George W. M. Reynolds in Bethnal Green: Peregrinations of a Serialised Mind

George W. M. Reynolds wrote many popular serials in the 1840s and 1850s, becoming one of the most widely read authors in Victorian England. Many of these texts are set in London and take the city as their subject, yet none is so grounded in its immediate social context as the first series of The Mysteries of London, published weekly between 1844 and 1846, before Reynolds achieved financial security and when he still lived in the sometimes dangerous East End area of Bethnal Green. Throughout the Mysteries, Reynolds writes his characters and scenarios into the streets through which he passed each day, engaging in continuous dialogue with the city as it underwent rapid modernisation. This essay explores the Mysteries as a fictionalised record of personal experience, written at pace and revealing the fears and ambitions of an author whose position in London was precarious, and asks how such an interpretation might change our understanding of the text’s republican principles and calls for social reform. Reynolds’s contemporaries were often suspicious of his commitment to progressive ideals. This essay contends that the Mysteries represents its own authority as fundamentally compromised, and that this position is integral to its critique of social inequality.