Thank you to Netgalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

As an avid fan of anything Victorian. I loved this book, its subject George William MacArthur Reynolds (23 July 1814 – 19 June 1879) is not an author I am familiar with, so to read about him was a pleasure.

Recommended.

3.5* rounded up to 4*

I enjoy Victorian literature and have never heard of G.W.M Reynolds. This history of the writings of this relatively unknown author was well-researched and easy to read.

Reynolds was far more political than I was expecting. The last half of the book is a resource of Reynold's political writings that have been out of print for a very long time.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. As someone who enjoys reading about Victorian England for fun, it was nice to see the authors break down the authors who made this era famous. I would highly recommend this for Victorian enthusiasts, history buffs, Anglophiles, and others interested in the great works of the Victorian Era.

3.5 rounded to 4

This somewhat breathless but engaging biography asks why Reynolds, supposedly England's best selling author (a claim I've seen about various writers from Jane Austen to Max Beerbohm) is no longer known? The text surmises that it might be due to Reynolds' haphazard financial affairs and his lack of papers, and also his lack of "originality" in his fiction.

Going by the passages quoted, and by a quick look through some online sources, I would say that this lack of originality is due not just to cliche sensationalistic plot tropes, but to the purple prose popular among sensationalist writers of the period.

That aside, the biography is a slim book--and it was somewhat dismaying to discover that actual biographical data takes up half the pages. Less than half the pages when you take into account the long quotations, followed by the authors telling us how great these passages are. It occurred to me while reading that the authors thoroughly dug in on Reynolds' writings, but didn't, or perhaps couldn't, do the detective work to track down the details of Reynolds' life. There is a lot of guesswork in the transitions, also some surprising acceptance of praise at face value, for example, the fulsome review praising Reynolds' earliest work, while he was in Paris, reads exactly like "friend of the author" reviews to be found all over the internet. The biggest clue being praise of the author more than of the text.

Still, though this is pretty short on academic cred as far as Reynolds' life is concerned, the book makes up for it for any reader interested in progressive movements during Victorian times, including Chartism. Here, the authorial knowledge and enthusiasm shines.

Victorian England's Best-Selling Author
The Revolutionary Life of G W M Reynolds
by Stephen Basdeo, Mya Driver
Pub Date 30 Aug 2022 |
Pen & Sword, Pen & Sword History
Biographies & Memoirs | History | Nonfiction (Adult)




I am reviewing a copy of Victorian England’s Best-Selling Author: The Revolutionary Life of GWM Reynolds’s through Pen and Sword and Netgalley:


George W.M Reynolds’s was born in 1814 and died in 1879. He was one of Victorian England’s best selling novelists. He was the author of over 58 novels and short stories and his “penny blood” The Mysteries of London, serialised in weekly numbers between 1844 and 1848, sold over a million copies. Reynolds was a controversial figure in his time Reynolds’s Mysteries, and its follow-up The Mysteries of the Court of London (1849–56), contained tales of crime, vice, and highly sexualised scenes. For this reason Charles Dickens remarked that Reynolds’s name was one “with which no lady’s, and no gentleman’s, should be associated.”



But Reynolds was much more than a novelist he was lauded by the working classes as their champion and campaigned for universal suffrage. To further the working classes’ cause, he established two newspapers: Reynolds’s Political Instructor and Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper. The latter newspaper, as Karl Marx recognised, became the principal organ of radical and labour politics.




I give Victorian England’s Best Selling Author four out of five stars!

To be perfectly honest, Reynolds was not an author whose name I immediately recognised, though I did know a couple of his books (now all out of print) by name when they got mentioned as the book went along.

Best described as Dickens with less moralising, Reynolds was a successful writer, publisher and man of varied political opinions who was a massive best-seller in his time. Heavily involved with the fight for electoral reform and the later Chartist movement, he was a prolific writer, turning out sensational novels by the bucketload. Unfortunately, he wasn't quite as good at either financial affairs, being declared bankrupt more than once and having a short period in debtor's prison, or in leaving behind documents that humanise him for posterity.

It's the latter which becomes an issue, making it difficult to see past the political views to the man himself, especially as he had a large family who just crop up as names. It's hard to get to grips with who Reynolds really was as a person without the kind of supporting correspondence that biographers rely upon. This book, which is over 200 pages in hardback, is actually only about 100 pages on Reynolds and his life and the rest is reprinted editorials, which was a bit of a disappointment - it felt as though I was doubly left without Reynolds the man, rather than Reynolds the writer.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, via Netgalley. This is my honest review of the book in question.

This was about Victoarian Englands's Best Selling atuhro George W.M. Reynolds who I admit I've never heard of. Till I picked up this book. But apparently he wasn't a favorite of Dickens

Victorian England's Best-Selling Author
The Revolutionary Life of G W M Reynolds

Thank you Netgallery and Pen & Sword books for an ARC e-book for an unbiased review.

This for me in reality is more 3.5 stars but I'm allowing 4 stars overall.

