Why am I passionate about this?
I’m a great one for alternative histories. I’m particularly fascinated by authors who were bestsellers in their own day but have been edited out of the official version of ‘English literature’. We constantly have Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and so forth fed back to us through reprinted novels, costume dramas, and lavish film adaptations, but there were other authors active at the time who commanded huge sales but whose work has now been largely forgotten or disregarded. These authors deserve attention, while their rediscovered work would freshen up the ongoing discourse of cultural retrieval. Seek them out, as I have, and I promise it’ll be worth it.
Stephen's book list on the 19th century they don’t teach you in school
Why did Stephen love this book?
A lurid penny dreadful serial launched in 1844. The English counterpart of Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1843), the Chartist author/publisher Reynolds inaugurates the ‘city mysteries’ genre, exploring shady urban underworlds, and revealing corruption and exploitation through a focus on violence and sexual deviance. Using sensation to make a powerful political point and to reach working-class readers, Reynolds reduced all the problems of the world to the divide between wealth and poverty. Even Queen Victoria does not escape judgment. His dark urban labyrinths mirror those of Dickens, but his politics are much more radical, making the two men bitter ideological and commercial rivals. I’ve always found Reynolds inspiring, and have written about him academically and in historical fiction.
1 author picked The Mysteries of London as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The government feared him. Rival authors like Charles Dickens, whom he outsold, despised him. The literary establishment did its best to write him out of literary history. But when George W.M. Reynolds, journalist, political reformer, Socialist, and novelist, died in 1879, even his critics were forced to acknowledge the truth of his obituary, which declared that he was the most popular writer of his time. And The Mysteries of London, which was published in 1844 in the "penny dreadful" format of weekly installments sold for a penny each, was his masterpiece and greatest success, selling 50,000 copies a week and…