George W. M. Reynolds

George William MacArthur Reynolds (1814–1879) was an English writer and radical journalist who, after squandering an inheritance in Paris, became the most widely read author in Victorian Britain, outselling Dickens among working-class readers. His penny serial The Mysteries of London, issued weekly from 1844 to 1848 and continued as The Mysteries of the Court of London, mixed crime, sensation and attacks on aristocratic vice; Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf was one of several Gothic romances. A Chartist speaker in 1848, he founded Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper, which survived into the twentieth century. Respectable critics despised him, and Dickens called him a pander to the basest passions.