G. W. M. Reynolds Society

By Stephen Knight

1.

George William Macarthur Reynolds (1814-79) was the most widely-read novelist of the nineteenth century in Britain. He published over twenty million words in novels – five times as much as Dickens and twice as much as the famously popular Bulwer Lytton. This came from thirty-eight novels, many of them in the popular range, but two were his famous series The Mysteries of London (1844-48), four volumes and over a million words, and its successor The Mysteries of the Court of London (1848-56), with eight volumes and two and a half million words.

Much of his work was sold in the new 1830s mode of short segments – both of the Mysteries appeared initially in weekly eight-page pamphlets with some eight thousand words and an illustration, all for one penny. His wide-ranging topics often dealt with the follies of the gentry, but also with the new theme of the rise of ordinary people through skill and good fortune – and the challenges they faced on the way and after they had arrived. More unusually, he also wrote about France, where he had spent his youthful years from 1830-1836, having left the English military college at Sandhurst after his mother’s death – his father, a naval captain, had already passed on. Sara James has described his links with French literature, classical and popular, from this period (2008).

After Reynolds settled back in London he remained an internationalist, and a third of his novels and two-thirds of his short stories are set fully or partly in Continental Europe, including the eastern part, even before the Crimean War of 1853-6. All this work was very popular with audiences, being vigorously plotted, well-written, richly illustrated and, more unusually at the time, consistently radical in its basic themes, showing the corrupt nature of many aristocratic, business and government people, and also the forces acting against honest, energetic, ordinary citizens. Reynolds was for a while a major figure in the Chartist movement, including in its important year of 1848, and the print media he started with great success were distinctly radical for the period: the penny weekly Reynolds’s Miscellany, from 1846, and the weekend newspaper Reynolds’s News, which ran from 1850 right until 1967 under various names and ownerships – the final one being Rupert Murdoch.

 Remarkably, this major figure of Victorian fiction, described in The Bookseller on his death in 1879 as “the most popular writer of his time,” is hardly known in the annals and discussions of English literary history. In large part this must be because of his major popularity and radicalism, but he was also disliked by some respectable writers of his day, especially Dickens: that was in part understandable, as Reynolds’ first real success was entitled Pickwick Abroad (1838-9) and the young man just back from France adapted technique as well as text from the new novel-master: he soon imitated Dickens’s Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840-1) with his own novel-like story-collection, Master Timothy’s Bookcase (1841-2). Later, on the first page of the first issue of Household Words,Dickens attacked Reynolds for his radicalism, saying he was one of the “Bastards of the Mountain [a French left-wing party], draggled fringe on the Red Cap, Panders to the basest passions of the lowest natures – whose existence is a national reproach” (1850, pp. 1-2). Reynolds’ reply in Reynolds’s Miscellany identified Dickens as “That lickspittle hanger-on to the skirts of Aristocracy’s role” (June 8th, 1851).

Recent years have seen Reynolds being taken seriously as a force in English popular and radical fiction. A major move was the essay-collection edited by Anne Humpherys and Louis James in 2008; the first book on Reynolds the novelist, by Stephen Knight, appeared in 2019. In 2020 was founded a lively international on-line Reynolds discussion group. But though the novels are beginning to find their way back to public cognition and recognition, there is still another major Reynolds knowledge absence in the literary world – he was also the author of rich, varied and intriguing short stories.

These stories have hardly ever been mentioned, let alone assembled and reprinted. In part this is simply because Reynolds has been so little-known, but whereas in recent years his novels have increasingly been recognised and reprinted in new international modes, both unedited reprints and also electronic re-representations, the stories are a good deal more difficult to identify and locate. When Reynolds started publishing in the late 1830s and early 1840s, it was common for short stories to be published without trace of an author’s name or even initials, almost as fillers in the cheap magazines that were then booming in England. Even when Reynolds was editor, as with The Monthly in 1837 and The Teetotaler in 1840-41, his short stories, unlike his serialised novels, were not attributed to the author, nor even, as was the case later on in Reynolds’s Miscellany, noted as being by ‘The Editor’. There no doubt remain early stories in some early magazines, even in the ones he edited, which are still unacknowledged and were not later reprinted in his collections or Reynolds’s Miscellany, and so cannot now be identified, except conceivably through an extensive linguistically-based survey.

