G.W.M. Reynolds

Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press

Anne Humpherys, Louis James, Louis James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351935081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

G.W.M. Reynolds (1814-1879) had a major impact on the mid-Victorian era that until now has been largely unacknowledged. A prolific novelist whose work had a massive circulation, and an influential journalist and editor, he was a man of contradictions in both his life and writing: a middle-class figure who devoted his life to working class issues but seldom missed a chance to profit from the exploitation of current issues; the founder of the radical newspaper Reynolds Weekly, as well as a bestselling author of historical romances, gothic and sensation novels, oriental tales, and domestic fiction; a perennial bankrupt who nevertheless ended his life prosperously. A figure of such diversity requires a collaborative study. Bringing together a distinguished group of scholars, this volume does justice to the full range of Reynolds's achievement and influence. With proper emphasis on new work in the field, the contributors take on Reynolds's involvement with Chartism, serial publication, the mass market periodical, commodity culture, and the introduction of French literature into British consciousness, to name just a few of the topics covered. The Mysteries of London, the century's most widely read serial, receives the extensive treatment this long-running urban gothic work deserves. Adding to the volume's usefulness are comprehensive bibliographies of Reynolds's own writings and secondary criticism relevant to the study of this central figure in mid-nineteenth-century Britain.

PART I
Beginnings: France

Chapter 1
G.W.M. Reynolds and the Modern Literature of France

Sara James

Throughout his career, G.W.M. Reynolds flaunted his associations with France. He lived in France for six years, from 1830 to 1836. He claimed to have served in the Thirteenth Legion of the Paris National Guard and to have witnessed the three glorious days of revolution in July 1830, and anecdotes in his early fiction hint at youthful escapades across Northern France with his younger brother Edward. He wrote his first polemic there, The Errors of the Christian Religion Exposed, by a Comparison of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (1832); his first novel, The Youthful Impostor (1835); and the first of several translations, Songs of Twilight (1836), an ambitious verse translation of Victor Hugo's Chants du Crépuscule (1835).¹ He was married and became a father in Paris, and was naturalized as a French citizen in 1835. His first involvement with the press was as editor of the shortlived Paris Literary Gazette, which ended in his first lawsuit, bankruptcy and subsequent return to England in 1836. Back in London, he was keen to affiliate himself with France at every opportunity, from the pseudonym ‘Parisianus’ he used in the late 1830s to the fact that he proudly announced his membership of the Historical, Statistical and Agricultural Societies of France on the title-page of many of his works. Much of his early fiction has a French flavour: Pickwick Abroad; or the Tour in France (1837–38), Alfred de Rosann, or the Adventures of a French Gentleman (1838–39) and Robert Macaire in England (1839–40).² He also wrote a guide to the Modern Writers of France, serialized in the Monthly Magazine in 1838 and published in two volumes as The Modern Literature of France (1839) and a French Self-Instructor (1846) teaching grammar and pronunciation.³ He even named one of his sons after the French politician Ledru Rollin.

Reynolds's involvement in politics and radical journalism in England following the 1848 uprisings in France associated him indelibly with revolutionary France and tends to overshadow the impact French literature had on him, both as reader and writer. Yet few Victorian writers had as wide a knowledge of contemporary French literature and particularly of French fiction as he did. So what can Reynolds's writings tell us about the modern literature of France and what can the modern literature of France tell us about Reynolds? Answers to both these questions can be explored through analysis of his first novel, The Youthful Impostor, and of his examination, translation and assessment of French writers in The Modern Literature of France. Understanding Reynolds's relationship with French letters is, as this chapter will demonstrate, central to our understanding of his attitudes to literature, his development as a writer and his later fiction.

The Youthful Impostor

Written when he was 18 and published three years later, The Youthful Impostor tells us a great deal about Reynolds's early aspirations and models as a writer. It was a three-volume novel, aimed at the readers of circulating libraries. It signalled its literary aspirations through epigraphs and frequent allusions to a diverse range of writers – from Spinoza to Descartes, Horace to Silvio Pellico, Ainsworth to Shakespeare – and it was eclectic, promising in the Preface to ‘vary the sameness so incidental to modern novels’.⁴ It was translated into French in 1836 by Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret, who was well known for his translations of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, and whose name thus bestowed considerable prestige.⁵ In presentation, if not in content, it is distinct from his subsequent fiction in its evident pursuit of an educated readership from the middle classes.

