By Stephen Knight
Having worked and published on Reynolds’ fiction for some years, starting with his grand The Mysteries of London as a major example of the mid-nineteenth century ‘Mysteries’ genre, and then moving through all his novels in my study of 2019, it kept coming to my attention that one of the elements in the major maltreatment of this prolific, rich and intriguing radical author by the English literary establishment was that though his novels were available — both in elderly copies from his great Victorian popularity and increasingly from the new genre of mechanical reprints — no work had been done on his short stories, especially not in collecting and reprinting them. This became especially painful when I was trying to make comparisons between his work and that of the other mid-century prolific and quite radical author, Wilkie Collins, whose many short stories were (almost all of them) available in a recent collection edited by Julian Thompson. Reflecting that being a friend of Dickens rather than like Reynolds an enemy was the basis for very different treatments in the cultural world, I started to look for stories, knowing that Reynolds had printed some in his own magazines and had also included a number in his two collections, Master Timothy’s Bookcase (1841-2) – not a title likely to please Dickens, the author of Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840-1) — and also in The Young Fisherman (1864), published soon after Reynolds, for some mysterious reason, finished writing fiction.
I doubted that what I had found was all that there were, and was then fortunate in two ways. The first was to receive some research funding from the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, my location in retirement — returning as my wife and I did to that southern city of culture, not to mention fine restaurants – and to a School generous enough to fund even its Honorary Research Professors. The second fortunate feature was that the funding enabled me to employ again Dr. Anna Kay, a researcher with both strong curiosity and a remarkable talent for finding with her keyboard fingers a way through the records of newspapers and magazines of the now distant past. She not only gathered in the Reynolds’ Miscellany pieces, with their grand illustrations and now tiny print, but even more importantly a good number of Reynolds’s basically unknown early stories, published in little-known magazines like The Monthly or The Teetotaler, and even less well-known, The Inquirer and Daily Courier. We were finally able to identify twenty-three stories certainly written by Reynolds between 1838, soon after he returned from his youthful years in France, and 1850, when he apparently stopped writing stories and turned, for a decade anyway, to producing many more novels.
Their locations and topics were so varied that to print them chronologically would be to produce what would seem like a jumble of themes and approaches – in his short stories Reynolds is as polyvalent and various as in his novels – so they have here been sorted into thematic areas on the basis of location, with about a third British, another third French, and a couple of other western European stories, and then the final third focused on the Islamic east and its encounters with the Christian world, a topic of recurring interest to Reynolds, from well before the Crimean war.
Varied in approach, rich in information, recurrently radical in attitudes to people, especially the gentry, Reynolds’ short stories can be seen as another part of his massive achievement, all of it volatile in approach and penetrating in insight, and above all rich in both detail and in the overall attitudes behind the narratives, the characters, and the authorial voice.
G. W. M. Reynolds Society 