CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
NOTE ON THE TEXT
CHAPTER CXXXVII.
CHAPTER CXXXVIII.
CHAPTER CXXXIX.
CHAPTER CXL.
CHAPTER CXLI.
CHAPTER CXLII.
CHAPTER CXLIII
CHAPTER CXLIV.
CHAPTER CXLV.
CHAPTER CXLVI.
CHAPTER CXLVII.
CHAPTER CXLVIII.
CHAPTER CXLIX.
CHAPTER CL.
CHAPTER CLI.
CHAPTER CLII.
CHAPTER CLIII.
CHAPTER CLIV.
CHAPTER CLV.
CHAPTER CLVI.
CHAPTER CLVII.
CHAPTER CLVIII.
CHAPTER CLIX.
CHAPTER CLX.
CHAPTER CLXI.
CHAPTER CLXII.
CHAPTER CLXIII.
CHAPTER CLXIV.
CHAPTER CLXV.
CHAPTER CLXVI.
CHAPTER CLXVII.
CHAPTER CLXVIII.
CHAPTER CLXIX.
CHAPTER CLXX.
CHAPTER CLXXI.
CHAPTER CLXXII.
CHAPTER CLXXIII.
CHAPTER CLXXIV.
CHAPTER CLXXV.
CHAPTER CLXXVI.
CHAPTER CLXXVII.
CHAPTER CLXXVIII.
CHAPTER CLXXIX.
CHAPTER CLXXX.
THE MAN OF MANY PURSUITS.
CHAPTER CLXXXI.
CHAPTER CLXXXII.
CHAPTER CLXXXIII.
CHAPTER CLXXXIV.
CHAPTER CLXXXV.
CHAPTER CLXXXVI.
CHAPTER CLXXXVII.
CHAPTER CLXXXVIII.
CHAPTER CLXXXIX.
CHAPTER CXC.
CHAPTER CXCI.
CHAPTER CXCIII.
CHAPTER CXCIV.
CHAPTER CXCV.
CHAPTER CXCVI.
CHAPTER CXCVII.
CHAPTER CXCVIII.
CHAPTER CXCIX.
CHAPTER CC.
CHAPTER CCI.
CHAPTER CCII.
CHAPTER CCIII.
CHAPTER CCIV.
CHAPTER CCV.
CHAPTER CCVI.
CHAPTER CCVII.
CHAPTER CCVIII.
CHAPTER CCIX.
CHAPTER CCX.
CHAPTER CCXI.
CHAPTER CCXII.
CHAPTER CCXIII.
CHAPTER CCXIV.
CHAPTER CCXV.
CHAPTER CCXVI
CHAPTER CCXVII.
CHAPTER CCXVIII.
CHAPTER CCXIX.
CHAPTER CCXX.
CHAPTER CCXXI.
CHAPTER CCXXII.
CHAPTER CCXXIII.
CHAPTER CCXXIV.
CHAPTER CCXXV.
CHAPTER CCXXVI.
CHAPTER CCXXVII.
CHAPTER CCXXVIII.
CHAPTER CCXXIX.
CHAPTER CCXXX.
CHAPTER CCXXXI.
CHAPTER CCXXXII.
CHAPTER CCXXXIII.
CHAPTER CCXXXIV.
CHAPTER CCXXXV.
CHAPTER CCXXXVI.
CHAPTER CCXXXVII.
CHAPTER CCXXXVIII.
CHAPTER CCXXXIX.
CHAPTER CCXL.
CHAPTER CCXLI.
CHAPTER CCXLII.
CHAPTER CCXLIII.
CHAPTER CCXLIV.
CHAPTER CCXLV.
CHAPTER CCXLVI.
CHAPTER CCXLVII.
CHAPTER CCXLVIII.
CHAPTER CCXLIX.
CHAPTER CCL.
CHAPTER CCLI.
CHAPTER CCLII.
CHAPTER CCLIII.
CHAPTER CCLIV.
CHAPTER CCLV.
CHAPTER CCLVI.
CHAPTER CCLVII.
CHAPTER CCLVIII.
CHAPTER CCLIX.
EPILOGUE.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GEORGE W. M. REYNOLDS
THE MYSTERIES OF LONDON
VOL. II
With a new introduction by
MARY L. SHANNON
VALANCOURT BOOKS
First published London: George Vickers, 1846
First Valancourt Books edition 2015
This edition copyright © 2015 by Valancourt Books
Introduction copyright © 2015 by Mary L. Shannon
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.
Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
INTRODUCTION
George William McArthur Reynolds was well acquainted with the mysteries of London. As a journalist and editor as well as a fiction writer, Reynolds had worked in both Paris and London and knew his subject well. This second volume of the first series of The Mysteries of London (1844-6) completes the narrative of the two Markham brothers, Richard and Eugene, and of Richard’s arch-nemesis Anthony Tidkins, the grave-robber or ‘Resurrection Man’. But this is not the end of the story: as Reynolds himself declares, his true subject is London itself, and the city is an inexhaustible mine of narrative. Richard Markham reappears in series two of Mysteries (1846-48), and Reynolds continued his theme with several volumes of The Mysteries of the Court of London (1848-56). There were more mysteries in London, it seems, than Reynolds could ever hope to solve. Nor may he have wished to; his Mysteries series were hugely popular and best-selling, prompting several stage adaptations, and so were surely too successful for Reynolds to have wished to bring them to too early a close.
Reynolds clearly possessed a detailed topographical knowledge of London: as his vast cast of characters move around the metropolis, wheeling and dealing, their routes are described with great precision, and the different areas of London are clearly mapped out. Reynolds’s London is one of dark secrets and strange locations, but it is also a place characterised by mobility. This mobility is very liberating, particularly in the case of his female characters Eliza Sydney and Ellen Monroe. Eliza and Ellen are both granted much more freedom of movement than most Dickens heroines, and roam the city at will. Eliza disguises herself as a young man, and Ellen is forced into selling her body as an artist’s model (an elegant euphemism for prostitution, as well as a comment on the economics of art); both women end up in difficult and dangerous situations. But these are perils that they negotiate on their own terms. However, the mobility which defines London is also very threatening; you never know where the villainous ‘Resurrection Man’ will turn up next.
Despite his comfortable background, Reynolds’s first adult experience of London was one of hardship and relative poverty, so when he described the living conditions east of Temple Bar he drew upon firsthand experience. On his return from Paris, penniless, Reynolds and his family lodged in Bethnal Green while he wrote this first series of The Mysteries of London. In Paris, Reynolds had tried to make a career as
a man of letters. He ran a bookshop, tried to start a newspaper, and published a novel, The Youthful Imposter (1835), and a work of literary criticism, The Modern Literature of France (1839). Indeed, Reynolds gave the young Thackeray his first work as a writer.[1] Most of the articles which Reynolds must have written after returning to London we will probably never be able to attribute to him, given the early-Victorian practice of anonymous journalism. However, we do know that in 1840 Reynolds was editor of The Teetotaler (a weekly journal advocating teetotalism), and by 1845 edited The London Journal. This was Reynolds’s big break in metropolitan periodical publishing. With an eventual circulation of over 500,000, The London Journal was a popular weekly magazine which published everything from serial fiction to news items.[2] Reynolds’s role as its editor complemented his own popular fiction writing.
[1] See Jean Guivarc’h, ‘Deux journalistes anglais de Paris en 1835 (G.W.M. Reynolds et W.M.T.)’, Etudes Anglaises 28, no. 2 (avril/juin 1975).
[2] Andrew King, The London Journal, 1845-83: Periodicals, Production and Gender (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
Reynolds left The London Journal as the first series of The Mysteries of London was drawing to a close in 1846, to launch his own journal, Reynolds’s Miscellany, and it was the success of Mysteries that must have contributed to his decision to trade on his own name. As his fame grew with the publication of a second series of Mysteries, Reynolds founded first Reynolds’s Political Instructor and Reynolds’s Newspaper as vehicles for his growing Chartist and republican political views. By the end of the first series, however, this increased journalistic activity was in the future. Yet the many different genres of writing contained within The Mysteries of London are rather like a magazine or a newspaper. The narrative includes sensation melodrama, first-person accounts, tables and figures of salaries, editorial-style opinion pieces, and instructions on how to cheat at cards. Topical news items, such as the assassination attempt on Queen Victoria, and the scandal of the Post Office opening private mail, are absorbed into the narrative. Reynolds maintained the weekly serial publication of Mysteries over many years, and he is adept at supporting the rhythm of such a long work. His multiple narratives, which spiral off from each other, are supported by regular features such as his emphasis on the contrasts between the very rich and the very poor, and the repeated motif of New Year’s Day. These internal patterns, reminiscent of the regular sections of a newspaper, maintain a coherent whole out of multiple parts and components, like the city of London itself.
