The Mysteries of London is a penny dreadful

Penny Dreadful

A penny dreadful was a type of British fiction publication in the 19th century that usually featured lurid serial stories appearing in parts over a number of weeks, each part costing an penny...

 or city mysteries

City mysteries

City mysteries are a 19th century genre of popular novel, in which characters explore the secret underworlds of cities and reveal corruption and exploitation, depicting violence and deviant sexuality. They were popular in both Europe and the United States....

 novel begun by George W. M. Reynolds

George W. M. Reynolds

George William MacArthur Reynolds was a British author and journalist.He was born in Sandwich, Kent, the son of Captain Sir George Reynolds, a flag officer in the Royal Navy. Reynolds was educated first at Dr. Nance's school in Ashford, Kent, and then passed on to the Royal Military College,...

 in 1844. Reynolds wrote the first two series of this long-running narrative of life in the seedy underbelly of mid-nineteenth-century London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. Thomas Miller

Thomas Miller (poet)

Thomas Miller , poet and novelist, was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, the son of George Miller, an unsuccessful wharfinger and ship-owner who deserted his wife and two sons in 1810. Thomas grew up in Sailors Alley, and one of his childhood friends was the future journalist Thomas Cooper...

 wrote the third series and Edward L. Blanchard wrote the fourth series of this immensely popular title.

Michael Angelo in Penny Dreadfuls and Other Victorian Horrors writes:

Reynolds had read Eugene Sue

Eugène Sue

Joseph Marie Eugène Sue was a French novelist.He was born in Paris, the son of a distinguished surgeon in Napoleon's army, and is said to have had the Empress Joséphine for godmother. Sue himself acted as surgeon both in the Spanish campaign undertaken by France in 1823 and at the Battle of Navarino...

 while in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 and was particularly impressed by his novel Les Mystères de Paris

Les Mystères de Paris

The Mysteries of Paris is a novel by Eugène Sue which was published serially in Journal des débats from June 19, 1842 until October 15, 1843. Les Mystères de Paris singlehandedly increased the circulation of Journal des débats...

 (The Mysteries of Paris). It inspired Reynolds to write and publish a penny part serial The Mysteries of London (1845), in which he paralleled Sue's tale of vice, depravity, and squalor in the Parisian slums with a sociological story contrasting the vice and degradation of London working-class life with the luxury and debaucheries of the hedonistic upper crust. An early socialist and a Chartist

Chartism

Chartism was a movement for political and social reform in the United Kingdom during the mid-19th century, between 1838 and 1859. It takes its name from the People's Charter of 1838. Chartism was possibly the first mass working class labour movement in the world...

 sympathizer, Reynolds had a genuine social conscience, and he contrived to stitch into the pages of his books diatribes against social evils and class inequities. (79)

Instalments were published weekly and contained a single illustration and eight pages of text printed in double columns. The weekly numbers were later bound in cloth covers with a fresh title page and table of contents and offered as complete works of fiction.

After Reynolds quit The Mysteries of London, he began a new title: The Mysteries of the Court of London, which ran from 1848 until 1856.

External links

• etext of The Mysteries of London