George W. M. Reynolds

George W. M. Reynolds was a British fiction writer and journalist, born in 1814, who became one of the most commercially successful authors of the Victorian era; his obituary in The Bookseller called him "the most popular writer of our times," with a readership that reportedly outstripped both Dickens and Thackeray. His best-known novel, The Mysteries of London (1844), sold some 40,000 copies a week in penny instalments and was translated into multiple languages; a lengthy sequel followed as The Mysteries of the Court of London. He also wrote the Gothic werewolf tale Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf, helping to define the sensational "urban mysteries" genre that mixed Gothic conventions with graphic depictions of poverty and crime in the industrial city. A committed Chartist and republican, Reynolds founded Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper in 1850, which remained in print until 1967. He died in 1879.