the neighbour of the most hideous poverty.’
Reynolds was often accused of insincerity and mass exploitation. Although in fact he remained remarkably true to his Radical convictions, anyone expecting The Mysteries of London to be a conventional political ‘novel of ideas’ will be disappointed. Reynolds saw his twelve volumes ‘one vast whole, which may be termed an Encyclopædia of tales.’ Like a newspaper, particularly that in the French form of the feuilleton, one that combined news with serialised fiction, The Mysteries contains a great variety of material and kinds of writing. There is documentary description as sharp as anything in Dickens or Mayhew; digressions on economics, criminal biography in the style of the ‘Newgate Calendar’, melodramatic horror, and scenes of luxury as voluptuous as any in a fashionable ‘silver fork novel’. Some scenes, like the horrific room where the public executioner educates his son to his trade, have a touch of surrealism; strands such as the preternatural hate of Tidkins, the hideous ‘resurrection man’, for the noble Markham, become psychological melodramas of good versus evil.
Readers might expect Reynolds as a Radical to show members of the deserving poor pitted against the evil rich. But the villains come equally from wealth and poverty—although the poor may have been driven to crime by their social betters—and in the end, the happiness of the good is equated, not with the simple life, but with acquiring comfortable wealth. In Dickens’s fiction, ultimate ‘Good’ is represented by the innocent child. But there are few children in Reynolds’s fiction, and these are often unhappy victims. Although he himself was a devoted family man, Reynolds gives little space in his fiction to the Victorian ideal of love and harmony, the family circle. For Reynolds’s detractors, his writing lacked a moral basis. However this is to misunderstand the nature of Reynolds’s fiction. This inhabits the symbolic universe of the imagination, and was written not for an audience looking for the domestic realism of the middle class novel, but a readership tuned by the conventions of popular culture to accept a range of fictional perspectives. Here the dimensions of reality varied in kind, from the documentary realism of newspaper reports, to the moral fantasy of folk tales, or to the ritualised conflict between good and evil of contemporary melodrama. For Reynolds’s readers, fictional characters take the form of moral synecdoche, a part representing the whole. Greenwood embodies the evils of a whole class of unscrupulous lawyers and financiers; the loathsome Reverend Tracy, the hypocrisy of typical establishment religion. ‘Good’ characters like Richard Markham or Ellen Monroe are, like Dickens’s Oliver Twist, in effect classless, the representation of courageous humanity with whom readers of any background could empathise.
The final happiness of the ‘good’ characters in Reynolds’s fiction may appear a convention. But in Reynolds’s work it also reflects a wider optimism about the human struggle. Controversially, Reynolds sees destiny as directed not by a benevolent divine Providence, but by courageous human endeavour. Ellen Monroe loses her virtue, and bears her seducer an illegitimate child. By the conventions of the middle class novel she would have been ruined, and died in poverty. But Reynolds shows her rebelling against fate, gathering her energies, and turning her persecutors’ wiles against them as she assumes a disguise to humiliate one seducer, and then blackmails the other into a marriage to legitimise her child. ‘Respectable’ Victorian middle class readers, if they knew of his writing, would have rejected such accounts of feminine spirit as ‘disgusting’, and whitewashed Reynolds out of the literary scene. But if he was more direct in his portrayal of violence and sexual passion than contemporary mores allowed, Reynolds never allowed an indecent word on his pages, and he had too great a respect for women to exploit their physicality in explicit pornography. For that, the reader has to turn to upper class journals like The Pearl. Reynolds was frequently accused of debauching his readership. But in fact he provided his mass readership with a world of excitement, controversy, and, however this was spiced with sensation and melodrama, information—for as we have noted, Reynolds believed passionately that any social advance must be based on education.
In the twentieth century Reynolds found an unexpected advocate in the champion of moral values in literature, Q. D. Leavis. Contrasting his writing favourably against modern standards of popular literature, she wrote of the ‘considerable achievement’ of his ‘constant appeal to open-mindedness in politics and non-material standards of living without any appeals to religious sentiment or anything cheap in the radicalism for which [he] stood.’[4] Others have begun to bring Reynolds back into the limelight. In 1996 Trefor Thomas’s abridged reprint of The Mysteries of London pioneered a growing industry in reprinting Reyn
olds’s work of which this Valancourt Books edition is the latest and most valuable example. Reynolds’s Mysteries now begins to emerge out of the shadows for a new generation of readers.
LOUIS JAMES
NOTE ON THE TEXT
The Mysteries of London was published serially in fifty-two weekly parts beginning in 1844. Each part was eight pages and featured one large woodcut illustration and sold for one penny. When the story had concluded, the fifty-two weekly parts were bound together in volume form with a title page and table of contents and sold as a book. The first edition published in book form was issued by George Vickers of London in 1845. This edition follows that text verbatim with the exception of obvious printer’s errors, such as transposed or upside-down characters, or other plain errors, such as one instance of the word “ladyship” when “lordship” was clearly intended. Such errors have been silently corrected, but otherwise the text here presented is identical to the original. Obsolete spellings such as “sate” for “sat” and inconsistent spellings and punctuation have been retained as in the original.
After a falling-out with Vickers, Reynolds switched printers, and later copies of The Mysteries of London were sold under the imprint of John Dicks of London. The Dicks printings were paginated identically to the earlier editions and were virtually identical to the Vickers printings in all respects, aside from minor spelling and punctuation variations not affecting the story. The illustrations reprinted in this volume are from a copy of the Dicks edition in the collection of the present publisher, and all the original illustrations are included here.
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