The

Mysteries of London

title: The Mysteries of London

author: Reynolds, George William MacArthur.
publisher: Edinburgh University Press
isbn10 | asin: 1853311111
print isbn13: 9781853311116
ebook isbn13: 9780585060866
language: English
subject London (England)--Fiction.
publication date: 1996
lcc: PZ3.R33561996eb
ddc: 823.8
subject: London (England)--Fiction.

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EDITOR'S ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to record my gratitude to many colleagues in the Department of

English and History at Manchester Metropolitan University with whom I have
discussed this project, and to Dr Bronwen Thomas for her invaluable editorial
assistance with some of the work.

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The Mysteries of London

G.W.M. Reynolds
Edited and with an Introduction by Trefor Thomas

KEELEUNIVERSITYPRESS

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First published in 1996 by
Keele University Press
Keele, Staffordshire
Introductory material and notes
© Trefor Thomas
Composed by KUP
Printed on acid-free paper
by Hartnolls, Bodmin,
Cornwall, England
ISBN 1 85331 111 1

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CONTENTS
G.W.M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London: An Introduction vii
Bibliography xxv
The Mysteries of London Series I, Volume I
Prologue 3
Chapter I The Old House in Smithfield 5
II The Mysteries of the Old House 9
III The Trap-Door 11
IV The Two Trees 15
V Eligible Acquaintances 18
VII The Boudoir 20
IX A City Man.Smithfield Scenes 25
XIII The Hell 32
XVII A Den of Horrors 37
XIX Morning 41
XXIII The Old House in Smithfield again 46
XXVI Newgate 48
XXVII The Republican and the Resurrection Man 50
XXVIII The Dungeon 54
XXIX The Black Chamber 64
XLII "The Dark House" 66
XLIV The Body-Snatchers 68
LV Miserrima!!! 73

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LVI The Road to Ruin 83
LVIII New Year's Day 90
LIX The Royal Lovers 99
LX Revelations 105
LXII The Resurrection Man's History 107
LXV The Wrongs and Crimes of the Poor 118
LXX The Image, the Picture, and the Statue 125
LXXI The House of Commons 130
LXXII The Black Chamber again 133
LXXXVII The Professor of Mesmerism 137

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LXXXVIII The Figurante 144

XC Markham's Occupations 147
XCI The Tragedy 149
XCVII Another New Year's Day 156
CIV Female Courage 156
CV The Combat 160
CVIII The Exhumation 162
CXIII The Lovers 167
CXVI The Rattlesnake's History 172
CXXIX The Fall 187
CXXXI The Statue 191
CXXXIV The Palace in the Holy Land 195
Epilogue 197
The Mysteries of London Series I, Volume II
CXXXVIII A Public Functionary 201
CXL Incidents in the Gipsy Palace 207
CXLVI The Bath.The Housekeeper 209
CXLIX The Masquerade 212
CLV Patriotism 218
CLXIII The Zingarees 223
CLXVIII The Plague Ship 228
CLXXI Mr. Greenwood's Dinner-party 234
CLXXII The Mysteries of Holmesford House 237
CLXXX The "Boozing-Ken" once more 242

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CLXXXI The Resurrection Man again 243
CLXXXV Another New Year's Day 248
CLXXXVI The New Cut 250
CLXXXVII The forged Bills 253
CLXXXIX The Battle of Montoni 254
CXCI Crankey Jem's History 259
CXCII The Mint.The Forty Thieves 272
CXCIII Another Visit to Buckingham Palace 275
CXCIV The Royal Breakfast 279
CCXI The Deed 285
CCXXIII The Marriage 289
CCXXXIX The Resurrection Man's Return Home 294
CCLII Death of the Marquis of Holmesford 297
CCLIII The Ex-Member for Rottenborough 303
CCLVII The Revenge 309
CCLVIII The Appointment kept 316
CCLIX Conclusion 326
Epilogue 328
Appendix: complete chapter titles from the original edition 331

