ABSTRACT
In response to Eugene Sue's enormous success, he did both those things in The Mysteries of London, which appeared in weekly installments from October 1844 and in annual volumes from September 1845 to September 1848. The Mysteries of London starts by describing and evaluating the city and its "contrasts of a strange nature" – wealth and poverty, pomp and squalor, luxury and misery. Both political and at times personal, the last two volumes of The Mysteries of London are rich in radical social commentary. Blanchard's Mysteries volume is most notable for not recreating the G. W. M. Reynoldsian lengthy narrative. Reynolds must have been amused at the attempt to imitate him – he was striding along in sensational, denunciatory high style in The Mysteries of the Court of London. Reynolds rejected this offer, saying that Reynolds's Miscellany was doing well and planning The Mysteries of the Court of London with his new printer-publisher John Dicks.
