George W. M. Reynolds

Reynolds was educated first at Dr. Nance's school in Ashford, Kent, and then attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.

He was intended for a career in the British Army, but his parents died during 1829 and, with his subsequent inheritance, he decided to quit the military and devote himself instead to literary pursuits.

He left Sandhurst on 13 September 1830 and for the next few years he traveled a great deal, particularly in France, and became a naturalised French citizen.

After the publication of his first novel Reynolds then assumed the editorship of The Monthly Magazine, a position which he held between 1837 and 1838 and wrote articles under the pseudonym of "Parisianus.

Although it was outlawed by the authorities, the German version achieved the status of a cult favourite on the Russian black market.

The Mysteries of London and its even lengthier sequel, The Mysteries of the Court of London, are considered to be among the seminal works of the Victorian "urban mysteries" genre, a style of sensational fiction which adapted elements of Gothic novels – with their haunted castles, innocent noble damsels in distress and nefarious villains – to produce stories which instead emphasized the poverty, crime, and violence of a great metropolis, complete with detailed and often sympathetic descriptions of the lives of lower-class lawbreakers and extensive glossaries of thieves' cant, all interwoven with a frank sexuality not usually found in popular fiction of the time.

Although Reynolds was unusual in his religious skepticism (one of the main characters in The Mysteries of London was a clergyman turned libertine) and political radicalism, his tales were intended for his mostly middle- and lower-class readers; they featured "hump-backed dwarves, harridans and grave-robbers [who] groped past against a background of workhouses, jails, execution yards, thieves' kitchens and cemeteries.