ABSTRACT
At the end of his mammoth eight volumes of The Mysteries of the Court of London in 1856, G.W.M. Reynolds added a postscript in which he noted that ‘[f]or twelve years, therefore, have I hebdomadally issued to the world a fragmentary portion of that which, as one vast whole, may be termed an Encyclopedia of Tales’.1 By this label Reynolds called attention to one of the more distinctive elements of his 12-year project that included the four volumes (two series of two volumes each) of The Mysteries of London (1844-48) and the eight (four series of two volumes each) of The Mysteries of the Court of London (1848-56), with their dozens of different fictional plots and first-person histories, journalistic information, political diatribes and internal references and footnotes to current events. He did indeed include in this work, taken as a whole, examples of nearly every popular genre from gothic melodrama to sentimental romance, from journalistic leaders to scientific processes.2