In this second volume of series one of The Mysteries of London, alongside his journalist’s eye for topical detail, Reynolds develops elements of the romantic and the fantastic in his depiction of London life. Richard Markham’s friendship with Morcar the gypsy prince is straight out of chivalric romance, where the loyal retainer follows his master into violent perils in the service of a Princess, in this case Princess Isabella. Oddly it is not just in London that this action takes place: Reynolds takes his hero and his readers off to the fictionalised Italian state of Castelcicala, where Richard must defeat a usurper and set Isabella’s father back on his rightful throne. In series two, this aspect of the narrative continues with Richard, now ruler of Castelcicala, renouncing his crown in the name of democracy and the People’s rights, while his overwhelmed subjects weep with joy. With this Italian portion of his narrative, Reynolds could be accused of trying to have his cake and eat it: in a text which denounces the British aristocracy for their role in the sufferings of the poor, the only solution is a hero like Richard who wins a place in that very aristocratic system of government. However, it is worth noticing that Richard’s rise to fame rests on his abilities and his virtue, not his birth. Furthermore, Morcar is himself a prince among his own people, who serves the middle-class Richard because of his nobility of character, not of lineage. Reynolds complicates class distinctions and gives us a fairy-tale version of what could happen if goodness and not birth led to high office. In this, we have an early version of Anthony Hope’s fictional kingdom of Ruritania. However, there is an implicit admission here that Reynolds’s dreams of a new system of government may remain firmly in the realm of fantasy.
Reynolds also makes use of gothic tropes in his depiction of London, as this second volume develops the plotline of Anthony Tidkins, the ‘Resurrection Man’. The Mysteries of London is a key text in the genre of urban gothic, along with novels such as Bleak House (1852-3) by Charles Dickens, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). After the popularity of novels like Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), writers experimented with taking gothic tropes out of the ruined castle and into the metropolis as a way of representing the threatening vastness of the city in a period of rapid urban expansion. Indeed, Bleak House, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, and The Mysteries of London form what Trefor Thomas has called ‘a literary triptych representing the culture of the metropolis from three distinctive perspectives at an epochal moment of social and political transition.’[1] New arrivals to Europe’s growing cities left the small towns and villages of their birth to live cheek-by-jowl with strangers whom they had never met, and urban gothic writing took this sense of dislocation and explored the possibilities of the dark secrets that could be lurking behind closed doors and around unfamiliar street corners.
[1] Trefor Thomas, ‘G.W.M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London: An Introduction’, in The Mysteries of London, by G.W.M. Reynolds, edited by Trefor Thomas (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), vii–xxvii.
The illustrations to The Mysteries of London formed an important part of this gothic reading experience. The text was originally issued as weekly parts priced at one penny, and each part began with a picture that acted as a ‘trailer’ for the action to come. This meant, of course, that the illustrations were not on the same page as the passage they illustrated, so they sometimes seem to offer conflicting or allegorical commentary on the opening paragraphs of each weekly part. Many of the illustrations emphasised the gothic elements of the text, such as the underground chambers, corpses, and graveyards which litter the narrative. The illustrations would have been a huge part of the appeal for Reynolds’s poorer readers, many of whom would have been illiterate or semi-literate, and would have relied on the text being read aloud to them by friends or family. Henry Mayhew captures the scene of the communal reading aloud of one of Reynolds’s tales to a group of London street-sellers:
‘Here all my audience’, said the man to me, ‘broke out with – “Aye, that’s the way the harristocrats hooks it. There’s nothing o’ that sort among us; the rich has all the barrikin to themselves”. “Yes, that’s the b-way the taxes goes in”, shouted a woman.’ (London Labour, 1: 25)
Reynolds knew full well the appeal of illustrated periodicals like The London Journal, a format which he used for his own Reynolds’s Miscellany, as well as the cheap one-sheet broadsides sold in the streets and illustrated with woodcut images, and the illustrated monthly parts of Dickens’s fiction. The original weekly parts of The Mysteries of London situated themselves within this spectrum of popular illustrated print.
The Mysteries of London, Vol. II [Unabridged & Illustrated] (Valancourt Classics) Page 1
