Join the Reynolds Society for an evening talk at the Bow Street Police Museum in London on Thursday 20th July 2023! Our very own Mary L. Shannon and Jennifer Conary will be discussing Reynolds, his life in Paris and London, and his brushes with the police. Mary and Jennifer will also be signing copies of … More Writing Up a Storm in Paris and London: Upcoming Reynolds Society Event
By Rebecca Nesvet The new book G.W.M. Reynolds Reimagined: Studies in Authorship, Radicalism, and Genre, 1830-1870, edited by Jennifer Conary and Mary L. Shannon and just out from Routledge, innovatively illuminates G. W. M. Reynolds’s radical career and exposes some new mysteries. Shannon examines the possible meanings of the 1843 Madras Comic Almanac’s claim to … More The Sepoys: The Indian Revolt in Reynolds’s Miscellany
By Ian Haywood At the end of February 2023 my colleague Mary Shannon and I made a trip to The National Archives (TNA) at Kew, London. There were several overlapping reasons for the visit. Firstly, we were scheduled for a PhD supervision with Mollie Clarke, an employee of the TNA, who is in the final … More Reynolds in The National Archives
By Sophie Raine After seven years, I finally came to the end of my PhD and submitted my thesis ‘”Haunts of Infamy”: penny dreadfuls and aberrant urban spaces”. The first part of my thesis’ title, as many may have spotted, comes from G. W. M Reynolds’s best-selling serial The Mysteries of London (1844-46) and is … More Reflections on Reynolds
By Dave McCall (AKA David Ebsworth) I first ran into George W. M. Reynolds about ten years ago. I was writing the first of my Spanish Civil War novels, The Assassin’s Mark, and I needed to find an appropriate real-life newspaper for which fictional protagonist and journalist Jack Telford might work. It needed to be … More Reynolds’s Afterlives in the Historical Fiction of David Ebsworth
By: David Dixon The early life of G. W. M Reynolds is shrouded in mystery, despite the efforts of a small but dedicated cadre of scholars, researchers, and enthusiasts. A conspicuous dearth of primary sources, including personal papers and family correspondence are one reason why the best-selling English novelist of the Victorian era remains an … More Radical Rakes: The Friendship of G. W. M. Reynolds and Hugh Forbes
Musing on the significance of treadmills in The Mysteries of London’s social commentary… while running on a 21C treadmill. … More Reynolds’s Treadmills
By Dr. Stephen Carver, Literary Historian As a child, I possessed a morbid passion for nineteenth century gothic literature. I had inherited this trait from my mother, a Catholic turned Spiritualist with a taste for true crime and horror film and fiction. My parents had me late in life and my grandparents were all born … More Reynolds and Me
I can honestly claim to have been interested in George W.M. Reynolds since early adolescence, even if my path into his life and work differs from the literary scholars who are making him their own. I first came across Reynolds in the library at St. Paul’s School in Barnes when I happened in a lunch … More Reynolds Studies: A Personal History by Rohan McWilliam
No prizes for guessing who the above moniker applies to. In light of the recent publication of G. W. M. Reynolds and His Fiction – The Man Who Outsold Dickens, it seemed like a good idea to conduct a bit of a parley with the book’s author, Stephen Knight. The Man Who Outsold Dickens covers … More Stephen Knight on ‘The Man Who Outsold Dickens’
G. W. M. Reynolds Society 