FORM AND REFORM: THE “MISCELLANY NOVEL”

Around 1847, an author describing himself as “A Discharged officer with twenty years’ experience” published a book entitled The Mysteries of the Madhouse.¹ It commences as a novel: the third-person narrative tells a thrilling tale complete with a harmless heir, conniving step-mother, and gormless step-brother. But after the heir of Howarth House is committed to a madhouse by his step-mother, the genre of the text changes abruptly. With no transition, the language of the novel is suddenly interrupted by extended, first-person, ostensibly factual accounts of what conditions are like inside madhouses. Here are examples from each section (the first is the text's opening, and the second is from an un-introduced intercalation):

The dewey [sic] shades of evening were softly falling before Captain Arundel and his daughter, accompanied by the heir of Howarth House, quitted the vicinity of the magnificent abbey. Much did they admire the fane in its old and venerable age, and happily enough did they point out to one another how its features contrasted with the objects of nature; and anon as they slowly walked through the woods and glades which are so strikingly intermingled on the banks of the Wye, directly for the Captain's cottage, sweet was the converse of the three, as if theirs had been a long intimacy. (Madhouse 4)

When the door was opened, I went into the passage, and I found four cells, each about eight feet square, in a very horrid and filthy condition; the straw being saturated with wetness and nastiness of the most repulsive description. . .. The walls were daubed with filth; the air-holes, of which there was one in each cell, were perfectly filled with it. I asked the keeper if these cells were inhabited by patients, and he said they were occupied at night by females. . .. I became very sick, and could not remain longer in the room – I vomited. (Madhouse 39)

As these examples show, the tale and the “factual account” are written in quite different genres – the style, word choice, and sentence structure of the first example mark it as novelistic romance, and parallel characteristics mark the second example as believable exposé. Throughout The Mysteries of the Madhouse, the disjunctures between such generically-distinct segments are very sharp: the first-person speaker present in the second example is never introduced in the novelistic sections, and the comments from this voice have no real relevance for the plot. The author makes no effort to integrate the “facts” and the fiction.

But in fact – as this article will argue – this lack of integration is deliberate, and is integral to the author's intention. The author deliberately wrote The Mysteries of the Madhouse in dis-integrated form, because this form is best suited for conveying the reformist ideas that drive the text. The text's dis-integrated form, its macro-narrative structure, and its socially conscious contents mark it as an instance of the genre I call the “miscellany novel.”

This article describes and defines a new genre: the “miscellany novel.” Texts belonging to this genre are likely familiar to many scholars of the nineteenth century, but in the absence of generic nomenclature or historical context, the genre has remained under-recognized and, arguably, misunderstood. Both my term and this article therefore seek to provide a name and a list of characteristics by which can know and discuss this curious, crucial, and transitional form. Because I see the genre as defined by the way its form is shaped by its contents and its ideologies, I will trace its antecedents and explain why, in 1847, the Discharged Officer selected this form for conveying reform.²

In this article, I will use two terms that apply specifically to the miscellany novel: “dis-integration” and “macro-narrative.” I will use the term “dis-integration” to describe the intercalations that are deliberately not intended to be integrated with the macro-narrative. Such dis-integration is characteristic of the miscellany novel. I will use the term “macro-narrative” to denote the over-arching narrative structure that provides continuity within each miscellany novel. I use this term instead of “frame narrative” because a frame narrative provides more of a predicate for a framed novel's contents than a macro-narrative does for a miscellany novel.

In my reading, the nineteenth-century miscellany novel was invented by Charles Dickens – previously a sketch writer and still a journalist – when he began writing “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” in 1836. Then G. W. M. Reynolds – formerly a tract writer, fiction author, and soon a miscellany editor, with philosophical and reformist bents – further evolved the genre in the 1840s by including socio-political intercalations. By 1847, when the Discharged Officer wrote The Mysteries of the Madhouse, the genre of the miscellany novel was both well-established and influential: an oft-cited number states that Reynolds's The Mysteries of London (1844–48) sold a million copies in ten years, and The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) was so influential that it was used as a precedent in breach-of-promise court cases. Based on these successes, the Discharged Officer had good reason to write a miscellany novel when he wanted to circulate his own reformist ideas.

In a footnote, the Discharged Officer states explicitly that he has a reformist project, and that he believes his project is best served by a dis-integrated form, in which the macro-narrative and the factual intercalations are separate:

The Discharged Officer will frequently introduce into the chapters of the “Mysteries of Bedlam,”³ authentic cases, in accordance with the promise of presenting the “Annals of Madhouses,” without a word of fiction on his part. These, as well as short disquisitions, of a plain and practical nature, belonging to the medical and jurisprudential branches of the subject, may be thrown, it is thought with advantage, into the framework formed by the tale; creating a deeper and more solid interest than generally attaches to the cheap weekly publications. Still, the exposure of the cruelties and abuses which at one time prevailed in madhouses, and which – after all that has been done by the legislature, and pronounced by the press and the public voice, are not yet abolished throughout the country – will constitute the principal object and feature of the work. (Madhouse 29)

I want to ask two questions of the Discharged Officer, and I think the answers can be found in that footnote. The questions themselves are short, but not simple:

1. 1. Where did the Discharged Officer get the idea for this thrown-together form?

2. 2. Why use this form to promote reform?

The long answers are the basis for this article. The short answers, as derived from the footnote quoted above, are as follows:

1. 1. The idea of the form came from “the cheap weekly publications” which the Discharged Officer seeks to transcend by imitating. That is, he acknowledges a similarity but wants his text to have “a deeper and more solid interest” than those texts can generate.

2. 2. As for why he would use this form, the Discharged Officer indicates that the “framework formed by the tale” is somehow necessary for carrying that “deeper and more solid interest,” which in turn will inspire the press, the public, and the legislature to “abolish” the remaining “cruelties and abuses” that persist in madhouses. That is, the Discharged Officer seems certain that the vehicle of the tale and the thrown-together form of the text will work in concert to further his reformist agenda, in a way that neither a tale nor pure fact alone could do.