This collection prints twenty-three stories that can with confidence be credited to Reynolds. Not all of them have been traced in their original magazine versions, if they had them: some come from Reynolds’ two story-collections, the informal Master Timothy’s Bookcase (1841-2), which also appeared as a series in Reynold’s Miscellany in 1847. This, more elaborate than Dickens’ story-collection in Master Humphrey’s Clock, offered a historical frame story about the Mortimer family, who had over several centuries the supernatural presence of Master Timothy to advise them. In the nineteenth-century he intrigues Sir Edmund Mortimer with a range of stories, elaborations and explanations about people he knows. This curious format was a way to privilege the pattern of the ‘interpolated story’ which Dickens and others, including Reynolds, had been using in novels to fill out space. Where the stories told in Master Timothy’s Bookcase are inter-related with the family and other narratives in the book they have been overlooked here as basically being elements of a novel, but a number of the stories are clearly self-standing, including some that had been separately published before. In Reynolds’ later straightforward short-story and novella collection, The Young Fisherman (1864), which he published after he had stopped writing fiction, he also used a number of stories not elsewhere traceable, as well as some from earlier – sometimes much earlier – publications.

As well as early magazine stories and those extractable from Reynolds’s two anthologies, there are five here which appeared in Reynolds’ Miscellany before he basically stopped writing short stories, apparently in 1850. There is a story, ‘The Two Christmas Days’ which has only been found in Reynolds’s Miscellany in 1860, but from theme and tone it seems likely to be earlier – indeed is here printed first. While Reynolds’s apparent withdrawal from short fiction may seem surprising, it may be explained by his emphasis in the 1850s on novels – in that decade he published an amazing twenty-one full-length novels, as well as the last six volumes of The Mysteries of the Court of London. It may be that his lively and very successful magazineReynolds’s Miscellany no longer needed his short fiction – and the newspaper Reynolds’s News did not publish fiction. Wilkie Collins himself stopped writing short stories around 1860, when his novels, after The Woman in White (1860), took off so well – but he did return to the form in the mid-1870s.

Even stranger than apparently abandoning the short story around 1850 is the fact that Reynolds wrote no fiction at all for the last twenty years of his life, stopping when only in his mid-forties. His last novel, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, is dated 1859 and the novella ‘The Young Fisherman’, published in Reynolds’s Miscellany in late 1861, and then the title piece in his 1864 anthology, seems to be his last fiction of all. No doubt Reynolds was busy with his two major publications, the monthly magazine and the weekly newspaper, but so he had been in the highly productive later 1840s and 1850s, and apart from the apparent absence of short stories from 1850 nothing else had changed in his productivity. Louis James has suggested that by about 1860 Reynolds was doing so well financially from his media that he did not need publishing income any more (2008, 199), but it still seems strange that a man who could write so quickly, fluently and successfully would simply stop the process entirely.

Sadly, we have no Reynolds papers to consult on the matter – they were apparently all destroyed by the son who succeeded him in his media business – so this must remain a mystery. One thought is that his fiction writing stopped very soon after the death of his wife in 1858. Susannah Reynolds, an Englishwoman he met and married in Paris, was not only the mother of their nine children but also the author of lively romantically-oriented novels and some short stories. Her style is most unlike that of Reynolds, and it seems improbable that she was, as has sometimes been suggested, a substitute author for him and so her death caused his silence. It is much more likely that, with his rich and rapid output and the remarkably accurate finish of his fiction – compared to the error-filled work of Dumas, for example – she acted as his editor as well as strong supporter. But his wife’s role in his stopping writing fiction can only be a speculation, and all that can be said is that for some reason he gave up writing stories: though it is worth reflecting that the extent of his work might have reached remarkably further had he not for some reason stopped writing fiction surprisingly early.

2.

The short stories are very varied. One notable difference is in their lengths. Some, like ‘The Father’, ‘The Two Sisters’ and ‘The Gipsy Boy’ are very short, with something over 3000 words at most. Most of the stories are in the 4000-7000 words range, but both ‘The Man with the Iron Mask’ and ‘The Prophecy, or The Lost Son’, at over 13000 and 14000 words each, read as if they could have been expanded to full novel length. The latter of these, like the quite long ‘The Appointment’ (also called ‘The Three Friends’), has a double plot structure that looks towards longer fiction.

