Knowledge, Power and Mass Market Fictions in GWM Reynolds's
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Revealing Bodies: Knowledge, Power and Mass Market Fictions in G.W.M. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London Jessica Hindes Royal Holloway, University of London PhD 1 Abstract This thesis examines how one early mass-market text, G.W.M. Reynolds’s 1844-56 The Mysteries of London (later The Mysteries of the Court of London), interrogates its own position as both artwork and traded commodity. Through imagery of bodies resurrected and secrets exposed, Reynolds uses the twelve volumes of his penny serial to consider questions about the purpose and value of art which link the developing popular market in fiction to wider issues about working-class autonomy and cultural power. Chapter 1 considers the idea of surface value. In the nineteenth century the distinction between popular and elite culture was often positioned as a contrast between surface and depth. Examining how Reynolds disputes this notion through his depiction of forgers and their clients, I further suggest how the Mysteries might contribute to twenty-first century critical debates about surface reading. Chapter 2 addresses the mid-century belief that it was necessary for the educated elite to protect more vulnerable (working-class) readers from certain cultural material. I show how Reynolds’s portrayal of the eroticised woman allows him to challenge this belittling notion of the popular audience, depict censorship as a mechanism for reinforcing existing power structures, and suggest a way for conventionally objectified social actors to reclaim their autonomy. Chapter 3 focuses on the hidden bodies of the poor, highlighting the analogy made in Reynolds’s work between the working-class corpses traded for dissection under the 1832 Anatomy Act and the bodies of the servants and labourers on which industrial society was founded. I explore how Reynolds draws on the radical Gothic of Mary Shelley to argue that erasing the humanity of the poor risks turning them into monsters. Reynolds’s serial operates on an ‘economy of secrets’, with blackmail a central motif. Chapter 4 examines this trope in the context of crime fiction more broadly, with a focus on the role of the servant. Comparisons with Caleb Williams, Bleak House and Lady Audley’s Secret throw the particular radicalism of Reynolds’s work into sharp relief. The Mysteries’ sensationalism, structure and sexual content have often seen the serial dismissed as populist trash; but they can also be seen as deliberate aesthetic choices, positing a particular notion of what literature might do. I conclude my thesis, the first to consider this lengthy serial in its entirety, by suggesting that taking Reynolds’s work on its own terms offers an important corrective to the period’s existing literary histories. 2 Acknowledgements Thanks to Ruth Livesey, Juliet John and Vicky Greenaway; Mum, Dad, Sam, Ellie, Maddie and Kim; and to Dan, who is a total hero without whom I would not have survived this PhD. 3 Index to Illustrations Figure 1: Portrait of G.W.M. Reynolds (Miscellany I.1)...…………………………………....6 Figure 2: Rat’s Castle (London II.1)………………………………..………………………..27 Figure 3: The Statue (London I.393)…..……………………………………………………..77 Figure 4: Venetia Trelawney (Court III.9), Ernestina Dysart (Court III.153), Eleanor Desborough (Court I.241)……………………………………………………………….….101 Figure 5: Corregio’s ‘Jupiter and Antiope’, Ernestina Dysart (Court III.153)……………..104 Figure 6: Caroline at the Midwife’s House (Court I.89)……………………………………128 Figure 7: The History of an Unfortunate Woman (London II.121)…………………………179 4 Contents Introduction ………………………………………………………,,………………………...6 Chapter 1: ‘A picture of such extraordinary merit that no-one could understand it’: surface reading and surface value in the new mass market……………………………27 1.1 Surface reading and surface writing: melodrama’s dramatic legibility ………………………………….…………………………………………………….34 1.2 ‘What a lot of print for the money’: ‘The Unknown Public’ and the surface reader ………………………………………………………………………………………..43 1.3 ‘A rum-looking mummy’: forgery and the reading elite……………………..58 1.4 Barney the Burker: the commodity comes to life………………………………...72 Chapter 2: Pornographic galleries and secret museums: obscenity, censorship and the literary mass market………………………………………………………………………..77 2.1 The Secret Museum: pornography and popular fiction at the early nineteenth century………………………….…………………………………………………….82 2.2 Pin-ups and passivity: the Mysteries as mass culture…………………………..94 2.3 The exploitative curator: reconfiguring the secret museum…………………….109 2.4 Animating the image: Reynolds’s subversive women………………………….120 Chapter 3: The child in the cupboard: Reynolds’s radical gothic…….