But what antecedents did the Discharged Officer have in mind? What evidence did he have that this thrown-together form could actually be successful? I believe that the Discharged Officer was deliberately writing in the popular but short-lived genre of the “miscellany novel.”

The miscellany novel has the following characteristics: it is held together by a fictional macro-narrative, it is written by one author, and it is often and abruptly interrupted by intercalations written entirely in other genres. These intercalations may be prompted by the macro-narrative, but they are not predicated upon it, nor do they advance the macro-plot(s). They are dis-integrated – they are deliberately not incorporated into the structure of the fictional macro-narrative. The intercalations in the miscellany novel are directly analogous to the columns and contents of the miscellany periodical.

In what follows, I will trace the development of the miscellany novel, from an accidental Dickensian invention in 1836, through Reynoldsian experimentation with reformist trajectories from 1841–48, to The Mysteries of the Madhouse and Dickens's final renunciation of the genre in 1848. The central texts of this article are: Charles Dickens's The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–37) and Master Humphrey's Clock (1840–41), G. W. M. Reynolds's Master Timothy's Book-case (1841–42) and The Mysteries of London (first series: 1844–46; second series: 1846–48), and the Discharged Officer's The Mysteries of the Madhouse. Each of these miscellany novels begins with, ends with, and periodically recurs to novelistic constructs of characters and plots. But each also contains other dis-integrated genres that are not and cannot be incorporated with its narrative(s).

My proposed generic term, “miscellany novel,” draws attention to these texts’ discontinuous, dis-integrated form and to their structural and literary antecedents, while identifying the crucial novelistic characteristics that produce coherence and marketability.

Definitions of “miscellany,” the first part of my genre term, are variable and sometimes vague, but always include notions of capaciousness and content discontinuity. The most precise description I have found comes from Michael F. Suarez's essay on the eighteenth-century poetic miscellany. Suarez says: “Miscellanies are usually compilations of relatively recent texts designed to suit contemporary tastes; . . .The miscellany, then, typically celebrates – and indeed constructs – taste, novelty and contemporaneity in assembling a synchronous body of material” (218–19).⁴ As per Suarez's definition, miscellanies are contemporaneous productions firmly rooted in the moment of their production. In order to appeal to a wide audience, miscellanies publish whatever they judge adequate or salable in the moment, as inclusively as possible.

This capaciousness made miscellany periodicals an ideal form for the time. In “The Trouble with Betsy: Periodicals and the Common Reader in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England,” Louis James argues that periodicals were uniquely capable of holding different desires in suspension, in ways novels could not. In his metaphor of the working-class reader, James says:

In one context, Betsy would have liked very much to consider herself a ‘lady’; in another, she would protest against being considered middle-class. In imagination, she might wish to murder her mistress; in preparing an important dinner, she might take pride in making a good meal. A novel could not embody these conflicting structures of reality: a periodical, with its fiction, its different kinds of information, can reflect this diversity. (359)

A novel, according to James, seems to “embody” only one structure of reality. A novel is limited in the ways it can represent things, but the periodical James here mentions is heterogeneous enough to make room for all the genres and modes of meaning important to nineteenth-century individuals.

Betsy, James's “common reader in mid-nineteenth-century England,” lives in a restricted social world, but in imagination she inhabits a variety of different positions. Each of Betsy's class aspirations or states of being might, as James implies, require a different genre – e.g., the Silver Fork novel, and/or a practical guide to cooking, and/or a “factual” report on the condition of under-servants. A miscellany periodical could include a wide range of genres, and therefore did not have to limit its contents in order to achieve some sort of consistency, as novels did. A periodical could “reflect this diversity” via its genres, and could adapt its contents at any moment to suit or create changing desires (James 359).

Suarez says that miscellanies construct the tastes of their readers. James seems to think that the taste created is for a genre capable of addressing all a reader's “conflicting structures of reality” in one capacious type of text (James 359). This taste was partially provided for by the range of miscellany periodicals available by the 1830s.

In the 1830s and 1840s, miscellany journals or magazines⁵ – such as Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (2s 6d), Bentley's Miscellany (1s), the Penny Magazine (1d), and Reynolds's Miscellany (1d)⁶ – were very popular, and varied widely in price, contents, frequency of publication, and political alignment.⁷ However, most had one thing in common: their market appeal was predicated upon fiction. Structurally and financially, fiction came first: serial fictions and their accompanying illustrations were usually published on the front page, and generated the interest and suspense required to keep patrons buying week after week.⁸ Authors like Dickens and Reynolds recognized the power of fiction, and responded by creating the miscellany novel. Though the first miscellany novel, Dickens's The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, was not begun as a miscellany novel (as I will explain shortly), and Reynolds's initial attempts at the genre were not successful, ultimately both authors were skilled and sensitive enough fulfill readers’ desires for both the novel's cohesiveness and the miscellany's multiple modes of reality.

The miscellany novel's significant innovation was to transmute the miscellany periodical's fiction-first form into a generic mode driven by fiction-first content. In the miscellany periodical, everything is preceded by fiction, but the periodical's contents do not absolutely require it (and one fiction can be replaced by another). In the miscellany novel, the fiction cannot be separated from the rest of the text – although the intercalated contents are distinct, the structure absolutely requires fiction. Miscellany novels begin with, end with, and constantly recur to fiction, and in the spaces between they include, with abrupt stylistic fractures, the genres that made miscellany periodicals so popular. But fiction holds the whole together – without fiction, there is only disorder.

In keeping with its periodical antecedents, the miscellany novel's intercalations are not incorporated into the novelistic narrative. They may be prompted by it, but they are conspicuously separate in style and genre. This lack of integration is crucial to the miscellany novel, because it allows each intercalated section to retain all the meanings that are keyed into the genre to which it belongs. That is, the intercalated genres carry meanings that are separate from the fictional macro-narrative, but their distinctiveness prevents them from destabilizing the whole miscellany novel.

