ABSTRACT

Towards the end of 1851, announcements of yet another new story by the proprietor began to appear in Reynolds’s periodicals.1 Mary Price, or The Memoirs of a ServantMaid was around the twenty-fifth novel to appear under Reynolds’s signature since The Youthful Impostor was issued in three volumes in Paris in 1835, and already it represented at least his twelfth serial tale since teaming up with publisher John Dicks in 1848.2 In more than one respect, however, Mary Price constituted a new departure. The novel was to be narrated in the first person and have a domestic setting in contemporary England, a combination of features that had no precedent in the author’s oeuvre. The bulk of Reynolds’s previous novels had been historical or gothic romances, while the minority with modern settings, like the early Pickwickian comedies, The Mysteries of London begun in 1844 in imitation of Sue, or the recent social protest novel The Seamstress, or The White Slave of England (1850), had all employed an omniscient narrator and tended to avoid scenes of family life. To emphasize this formal innovation, the advertisements for Mary Price included a lengthy explication of the rationale of the new work:

Further, since the mid-1840s all of Reynolds’s instalment novels had run for rather less than a year in one or other of the new penny literary miscellanies4 – with the admittedly monstrous exception of The Mysteries of London itself, which effectively

appeared over an unbroken sequence of 12 years, independently in penny numbers or monthly parts making up six biannual series.5 Contrary to the rule, Mary Price was to be published not in Reynolds’s Miscellany but in fascicles, starting in early November 1851 and reaching a conclusion two years later in a total of 104 weekly numbers. Moreover, the novel was only the first of four autobiographical narratives of everyday life published in numbers in overlapping sequence during the 1850s. The sequels were Joseph Wilmot, or The Memoirs of a Man Servant and Ellen Percy, or The Memoir of an Actress, both of which ran for two years from July 1853 and 1855 respectively, plus Rosa Lambert, or The Memoirs of an Unfortunate Woman, which appeared over a single year from November 1853.6 Though the ‘Memoirs’ sequence is little more than half of the length of The Mysteries of London in its entirety, it nevertheless amounts to just short of 3,000 pages in the original fascicle format, with its compact print in double columns, or something over three million words.