ABSTRACT
G.W.M. Reynolds has remained a tantalizingly shadowy presence in mid-Victorian culture. He was hailed by The Bookseller as ‘the most popular writer of his time,’1 an author whose works outsold those of Dickens; he was an influential pioneer in the field of modern popular journalism; his radical newspapers were valued by many British working-class readers untouched by mainstream politicians. His influence spread to the United States, where he was pirated and plagiarized, and to India, where many of the emergent reading public considered him an English ‘classic’. Yet until very recently, he has remained absent from standard histories of the period. His attitude towards his contemporaries in both literary and political culture is hard to determine with certainty, which makes him difficult to place in the overall picture of nineteenth-century society and culture. This volume is the first book-length effort to remedy this neglect; it brings together a range of authoritative scholars, from different disciplines, to create a coherent study of a major figure that the Victorian ‘respectable’ public conspired to ignore.