The stories are strikingly different in mood, context and setting. If they were reprinted in order of publication those variations would be exaggerated by the constant change of setting – Reynolds evidently enjoyed variety in his locations. Here the stories have been sorted into the dominant context-groups, which also broadly match the periods in which the stories in those setting-based sections were published: this process enables the considerable variety of Reynolds’ treatment to be appreciated in a more focused and coherent way.

The texts of the stories have here been edited a little, in part to remove evident printers’ errors, and sometimes to simplify the rather complicated early Victorian punctuation – placing a comma before the verb after a long subject, for example. Some older features, like spelling ‘sat’ as ‘sate’ or ‘to-morrow’ and ‘van-guard’ with a hyphen, and a number of outdated spellings – even naming the great painter ‘Michael Angelo’ – have been left as part of the now dated originals, and so have the occasional notes used to explain foreign words.

The collection starts in 1838, soon after Reynolds returned from France, with stories set in England, mostly in the south – though some later novels, essentially in the mid and late 1850s often move into the north and Scotland. The seven Section 1 stories were mostly written early in Reynolds’ career. Two deal with imperial maritime travel as well as interpersonal dramas, but most explore social and personal conflict in fairly modern England, as do many of his 1850s citizen-based novels. The eight stories in Section 2, also mostly written early, are set in France, obviously linked to his own residential experience from 1830-6 – with occasional references to Britain and other international connections. Remarkably, three stories in the section, numbers 13-15, all deal with personal encounters with Napoleon, by no means regarded here as the foreign monster that was his usual English representation – though he is in the stories basically off-stage, and the dominant negative attitude may have been the reason why Reynolds, in spite of his obvious interest in the emperor, never wrote a novel based on him.

Linked to that near-Europe section are two stories set in Germany, ‘Mary Hamel, or The Fatal Glove’, and Italy, ‘The Sculptor of Florence, or The Broken Statue’. It must seem likely that the young Reynolds travelled there when living in Paris, but we have no evidence on that. He wrote about both countries in novels, Germany in Faust (1845-6), and Italy in later volumes of The Mysteries of London (1844-8), in Joseph Wilmot (1853-5), and quite substantially in Agnes (1855-7).

Then follow in Section 3 six stories which must have seemed the most surprising for a mid-nineteenth-century English author reaching out to a very large popular audience, as they deal with eastern Europe and beyond. The first two, ‘The Man with the Iron Mask’ and ‘The Castellan’s Daughter’, present late medieval Arab-linked conflict in the western and mid Mediterranean, but the other four are more fully eastern-oriented, all dealing with past conflicts that in some way involve the forces of eastern Moslem Europe and beyond. This material seems based on early interests that Reynolds had: one of the oddest things in his literary biography is that in late 1840 the magazine he was then editing, The Teetotaler, announced by him a book on the history of Turkey – but it never appeared (see Bleiler, 1975, p. viii).

3.

Overall, the short stories, as well as having a very broad geographic and historical extent, offer a wide range of thematic and social interests. They tend to deal with upper-class people more than do the novels: only one of the English stories, ‘Margaret Catchpole’, is about a working-class woman, and that was based on a real criminal case, though Reynolds finally fictionalises her story. It may be that the socially higher level of the stories, unlike long novels such as Joseph Wilmot (1853-5) and Ellen Percy (1855-7) which deal with ordinary people who have rich experiences, including with the gentry, derives from the fact that the magazines where Reynolds published many of them were, though distinctly liberal in their politics, largely middle-class in their contexts and concerns: it was lower-class people who basically made a large audience for the penny-weekly novel segments. Several of the French stories deal with ordinary people, but they also soon become involved with the upper classes – including even Napoleon himself. While the one Italy-based story focuses on a sculptor, he has lofty contacts, and the German one deals with people from a fairly high class. All of the six stories focused on eastern Europe deal largely with very highly-placed people, including a number of Turkish rulers, though there are, as in the French stories, also ordinary people who become involved with a potentate.