The fact I'd never heard of G.W.M Reynolds before now was surprising once I realised just how prolific he had been. Then as I began to read his work excerpts throughout this book, you really grasped how controversial he was, and how well renowned at the time! It seems almost inconceivable that he isn't a name we know of today.
It struck me that we all know Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and many others from the era and yet his name is missing. I'm hoping this book can change this somewhat.

My biggest complaint was the format for this book. It felt more like a history thesis being presented, rather than a biography, which is why I've marked it down like I did. This is because, as much as I love history, love historical facts, even I could only tackle it periodically over several days. And that's a shame because I do think it will potentially put some off reading this book and it doesn't deserve that.

Nonetheless, a fascinating slice of our literary past that I'm glad I now know about. Reynolds should be remembered alongside our other literary giants of the time.

4/5 stars 🌟

This is a book about the best selling author you’ve never heard of and why that should be so is very thought provoking . Within 30 years of his death, George W. M. Reynolds had been almost completely written out of Chartist history and after some 80 years he had been almost forgotten altogether.

Ramsey MacDonald was the first biographer of Reynolds, who was born in 1814 and died in 1879. Reynolds left very few personal papers, so the biographer then and now has a difficult task. His current biographers have included a comprehensive collection of his editorials in this book, so he is at least able to speak directly to us.

As an author, however, Reynolds was renowned in his own time too for his Mysteries of London series, which was published in 4 volumes and sold over a million copies. He also wrote 58 full length novels and lots of short stories, poems and essays. His steamy and sordid tales of aristocratic misdemeanours were scorned by the literary establishment then and since, although Les Miserables may have been based on a Reynolds book by Hugo, who knew Reynolds. Reynolds certainly got the idea for his Mysteries from the Paris Mysteries published by Eugene Sue, who he knew when he was living in France. And, like many another, Reynolds was not above peddling his own ‘Pickwick’ stories, which no doubt fuelled Dickens’ dislike of his work.

Perhaps a different age’s practice on plagiarism and copyright have reinforced establishment disdain for Reynolds, who nonetheless died a wealthy man despite the poverty and bankruptcies which dogged his early life.

In a lifetime of radical thought and action, notably in the Chartist cause, but also against flogging in the army, Reynolds became increasingly socialist over the years and his Reynolds Political Instructor and then Reynolds Weekly magazines are testament that from the 1830s to the 1860s radicalism was far more popular than historians have allowed.

Marx himself acknowledged Reynolds popular influence through these publications, while clearly thinking him more of a rogue than his present biographers countenance.

This is an intriguing book on a forgotten history and it is well worth reading.

“Victorian England's Best-Selling Author: The Revolutionary Life of G. W. M. Reynolds,” by Stephen Basdeo and Mya Driver, publication date 30 August 2022 (ISBN 9781399015721), earns three stars.

George William MacArthur Reynolds (23 July 1814 – 19 June 1879) was a British fiction writer and journalist. He was one of Victorian England’s largest selling and most successful authors, writing over 58 novels and his wildly popular serialized stories and essays. He was quite controversial in his time due to his subject matter (e.g., sex, violence, etc.), a fact commented on by Charles Dickens (who had his own scandals) and others.

Reynolds was also a champion of the common man, and was prominent in the Chartism movement, which was a large working-class movement for political reform in Britain lasting from the late 1830s to the late 1850s. While government authorities energetically opposed and ultimately suppressed this movement, they ultimately adopted many of its populist proposals.

This book provides a comprehensive biography of Reynolds and reproduces his editorials from Reynolds’s Political Instructor as well as excerpts from his fiction. It is quite a scholarly endeavor and fascinating, although it reads more like a doctoral dissertation thesis than a biography. Still, it is quite informative work about an extremely popular and successful writer who today is little remembered despite him being more popular than Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot or Oscar Wilde.

Sincere thanks to the publisher, Pen & Sword, Pen & Sword History, for granting this reviewer the opportunity to read this Advance Reader Copy (ARC), and thanks to NetGalley for helping to make that possible.

Who was the best-selling author of the Victorian era? Charles Dickens? The Brontës? Thomas Hardy? Elizabeth Gaskell? William Makepeace Thackeray? George Eliot? Anthony Trollope? Oscar Wilde?

None of the above.

It was a man that is now largely forgotten: George William McArthur Reynolds, who was so popular that at one point he sold over 1 million copies of his work. Born to a family of modest means in England in 1814, he started as a journalist and went into novel-writing at a time when the "penny dreadfuls" were in full swing. Charles Dickens was The Name back then, pumping out these once-a-week serialised novels for a penny that the Victorians consumed with the same fervour we now follow our favourite TV shows in cable and streaming, and Reynolds, then a stereotypical starving author (he even had to file for the royal welfare grant for authors available at the time), found a way to fanfiction Dickens' "Pickwick Papers," that was his most popular at the time. After that, he would publish more and more of his own novels that garnered a respectable following, until one of them exploded in popularity so much it became the unbeatable #1 bestseller penny dreadful of all time, The Mysteries of London.