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G. W. M. REYNOLDS'S
THE MYSTERIES OF LONDON
AN INTRODUCTION
George William MacArthur Reynolds's novel The Mysteries of London, with
its continuation The Mysteries of the Court of London, was a phenomenon of
Victorian book production. This monumental work comprised a total of
approximately four and a half million words, and was a best seller in its most
characteristic format, the penny number, from its commencement in October
1844 to its conclusion in 1856. As a weekly literary soap opera, it was
shrewdly designed to appeal to a newly literate lower-class readership in the
cities; the combination of populist politics, dramatic illustration, voyeuristic
revelation of high and low life depravity in the metropolis, and the
exploitation of established conventional motifs from the Gothic horror canon
produced sales figures which dwarfed those of rivals in this rapidly evolving
market and brought national celebrity to its author. By 1847, Reynolds
himself was able to refer to the 'immense circulation' of the weekly numbers,
'exceeding', he claimed, 'that of any novel published in the last twenty years',
and to assert its status as a 'national tale'. 1 Total sales of the title in English
and the other languages into which it was rapidly translated have been
estimated at over a million.
The complete original text has never been reprinted in the twentieth century.
Although the odd bound volume occasionally surfaces in the antiquarian book
trade, the full set of twelve can now only be consulted in specialist libraries.
The purpose of this edition, therefore, is to put back into circulation
substantial extracts from a novel that once had considerable cultural, political,
and social significance. Its historical placing in the mid-1840s, at a moment
when Europe was riven by pre-revolutionary tensions and when a new market
for cheap popular fiction with values radically unlike those of the improving
and moralistic penny magazines of the 1830s was evolving in the cities, gave
it an almost emblematic status in the raging cultural battle for the minds of the
working classes. In spite of, or perhaps even because of, its many crudities
and contradictions, the text conveys insights into aspects of nineteenth-
century urban life and culture often denied to more finished or literary fiction.
Taken with Henry Mayhew's recording of the detail of street life in his

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Morning Chronicle letters of 1849, and with Dickens's apocalyptic vision of
London in Bleak House, the text completes a literary triptych representing the
culture of the metropolis from three

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distinctive perspectives at an epochal moment of social and political
transition. The exceptional narrative variety and energy of the writing should
also enable most modern readers to find some 'pleasures of the text' to
celebrate in this edition.
The complete work, The Mysteries of London (Series One and Two, four
volumes) and The Mysteries of the Court of London (Series One, Two, Three
and Four, eight volumes), first appeared in the format with which it is most
typically associated weekly penny numbers beginning in October 1844 and
finally ceasing in 1856. 2 In a postscript at the conclusion of the final volume
Reynolds remarked that for twelve years he had issued a number every week,
'without any intermission'. Each number occupied him 'an average of seven
hours' in the composition; he explicitly denied the claim sometimes made that
an 'army' of writers was employed. There is a total of 624 weekly penny
numbers in the finished work, which Reynolds described as 'a complete
Encyclopedia of tales'. Each number consists of 8 pages of small-print,
double-column text, with a wood engraving, usually of a climactic moment in
the narrative, on the first page.3 The text often breaks off in the middle of a
sentence, to be continued in the next number. The material could also be
purchased as monthly parts for the price of sixpence: the parts consisted of 4
weekly numbers stitched into a specially engraved cover. At the end of each
year, unsold weekly numbers were collected and bound up for sale in volume
form: a title page and list of contents was available, at the cost of one penny,
for purchasers who wished to make their own binding arrangements. In a
complete bound set, there are 12 double-columned, small-print, 400-page
volumes, one for each year of publication, each including 52 weekly numbers.
There was also a substantial trade in back numbers, and the whole series was
reissued from its commencement several times, once its commercial success
became apparent. Advertisements in the London Journal reassured anxious
readers that missing numbers could be reprinted from the stereotype plates
without difficulty, and this was clearly done on a regular basis to satisfy
demand. The full set of 12 volumes was also reissued by John Dicks in
undated versions at least twice after the end of the series in 1856. Dicks also
published a 36-volume, undated Complete Works of Reynolds later in the
century. There was a later condensed, simplified and undated version in
Milner's Cottage Library series, with the sub-title Stories of Life in the
Modern Babylon. A few episodes from the novel have been included in
modern anthologies, but the mass of the material has never been reprinted.

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In a letter addressed to the 'industrious classes' in Reynolds's Miscellany,
Reynolds himself gave an account of the 'mysteries' cult which developed in
England after the publication of Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris in an
English translation in 1845:
The Mysteries of London have been reprinted in America, and translations have
been published in four languages of Europe French,

