Jenna M. Herdman, PhD candidate in English, has recently published an article in Victorian Periodicals Review titled “The Prince and the Penny Chartist: The Great Exhibition in Reynolds’s Newspaper.” This article studies the response of the radical Victorian press to the Great Exhibition of the Works of All Nations in London, 1851. Using original archival research, Herdman’s article studies Reynolds’s Newspaper, a popular Sunday weekly founded by journalist and urban mysteries writer George W. M. Reynolds.
“The Inauguration of the Great Exhibition: 1 May 1851.” Source: Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:David_Roberts_(1796-1864)_-_The_Inauguration_of_the_Great_Exhibition,_1_May_1851_-_RCIN_407143_-_Royal_Collection.jpg.
Reynolds was one of the most widely read authors of the nineteenth century. However, the ‘low’ content of his fiction and journalism, and the difficulties of accessing and navigating the labyrinthine print archive that he produced, means that he has generally been understudied by scholars of Victorian culture. In 1851, Reynolds harnessed the national excitement surrounding the Great Exhibition to advocate for working people and position himself as a leader among his readership. He accomplished this goal by attacking Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, who famously served as head of the Exhibition planning committee, and challenging the mainstream pro-Exhibition press. Though the Exhibition was posited as a unifying national event that reconciled the class tensions of the first half of the century, Reynolds argued that the Exhibition contributed to the exploitation of the working class at the hands of royal pageantry. Herdman’s analysis of the scathing (and often humorous) critiques in Reynolds’s Newspaper contributes to scholarship on Reynolds’s influence in working-class history and the development of the mass popular press.