ABSTRACT
Reynolds himself seems to have been more interested in the social realities of theatre life as he portrayed them in Ellen Percy, or The Memoir of an Actress (1855-57) than in theatrical practice itself. It is significant that while all Dickens’s early novels were immediately transferred to the stage, there are virtually no dramatizations of Reynolds’s fiction.2 Burt, who notes that Reynolds’s inclusive fiction was hardly fitted to the enclosed theatre, suggests one reason for this. He aptly quotes Reynolds’s own punning comment on The Mysteries of London: ‘Shakespeare said, “All the world is a stage”; we say, “All the world is an Omnibus.”’3 But there are other ways in which Reynolds’s fiction, if on the page rather than behind footlights, was rooted in nineteenth-century melodramatic practice. For the ‘respectable’ Victorian reader, Reynolds was a writer who abandoned standards of taste and morality to exploit the lowest predilections of his readership. If his periodicals featured serious educational articles, he published these alongside luridly sensational fiction; his novels contained
documentary passages as objective as those of Henry Mayhew, but these were embedded in narratives of melodramatic excess. Yet such contradictions are central to what John G. Cawelti has termed the literature of ‘social melodrama’.4
