The Mysteries of London

"The Mysteries of London" Volume 1 is a mammoth 818-page novel. This penny dreadful (or city mysteries novel) was begun as a weekly serial by George W. M. Reynolds in 1844. Reynolds wrote the first two series of this long-running narrative of life in the seedy underbelly of mid-nineteenth-century London. Thomas Miller wrote the third series and Edward L. Blanchard wrote the fourth series. All were immensely popular. Reynolds modelled his story after Eugene Sue's novel "Les Mystères de Paris" (The Mysteries of Paris), and he paralleled Sue's tale of vice, depravity, and squalor in the Parisian slums. Installments were published weekly and contained a single illustration and eight pages of text printed in double columns. The weekly numbers were later bound in cloth covers with a fresh title page and table of contents and offered as complete works of fiction.