Authors: George W. M. Reynolds,James Malcolm Rymer
THUS far have we pursued our adventurous
theme; and though we have already told so much, how much more does there remain
yet to tell!
Said we not, at the outset, that we would introduce our
readers to a city of strange contrasts? and who shall say that we have not
fulfilled our promise?
But as yet we have only drawn the veil partially aside
from the mighty panorama of grandeur and misery which it is our task to
display: — the reader has still to be initiated more deeply into the
MYSTERIES OF LONDON.
We have a grand moral to work out — a great
lesson to teach every class of
society; — a moral and a lesson whose themes are:
WEALTH | POVERTY
For we have constituted ourselves the scourge
of the oppressor, and the champion of the oppressed: we have taken virtue by
the hand to raise it, and we have seized upon vice to expose it; we have no
fear of those who sit in high places; but we dwell as emphatically upon the
failings of the educated and rich, as on the immorality of the ignorant and
poor.
We invite all those who have been deceived to come around
us, and we will unmask the deceiver; — we seek the company of them that drag
the chains of tyranny along the rough thoroughfares of the world, that we may
put the tyrant to shame; — we gather around us all those who suffer from
vicious institutions, that we may expose the rottenness of the social heart.
Crime, oppression, and injustice prosper for a time; but,
with nations as with individuals, the day of retribution must come. Such is the
lesson which we have yet to teach.
And let those who have perused what we have already written,
pause ere they deduce therefrom a general moral; — for as yet they cannot
anticipate our design, nor read our end.
No:— for we have yet more to write, and they have more to
learn, of the MYSTERIES OF LONDON.
Strange as many of the incidents already recorded may be
deemed,— wild and fanciful as much of our narrative up to this point may
appear,— we have yet events more strange, and episodes more seemingly wild and
fanciful, to narrate in the ensuing volume.
For the word "LONDON" constitutes a theme whose
details, whether of good or evil, are inexhaustible: nor knew we, when we took
up our pen to enter upon the subject, how vast — how mighty — how comprehensive
it might be!
Ye, then, who have borne with us thus far, condescend to
follow us on to the end :— we can promise that the spirit which has animated us
up to this point will not flag as we prosecute our undertaking;— and, at the
close, we feel convinced that more than one will be enabled to retrospect over
some good and useful sentiment which will have been awakened in the soul by the
perusal of "THE MYSTERIES OF LONDON."
END OF THE FIRST
VOLUME
A penny dreadful was a cheap
paperback novel popular in England during the time of Queen Victoria. Its
American equivalent was the dime novel. The stories were printed on cheap paper
hence the price and were also known as penny bloods, penny numbers, penny
awfuls and penny horribles. They were racy, violent, popular entertainments
aimed at young working class men. A lot of it was terrible but much of it was
also quite good.
The plots were
often inspired by the melodramas of the day are often complete rip-offs or
sometimes credited rewrites of Gothic classics like
The Monk
or
The
Castle of Otranto
. Many dreadfuls were anonymous. Detailed-filled true
crime – or ‘felon literature’ - was a popular sub-genre. Highwaymen and
notorious criminals were perennial favorites, and there were many fictionalized
accounts of Dick Turpin, Jack Rann, Jack Sheppard, and Sweeney Todd. Many
dreadfuls were produced by a few major firms - Edward Lloyd, G. Purkess, John
Dicks, Edwin Brett or the Hogarth House - but many small publishers and obscure
printers are also represented. It was a competitive and lucrative market.
Respected man of letters
G.K. Chesterton, creator of the Father Brown detective
stories wrote, “Sensational novels are the most moral part of modern fiction,”
in
Fiction as Food
. Any literature,” he writes, “that represents our
life as dangerous and startling is truer than any literature that represents it
as dubious and languid. For life is a fight and is not a conversation.”
Notable practitioners of the
genre in addition to Reynolds included James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett
Prest.
During the time of Queen
Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) the rate of literacy in Great Britain skyrocketed
from somewhere between half and two-thirds to around 97 per cent. A big reason
for this was an expansion of popular education that happened to coincide with
the increasing availability of cheap reading material. The nineteenth century
witnessed a sea change in publishing for the mass market. The runaway success
of Charles Dickens’
Pickwick Papers
, published in 1836 as a serial, was
proof enough for those who owned printing presses that revenue from “books”
could be increased when they were sold in monthly installments. In 1870, the
Elementary Education Act was passed which would lead to a million new readers
over the next decade.