In The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin refers to the poly-voicedness of the novel as its “heteroglossia,” and he theorizes that the novel incorporates a range of genres “precisely because of their capacity, as well-worked-out forms, to assimilate reality in words” (321). I believe that the miscellany novel is a superlative example of heteroglossia: the miscellany novel is so heteroglossic that it does not even incorporate its contributory genres. Instead, the miscellany novel includes other genres whole, as hard-edged intercalations. This lack of incorporation allows each intercalation to be read on its own terms, thereby preserving each genre's ability to “assimilate reality in words,” as Bakhtin says (321). It is this very power of generic separation that the Discharged Officer depends upon when he announces his belief that the inclusion of “authentic cases” and “disquisitions” will generate “a deeper and more solid interest” than would accrue to fiction alone (Madhouse 29). The Discharged Officer evidently believes that generic dis-integration will prevent his genuine calls for reform from being read the same way as the macro-narrative (that is, as fictional entertainment).

But the Discharged Officer's perspective of the miscellany novel as a genre for carrying a reform-minded agenda is a late-stage one. The first nineteenth-century miscellany novel is, in my reading, Charles Dickens's The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–37), and this miscellany novel does not have a reformist agenda. Nor did it even begin as a novel; nor was it read as one.

In Dickens and the 1830s, Kathryn Chittick describes the various ways that contemporary reviewers struggled to classify Pickwick. She cites the Morning Chronicle in 1836 as calling Pickwick, “entitled in every way to be placed among the periodicals; it is, in fact, a magazine consisting of only one article” and of only one author (65).⁹The United Services Gazette, in 1837, called Pickwick “a very droll miscellany,” and Bentley's Miscellany said it was “one of the pleasantest of the London periodicals” (75).¹⁰

So what was Pickwick? Was it a magazine after all? The developmental history of Pickwick only muddles the situation further. It was originally commissioned by Chapman and Hall as a series of sketches narrated by Charles Dickens (at the time known only for his Sketches by Boz),¹¹ and illustrated by Robert Seymour (by far the more famous half of the pair). But Seymour committed suicide early in the series, and Dickens took over. Throughout, The Pickwick Papers contains long, generically distinct tales only superficially keyed into the escapades of his recurring characters. These generically distinct, intercalated tales are mechanically introduced as stories told by persons at dinner, or as manuscripts given to or discovered by the titular Mr. Pickwick. But the tales never modify the behaviors of the main characters, nor do they have any influence on what we might recognize as the plot(s), or on each other. They appear and disappear, making little or no contact with the macro-narrative – they are as self-contained as magazine articles or miscellany columns.

Can a magazine have only one author and one article, and remain a magazine? The contemporary confusion Chittick references is our confusion as well, unless we consider Pickwick as something new altogether. The term “miscellany novel” allows us to reconcile the authorial and plotted continuity we recognize in the novel with the dis-integrated comprehensiveness of the miscellany periodical.

In the case of Pickwick, Dickens is the author claiming to be an editor – so how should we define his relationship to the text? And should we locate him in the macro-narrative, or in the intercalated tales? I suggest we can identify Dickens as a novelistic author if we follow Bakhtin's description of where we can find such an author. Bakhtin says:

[T]here is no unitary language or style in the novel. But at the same time there does exist a center of language (a verbal-ideological center) for the novel. The author (as creator of the novelistic whole) cannot be found at any one of the novel's language levels: he is to be found at the center of organization where all levels intersect. (48–49)

Dickens lies at the centre of Pickwick's languages, creating organization but not, crucially, integration. Therefore, though he clearly functions as a novelistic author as per Bakhtin's description (Dickens is at the center), Dickens is also in a sense still writing a periodical (which we recognize by disparate genres and a lack of integration). In Pickwick, Dickens has elected not to integrate each part into the whole, choosing instead to let each intercalated genre remain as distinct as it is in the miscellany periodical. Therefore, Bakhtin has accurately described Dickens as at the center of novelistic language, and contemporary reviewers have accurately described Pickwick as a text that is at the same time a periodical, a miscellany, and a novel.

Dickens had been involved in miscellany periodical production since November 1836, when he agreed to act as editor for the new periodical Bentley's Miscellany. By 1839, however, he had decided it was too difficult to work with Richard Bentley. Dickens then launched his own miscellany, Master Humphrey's Clock, in 1840. Dickens's plan required that the miscellany periodical was to be conducted by an invented figure, Master Humphrey, an elderly bachelor who would tell miscellaneous stories to an audience of yet more bachelors. At this stage, it seems Dickens planned to write a more intentional miscellany novel, one held in coherence by a sort of Mr. Pickwick character (but Pickwick as he is at the end of The Pickwick Papers – a sensitive figure rather than a comical one).

In an article on Master Humphrey's Clock, Chittick contends that Dickens invented this figure “partly in order to avoid the exertion of continuous plot constructions, in the hope that the unity lent by the subsuming identity of a single narrator would give another type of coherence of the variety of topics brought to the notice of the reader” (Idea 163). Chittick identifies a struggle: in her reading, coherence is necessary, but the single author is contradictory to the ethos of a miscellany periodical. As I see it, Dickens was seeking for another way to write a text that was both miscellaneous and written entirely by himself. He was trying to re-create the combination of coherence, interest, and impetus that made Pickwick so successful.

Chittick traces Dickens's solution (the invention of Master Humphrey) back to the eighteenth-century periodical tradition. She describes his references to The Tatler (1709–11), The Spectator (1711–12) and Idler (1758–60), and argues that he used these antecedents’ concept of the eidolon to structure his frame character Master Humphrey. Chittick says:

In his substantial outline of the proposed magazine . . . Dickens invokes The Tatler and The Spectator, and one thinks of a small boy sitting on his bed at twilight, ‘reading as if for life’ these books from another era. . .. Completely unlike the faddish Bentley's, Dickens was not apprehensive about reverting to a format of the previous century, and seemed to feel that the cultivation of an eidolon personality would be as attractive to readers of the 1840s as it was to those of the eighteenth century or an unworldly small boy twenty years earlier. (Idea 158)

However, Master Humphrey's Clock was not successful as a periodical (nor, evidently as a miscellany novel). Chittick theorizes that Dickens's “artistic error was in constructing a narrator whose character was unequal to his own narrative talents: as he was gradually to discover, the eidolon of ‘Charles Dickens’ carried its own very recognisable identity and, most importantly, attraction” (Idea 163–64). I would add that the eidolon may also have failed because it was not important for most nineteenth-century miscellanies, and because Dickens did not need an eidolon for the types of texts he was writing.

