I, Dynamo

Alright! We’re down to the nitty gritty. It’s time to admit that the United States are not united; they are a group of dissimilar peoples, all of which have formed their own communities, semi-autonomous peoples under the guidance of the Democrats. The Dems have placed them above the natives, a privileged congeries of nationalities with all kinds of benefits denied the citizens. It is no use saying this must be stopped as the new immigrants are supported by a huge fifth column inside the established state.

It is clear that this fifth column is bought by essentially stolen tax funds. It is clear who constitutes this fifth column, and while we have a president who knows the situation and is intent on reversing it, huge criminal elements of the judiciary are intent on foiling his good intentions. Investigate every member of the judiciary noting their finances. There is no need for trials, they are traitors. They’re all lawyers, just disbar them and put them under house arrest.

There is no reason to go the public expense of jailtime. Just deny them any public employment. Quit messing around, this is serious, do or die.

Just now ·

While we’re talking about the Ancients here, let us take a moment to consider the creation of a very important item, that of the Zodiac. The Zodiac was an idea not born in the local pub by a few inebriated celebrants. It didn’t come into existence over a generation. No, lit was a long thought out result of an acute astronomical study by generations of the priesthood. The priests were the original scholars. In my youth we sneered at priesthoods and laughed them to scorn. Nevertheless civilization has its base in the priesthoods and as this Great Year we are in is generally considered to be the fourth, the Zodiac had its germ way back a hundred thousand years ago.

The Zodiac was never intended to be a fortune telling tool. It began as a calendar divided into 12 units just as the terrestrial year is of twelve units. Over the Great Years it also appears to have become a weather predictor. The twelve Ages of about 2100 years each can be grouped into four seasons that corresponds to the annual year. If we begin with Easter as the new year the groupings Pisces, Aires, and Taurus as the Great Year summer And Gemini, Cancer and Leo as the Spring. Scorpio, Libra and Virgo as the Winter of each recurring ice age. Aquarius, Capricorn and Sagittarius then is the Fall. This series of seasons recurs every twenty-six thousand years.

12-13 thousand years ago Spring and Summer of the Great Year began. We are now entering the Age of Aquarius or Autumn. That’s the calendar and we now get to the weather. Just as in the annual year each season has its own particular weather. In other words, turning to astronomy, the earth’s position vis a vis the Sun changes. Weather phenomena will necessarily be different for the various seasons. If you notice the symbol for Aquarius is a boy pouring water from a jug unto Earth. Therefore we may conclude that the next 2100 years are going to be in various stages of wet. The wet period is not caused by human activities it is inevitable and unavoidable. The only reaction to it can be adaptation. Everything we have known now becomes wrong. Adapt or die. (Cont.)

How the Earth’s position to the sun changes next.

A DEMAND FOR A WRITTEN APOLOGY TO HENRY FORD FROM THE AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE

The following paragraph from Licktman and Brightman’s FDR and the Jews corroborates Henry Ford’s writings in the International Jew for which he was crucified

Quote:

Leaders of the American Jewish Committee united with Zionists to support the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 in which Britain promised a ‘National Homeland’ for Jews in Palestine, but not explicitly a Jewish state (which Committee leaders mostly opposed). They also agreed to proposals to establish a “bill of rights” for Jews living in newly created European states at the end of the war. Postwar treaties incorporated both the Balfour Declaration and on-paper protection for Jewish minorities although not the full safeguards of Jewish bill of rights.

Unquote.

So there you have it, Henry Ford was absolutely correct. Let’s have a repudiation of Ford’s false apology and an authentic one from the American Jewish Committee

The Roosevelt Effect:

The Tyranny Has Arrived

by

R.E. Prindle

There is nothing more clear, this Baltimore Bridge thing is an act of war.  If the Iranians didn’t do it I will be more than amazed.  We have had clear threats from the Iranians that the war would be brought home to us.  The Bridge is a first example.  Others will follow.

The US cannot go around bombing everyone without expecting retaliations.  Twin Towers, this bridge, the continual burning of US forests, when will we officially acknowledge that these are all acts of war?  Things can only get worse.

