George William MacArthur Reynolds (23 July 1814 – 19 June 1879) was a British author and journalist. Reynolds was a prolific writer of popular fiction starting from The Youthful Imposter, published in 1835. Virtually forgotten now, in his lifetime he was more read than Dickens or Thackeray; in his obituary, the trade magazine The Bookseller called Reynolds "the most popular writer of our times". His best-known work was the long-running serial The Mysteries of London (1844), which borrowed liberally in concept from Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris). It sold 40,000 copies a week in penny instalments and over a million copies cumulatively before it was issued in bound volumes, enjoying an international circulation in French, German, Italian, and Spanish translations. Although (or perhaps because) it was outlawed by the authorities, the German version achieved the status of a cult favourite on the Russian black market.