For all this, many stylistic as well as plot elements of the novel indicate some of the avenues he was to follow in Robert Macaire in England and The Mysteries of London. There are frequent authorial digressions on matters as diverse as love, beauty, prostitution and the afterlife; flowery apostrophes to the spirits of great men; songs; slang; and references to present-day events in France.⁶ Large sections of the narrative concern life in the city and the possibility of practising deception on unsuspecting visitors to the metropolis; and as the title suggests, duplicity and its exposure is the theme that unites the otherwise rather rambling central plot. The epigraph from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, ‘Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness, / Wherein the pregnant enemy does much’ (II, ii), was repeated on the title-page of Robert Macaire in England and the theme of disguise was reworked time and again in The Mysteries of London.

The Youthful Impostor is particularly interesting in its frank acknowledgement of the debts it owes to other writers. The Preface explicitly stated that the inspiration for a central character was taken directly from Alexandre Dumas's play Angèle, which Reynolds had no doubt seen at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin where it played from December 1833 to early 1834.⁷ Authorial intercalations throughout the novel also point out other borrowings, for example from two works he later translated, Victor Hugo's Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné and Paul de Kock's Soeur Anne.⁸ Comparing Reynolds's novel with Dumas's stage play allows us to see which elements of Angèle Reynolds chose to develop and how he modifies them; it also foregrounds his anxieties about his ability to generate completely new material and his hesitation over what constituted plagiarism.⁹

Angèle

Initially entitled L'Echelle des femmes (The Ladder of Women), Angèle is set in the latter half of 1830 and follows the fortunes of Alfred d'Almivar, an opportunistic Don Juan who established his financial and social position through amorous conquests, lost it in the aftermath of the July Revolution, and is determined to regain it by marrying the 15-year-old heroine. Watched by a jealous rival, the melancholic and tubercular doctor Henri Muller, Alfred seduces Angèle while she is taking a water cure in the Pyrenees chaperoned by an elderly aunt, promising to secure her mother's agreement to their marriage. He quickly changes his plans when Angèle's widowed mother, the Comtesse de Gaston, reveals she intends to marry again herself to further her political influence. She takes him back to Paris as her lover. The night their engagement is to be announced and Alfred's promotion to Minister assured, his plans are frustrated by the political influence of a former lover, Ernestine de Rieux, and by the arrival of Angèle in Paris, heavily pregnant and seeking his help. Fortunately for Angèle, Henri Muller has followed her to Paris and is at hand to deliver the baby, kill Alfred in a duel and marry her himself. The play is a fast-paced and light-handed drame bourgeois that employs various theatrical commonplaces – soliloquy, asides, dramatic irony, disguise and coincidence – to explore the causes and effects of the political, social and sexual fortunes of both men and women. Dumas's unnamed collaborator, Anicet Bourgeois, added a more sombre, proto-naturalist tone by limiting Henri's social aspirations not only by his social standing but also by his genetic inheritance of tuberculosis.¹⁰ The play was an immediate success when it opened at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin on 28 December 1833 and the following day a review in the Gazette des Théâtres proclaimed Dumas the leader of the modern dramatists.¹¹

Reynolds borrowed two major elements from Angèle for The Youthful Impostor. The first he acknowledged directly, explaining in an Advertisement preceding the opening chapter that ‘the original idea of the young Surgeon's character is taken from that of Henri Muller in M. Dumas's excellent melo-drama, Angèle’.¹² The idea underwent very few modifications: Reynolds's Henry Hunter no longer suffers from tuberculosis but simply from the effects of his undeclared passion for the heroine, Emily Crawford. The second, a suitably anglicized seduction plot, was signalled indirectly by one of the two epigraphs to the novel, taken from the first scene of Act IV: ‘Assez loin d'ici pour qu'il n'y ait pas un instant à perdre, monsieur – une jeune fille – en ce moment – une jeune fille dont le déshonneur rejaillirait sur toute une famille, une jeune fille va devenir mère!’¹³ Emily, seduced by Stanley Arnold whilst staying with her aunt and tricked by him into believing they will be married once her mother consents, becomes pregnant; Hunter mopes his way through some nine hundred pages before delivering her baby and killing Arnold in a duel. This time Reynolds kept the bare bones of the action but expanded the character of the heroine, her family and in particular her brother, the impostor of the title, whose descent into crime is also brought about by Arnold. Numerous borrowings from English Newgate and silver fork novels, particularly those of Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, were also evident in this criminal plot, as were certain tongue-in-cheek references to his own life.¹⁴

Several thin...