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Spanish, Italian, German. The German edition has sold to the extent of 8,000
copies, great numbers of which have found their way into Russia, despite the
vigilance of the police. The book is literally devoured in Russia, and large sums
are given for the loan of it. 4
By 1846, according to advertisements in Reynolds's Miscellany of Romance,
General Literature, Science and Art, at least two dramatic versions were in
performance on the London stage and numerous imitations and variations on
the 'mysteries' theme were published.5 Anne Humpherys argues that the
'mysteries' novel at this time was evolving as a distinctive urban genre, and
she identifies a dozen contemporary fictions which use the motif in their
titles; she remarks that the plural form 'refers linguistically to the fragmented
and hence incoherent experience of the modern city, as well as to the resulting
feeling of disconnectedness'.6 Richard Maxwell's recent The Mysteries of
Paris and London7 also discusses the 'mystery mania' of the 1840s. The genre
represents an urbanization of eighteenth-century Gothic, and a new
consciousness of the city as inexplicable and impenetrable.
The Mysteries of London itself was rapidly successful; its weekly sales were
variously reported as 30,000 to 40,000 shortly after commencement in 1844.
Even after its cessation, the fame of the title lived on: J. A. Berger's New
Mysteries of London (1861) was a chapter-by-chapter parody of Reynolds's
text, in which the infamous Resurrection Man rises once more from the dead.
Although publication in volume form was a significant factor in the sales
figures, it was the weekly penny number which lay at the heart of Reynolds's
fame. This format was exploited by a number of entrepreneurial publishers in
the 1840s, notably Edward Lloyd, who issued many 'penny bloods' from his
Salisbury Square offices, but Reynolds was distinguished from this group by
both the relative quality of his writing and the radical thrust of his social and
political comment. The distinctive qualities of The Mysteries of London made
it a key element in the dramatic literary moment of the 1840s, when the mass
market for cheap serial publications, created above all by Charles Knight's
Penny Magazine and William Chambers's Chambers's Journal in the 1830s,
moved towards entertainment rather than improvement. The national debate
which raged around the emblematic penny if the working classes were to be
educated, what should they read? gives some indication of the cultural and
political anxieties associated with the evolution of cheap popular fiction in the
cities in the decade of English Chartism and European revolution.8 The
middle-class sponsorship of improving weekly penny magazines such as the

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Working Man's Friend and Family Instructor, with its explicit programme of
'elevating the taste of the male and female operatives of England', was a direct
response to fears about the effect of sensational fiction. Many derogatory
accounts of cheap popular literature at this time are centred around the key
terms 'sensational' and 'exciting'; it was the treatment of gender and sexuality,
as much as populist political rhetoric,

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which aroused middle-class anxieties. Dickens's decision at the end of the
decade to found a weekly magazine, significantly entitled Household Words,
was a further instance of this opposition of sexual licence to domestic order;
his references in the opening number to some 'tillers of the field' of cheap
fiction as 'Bastards of the Mountain, draggled fringe on the Red Cap', who
'pander to the basest passions of the basest natures whose existence is a
national reproach', were widely taken as a direct reference to Reynolds.
The extracts chosen in this collection represent only a proportion of the whole
work. Even the original first series of The Mysteries of London, published
between 1844 and 1846, when the characteristics of the form were most
sharply defined and from which this selection is chosen, includes an estimated
800,000 words and 104 weekly numbers. The narrative of the first series is
complete in itself, although one of the central protagonists, Richard Markham,
is reintroduced in the second series; later volumes show some decline from
the quality of the earlier productions. After completion of the first and second
series of The Mysteries of London (four volumes, 18448), Reynolds prepared
a mass of material for a continuation, but quarrelled with both the original
publisher, George Vickers, and with George Stiff, the proprietor of the
London Journal, who also engraved the blocks for the first four volumes.
Reynolds set up an independent publishing house with John Dicks, who had
been a clerk in the Vickers office. 9 The later series were published by Dicks
under the changed title of The Mysteries of the Court of London, while Stiff
employed first Thomas Miller and later E. J. Blanchard to continue the
original title, which was less successful after Reynolds severed his connection
with it. The final number of the second series of The Mysteries of London
announced that the first number of a new serial of the same title, written by
Miller, would appear on 20 September 1848. This arrangement was, not
unnaturally, angrily contested by Reynolds, who immediately began a
continuation of his own under the modified title of The Mysteries of the Court
of London.
In the original first series of The Mysteries of London, there are 259 chapters.
This edition reproduces substantial extracts from 60 of those chapters, about
140,000 of the 800,000 words. The Appendix provides a complete list of the
chapter titles in the first edition and references to the original page numbers.
Where chapters have been abridged, this is indicated in the text by ellipses in
square brackets. The reduction in size has been achieved by the complete
omission of a number of the sub-plots which are appended to the main

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narrative line. The selections have also been chosen to contrast episodes of
'low' and 'high' London life, as happened in the original numbers, and to
follow out the experiences of the central characters: Richard Markham; his
brother Eugene (under one or other of his many pseudonyms); Anthony
Tidkins, the Resurrection Man; his sworn enemy, James Cuffin, or Crankey
Jem; and the two women, Ellen Monroe and Isabella Alteroni, who marry the
brothers. Although this is not a complete version of the first series, every
effort has been made, within the limits outlined above, to