Dickens may have desired an eidolon to “avoid the exertion of continuous plot constructions,” as Chittick says, but his subsequent career amply shows that Dickens overcame that desire (Idea 163). For Dickens, then, it seems both that the eidolon failed, and that he found himself equal to greater exertions of plot. For him, both the eidolon and the miscellany novel were dead ends.

G. W. M. Reynolds picked up directly where Dickens left off: he published a plagiarism, Pickwick Abroad (1837–38) and a stylistic imitation of Master Humphrey's Clock, entitled Master Timothy's Book-case (1841–42).¹² In between, he wrote a variety of sensational novels as well as an extended temperance tract entitled, “The Anatomy of Intemperance” (1840), which ran to ninety-four closely-printed pages (over 37,000 words).¹³ Through these imitations, I believe he developed an understanding of the pitfalls and potentials of the miscellany novel, and through his tract writing he developed an emphatic style and an enthusiasm for social reform. Taken together, his experiments and experience, combined with his social and political agendas, enabled him to evolve the longest-running miscellany novel of the nineteenth century: The Mysteries of London (first series: 1844–46; second series:1846–48).¹⁴

Reynolds's first effort at a novelistic narrative, Pickwick Abroad, was a straightforward plagiarism of Dickens's text, and as such is constructed as a miscellany novel. Reynolds was doubtless plagiarizing Dickens's novel for economic reasons, but by imitating Pickwick he must also have learned about alternative textual constructions.

The next unusual text (and Dickens imitation) Reynolds produced was a book titled Master Timothy's Book-case. This text takes up Dickens's eidolon construct, this time cast in the shape of a magical genius. In the preface, Reynolds describes his project thus:

The tendency of this work is thus perfectly moral; and a true description of the world, and of society in general, is presented to the reader in the guise of a series of tales, which the Author has endeavoured to render as amusing and as varied as possible. These tales are, however, all connected with the narrative which forms the ground-work of the plan, and are therefore parts of one great whole. The hero of the work is the same throughout the narrative parts; and all the tales are told to elucidate those mysteries in society, or in individual biographies, which he cannot comprehend at first sight. In order to work out this aim, a supernatural agency was required; and the task of revelation is therefore confided to Master Timothy, through the medium of his magic “Book-Case.” (Preface)

Like Dickens's Master Humphrey, “the hero of the work” in Reynolds's text is supposed to provide coherence through his constancy. The tales are supposed to elucidate the mysteries which Edmund (the protagonist/hero) cannot solve without magical intervention. Edmund is specifically instructed to only ask for histories when he cannot discover the truth through more pedestrian means. Structurally, this should ensure that Edmund continues to have his own adventures (much as Pickwick did) in between the magically-revealed tales. As long as Edmund remains a strong enough character, the text should hold together and retain its interest – again, much as Pickwick did.

Reynolds's emphasis on the hero's consistency as the thing which holds the whole together indicates his recognition that his project is centrifugal. He knows that the dis-integrated tales may make the whole text too incoherent. That is, unless the novelistic aspects are strong enough to create a center, the miscellany novel may disintegrate into mere miscellaneousness.

Reynolds distinguishes the macro-narrative from the other tales; he stresses both that narrative is the ground-work of the plan, and that the narrative is created by the hero. Clearly, narrative fiction is distinct from the fictional tales that are keyed into the text. This preface states one of the fundamental feature of the miscellany novel: although a miscellany novel may contain other fictional tales in similar genres, the macro-narrative is the most important fictional genre. It provides the continuity that holds the miscellany novel together, and no intercalated tales – even if they are also fictional – can usurp the place of the macro-narrative. If this happens, the miscellany novel loses coherence.

As Reynolds indicates, narrative continuity pulls this text together, so that the “numerous and varied” objects of the project can be both demonstrated and elucidated. On a mechanical level, Reynolds obviously knows that the coherence of a miscellany novel – which he is self-consciously writing – relies on consistency of character. By extension, the coherence relies on consistency of macro-narrative.

But Reynolds is unable to sustain his own interest in his protagonist, for much the same reasons as Chittick believes Dickens abandoned Master Humphrey: Reynolds too had created a figure “whose character was unequal to his own narrative talents” (Idea 163). Reynolds seems to become impatient with the inadequacies of his protagonist, whose naïveté is incompatible with the author's sweeping commentaries and moralizations. As a result, the tales begin to take precedence over the macro-narrative, and the miscellany novel flies apart into miscellanousness.

As the text progresses, Edmund becomes less active and less of a force for cohesion. Eventually, he is incarcerated in Bicêtre, where his own progress stops completely. Once incarcerated he can do nothing but solicit tales from the book-case, effectively freeing Reynolds from the burden of sustaining his protagonist. But the incarceration also prevents Edmund from providing the cohesion for which Reynolds invented him. Without a protagonist, Master Timothy's Book-Case loses its macro-narrative, and Reynolds's voice takes over entirely.

From the beginning, Master Timothy's Book-Case was troubled by not by the heteroglossia which Reynolds intends to hold in tension as “parts of one great whole,” but rather in the increasing didacticism of Reynolds's monologic voice (Preface). At first, Reynolds channeled his voice through the third-person Edmund: Reynolds's moralizing commentaries were thought by his ingénue. The character was supposed to function as both a conceit from which stories could spring, and a voice capable of commenting on it. As the text progresses, however, Reynolds seems to become impatient with his foil's opacity, and he begins moralizing at length without bothering to filter his voice through Edmund's perspective. The result is that all dialogism – the force, according to Bakhtin, that holds the novel together – vanishes, replaced by monologism.