The increasing demand for
reading material, together with the reduction in printing costs meant that it
was possible to supply the new market at a very low per-book cost. Newspapers
continued to appeal to the more educated classes but by 1880 were feeling the
pinch from the increasingly popular penny dailies. As the market for
reading-as-entertainment exploded, penny periodicals emerged that were catered
exclusively to young working class men. The stories were sometimes violent and
a little bit risqué. The dreadfuls became a very popular genre in the juvenile
population. The stories were serialized, as with a novel from Dickens or Wilkie
Collins, each story usually appearing in eight-page installments. The subject
matter was lurid and often featured crime or a mystery. Like the later
‘shilling shocker’ and the American dime novel, the penny dreadful denoted
schlocky writing and plenty of violence with some lovemaking. But not all of it
was dreck as any reader of George Reynolds will attest to. While most of the
establishment looked down on these trashy divertissements occasionally someone
stood up for the pulp offerings. Among the more popular titles were "Vice
and its Victims," "Wagner the Wehr-Wolf" and "Varney, the
Vampire." Perhaps the most last character to emerge from the genre was
Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street who first appeared in the gently
titled "String of Pearls: A Romance." The dreadfuls included vibrant
illustrations of appeal to male readers. Some of the famous early Penny
Dreadful titles, many of which have long been out of print:
Vileroy or The Horrors of
Zindorf Castle
The Mysteries of London
The Mysteries of the Courts
of London
The Mysteries of Paris
Varney The Vampire
The Boy Detective or The
Crimes of London
The New Newgate Calendar
The Poor Boys of London, or,
Driven to Crime
Ela The Outcast or The Gipsy
of Rosemary Dell
The Lambs of Littlecote
Black Bess Knight of the
Road
Wagner The Wehr Wolf
One of the best holdings of
penny-bloods is in the British Museum and consists of a personal collection
bequeathed to the library in 1941 by Barry Ono. The 700 books and magazines
which make up the collection represent the development of the penny dreadful,
from the chapbooks of the early 19th century to the boys' periodicals and
imitations of American dime novels of the 1880s and 1890s. The collection is
particularly rich in the penny fiction of the 1840s and 1850s, especially the
works of prolific authors such as Thomas Prest and James Rymer, and in Ono's
personal favorites, the later adventure stories of Edwin Harcourt Burrage.
In 1866,
Boys of England
was introduced as a new type of magazine, an eight page paper that featured
serial stories as well as articles and other ephemera of interest. It was
printed on the same cheap paper, though sporting a larger format than the penny
parts. Competitors soon sprouted up, with such titles as
Boys Leisure
Hour, Boys Standard
and
Young Men of Great Britain
. As the price and
quality of writing was the same, these also fell under the general definition
of penny dreadfuls. American dime novels were combed for potential adaptations
and quickly rewritten for a British audience. These appeared in booklet form,
such as the Boy's First Rate Pocket Library. Frank Read, Buffalo Bill and
Deadwood Dick were popular titles.
The later period of penny
fiction is dominated by the boys' school and adventure stories of Bracebridge Hemyng,
George Emmett and Edwin Harcourt Burrage. Hemyng’s Jack Harkaway was popular in
English-speaking countries around the world. The series title reflect the
international appeal:
Jack Harkaway and his Son’s Adventures in Australia,
Jark Harkaway’s Boy Tinker Among the Turks, Jack Harkaway and his Son’s Escape
From The Brigands of Greece
and so on. Harkaway and his son’s
globe-trotting exploits were serialized in periodicals published by Edwin J.
Brett, and then issued and re-issued in parts and paperback sixpenny or
shilling volumes. These stories clicked with their target audience because the
eponymous hero was likable, fearless and full-blooded, a cocky chap with a
glint in his eye who epitomized the British spirit.
Working class men who could not afford a penny a week often
formed book clubs that would share the cost of the flimsy booklets. Other
enterprising boys would collect a number of consecutive parts then rent the
volume out.
The Jack Harkaway stories
first appeared in the UK in the periodical
Boys of England
. Immensely
popular almost immediately, they were pirated in America, appearing
in The
Boys and Girls Weekly
. The Harkaway titles (which came out in penny parts
as well as magazines) included:
Jack Harkaway’s Schooldays
Jack Harkaway After Schooldays
Jack Harkaway At Oxford
Jack Harkaway’s Adventures
Round The World
Jack Harkaway in Search of
the Mountain of Gold
Jack Harkaway in Search of
his Father
Jack Harkaway Among the
Pirates
Jack Harkaway on the Prairie
Jack Harkaway Out West Among
The Indians
Jack Harkaway and his Father
at the Haunt of the Pirates
Jack Harkaway in Australia
Jack Harkaway and his Son’s
Adventure in China
Jack Harkaway and his Son’s
Adventure in Greece
Jack Harkaway and his Boy
Tinker
Jack Harkaway at School in
America
Jack Harkaway at the Isle of
Palms
Jack Harkaway in the
Transvaal
Jack Harkaway’s War Scouts
The term penny dreadful came
to be applied to any sensational literature that came from the cheap Victorian printing
presses rather than the more respected publishing houses. Or, indeed, any kind
of lurid matter from the time, including and not limited to …
Dracula, The
Portrait of Dorian Gray, Wagner The Wehr Wolf, Varney The Vampire, The String
of Pearls, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde…
The
Youthful Imposter
,
published in 1835, was to be the first of many well-received books.
The
Mysteries of London
and its even lengthier sequel,
The Mysteries
of the Court of London
, are hailed by critics as preeminent examples of the
Victorian "urban mysteries" genre, a style of sensational fiction
which incorporated aspects of the Gothic novel - with its haunted castles,
sexually charged damsels in distress and bloody villains. Like with Dickens, Reynolds’
work is infused with a keen awareness of the rough lives led by the vast
majority of Londoners who were poverty-stricken and subsisted in ghastly
conditions. His language features a colorful use of slang from the working
class and his books are valuable historical documents for the lost language of
early Cockney rhyming slang, which had its origins in its use as criminal slang
as seen in
Mysteries
in vivid detail.
Ironically,
although largely ignored today,
Reynold's
work remained in circulation on both sides of the Atlantic much longer than his
brand name contemporaries. An 1875 copy of Reynolds's
Ciprina
, published in
Philadelphia, lists 40 works including
Mysteries
of London
under the heading
"George W. M. Reynolds' Great Works," priced between 50 cents and one
dollar.
The Mysteries of the
Court of London
was a huge seller amongst the English speakers of
India and continued to sell there well
into
the twentieth century.