G. W. M. Reynolds and His Fiction: The Man Who Outsold Dickens by Stephen Knight, and: Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy: The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act by Anna Gasperini (review)

Stephen Knight's G. W. M. Reynolds and His Fiction: The Man Who Outsold Dickensis a significant addition to the study of G. W. M. Reynolds's novelistic output. Reynolds has often been studied alongside similar writers of popular fiction in critical works by Margaret Dalziel, Ian Haywood, Louis James, Mary L. Shannon, and others. However, excluding the excellent essay collection G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press(2008) edited by Anne Humphreys and Louis James, there are few book-length studies that focus on Reynolds alone, much less with such full attention to his fiction. Knight's book aims to familiarize readers with the thirty-six novels Reynolds produced during his career by providing summaries of the novels' contents (correcting common confusions surrounding characters and details of plot along the way) as well as analyses of general patterns and movements in Reynolds's oeuvre.

G. W. M. Reynolds and His Fictionis divided into five chapters organized in a roughly chronological order; each addresses Reynolds's output within specific genres. The first chapter attends to Reynolds's early novels, many influenced by Charles Dickens's theatrically comic style and depicting Anglo-French exchanges informed by the seven years Reynolds spent in Paris. The second chapter addresses Reynolds's breakthrough series, The Mysteries of London(1844–48), a text so intricate that Knight's division of the chapter into sections by volume and subdivided into topical strains ("Minor Characters, Noble, Troubled, and Vicious," "Criminals Great and Small," "Modern Seductresses") should be celebrated for so mercifully delineating Reynolds's twisting plotlines. Reynolds's turn to historical romances takes up the third chapter (also subdivided into easily digestible units), which summarizes the plots of The Parricide(1847) and The Days of Hogarth(1847–48) in addition to Reynolds's second runaway hit, The Mysteries of the Court of London(1848–56). Nine fictionalized memoirs about lower-class heroines and heroes working as actors, servants, soldiers, and more make up the contents of the fourth chapter, covering much of Reynolds's work during the 1850s. The fifth and last chapter, "Fantasy History, Historical Fiction, International Narratives," rounds out Knight's study by turning to the more fantastical work typical of Reynolds's late novelistic career, including the excellent Wagner the Wehr-Wolf(1846–47) and novels inspired by events of the Crimean War and a life-long interest in Turkey.

Knight usefully situates Reynolds in context with his peers. He outlines how Dickens and Reynolds influenced and combatted with each other; traces Reynolds's relationship to other popular authors such as Edward Bulwer Lytton, Wilkie Collins, and William Makepeace Thackeray; compares and contrasts Reynolds's version of The Mysteries of Londonagainst his ghostwriters'; and develops a fuller account of Susannah Reynolds née Pierson, Reynolds's fellow writer of fiction and journalism, frequent editor, and wife. Knight's topical chapter subsections highlight the working class and active, agential women in Reynolds's fiction. The sheer scope of Knight's work emphasizes the breadth of research available to scholars of Reynolds.

In Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy: The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act, Anna Gasperini argues that penny bloods exposed anxieties about the body trade in the wake of the Anatomy Act of 1832. Four significant historicist studies by Ruth Richardson, Elizabeth T. Hurren, Sarah Wise, and Lisa Rosner influence Gasperini's monograph. These earlier works have exposed how the Anatomy Act legislated the instrumentalization of working-class bodies by the medical profession...