George William MacArthur Reynolds is one of the most significant Victorians not previously the subject of a book. Some of his penny-weekly novels far outsold Dickens. Reynolds created the first cheap illustrated magazine for a mass readership, he played a leading role in the 1848 Chartist demonstrations, and his radical Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper survived from 1850 to 1967. Add his other journalism, translations, and projects, ranging from The Errors of The Christian Religion Exposed (1832) to a teach-yourself-French series, as well as the fact that much of his work was considered too objectionable for libraries, and it becomes clear that G. W. M. Reynolds is an ideal subject for a collection of essays by specialists in several fields who can digest separate aspects of his work. Also important: the volume has been edited with great care by two authorities on Reynolds.

The introduction by Anne Humpherys and Louis James explains what is known—and not known—about Reynolds's biography and provides an overview of his work and a history of its reception. Conscientious footnotes to the sources and analyses of their contradictory assertions are actually at the foot of the page (for which Ashgate must be praised). In addition, the book has a good index and a single bibliography of secondary sources, two features all too often missing in essay collections. And finally, the editors’ prefatory note and the bibliography of Reynolds's work by Louis James (who began in the 1960s to resurrect Victorian working-class reading) detail the complexity of dates, title changes, and forms of publication that create puzzles in discovering what he did.

Essays in the book's first section explore Reynolds's experience in France during the early 1830s. The second group covers his work as editor of cheap periodicals, especially his strategies for political writing during the years when magazines could not print news without paying the stamp duty that would make them too expensive for working-class purchase. Although he claimed that Reynolds's Miscellany would not, as Andrew King reports, “enter upon political disquisitions” but merely be “moral, domestic and social” (68), with his name in the title readers know that “moral, domestic and social” issues would include class, resources, income distribution, power, education, and opportunity. Essays by Michael H. Shirley and Antony Taylor place Reynolds's Newspaper in the working-class politics of its period.

The third section covers The Mysteries of London and its relatives. Anne Humpherys sorts out the titles, publishers, and contents of a tale that eventually ran to about 9 million words issued in penny parts between 1844 and 1855 and reissued in multiple formats for the rest of the century. The Mysteries not only explored the urban depths without Charles Dickens's sentimental evasions but also portrayed corrupt aristocrats, churchmen, governments, and laws as both melodramatic villains and representations of institutional evil. Berry Chevasco then complicates the common assertion that Reynolds merely imitated Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris by describing differences in language, style, tone, and, most important, underlying viewpoint.

Among the essays collected under the heading “Popular Culture,” Louis James examines the novels Reynolds wrote as serials for the London Journal and Reynolds's Miscellany, which were often historical or Gothic narratives. Graham Law describes another series, published in independent weekly numbers, of first-person narratives pitched as the memoirs of a servant-maid, a manservant, an actress, a soldier's wife, and so forth. In addition to pointing out the technical and formal features that link these novels from the 1850s to the sensation fiction of the 1860s, Law also discovers—after the supplement to Household Words had attacked Reynolds's “books of a debasing tendency”—an appearance in the servant-maid's memoir of “Mr Charles Wiggins, who from having been a penny-a-liner on the Morning Chronicle, had by dishing up all kinds of absurdities … [and] a dash of maudlin sentimentalism … managed to establish his renown as a popular author” (206–7). Finally, the book's fifth section provides two entrancing indications of Reynolds's “afterlife” in the Bengali translations/adaptations of his fiction and in the “mythical narrative” encoded in the May 1950 centenary edition of Reynolds's News.

This volume's timeliness is almost breathtaking, for although most contributors no doubt spent months in libraries reading fragile paper or peering at microfilm, digitization now makes a significant fraction of Reynolds's work available on our desktops. Lee Jackson has mounted the whole first series of The Mysteries of London (2 vols., 259 chaps.) on his Victorian Dictionary Web site at http://www.victorianlondon.org. Gale's British Newspapers 1600–1900 has Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper from 1850 through 1900. The ProQuest British Periodicals collection includes London Journal (1845–1906), Reynolds's Miscellany (1846–69), and Bow Bells for 1864–97. (Reynolds edited this curious penny weekly, which included a piece of sheet music on the back cover, in 1864–68.) Google Books currently supplies (at least in the United States) twelve titles, including The Parricide (a revision of Reynolds's first novel) and The Days of Hogarth, which is the example considered in Brian Maidment's essay on illustration. (I found them by using “George Williams MacArthur Reynolds” in the author box of the advanced search page.) Although some of the pdf files have only one volume of a multivolume title, one was digitized as recently as December 2008, so more may be coming. Studying or just sampling the works of G. W. M. Reynolds has become much more widely possible, and the essays in this book provide essential adjuncts to research and appreciation.