ABSTRACT
In the mid-1850s Reynolds’s Miscellany (1846-69) was one of the four penny fiction weeklies that served most to inform the cultural imaginary of Britain. Together, these four – the Miscellany, the Family Herald, the London Journal and Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper – reached at least 50 per cent of the population of Britain, a social penetration far exceeding that of canonical works and usually associated with twentieth-century mass media, or the 1890s at the earliest.1 This chapter, however, is concerned with examining the particularities of Reynolds’s Miscellany in the late 1840s, when its circulation was low. Rather than challenging head on the orthodoxies of either literary or media history by focusing on mass-consumed texts several decades before they are supposed to occur, this chapter has two, less ambitious, purposes.
