ABSTRACT
G.W.M. Reynolds is traditionally seen as a fragment of radical culture that persisted into the 1870s. Mediated through Reynolds’s Newspaper, his ideas symbolize the overlap between the radical demi-monde of the 1840s and new styles within popular politics that predated and accompanied the rise of labour. As part of this reevaluation, Reynolds’s Newspaper has received timely analysis in recent work on the continuities within popular politics. Some central concerns of the paper under G.W.M. Reynolds’s editorship, however, have been omitted from this wider reassessment. Analysis of Reynolds’s attitudes to empire are notable for their absence. Yet for many contemporaries, the position of Reynolds’s Newspaper on imperial issues was central, rather than peripheral, to its appeal. The question of the paper’s core concern with empire, and its connections with G.W.M. Reynolds’s broader political platform, deserves further scrutiny at a time when the topic of empire had been rediscovered in the historiography of Victorian Britain.