The mad men are in control.  They have dropped all their masks and repudiate all laws and customs in the attempt to destroy Trump.  They have returned to the Stone Age.  The mad Biden/Obama, Obama/Biden administrations are not going to give up power unless absolutely forced to.  They are tyrants in the original ancient Greek sense and they govern tyrannically. 

The final means of preventing Trump resuming his presidency is allow the election but by declaring a state of emergency and instituting martial lar preventing his inauguration much as Roosevelt did in 1940 when he sought his third term.  Upon election in 1932 he ‘declared war on the depression’ and was given full war time powers, hence becoming a dictator and establishing a tyranny until his death.  Democratic actions have and are closely following Roosevelt’s procedures.  The only thing that prevented a post war tyranny was the fortunate death of Roosevelt in early 1945 and the accession of VP Harry Trueman.  There will be no saving us this time unless we invade the White House and bodily eject Joe Biden and his buddy Barack Obama, immediately declaring a state of emergency and martial law.  Direct action is required. 

These are the times for all good men to come to the aid of their party.

Mar 9, 2024

By Pamela Andrews aka Daughter of Babylon

God & Jesus Discuss the Challenge of Holy Daughter of Babylon

Jesus: Why’d you leave? Why’d you walk away like that?
God: Life’s too short, kid.

Jesus: Where you goin’?

God: I’m goin’ on a permanent vacation.

Jesus: What do you mean? We got one more war.

God: No, no. Not “we”. You.

Jesus: Why are you doin’ this? – I said, why you doin’ this? –

God: Because you can’t win Son! This girl will kill you to death inside of three days.

Jesus: You’re crazy. –

God: What else is new?

Jesus: She’s just another anti-christ.

God: No, She ain’t. This girl is a wreckin’ machine. And She’s hungry. You ain’t been hungry since The Last Supper.

Jesus: What? I ruled for 20 centuries. –

God: That was easy!

Jesus: What do you mean, easy? –

God: Your enemies were hand-picked!

Jesus: Set-ups? –

God: No, they weren’t set-ups! They were strong enemies of the Church & Me. But they wasn’t killers, like this Girl. She’ll knock ya into tomorrow, Son.

Jesus: Jeez, Dad..Why’d you do it?

God: Because the beating that you got from the Romans shoulda killed you, kid. It didn’t. It was my job to keep you on top, and to keep you healthy.

All Roads Lead to Sigmund Freud

by

R.E. Prindle

Texts:

Bernays, Edward,: The Edward Bernays Reader, From Propaganda To The Engineering Of Consent, Ig Publishing, 2021

Freud, Sigmund:  Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego, Standard Ediition, 1922

Le Bon, Gustave:  The Crowd: A Study Of The Popular Mind, 1895

Samuel, Maurice:  You Gentiles, 1924

Read that subtitle carefully they are both titles of works by the Jewish propagandist Edward Bernays.  Now turning the book over let us read the sales pitch:

Quote,

Edward Bernays (1891-1995) was a pioneer in the art of propaganda and public persuasion.  Combining theories on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytic ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays elucidated how public opinion could be shaped.  His seminal 1928 book, Propaganda, laid out how propaganda could be used to regiment the collective mind, while his 1923 classic, Crystallizing Public Opinion set down the principles that business and government have used to influence public attitudes over the past century.

Unquote.

Let examine this innocuous sounding text.  In Bernays work:  Propaganda he attempt to make positive a term that has always had negative connotations.  In general it meant probably using untruths to get people to do what you want and they don’t. In other words he says that now propaganda can be good thing ignoring the element of lying in the term. And then in 1923 he published Crystallizing  Public Opiniion which I understand to mean converting you propaganda into incontrovertible stone.  The public then accepts the propaganda which may or may not be beneficial for them into ‘truth.’  So, Bernays is corrupting the integrity of the word.  He then goes on to explain the method, ‘engineering’ public opinion, or, how to achieve your goal essentially by hypnotizing your public.

Note this was written and published openly.  Nothing clandestine here.  Now note how these ideas  were put into use during the Roosevelt administration from 1932 to 1945.  Then extend the method to the open corruption of the current Biden administration.

Now Freud read Le Bons The Crowd sometime after 1895 as he was forming his ideas on psychology based on the ideas of the French psychologists Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre  Janet.

