Abstract
In G. W. M. Reynolds’s best seller The Mysteries of London (1846–8), the arch-villain Anthony Tidkins, known throughout the novel as the Resurrection Man, is drinking one night in a ‘boozing ken’ with several acquaintances, including one called The Cracksman. Waiting for a contact to appear, they engage in conversation with the waiter.
‘Ah! there’s many things that has struck me since I’ve been in the waiter-line in flash houses of this kind,’ observed the paralytic attendant, shaking his head solemnly; ‘but one curious fact I’ve noticed, — which is, that in nine cases out of ten the laws themselves make men take to bad ways, and then punish them for acting under their influence.’
‘I don’t understand that,’ said the Cracksman.
‘I do, though,’ exclaimed the Resurrection Man.2
And as a way of making meaning of the flunkey’s remark, he narrates ‘the history of my own life’.
The research on which this essay is based was supported in part through travel grants awarded by the PSC/CUNY Research Awards Program in 1984, 1985, 1987 and 1988, and by an NEH Summer Stipend Award in 1986.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
G.W.M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, vol. I (London, 1846) p. 191.
See T.J. Edelstein, ‘They Sang “The Song of the Shirt”: The Visual Iconology of the Seamstress’, Victorian Studies, XXIII (1980) 183–210.
Virginia Berridge’s work on Reynolds’s is an example of this effort, in this case analysing the content of newspapers by turning it into numbers. See ‘Content Analysis and Historical Research on Newspapers’, in Michael Harris and Alan Lee (eds), The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (London and Toronto, 1986) pp. 201–18.
Lennard J. Davis argues that the ‘news’ and the ‘novel’ both come out of the same discourse in the late seventeenth century. See Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York, 1983).
This is Virginia Berridge’s position in her dissertation ‘Popular Journalism and Working-Class Attitudes, 1854–86: A Study of Reynolds’s Newspaper, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper and the Weekly Times’, University of London, 1976, and in ‘The Language of Popular and Radical Journalism: The Case of Reynolds’s Newspaper’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, XLIV (1982) 6–7. See also Berridge, ‘Popular Sunday Papers and Mid-Victorian Society’ in G. Boyce, J. Curran and P. Wingate (eds), Newspaper History: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (London, 1978) pp. 249–64.
I am indebted for my discussion of melodrama to Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, 1976). See especially Chapter 1, ‘The Melodramatic Imagination’ and Chapter 2, ‘The Aesthetics of Astonishment’.
‘G. W. M. Reynolds: Popular Literature and Popular Politics’, in Joel Wiener (ed.) Innovators and Preachers: the Victorian Editor (New York, 1986) pp. 16–18.
In a letter to Ferdinand Lassalles, 28 April 1862, Marx complained that the only ‘big organ’ the working class had in England was ‘the scoundrel Reynolds’s Newspaper’. See Saul K. Padover (ed.), The Letters of Karl Marx (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1979) p. 465. Marx, like others, seemed to consider Reynolds a careerist.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1990 Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, Lionel Madden
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Humpherys, A. (1990). Popular Narrative and Political Discourse in Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper. In: Brake, L., Jones, A., Madden, L. (eds) Investigating Victorian Journalism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20790-9_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20790-9_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-20792-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-20790-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)