Monologism is the only thing, for Bakhtin, inimical to the essentially dialogic and heteroglossic novel. He says:

If the novelist . . . is deaf to organic double-voicedness and to the internal dialogization of living and evolving discourse, then he will never comprehend, or even realize, the actual possibilities and tasks of the novel as a genre. He may, of course, create an artistic work that compositionally and thematically will be similar to a novel, will be “made” exactly as a novel is made, but he will not thereby have created a novel. The style will always give him away. We will recognize the naively self-confident or obtusely stubborn unity of a smooth, pure single-voiced language (perhaps accompanied by a primitive, artificial, worked-up double-voicedness). . .. In such a novel, divested of its language of diversity, authorial language inevitably ends up in the awkward and absurd position of the language of stage directions in plays. (327)

This is precisely the criticism that can be leveled at Master Timothy's later sections. If the earlier sections perhaps were guilty of “a primitive, artificial, worked-up double-voicedness,” in the later sections Reynolds abandons all pretense at narrative structure. He abandons Edmund to prison, and, after his release, Reynolds exiles him to his country-seat, where he does nothing but read the tales Reynolds wants to tell.

Despite the mechanisms of novelistic unity Reynolds describes in his Preface, despite his text being “‘made’ exactly as a novel is made,” the “stubborn unity of a smooth, pure single-voiced” didactic narrator takes over the content and construction of the text. Though the tales Reynolds tells are as multifarious as they were before, the narrative continuity has been superceded by an author “deaf to organic double-voicedness,” and invested primarily in hearing his own voice speak.

Like the stage director Bakhtin mocks, later in Master Timothy Reynolds simply and blatantly excises causal, character-based motivations for story. Though he still attributes the intercalated tales to Edmund's logic processes, those processes are removed from the reader's purview, and replaced by the narrator's monologic insistence on a connection that is palpably absent. The authorial voice interjects:

We have extended these reflections [on not hanging people on circumstantial evidence] to a great length; but it is the fault of our hero, and not our own. These were his own meditations – encouraged by a retrospection over the various histories which he had evoked from his Book-Case. We are unwilling, at all times, to intrude upon the patience and time of our readers; but we could not in justice omit these important observations, which are the results of the very narratives they have been perusing, and which constitute a portion of the moral of the whole. The lucubrations of Sir Edmund Mortimer were numerous and varied; and the slightest incident was enough to call forth a manuscript, during the period that he was compelled to remain at his country-seat in Berkshire. . .. It will not therefore be necessary to narrate the incident, – which was a trivial one, and by no means connected with the general interest of the whole narrative, – that led to the evocation of the ensuing tale from the Book-Case. (396; emphasis mine)¹⁵

The authoritative voice assures the reader that the organic, causal processes of narrative are still in the background, but removed in order to preserve the “general interest of the whole narrative.” Reynolds seems to have forgotten that the general interest relies far more on trivial incidents experienced by Edmund than it does on the extended reflections that Reynolds wants to write.

Reynolds tries to have it both ways here: first he says that Edmund's lucubrations were the result of his reading, but then he says that the incident “that led to the evocation of the ensuing tale” was a trivial one. Reynolds has obviously abandoned his narrative, but tries to hold on to it by invoking the term narrative. It necessarily fails. As Bakhtin says, the mere assertion of dialogism is not the same as genuine novelistic dialogism. Given the previous, careful interconnection between Edmund's subjectivity and what the Book-Case objectively tells him, the passage is clearly disingenuous. Although Reynolds knows and acknowledges that narrative coherence is valuable and necessary, as the book progresses he invokes dialogism without actually presenting a dialogic text. Instead, Reynolds's own didactic voice takes over.

Under the mechanism set out by Reynolds in his Preface, only things immediately relevant to Edmund's life ought to produce stories: “The hero of the work is the same throughout the narrative parts; and all the tales are told to elucidate those mysteries in society, or in individual biographies, which he cannot comprehend at first sight” (Preface, emphasis mine). Once Reynolds abandons Edmund's perspective in favor of Reynolds's own authorial “magical agency,” the scaffolding of the narrative – and therefore, of the entire miscellany novel – is fatally undermined.

Although Reynolds fails to sustain this miscellany novel, the reasons for its failure are illuminating. I have already outlined the structural reason it failed. But the deep cause – the reason Reynolds allows the structure to fail – is that Reynolds is more invested in commenting on social ills than he is in sustaining his miscellany novel.

In the latter sections of Master Timothy's Book-Case, Reynolds the tract writer begins to overwhelm Reynolds the novelist. Throughout, many of the solicited tales are about man's inhumanity to man (and also to woman). As the book progresses, Reynolds loses interest in Edmund because his naïve character cannot adequately deplore the injustices the Book-Case reveals. Reynolds, however, is fully capable of expounding on social ills, and is impatient to do so.

Towards the end of Master Timothy's Book-Case – in a section that was later removed from the 1847 reprint – we read a long tale (nearly 100 of the 593 pages) entitled “The Marriage of Mr. Pickwick.”¹⁶ At one point in the text, Pickwick sits down to read a newspaper before setting off to his marriage. He reads:

First he read of how the Queen had sat down to dinner at precisely seven minutes and a half past eight on the preceding evening; and then he came to the case of a poor man who had not had any dinner for the last three days. . .. In another part of the journal was a statement that a man had just killed his own children and attempted suicide himself, in order to avoid the workhouse: and the very next paragraph to this was the pleasing intelligence that her Most Gracious Majesty had just purchased a very handsome monkey for a hundred guineas. These and other equally amusing and diverting pieces of information – all tending to show the prosperous state of the country, and to support the often repeated assertion that England is the happiest and freest country in the world – were perused and conned over by Mr. Pickwick in the various cells of whose fertile memory they were duly distributed. (500–01)

Mr. Pickwick – like the newspaper itself – compartmentalizes each bit of news by distributing it to an appropriate memory cell. The implication is that Pickwick never sees the connections between the stories. But Reynolds's language and juxtapositions demonstrate that the news is not composed of disconnected elements – like the paragraph itself, each sentence develops meaning from its surroundings. Through the structure and content of this paragraph, Reynolds is clearly arguing that neither news nor society is made of discrete parts – both text and society are necessarily interconnected.