As well as the wide range of locations, the stories reprinted here vary consistently in their overall tone. If they were divided into sad and happy they would, curiously, and perhaps not accidentally, fall into almost equal categories – though some of the sad ones are not as tragic as others, and most of the happy ones are problem romances with benign, and marital, outcomes. These tend to be told from the viewpoint of the young woman, who in most cases marries a fine gentleman, though ‘Ellen Maxwell’ meets a brave sailor who rescues her from a burning ship, and another English benign story, ‘A Tale for Christmas’  simply relates the return to his gentry family of a man who has served time in jail for youthful crimes – one of the two stories set at Christmas and directed at the readers of the bumper holiday issues of contemporary magazines. Of the eight French stories three are very sad and one largely so – the wife and father-in-law of ‘The Engraver’ die, though he does finally escape from jail. The three Napoleon-linked stories contain a good deal of misery, though also elements of happiness, like the emergence of the Empress Josephine. Seeming quite out of character among the French is ‘The Matrimonial Advertisement’, which is both recent in setting – 1833 – and also richly comic, with a surprise marital ending. The German story is finally tragic but the Italian one ends very happily – through the assistance of no less than Michelangelo himself. While three of the six eastern Europe based stories are grim and death-filled, the others show the good central figure surviving a world of violence and living on happily.

Another notable feature of the stories is the date at which they are set. The English stories mostly occur in the recent past, being dated like most novels of the period about a generation ago, presumably both to make descriptions easier and also to avoid possible contemporary legal challenges – though in his two lengthy Mysteries Reynolds picked up from Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842-3) the striking feature of making the story right up-to-date. The only English story set in the past is ‘Margaret Catchpole’, and its central figure had a real date in the late eighteenth century. Of the French stories, ‘A Legend of Grandier’ essentially occurs in the twelfth century, though it is linked to the present, as a figure in the overarching narrative here remembers his family’s grim medieval past. Four other French stories are set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – including the three dealing with Napoleon, and only three of the French stories are, like most of the English-set ones, set about a generation in the past. The German and Italian stories are medieval, as are several of Reynolds’ novels, but those tend to be exotic fantasies, like Faust (1845-6) and Wagner, The Wehr-Wolf (1846-7), when the short stories are quite factual. Most striking of all is that all the stories based in eastern Europe are medieval, from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – this seems clearly the case with ‘The Odalisque’ though no evident date is given to its action: Reynolds’ early interest in the history of Turkey was clearly influential.

These stories are not the only relatively short fiction that Reynolds wrote. One of his first pieces was ‘The Baroness’, a novella of 25000 words, which he cut and reworked for his 1864 collection The Young Fisherman, in which the title piece was itself a novella of 30000 words. That collection also contained ‘The Worries of Mr Chickpick,’ with some 40000 words, which had originally been, in full novel form, ‘Pickwick Married’, published in The Teetotaler in 1841 when Reynolds was editing the magazine: this was clearly a follow-up to his earlier novel Pickwick Abroad. He then printed it in heavily cut, and somewhat randomised, form as ‘The Marriage of Mr Pickwick’ in Master Timothy’s Bookcase (1841-2), but finally reworked the lead character as Mr Chickpick for The Young Fisherman, presumably to conceal the Dickensian borrowing of the original. He also wrote The Pixy, or The Unbaptized Child, of 27000 words, which was separately published in 1848. It is called ‘A Christmas Tale’, but is in fact a fairly tough account of crime in a respectable English context around 1800. Those four novellas could all have been expanded into novels, but presumably at the time of their being written Reynolds needed something of that length for one of his magazines.

The novellas are all rich in plot and detail and would themselves make a fine reprint collection, but it has seemed at present more useful to make available the wide range of lively, thoughtful and often quite searching short stories that Reynolds produced over some thirteen years. In their own way they extend the range and richness of his huge contribution in novel writing: and in their varying outcomes, sad and comic, tragic and romantic, they provide a wide range of encounters both with ordinary people and especially with the noble and powerful across Europe and even the Near East. Overall, the stories offer compelling narratives of human relations in periods which range from the twelfth century to the very recent present, and in their settings spread right across the breadth and complexity of Europe.

References

E. F. Bleiler, ‘Introduction’ to G. W. M. Reynolds, Wagner, The Wehr-Wolf, New York, Dover, 1975, pp. vii-xviii.

G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press, edited by Anne Humpherys, and Louis James, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008.

Louis James, ‘Time, Politics and the Symbolic Imagination in Reynolds’s Social Melodrama’, Chapter 11 in G. W. M. Reynolds, ed. Humpherys and James, 2008, pp. 181-200.

Sara James, ‘G. W. M. Reynolds and the Modern Literature of France’, Chapter 1 in G. W. M. Reynolds, ed. Humpherys and James, 2008, pp. 19-32 Stephen Knight, G. W. M. Reynolds and His Fiction: The Man Who Outsold Dickens, New York, and London, Routledge, 2019.