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include a representative selection of the contents. Where possible, long
extracts or complete chapters have been included, rather than briefer episodes.
A dagger ( ) has been used in the text to indicate those points at which the
first and second penny numbers ceased. Most of the extracts chosen are
illustrated by the wood-engravings so typical of this literary mode: the
technique evolved by Thomas Bewick and his followers of engraving on the
end-grain of a boxwood block allowed the representation of a high level of
detail, and produced durable and cheap blocks which could withstand long
print runs without wear. Many of the blocks for the first series of The
Mysteries of London were drawn and engraved by George Stiff, who was also,
briefly, the owner of the London Journal and later director of the 'Illustrated
London News Engraving Establishment'. Some of the woodcuts are unsigned
and can only be attributed to Stiff on stylistic grounds. Later series used a
variety of other artists and engravers; the first volume of The Mysteries of the
Court of London (1847) includes 52 woodcuts 'drawn by Henry Anelay and
engraved by E. Hooper'. 10

G. W. M. Reynolds: Biography and Politics

George Reynolds was born in Sandwich on 23 July 1814, the son of a flag-
officer in the Royal Navy. He inherited a substantial sum on his mother's
death in 1830 (his father had died earlier) and left the Sandhurst Royal
Military College, where he had been preparing for a military career, for Paris,
to begin his career as a journalist. Here he acquired the knowledge of French
popular fiction which he was able to use to good effect, edited an English-
language newspaper published in Paris, and came in contact with
revolutionary political ideas. His book The Modern Literature of France
(London: 1839) contains an account of the major French writers of the time
and their innovations. His reading of Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris
was of especial importance, as it suggested the idea for a similar novel of
London life and demonstrated the potential of the roman feuilleton, a novel
specifically designed for serial publication in newspapers.
After the failure of some business enterprises, Reynolds was declared
bankrupt and he returned to England. In London he continued his journalistic
career and contributed to a number of periodicals. His novel Pickwick
Abroad, published in the Monthly Magazine from 1837, was a successful if

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plagiaristic attempt to emulate Dickens's commercial success, as was his
Master Timothy's Bookcase (1841). At this time he also edited a crusading
magazine, the Teetotaller (18401), having signed the pledge in 1840. He was
briefly editor of the London Journal in 1845; this was a pioneering and
important attempt to identify and exploit a new market for a weekly popular
magazine among the urban working class. Simultaneously, he edited a highly
successful family magazine, Reynolds's Miscellany of Romance, General
Literature, Science and Art, which combined fiction with improving and

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informative articles. Between 1845 and 1855 Reynolds wrote at least 36
novels and short tales, all of which appeared either in magazines or as penny
numbers. Many, but perhaps not all, of these titles were included in the
Complete Works published later in the century by John Dicks. In 1848 he
married Susanna Pearson, who was also a successful popular novelist. They
had three children, one of whom was, significantly, christened Kossuth
Mazzini. 11 After 1860 he wrote little and, according to Frederic Boase's
Modern Biographies, became a churchwarden at St Andrew's, Well Street. He
died in his Woburn Square house on 17 June 1879.
By 1848, Reynolds's reputation as a successful popular author and editor,
exploiting the new technologies of steam press, cheap paper, and national
distribution through the developing railway network, was firmly established.
It was at this point, in the winter of 1848 the year of revolution that his active
political career began, although his interest in radicalism and republicanism
had been apparent throughout the 1840s. In its edition of II March 1848, the
Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star, carried a report of a 'great open-air
meeting' which had been held a few days previously in Trafalgar Square.
Police attempts to disperse this illegal gathering of 'an immense assemblage',
which was inflamed by the recent news of the successful revolutionary
overthrow of Louis Philippe in Paris, had led to sporadic street violence. A
mob surged down the Mall and through St James's Park, egged on by cries of
'To the Palace!', as far as the gates of the royal residence itself. A week later,
the same paper triumphantly reported a further great mass meeting at
Kennington Common.
At the first of these meetings, in Trafalgar Square, the chairman, selected by
acclaim, was a man described by the Northern Star as 'the popular author Mr.
G. W. M. Reynolds'. At the conclusion of the demonstration, Reynolds was
carried in triumph back to his house in Wellington Street, where he addressed
the crowd from a balcony. A week later, at Kennington Common, Reynolds
once more took the chair and presided beneath a revolutionary tricolour
banner. In his speech, he fiercely attacked the profligacy of the monarchy and
the callousness of the aristocracy they enjoyed untold luxury in their private
lives while ignoring the plight of the poor, who existed 'herded together in the
dens and cellars of the metropolis'.12 He also attacked those elements in the
press which referred to the Chartists as 'a mob, ruffians or rifraff'.
Although he was elected as representative for Derby on the Chartist

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convention in 1848 and continued to be a member of the National Charter
Association, Reynolds played only a minor role in the later history of the
movement. After four years he quarrelled with a number of its leaders, and
was involved in a libel case with Ernest Jones. It is, however, his work as a
journalist, editor, and popular novelist, advocating the cause of the poor
against the rich in the crucial transitional decade between 1844 and 1854,
rather than his engagement in public politics, which is central to his
reputation. The Chartist newspaper which he founded and edited in 1849,

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