G.W.M. Reynolds Reimagined

This essay collection proposes that G.W.M. Reynolds’s contribution to Victorian print culture reveals the interrelations between authorship, genre, and radicalism in popular print culture of the nineteenth century. As a best-selling author of popular fiction marketed to the lower classes, and a passionate champion of radical politics and "the industrious classes," Reynolds and his work demonstrate the relevance of Victorian Studies to topics of pressing contemporary concern including populism, working-class fiction, the concept of ‘originality’, and the collective scholarly endeavour to ‘widen’ and ‘undiscipline’ Victorian Studies. Bringing together well-known and newly-emerging scholars from across different disciplinary perspectives, the volume explores the importance of Reynolds Studies to scholarship on the nineteenth-century. This book will appeal to students and scholars of the nineteenth-century press, popular culture, and of authorship, as well as to Victorian Studies scholars interested in the translation of Victorian texts into new and indigenous markets.

Jennifer Conary is Associate Professor of English at DePaul University, Chicago, USA, and author of numerous articles on Victorian literature and culture. Mary L. Shannon is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton, London, UK, author of Dickens, Reynolds and Mayhew on Wellington Street: the Print Culture of a Victorian Street (2015), and co-editor of Romanticism and Illustration (2019), with Ian Haywood and Susan Matthews. She is currently working on her second book, Billy Waters is Dancing: How One Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency and Victorian Britain.