Therefore, although the Queen and a starving man may not know one another, they are side-by-side in the newspaper, and the vague details about the starvation of the one makes the overly-precise information about the dinner of the other all the more obscene. And although the Queen's purchase of a monkey does not directly impinge on the murderous man, Reynolds prompts the question of what good could have been done for that man with the 100 guineas spent on a useless monkey.

Just as these persons are side-by-side in the newspaper, so are they near neighbors in London itself. The sharp socio-economic contrasts between persons living cheek-by-jowl in the same city are endlessly troubling to Reynolds. The desire to expound on the interconnections between all parts of London society, and on the causes of effects like murder, informs and drives his most successful miscellany novel: The Mysteries of London.

The bulk of The Mysteries of London is bracketed by the tales of two brothers, who separate at the beginning of the text to make their ways in the world. They agree to meet twelve years later, beneath the same trees where they parted. Eugene takes the path of an immoral, hedonistic capitalist, and Richard follows the more tedious path of virtue.¹⁷ Although the macro-narrative is not a particularly innovative one, the duality allows Reynolds considerable flexibility for introducing various incidents which he can link back to the brothers’ narratives. In addition, the duality of the two brothers allows Reynolds to introduce his own social theories through explorations (and explosions) of moral, ethical, and economic binaries.

Though summaries of The Mysteries of London usually begin with the frame narrative of the two brothers (itself illuminating of how we read for narrative),¹⁸ the text actually begins with a discourse on civilization, described in terms of binaries (and preceded by an illustration, as discussed below).

Civilization, according to Reynolds, began in Egypt and Syria and now resides in England. He states that “The bounties of Civilisation are at present almost everywhere recognised . . . and with Civilisation does Vice go hand-in-hand” (MoL 1: 1). He then follows with a series of declamatory binaries, similar to those Mr. Pickwick reads in Master Timothy's Book-Case: “The most unbounded wealth is the neighbour of the most hideous poverty; the most gorgeous pomp is placed in strong relief by the most deplorable squalor; the most seducing luxury is only separated by a narrow wall from the most appalling misery” (MoL 1: 1–2).

To drive his point home, Reynolds even includes a graphic representation of the text's purpose:

There are but two words known in the moral alphabet of this great city; for all virtues are summed up in the one, and all vices in the other: and those words are

WEALTH. | POVERTY.

. . . From this city of strange contrasts branch off two roads, leading to two points totally distinct the one from the other. (MoL 1: 2)

From the beginning, Reynolds's text is split in its terms, but also in its genres. Declamatory, pseudo-historical prose stops abruptly, replaced by a graphic representation of one of the text's central divisions. Shortly thereafter, chapter I commences in a narrative mode, with the words: “Our narrative opens at the commencement of July, 1831” (MoL 1: 2). Within the space of two pages, the reader has already been confronted with three different printed genres, each founded on binary language. However, the fourth genre – the opening illustration – challenges binaries, and demonstrates that this text will indeed be able to embody many conflicting structures of reality (which Louis James's Betsy would doubtless appreciate).

The opening illustration is of a well-dressed, androgynous person poised in the London smog, with the dome of St. Paul's in the background (Figure 7). S/he is surrounded by a background of clearly impoverished people. To one side of the image a man grasps the arm of a woman in a hat, who is looking up into his face – this is most likely a scene of prostitution. To the other side of the image, we see the rear of a skeletally thin horse, surrounded by horse-handlers. Towards the center of the image, the second-largest figure is a very ragged woman, with two desperate-faced children clinging to her skirts, and a third child sprawling in her arms. Behind her skulks a man with a cadaverous face; he, the woman, and the horse-handlers are all glowering at the well-dressed central figure.

Figure 7. G. Stiff, Opening illustration, from G. W. M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London. First series. Vol 1. (London: George Vickers, 1846), 1.

The illustration visually undermines the simple binary Reynolds has stated in words. According to his written schematic, wealth is opposed to poverty, and surely we ought to commiserate those on the poverty side while deploring those callous rich persons lolling in luxury. However, in this illustration the well-dressed figure is clearly being menaced by those around him/her, and though the children are piteous the ill-favored mother inspires more fear than compassion. Even the central figure challenges the simpler binary of sex/gender: this is Eliza Sydney, who has been impersonating her dead brother since she was a child.

Indeed, if James's Betsy is looking for a text capable of containing different structures of reality, The Mysteries of London is ready to deliver.

This brief overview of the text's heterogeneity gives a sense of its miscellaneousness and its radical structure, but it cannot give a sense of how well the separate sections fit together. The text is not confusing or disorienting to read, even though its modes are so disparate. In fact, I would argue that the text manages to avoid being confusing or disorienting precisely because it switches genres and modes so often. Here, in The Mysteries of London, with its illustrations, its narrative framework, and its controlled heteroglossia, we find an example of a text that is able to hold a range of ideas, perspectives, and desires in balance. And in order not to miss any of its complexities, I suggest we call it a miscellany novel.

