ABSTRACT
In his literary memoir of 1852, Lions: Living and Dead, John Ross Dix attributed the prodigious popularity of The Mysteries of London to the fact that the penny serial ‘ministered to the depraved appetites of the lower classes’,1 while ‘murders, seductions, robberies, horrors of all sorts, spiced with the abuse of the upper orders, formed the staple of the story’.2 Dix did acknowledge some skill on the part of the author, Mr G.W.M. Reynolds, who wrote ‘like a steam engine’,3 but concluded that ‘as a writer his works will not perpetuate his name, for none of them have a vitality sufficient to reserve them from the rubbish of the cheap and nasty school of literature’.4 This final prophecy has largely been fulfilled. Reynolds doesn’t even make it into Malcolm Elwin’s Victorian Wallflowers.5 Critically, Reynolds has always resided in an underworld of sorts, but, given the mise-en-scène of The Mysteries of London, ‘a labyrinth of dwellings whose very aspect appeared to speak of hideous poverty and fearful crime’, where else could he be?6
