‘That’s Business’: Organised Crime in G.W.M. Reynolds’ The Mysteries of London (1844-48)

Abstract

Scholars such as Stephen J. Carver argue that G.W.M. Reynolds’s penny blood The Mysteries of London (1844-48) represents organised crime in the Victorian criminal underworld. Yet thus far no researcher has yet applied any theories from criminology relating to organised crime to explain why the activities of the Resurrection Man, the novel's principal criminal protagonist, and his associates constitute an example of it. This article remedies this situation by applying Mark Galeotti’s definition of organised crime to a study of the Resurrection Man's gang in Reynolds’s novel, showing how Reynolds understood that, not only was there an underworld, but there was also a criminal upper world. These two worlds overlapped, their members colluded together.