Just as critics in the 1830s struggled to classify Pickwick, so twentieth-century critics have struggled to classify The Mysteries of London. Trefor Thomas, in “Rereading G. W. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London,” says: “weekly penny fiction can be understood as an impure, almost hybrid mode, half weekly newspaper, half romance” (60). Louis James says The Mysteries of London “brought to the novel the features of the newspaper” (358). Rohan McWilliam says, “What Reynolds demonstrates is that the boundaries between fiction, politics and reportage were permeable in the nineteenth century,” and he describes Reynolds's language as melodramatic (184). Juliet John perhaps summarizes Reynolds best when she says:

Reynolds exhibits, perhaps more than Dickens, a Bakhtinian ‘dialogism’ in his incorporation of so many extra-literary discourses: he flaunts his hybridity. There is arguably a kind of honesty in this. From one perspective, then, Dickens was right to call Reynolds a ‘Bastard’, but Reynolds is open about his ‘bastardy’. More importantly, despite Reynolds's ironically ‘thoroughbred’ status as a low and/or mass cultural author, his work is sophisticated and open about the inevitability of cultural fluidity in this ‘first age of mass culture.’ (165)

Instead of dividing Reynolds into halves, John acknowledges his “many extra-literary discourses.” He cannot be divided into halves, and a list of the constituent genres, literary and extra-literary, would be as unwieldy as a list of a miscellany's contents.

John's recourse to the language of mixtures, of “hybridity” and the bastard combination, takes us back to the contemporary “periodical / magazine / miscellany” terminology used to describe Dickens's Pickwick. Clearly, Reynolds's works have also created problems of generic notation, and therefore of interpretation. If we could simply categorize a text like The Mysteries of London as a novel, or a periodical, we might know how to read it. Instead, like Pickwick, The Mysteries of London defies conventional categorization.

In her article, “G. W. M. Reynolds: Popular Literature & Popular Politics,” Anne Humpherys analyzes the power of Reynolds's editorial work, and she theorizes that his power stems from his singular ability to hold himself in suspension. She says:

Reynolds's very ability not to try to blend the various elements of the popular mind into a unified position is what made his work successful both as fiction writer and editor. To borrow a term from an earlier English poet, I think Reynolds as editor possessed a kind of ‘negative capability’ – an ability to absorb the contradictory impulses and desires of the populace without any ‘irritable’ effort at resolution. (83)

Like the ability to bring to a novel all the “features of a newspaper” that James notes, Reynolds's “negative capability” answers Betsy's conflicting desires. Instead of offering resolution, Reynolds “simply” mixed the miscellany with the novel, and offered Betsy everything she might want. As Humpherys says, without trying to “blend the various elements of the popular mind,” Reynolds could incorporate not only a range of “impulses and desires,” but also thereby a range of readers. The “popular mind” was a disparate object, one whose tastes were as contradictory as the entire society.

The main question Humpherys addresses in her article – which is also the question addressed by Thomas, McWilliam, and James – is how to address Reynolds's intentions in combining “sensational fiction, frequent woodcuts of full-bosomed ladies, improving lessons, and practical advice” with “realism and call to action of practical politics” (Humpherys 82). Reynolds's radicalism and his mercenary objectives seem to many critics to be his essential contradiction. Humpherys concludes, as quoted above, that Reynolds's genius lay in his incorporative ability. She sees Reynolds as poised at the point where escapism and activism meet, and she locates his appeal, to the working classes, in his ability to present what interested and attracted people without trying to integrate it. He did not try to resolve people's interests in both sensation and politics, but recognized that people, like James's Betsy, liked both, and would pay for a text that could give them both.

If Dickens invented the miscellany novel, it was Reynolds who evolved it by making it political. As a radical and a writer who included commentary on political events in the weekly numbers of The Mysteries of London, Reynolds was always political. As a Chartist, he was also a man who believed in the power of collective action. Therefore, although the socio-political commentary in The Mysteries of London rarely suggests what people should do as they learn about social wrongs, Reynolds did seem to believe that the dissemination of ideas was the beginning of change.¹⁹

Henry Mayhew records that the costermongers of London read Reynolds, and considered him “a trump” thanks to the combination of his writing and his political activities (London Labour and the London Poor; the Literature of Costermongers). Mayhew also records that the costermongers would not read tracts. But if they were reading Reynolds, they were reading an ex-tract writer with many vehement opinions to share. If they were reading Reynolds, they were reading his opinions that (for example): seduced women ought to be judged gently, that seducers should be sentenced harshly, that criminals might be the products of social forces, that the Post Office was a corrupt institution. Whether or not they agreed with him, whoever read Reynolds was sure to get a thorough dose of his own opinions on situations and institutions in need of reform. And those opinions would be presented in their own hard-edged genres, with little or no integration into the macro-narrative to soften their impact.

It is this politicized version of the miscellany novel that I believe the Discharged Officer was trying to write when he wrote The Mysteries of the Madhouse. I believe he selected the miscellany novel as an ideal genre for conveying calls for reform because, by 1847, Reynolds had been writing a politically aware, reform-minded miscellany novel for three years. The Discharged Officer accurately recognized the form and potential of the miscellany novel, and, because of Reynolds's influence on the genre, the Discharged Officer believed it was the best form for instigating reform.

By the time the Discharged Officer was writing, however, the genre may already have been on the wane. In 1847, the same year The Mysteries of the Madhouse was published, Reynolds reissued Master Timothy in a sharply abridged version. The newer version, apparently printed from the same stereotyped plates as the original, was 220 pages shorter (373 instead of 593), and removed many of the later stories, including “The Marriage of Mr. Pickwick.”²⁰ Those 220 cut pages contained the most tangential tales; the 1847 edition was abridged purely for narrative continuity. The new edition was published at the offices of Reynolds's Miscellany, so it is likely that Reynolds was trying to capitalize on previous work now that his name was more valuable. Nevertheless, the text's abridgement for narrative is telling. Although he was still working on the second series of The Mysteries of London, which remained thoroughly miscellaneous through 1848, Reynolds was tacitly indicating that narrative coherence was taking precedence over comprehensiveness.

This shift in the value of narrative can be seen in Dickens as well, through the 1841 and 1848 prefaces to The Old Curiosity Shop (the novel produced out of the failed miscellany periodical Master Humphrey's Clock). As I mentioned earlier, evidence indicates that Dickens began Master Humphrey's Clock as a miscellany novel, but he abandoned the plan quite early on. However, in the 1841 preface to The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens still wants to associate this text with the miscellany novel that might have been. Though The Old Curiosity Shop is not dis-integrated enough to be a miscellany novel, in this preface Dickens is at pains to emphasize its miscellaneous qualities which, he imagines, can feed all the tastes of the public (as a miscellany novel might have done).

