G. W. M. Reynolds Society

By Hayley Braithwaite

I am really excited to be able to share the news of my first publication with the Reynolds Society. It is wonderful to be able to join the ranks of scholars to have published on Reynolds, and to share my research into Reynolds’s gothic with this incredible community.

‘“The Pretence of Civilisation:” Gothic Progress in G. W. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London’ was born in 2022 at a conference at the University of Reading. ‘The Past as Nightmare’ was an interdisciplinary conference that sought to explore the gothic’s complex relationship with pastness, and with the discipline of history. The notion of the past returning to haunt modernity was something I had come up against time and time again in my examination of The Mysteries of London. As those of us who have had the pleasure of reading Mysteries will know, Reynolds often looks backwards as he attempts to narrate the present, and anticipate the future. First-wave gothic tropes and techniques are a common feature of Reynolds’s writing, and pull us into the past even as Reynolds narrates the realities of contemporary London.

That late-Summer weekend in Reading was the site of numerous exciting and thought-provoking conversations. I am always incredibly grateful for gothic-focused conferences for giving me the opportunity to share Reynolds with a different audience – and ‘The Past as Nightmare’ was a particular joy. The calibre of research was high, and the sheer diversity of topics generated many a productive idea. As a then second-year PhD student, the follow-up email some two months later about the possibly of turning the conference into an edited collection was the cherry on top of what had already been an inspiriting and motivating experience. Across the next few months (and years), I worked with our editors Daniel Renshaw and Neil Cocks to produce a chapter that captured the energy of the Reading conference and inspired others to consider Reynolds’s role in the story of the Victorian gothic.

The chapter I eventually developed incorporated many of the ideas shared at the University of Reading, and evolved quickly into a piece that (I hope) provides crucial insights into Reynolds’s presentation of slum clearance, metropolitan improvements, and Victorian progress. My contribution to Literature, the Gothic, and the Reconstruction of History: The Past as Nightmare locates Mysteries amongst a myriad of gothics that create, complicate, and subvert historical narratives. Just like Emily Bronte, William Harrison Ainsworth, and Bram Stoker, Reynolds was, I argue, engaged with the constructed conception of “history.”  

‘Gothic Progress’ specifically examines the chronology of the third and fourth volumes of Mysteries (serialised between 1846-8), and analyses Reynolds’s use of gothic disorder as a means of critiquing modern Britain. Centring on Reynolds’s rendering of a criminal haunt in the impoverished London district of Farringdon, my chapter charts the representation of slum clearance within Mysteries – considering the impact of metropolitan improvements on Victorian perceptions of the slum. As medieval houses were levelled, and sewerage tunnels excavated, the many layers of London’s history came into view. Slum clearance encouraged Victorian Londoners to consider their past, even as their city ostensibly hurtled towards modernity. Writing against this backdrop, Reynolds uses the city’s newfound historical awareness to undermine prevailing beliefs relating to the slum’s vestigial barbarity and the establishment’s inherent progressiveness. In Reynolds’s ambitious and radical text, modern Britain’s lawmakers, politicians, and systems of rule are associated with the tyrannical, medieval governance of first-wave gothic works, whilst Farringdon’s criminals operate sophisticated, modern businesses. Dramatizing the deadly consequences of the profit-motive, Mysteries blends chronological uncertainty, gothic motifs, and narratives of contemporary reform to undercut the notion of linear progression. In one of the most widely-read texts of the Victorian period, as Old London came into view, new London looked all the more backwards.

I am very thankful for the Taylor & Francis Group who have given permission for me to share an excerpt of ‘Gothic Progress’ with the Reynolds Society. A link to these pages can be found here.

Should you be interested in reading the whole chapter, or indeed any of the incredible and varied work of my fellow contributors, Literature, the Gothic, and the Reconstruction of History: The Past as Nightmare is available for purchase here.