George W. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London was one of the best-selling works of the Victorian era, published in weekly penny instalments from 1844 to 1848. The fourth and final volume completes an enormous panorama of London low-life: criminals, aristocrats, politicians, and the desperately poor are woven together in a narrative of crime, corruption, and occasional redemption. Reynolds wrote with moral outrage about inequality and never flinched from depicting suffering.
As a document of how Victorian popular fiction imagined crime and society, the series is unmatched. Download the free EPUB for the concluding volume of a landmark in working-class serial literature.