ABSTRACT
Throughout his career, G.W.M. Reynolds flaunted his associations with France. He lived in France for six years, from 1830 to 1836. He claimed to have served in the Thirteenth Legion of the Paris National Guard and to have witnessed the three glorious days of revolution in July 1830, and anecdotes in his early fiction hint at youthful escapades across Northern France with his younger brother Edward. He wrote his first polemic there, The Errors of the Christian Religion Exposed, by a Comparison of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (1832); his first novel, The Youthful Impostor (1835); and the first of several translations, Songs of Twilight (1836), an ambitious verse translation of Victor Hugo’s Chants du Crépuscule (1835).1 He was married and became a father in Paris, and was naturalized as a French citizen in 1835. His first involvement with the press was as editor of the shortlived Paris Literary Gazette, which ended in his first lawsuit, bankruptcy and subsequent return to England in 1836. Back in London, he was keen to affiliate himself with France at every opportunity, from the pseudonym ‘Parisianus’ he used in the late 1830s to the fact that he proudly announced his membership of the Historical, Statistical and Agricultural Societies of France on the title-page of many of his works. Much of his early fiction has a French flavour: Pickwick Abroad; or the Tour in France (1837-38), Alfred de Rosann, or the Adventures of a French Gentleman (1838-39) and Robert Macaire in England (1839-40).2 He also wrote a guide to the Modern Writers of France, serialized in the Monthly Magazine in 1838 and published in two volumes as The Modern Literature of France (1839) and a French Self-Instructor (1846) teaching grammar and pronunciation.3 He even named one of his sons after the French politician Ledru Rollin.
