c1860 GWM REYNOLDS THE MYSTERIES OF THE COURT OF LONDON

THE
MYSTERIES
OF THE
COURT OF LONDON
BY
GEORGE W. M. REYNOLDS

NEW EDITION

LONDON
PUBLISHED BY JOHN DICKS, AT THE OFFICE, 313 STRAND.

George William MacArthur Reynolds 1814 – 1879) novelist, journalist,  radical, and a prolific writer of cheap popular fiction, the penny dreadfuls.
 This is the very scarce  8 volumes of  The Mysteries of the Court of London, his sequel to "The Mysteries of London," one of the most famous 'penny bloods' a cheap sensational serial, published weekly and massed produced for working class readers.which contained scandalised portrayal of the British aristocracy along with romanticised criminals and low life.
Called in its time a work of decidedly immoral tendency Reynolds turns royal lives into melodramatic fiction which portrays the debauched decadence of the Regency court and the life and crimes of London's underworld characters. 

 Originally published by John Dicks at 7, Wellington Street North, Strand from 1848 to 1855 the instalments were published weekly and each issue contained a single illustration and eight pages of text printed in double columns. The weekly numbers were later bound in cloth covers with a fresh title page and table of contents and offered as complete works of fiction The entire work was made up into four series of two volumes each bearing dates from 1848 to 1856.They were the first issues.
 The series was afterwards reissued in volume form at the address,  313, Strand, 

This set is the undated circa 1860 reissued volumes, the Second Editions.

A total of over 3,300 pages with over 400 illustrations, each volume has its own title page and contents pages.
Listed in Hubin's Crime Bibliography.

Condition
Original publishers cloth bindings with gilt illustrated front boards and spines. The bindings are solid with new endpapers, pages are clean. Volume 1 has the same gilt decorations as the other volumes but the cloth is a completely different colour and has slight stains etc, Volume 5 lacks 1 leaf of text and has some damage to bottom of spine, Volume 3 lacks 4 leaves of text, all other volumes are complete.

Size of each volume is 10¼ by 7 inches
These are heavy volumes, nearly 8 kilos when packed

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