The Mysteries of London, v. 4/4.

Gaslight, forged wills, aristocrats with skeletons in their cellars and pickpockets with hearts worth more than their masters' — this fourth and final volume brings one of the nineteenth century's most devoured serials to its close.

What it's about

G. W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London was a publishing phenomenon, sold in cheap weekly numbers and read aloud in workshops and taverns across the country. Modelled on Eugène Sue's Parisian Mystères, it stitches together dozens of interlocking plots that carry the reader from the mansions of Mayfair to the fever-dens of the slums. This concluding volume gathers up the many threads — the schemers, the wronged innocents, the returning avengers — and drives them toward reckoning. Fortunes are made and unmade, disguises fall away, and the fates long deferred finally arrive.

Themes

Reynolds wrote with a radical's anger, and the book is as much political tract as entertainment. The gulf between wealth and want runs through every chapter; crime is shown less as individual wickedness than as the predictable harvest of injustice. Alongside that indignation runs an appetite for spectacle — seduction, murder, imprisonment and revenge — that never lets the sermon smother the story. Class, corruption, the corrosions of money and the precarious dignity of the poor are its recurring preoccupations.

Why it still matters

This is popular fiction at its most influential: the ancestor of the crime serial, the soap opera and the exposé. Reading it now is to watch a mass literary culture being invented in real time, written for readers whom respectable literature ignored. It captures the texture of Victorian London — its appetites and its cruelties — from angles that the great triple-decker novels rarely reached, and it does so with a momentum that still pulls the pages along.

Who it's for

For readers who relish long, teeming Victorian narratives, admirers of Dickens who want the rawer, cheaper, more sensational strain that ran beside him, and anyone curious about the roots of popular crime fiction. Newcomers should know this is the last of four volumes; those who have followed the earlier parts will find the payoff they were promised.