ABSTRACT
After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, France remained a source of fascination for the British. Its fashions, styles, political movements and restaurants were the subject of lavish accounts if only to explain the peculiarities of the national character of each nation. Paris was an obvious tourist destination and playground of pleasure but the plays and literature of the French were eagerly followed, reproduced and pirated within British popular culture.2 Nor was the trade one way. The French Romantics, for example, gobbled up Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott and the gothic. London and Paris represented two paths to urban modernity, cities that dealt with comparable problems in different ways. Tales of the two cities were not unusual, whether it took the form of comparing their respective sanitary achievements or exploring their underworlds and their treatment of prostitution. When George W.M. Reynolds first came to the attention of the mass reading public, it was essentially as an interpreter of France to the British.
