author
G. W.
A wildly popular Victorian writer and journalist, he built a huge readership with fast-moving serial fiction packed with crime, suspense, and social protest. His work once rivaled Dickens in reach and helped define the world of penny fiction.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in Sandwich, Kent, in 1814, George William MacArthur Reynolds became one of the best-known popular writers of Victorian Britain. He wrote fiction and worked as a journalist, and he is especially remembered for long serial stories that reached a mass audience.
His best-known work is The Mysteries of London, a sprawling urban tale of crime, poverty, and hidden lives in the city. He also founded Reynolds's Miscellany, and his career connected sensational storytelling with radical politics and reform-minded journalism.
Although he was hugely successful in his own time, Reynolds was often left out of the literary spotlight later on. In recent years, readers and scholars have taken renewed interest in him as a major voice in nineteenth-century popular fiction.