Abstract
Propelled by new printing and dissemination technologies, a global network of print and electronic media and communications had enveloped much of the globe by the end of the nineteenth century. Part of this network was an explosion of serial print media and terminology categorizing such media in the press and on the literary marketplace. G.W.M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London serves as a case study on the unruliness of the serial city mystery genre, as well as the necessity of centering the serial in discourse on nineteenth-century popular media.
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Notes
- 1.
For a range of scholarship on the global nineteenth century, media history, and print culture, see Finkelstein; Henkin; Koehler; Menke; Osterhammel; Pettitt; Wenzlhuemer.
- 2.
For recent discussions of digitization of nineteenth-century print, see Mussell, Nineteenth; Mussell, “Digitization.” See also the ongoing discussions in the “Digital Forum” section of the Journal of Victorian Culture.
- 3.
On the history and significance of Mitchell’s and its successors, see Brake, “Nineteenth-Century.”
- 4.
On the SDUK and Charles Knight, see Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge: A Prospectus; Gray; Haywood, esp. chapter 5.
- 5.
On the instability of generic categories in the context of burgeoning cheap print, see Turner, “Companions.”
- 6.
On the Victorian book series, see Howsam; Kijinski.
- 7.
Unlike Reynolds, Vickers, and Dicks, Thomas Miller (1807–1874) and E.L. Blanchard (1820–1889) are relatively little known today. Miller was a jobbing popular writer who found some early success in the 1840s but remained impoverished for most of his writing life. According to Louis James in the ODNB, Miller is “a tragic example of aspirations crushed by Victorian Grub Street.” Blanchard was a stalwart playwright for the stage, in particular pantomimes at Drury Lane. In addition to his work for the stage, he contributed widely to comic and other periodicals, wrote novels, and revised guidebooks such as Bradshaw’s Railway Guide. There is only a cursory mention of The Mysteries of London in Blanchard’s 2-volume biography: “Sept. 5th.—Arrange for new serial. Fourth series of the Mysteries of London” (cf. Scott and Howard, vol. 1, 68).
- 8.
For a discussion of the relation between image and text in Hogarth’s series and Reynolds’s serial, see Maidment.
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Turner, M.W. (2019). Serial Culture in the Nineteenth Century: G.W.M. Reynolds, the Many Mysteries of London, and the Spread of Print. In: Stein, D., Wiele, L. (eds) Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in Transnational Perspective, 1830s−1860s. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15895-8_11
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