………………..128 3.1 Two houses in Smithfield: mythologizing the slum…………………………….133 3.2 The 1832 Anatomy Act: dissecting the Victorian poor…………………………154 3.3 Disinterring secrets: resurrecting the working-class dead………………………170 Chapter 4: Servants, secrets and sensation fiction: Reynolds and the nineteenth-century literature of crime………………………………………………………………………….179 4.1 The subjected servant: Caleb Williams…………………………………………196 4.2 Blackmail and the early nineteenth century radical press………………………208 4.3 Sexual blackmail and substituted servants: Bleak House……………………….221 4.4 Amateur agents of justice: Lady Audley’s Secret……………………………….233 Bibliography……………………………………………….….….………………………..244 5 Introduction 1 On the 28th September 1844, the London printer George Vickers published the first instalment of The Mysteries of London. Written by the novelist and journalist G.W.M. Reynolds, then employed as editor of Vickers’s miscellany, the London Journal, this eight- page penny number began a serial of epic proportions. The Mysteries’ weekly serialisation would continue for a further twelve years, spanning a period of literary and social change that saw not only the rise and fall of Chartism but the abolition of newspaper stamp duty, the 1 This engraving of G.W.M. Reynolds appeared on the cover of Reynolds’s Miscellany and on the monthly parts of the Mysteries of the Court of London. In his 1852 memoir Lions, Living and Dead, the writer John Ross Dix offers an amusing account of the picture: ‘on the covers of the monthly parts, may be seen a portrait of Mr Reynolds himself, looking as bland and beatific as though he had never dipped his pen in blood and brimstone, and sent his readers, after supping of horrors, to shiver in the streets. By the way,’ he adds, ‘the portrait is about one of the very best likenesses I ever saw.’ (John Ross Dix, Lions, Living and Dead; or Personal Recollections of The "Great and Gifted", 2nd edn [London: W. Tweedie, 1854], p. 281.) 6 Crimean War and the Great Exhibition. During the same period, Reynolds’s own fortunes transformed. He went from a relative unknown working on another man’s publication to the editor-proprietor of a newspaper and a miscellany-journal, both of which carried his name.2 Although his output of fiction was largely confined to the 1840s and 50s, these other publications maintained the popularity that the Mysteries had helped to establish: and when Reynolds died, in 1879, he was obituarised in the Bookseller magazine as ‘perhaps… the most popular writer of our time’.3 This thesis, which is the first to consider the Mysteries cycle in its entirety, offers an extended analysis of Reynolds’s most notorious work. I argue that, although the serial’s contemporary success might in itself be enough to merit some critical attention, what is most important about this particular text is the way in which Reynolds uses it to engage with his own position as an author writing for the popular market. In particular, the Mysteries examines the impact of industrial capitalism and consumer culture on the working class. These were, of course, the same economic developments which had contributed to produce the literary mass market. What Reynolds’s serial does is to consider how the latter might mitigate the former: that is, how a newly literate working class might be empowered by a literature of its own. His faith in the possibilities offered by the new mass market and his inventiveness in creating a new kind of fiction to serve it make the Mysteries a compelling counterpoint to the canonical literature of the period. Reynolds’s serial addresses many of the same central issues tackled by the Victorian realist novel; but it does so with a style and an attitude all its own. 2 Reynolds’s Miscellany was established in 1846 and ran until 1869; Reynolds’s [Weekly] Newspaper, which began publication in 1850, ran (under various titles) until 1967. There are useful chapters on both publications in Louis James’s and Anne Humpherys’s edited collection on Reynolds: Andrew King, 'Reynolds's Miscellany, 1846-49: Advertising Networks and Politics', in G.W.M. Reynolds: Nineteenth Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press, ed. by Anne Humpherys and Louis James (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 53-74; Michael Shirley, 'G.W.M. Reynolds, Reynolds's Newspaper and Popular Politics', in G.W.M. Reynolds: Nineteenth Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press, ed. by Louis James and Anne Humpherys (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 75- 90. 3 'Obituary for G.W.M. Reynolds', The Bookseller, 260 (1879), 600-01. 7 Reynolds’s keen interest in the condition of the working class reflects his own experience of financial insecurity. Born into a middle-class family in Sandwich, Kent in July 1814, he was sent to Sandhurst military academy in 1828 under the instruction of his guardian Dr MacArthur (his father had died when Reynolds was only eight years old). Reynolds left the school in 1830 without having completed his training. Reportedly inspired by his reading of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, at some point during the 1830s Reynolds decided to travel to Paris, where by 1835 he was working in an English-language bookshop. In July of that year he married Susannah Pearson at the British Embassy in Paris; Pearson was still a minor and was already pregnant with their first child.