Book Review: Victoria England’s Best-Selling Author

 

Victorian England's Best-Selling Author

The Revolutionary Life of G W M Reynolds

by Stephen Basdeo, Mya Driver

Pub Date 30 Aug 2022 |

 Pen & Sword,  Pen & Sword History

 Biographies & Memoirs  |  History  |  Nonfiction (Adult) 

I am reviewing a copy of Victorian England’s Best-Selling Author: The Revolutionary Life of GWM Reynolds’s through Pen and Sword and Netgalley:

George W.M Reynolds’s was born in 1814 and died in 1879.  He was one of Victorian England’s best selling novelists.  He was the author of over 58 novels and short stories and his “penny blood” The Mysteries of London, serialised in weekly numbers between 1844 and 1848, sold over a million copies.  Reynolds was a controversial figure in his time Reynolds’s Mysteries, and its follow-up The Mysteries of the Court of London (1849–56), contained tales of crime, vice, and highly sexualised scenes. For this reason Charles Dickens remarked that Reynolds’s name was one “with which no lady’s, and no gentleman’s, should be associated.”   

But Reynolds was much more than a novelist he was lauded by the working classes as their champion and campaigned for universal suffrage. To further the working classes’ cause, he established two newspapers: Reynolds’s Political Instructor and Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper. The latter newspaper, as Karl Marx recognised, became the principal organ of radical and labour politics. 

I give Victorian England’s Best Selling Author four out of five stars!