By Sucheta Bhattacharya
My acquaintance with the novels of George William MacArthur Reynolds happened around 1996-97 when I was introduced to The Mysteries of London. It was not the mammoth compendium of colourful and riotous episodes that I would read later, but an abridged version, edited by Trefor Thomas – spicy enough to whet my appetite but not yet exposing me to the entirety of the mindboggling narrative strategy deployed by Reynolds.
My introduction to Reynolds was not without preparation and certainly not fortuitous. My PhD supervisor-to-be Professor Sajni Kripalani Mukherji first talked to me about Reynolds when I was doing my MPhil on Lytton Strachey’s iconoclastic biographies of some eminent Victorians. I think iconoclasm was the key idea which bound my MPhil dissertation and PhD concept.
To an Indian student for whom Victorian literature consisted of Dickens, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, Gaskell, Thackeray, Tennyson, the Brownings, Matthew Arnold, Hardy (late Victorian) et al., Reynolds was a revelation. The choice of Victorian authors and texts in the University of Calcutta curriculum, when I was a BA student and later, followed an early twentieth-century syllabic structure with minor changes. Even in the 1980s and 1990s, not much had changed regarding the perception of Victorian literature: the hidden figures in the literary fabric of the age were seldom, if ever mentioned. Reynolds of course was a persona non grata. The reverence that was sought from the students whenever one mentioned Victorian literature could be emotionally draining at times and only the melodramatic moments of Dickens and Hardy perhaps provided some respite.
So, Sajni Mukherji with a twinkle in her eyes introduced the bad boy of Victorian Literature into the stock of the Victorian novels I had read so far. She also mentioned casually that Reynolds was a rather popular novelist for the English reading public of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century India, and that his popularity far surpassed that of Dickens. The loan records of many public libraries in India testify to his popularity (established by Priya Joshi in her valuable study In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India, 2002).
As Reynolds’s reputation (notoriety?) was grounded on his Mysteries, I looked for it first and, as I have already mentioned, acquired the edited volume by Trefor Thomas. Then I found that the National Library of Calcutta had a whole collection devoted to Reynolds. The entire body of his novels forms part of its Ashutosh Collection (named after the first Indian Vice Chancellor of the University of Calcutta, from whose personal library the ‘Reynolds collection’ was garnered). I remember spending dull winter afternoons in The National Library, poring over the yellowed brittle pages of Reynolds’s novels with their tiny prints, the closed air redolent with the odour of the pesticides and preservatives regularly used for the protection of those leather-bound, brittle-paged volumes, my eyes burning with the light fume of the chemicals always lingering in the room.
What I did not yet know was that Reynolds was more familiar, and much closer to the Indian imagination than those volumes I read with such assiduity in the quiet reading room of a library, ever gave hint of. He was already buried deep in the literary culture of the pre-independence years in India forming a subculture growing around his novels, which was too widespread and too complex to be easily defined in terms of its nature of influence on contemporary vernacular literatures of India.
I would go on to write a PhD thesis on adaptations of Reynolds’s novels in Bangla in the early years of the twentieth century, but I still feel that Reynolds’s impact on the vernacular literatures of India has not been properly mapped. The reason behind that I hope to explain in my later blogs…
My inclusion in the Advisory Board of the G W M Reynolds Society has given me the happy opportunity to re-read and re-explore Reynolds.
Sucheta Bhattacharya
Sucheta.bhattacharya@jadavpuruniversity.in
Professor, Department of Comparative Literature
Jadavpur University, Kolkata
India
G. W. M. Reynolds Society 