Dickens begins with a quote from Fielding, who compares the author's offerings to the food prepared by “‘one who keeps a public ordinary’” (Curiosity 39, 1841 Preface). Dickens specifies that “in the present instant” he had “provided no bill of fare,” ostensibly so that each segment could “make its own way . . . or make no way at all” (Curiosity 39, 1841 Preface). Dickens implies an analogy between the miscellany and the smorgasbord – both of which are made for consumption, and neither of which requires restriction or logic for its contents. Tellingly, Dickens promises no coherence, no “bill of fare” to hold the whole offering together; he simply presents the text as the mixture it is. Each reader can make his own way through the text, and take or leave what he likes – the text does not absolutely require that each offering be consumed. In this preface, Dickens actively stresses the heterogeneity of The Old Curiosity Shop.

But in 1848, his introduction actively disavows all heterogeneity and miscellaneousness. In this preface, Dickens begins with a bit of history about Master Humphrey's Clock, calling it “the proposed Miscellany” and lamenting its necessary demise (Curiosity 41, 1848 Preface). Instead of calling attention to its production as discrete segments, as his previous analogy of the smorgasbord did, this prefaces stress the ways it differs from its miscellaneous beginnings. He refers to the “desultory character” of Master Humphrey's Clock, and he stresses that the “commencement of a story was a great satisfaction to me” – a quite different feeling about story than Chittick believes motivated Dickens (i.e., that he invented Master Humphrey to avoid the exertions of plot) (Curiosity 41, 1848 Preface; Chittick, Idea 163).

Instead of discussing the text as it is, Dickens stresses the ways it is not what it might have been: his language of the lost book and the excision of Master Humphrey disavow the novel's miscellaneous beginnings. Dickens says, “When the story was finished, that it might be freed from the incumbrance of associations and interruptions with which it had no kind of concern, I caused the few sheets of Master Humphrey's Clock, which had been printed in connexion with it, to be cancelled” (Curiosity 41). Clearly, Dickens no longer wishes to publicly present The Old Curiosity Shop as a heterogeneous text; instead, he views such savory heterogeneity as an “incumbrance,” and he sees dis-integrated inclusions as “interruptions.” He is so anxious to distance The Old Curiosity Shop from its origins that he calls Master Humphrey's Clock “one of the lost books of the earth,” thereby insisting on the text's extinction even though the eidolon of Master Humphrey still exists in the very beginning and end of the text (Curiosity 41–42, 1848 Preface).

The two remnants of miscellany Dickens retains are the figure of Master Humphrey, whose “demise has not involved the necessity of any alteration,” and the “grotesque and wild, but not impossible companions” who gather like the “grim objects that are about her [Nell's] bed when her history is first foreshadowed” (Curiosity 42, 1848 Preface). The gathering of companions could be a miscellaneous gathering, as they were in the 1841 edition, but they are not so any longer. In this revisionist history, the miscellaneous gathering has become part and parcel of Nell's “history,” which seems now to have been established from the beginning. Dickens now claims he “had it always in my fancy” to create the companions to Nell's history – all sense of a scattered beginning has been pointedly denied by this new preface (Curiosity 42, 1848 Preface).

Whatever the original design of Nell's story, or of Master Humphrey's, in the seven years between the first book publication and the first cheap publication, Dickens's valuation of miscellaneousness versus narrative has palpably shifted. As if to distance himself from Reynolds and from his own beginnings, and perhaps to respond to an updated aesthetic sensibility, Dickens insists on a narrative reading of what was once the miscellany Master Humphrey's Clock. Whether Dickens was creating or responding to a change in the literary atmosphere, the miscellany novel seems to have been a dead genre by 1848.

Trefor Thomas links the post-1848 change in genre within Reynolds's own texts with changes in English and European politics. Thomas says: “The early penny numbers, and in particular the two series of The Mysteries of London produced during an historical conjuncture of extreme political crisis in England and revolution in Europe, are, however, less easily contained within the broad realist conventions of closure and narrative control” than the post-1850 numbers are (64). Thomas says that in the later numbers, the ones published under the title The Mysteries of the Court of London:

[T]he hierarchical ordering of narration within the text is more manifest. Conventional closures are deployed to reward virtue and punish vice, while other voices within the text are subdued or repressed. Interpolated narratives by minor characters tend to support and reinforce the values promoted in the over-arching narration. (64)

Thomas argues that the change in genre – from the more transgressive form of the early numbers to the more hierarchically organized later ones – is due to the change in the socio-political climate. In his reading, the transgressive form I've been calling a miscellany novel could exist only at a specific moment, when its peculiar mixture of reform desires and narrative coherence resonated with an England quivering on the edge of enormous change. Once that historical moment was past, the miscellany novel's singular ability to hold conflict in suspension may no longer have had meaning for its audience.

In 1848, therefore, Dickens's tacit disclaimer of his previous assessment of The Old Curiosity Shop may have been a response to changes in the aesthetic environment, produced by changes in the socio-political one. Eighteen forty-eight was a year of revolution throughout Europe; in Dickens's revision of his preface, in Reynolds's reconstruction of Master Timothy, and in the more narrative structure of The Mysteries of the Court of London, we can perhaps see a shift away from glorification of instability, and towards a reliance on hierarchical meaning.

Georg Lukács says that genres intimately connected to their human conditions do not survive beyond the sociological environment that produced them. The miscellany novel, so profoundly steeped in the exciting, irrational morass of early Victorian London, did not outlast its age. The genre as it existed between 1837 and 1848 vanished.

But if the brightness of the miscellany novel's light was short lived, the sales and readership numbers for The Mysteries of London and Pickwick Papers indicate that it burnt very bright indeed. By naming the miscellany novel, I seek to illuminate a way of writing, reading, and constructing the world that was so compelling the biggest authors wrote in it, and “all” the early Victorians read it.