Inspired by Eugène Sue's The Mysteries of Paris, the novel brought Reynolds fame and eventually financial security (he died a wealthy man), but not the recognition of historians and literary critics as you probably figured because of how obscure the author is nowadays and how little he is discussed in Victorian literature circles. Having read both Sue's and Reynolds' "Mysteries," I always found Reynolds the better writer, the better at characterisation, and the better at depicting the underworld and the low-class lifestyle of the less fortunate in these big cities. And now, reading this excellent biography, I can say I wasn't wrong.

Reynolds wasn't merely a writer, he was also a journalist and a political speaker/activist, and he had ideas that were progressive for his time, which also reflected on his novels, of which he wrote 58 in total as well as numerous essays and poems and articles. A firm proponent of universal suffrage for men and women, as voting was very restricted at the time in Britain, he campaigned for this and other causes, often denouncing injustices in his novels, which led to the British Army forbidding their soldiers to read Reynolds' novels when the author portrayed the appalling physical abuse and flogging soldiers endured in one of his novels.

Yet, despite the critics and attempts at censorship, he won a devoted readership precisely due to the issues his critics attacked him for. His best-selling "The Mysteries of London" is very long, very melodramatic at times, but also unusually socially-conscious and compassionate towards the downtrodden classes. In Sue's "The Mysteries of Paris," the villains are rather cartoonish, one-dimensionally evil, but not so much in Reynolds' novel. As Basdeo says:

"While many Victorian writers often presented their characters as irredeemably criminal, often two-dimensional, characters, Reynolds however humanises his criminals and encourages the reader to feel sympathy with them. There is not a person who reads The Mysteries of London and does not feel for the plight of the ‘Rattlesnake’ growing up as a labourer in the mines, or even the Resurrection Man who wanted to live an honest life but is told that ‘society has condemned you’."

Although the novel's protagonists are two brothers, one virtuous and one corrupted, the underworld characters are often spotlight-stealers, and each has his own background, which Basdeo says was Reynolds' "way of providing nuance to contemporary beliefs about the existence of a supposed criminal class." To the Victorians, poor equated criminal, and Reynolds torched this stereotype. He also held other ahead-of-his-time views, such as:

"... in an era marked by colonialism and racial discrimination, he spoke out against the conventional prejudices of his day. His remarks against slavery above are evidence of this, as is his treatment of Jewish people, for some of Reynolds’s novels featured sympathetically-drawn Jewish characters. This won him praise from Britain’s Jewish community, who thanked Reynolds for his ‘manly defence’ of them, and for helping to ‘remov[e] the national prejudice’."

That's quite remarkable! Not even Dickens, so well-received and admired by today's literary critics, had such progressive views even though he was also anti-slavery. Remember Fagin from "Oliver Twist"? The Jewish community weren't exactly looking kindly on good old Dickens' portrayal, unlike their praise for Reynolds.

Then why is Reynolds overshadowed by Dickens and practically anyone that achieved success as a writer in the Victorian era? Why are his books not republished by Penguin Classics like many authors from his time? Stephen Basdeo has theorised about a few reasons for this, starting with a lack of letters, papers, and memoirs, because Reynolds left little to nothing in terms of personal papers. But also, he says:

"There are a number of possible reasons for the neglect of Reynolds by early twentieth-century literary and social historians. One of these might have been the fact that, while Reynolds wrote good and highly entertaining fiction, he was never ‘original’. As the foregoing account of his life and works has revealed, his most famous works piggybacked on the success of other people’s ideas: Reynolds’s Pickwick Abroad took a Dickens character, and The Mysteries of London was inspired by Eugène Sue’s
Mysteries of Paris. Sue’s Mysteries of Paris has at least had the honour to enter into Penguin Books’ ‘Classics’ series, while Reynolds’s Mysteries of London is reprinted only by the small, independent Valancourt Books.
A similar fate has befallen many an author of so-called penny bloods, although that term was rarely used by the Victorians themselves. The lack of originality can also be said of Reynolds’s political ideology. He was a Red Republican, but he did not formulate any theories of his own, but instead took the theories of other radical and socialist thinkers and distilled them for popular consumption in his newspaper."

I'm not entirely convinced by the originality argument per se. Reynolds may not have started the penny dreadfuls fad, or launched a "genre," but he did bring novelties to the table and made contributions of significance to the genre, or he wouldn't have been considered a revolutionary, as the subtitle of this book admits, and wouldn't have been worthier of following by the readership of his time than other writers also selling penny dreadfuls. I think the originality aspect understood as in "entirely new" is overstated and underestimates an author's contributions to an established genre. Jane Austen also "copied" and was inspired by Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney, and yet she's far more famous than either. As for political originality, neither was Dickens' original in his political ideas, nor were most Victorian authors with rare exceptions, so it's even less convincing to me. I think the lack of personal papers is more plausible, as the more you know and read of an authors' worldview, opinions, private life, the more you write about him and the more you understand and appreciate his writings; and I also wonder if literary fads and Reynolds' own writing might've had at least a little bit to do, too, because although he's great at characterisation and a decent storyteller, his prose by itself wasn't quite suited for literary studies that favoured other styles.