ABSTRACT
So Dickens addressed his rapt audience while speaking in America in 1842. At that time, Dickens could not perhaps have imagined that G.W.M. Reynolds, the plagiaristic author of Pickwick Abroad; or the Tour in France (1837-38), would soon be thought of by some as ‘the most popular writer of our time’.2 Reynolds and Dickens were unusual in the extent to which they made ‘heaps and mines of gold’ from literature that was popular in the sense that it both sold in vast quantities and claimed to speak for ‘the people’ – a capacious phrase which included particularly, for both authors, the dispossessed, the marginalized and the oppressed. A touchstone of debate in modern cultural theory is the idea of a tension between the goals of commercial culture and those of a genuinely ‘popular’ culture consonant with the values and interests of the people, and of a more equal society.3 Whereas Dickens has
been praised for his ability ‘to negotiate and frequently to transcend the boundaries between popular and radical culture in a way that virtually no other mid-nineteenthcentury writer was able to do’, Reynolds has never quite been able to throw off Dickens’s sideswipe that he was one of the ‘Bastards of the Mountain, draggled fringe on the Red Cap, Panders to the basest passions of the lowest natures’, or Marx’s verdict that he was a ‘scoundrel’, a ‘rich and able speculator’.4 Even at the height of his popularity, Reynolds could not assume that his sales figures were an index of the ‘affectionate regard’ of his ‘fellow men’. Indeed, from his day to ours, the regard of fellow writers and political sympathizers in particular has been as suspicious as it has been affectionate.