Freud’s ideas jelled after the disaster of World War I.  One can’t be sure but perhaps Freud saw the astounding success of George Creels effort of propagandizing and crystallizing public opinion in the United States with his and President Wilson’s Committee on Public Information.  There was the matrix for Freud’s Group Psychology.  Creel requires a separate study as do the years 1920 to 1925. 

The crux of the matter was the failure of its advocates to persuade Americans to accept the League of Nations.  Out of that failure came the Counsel of Forgeing Affairs who collaborated or adopted Freud and Bernays’ formulation   Propaganda and the Engineering of Consent which today is pursued so relentlessly on the internet.

Due to the interface on the internet when opinions counter to official doctrine can be denied with no discussion.

I will develop this further.

Investigating A Border Incident

by

R.E. Prindle 

The Israeli-Moslem war erupted again with the regularity of Mount Etna.  There is nothing rare or unexpected in these conflicts.  For seventy years they have been counted on for activity.  Unfortunately there is nothing more tragic in this eruption than the many horrors of the seventy year history between these two peoples or nations preceding this one.

Perhaps not too strangely  the Jewish Nation is equally or predominantly  guilty in this border incident as well as the war going on further North on the plains of the Ukraine and Russia.  It is to be noted that the Jewish nature bears hatred deep within its heart toward both the Ukraine and Russia.  In other words  they would like to see both nations dead and their names wiped from the maps.  What better way to do it than to set them at each other’s throats, mutual annihilation, while the war is waged at the expense of Europe and the United States.

Is it strange that no one, neither the US nor the EU, both controlled by the Jewish Nation, don’t want a calmer Europe?  Why has there been no attempt for a cease fire and negotiation for peace?  The acting President of the United States, Joe Biden, is extending himself to unconstitutionally throw fuel on the fire.  Why does he want to see Ukrainians and Russians die?  He sends billions of dollars worth of high tech weapons to the Ukraine without which they would long ago been conquered and the war ended.  He finances the Ukraine with tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to keep them in the fight.  Why?  Where is that money disappearing to?

And now a mere flareup on the Israeli=Gaza border while the Ukraine=Russia war is no longer in the news.  This is beginning to sound like the Wag the Dog movie.

Netanyahu is calling for a genocide to remove Gazans from the map.  According to reports a genocide is happening in the Ukraine where its manhood is lowly being wiped out on the battle front.  Its original army is said to have been entirely annihilated.  The dirty work done by the US and Eu while the Jewish Nation stands by with folded hands.

Many millions have already fled the Ukraine for greener pastures in the EU and the US.  What will happen should the Ukraine be depopulated?  Israel is seriously over populated.  It is nearing the point  where it is unlivable.  Where might to surplus population find ‘lebensraum?’ 

North to the depopulated Ukraine.  Perhaps the Ukraine will change identity and fly the Israeli flag.  Is that the desired end result?

Joe Biden, the EU, and NATO, you began this carnage, this attempt at double genocide. You fellows stop it.  NOW.  Yes, stop it now.  Enough of this nonsense. 

No more revolution.

End the war.

Spare the planet.

The Universe is watching.

A Review

Canonbury House by Susannah Reynolds, Wife of George W. M. Reynolds

And

Mary Queen Of Scots by George W.M. Reynolds

Review by R.E. Prindle

As you can tell by my attribution of Canonbury House to Susannah Reynolds, Georges wife I’m making a claim that needs explaining.  Let me establish my grounds for such a claim by reviewing circumstances of the couple at the time. 

‘Canonbury House was written from 11 July 1857-1 May 1858, first published in the Reynolds Miscellany in parts.

At the time the Reynolds were living in the resort town of Ramsgate in Georges home shire, Kent.  They had removed from London in 1854.  Susannah died in Ramsgate during 1858.

From those facts I surmise that Susannah was ill, suffering from a wasting disease.  Further, my guess is that she was suffering from breast cancer.  You may think that’s a leap.

Consider, George was  a breast fetishist, quite clearly shown in all his writing.  He was first magnitude.  He writes marvelous descriptions of the female breast, they are frequent and quite detailed.  On a few occasions he mentions breasts disfigured by cancers.  Unless he was unfaithful to Susannah, which I can’t conceive, where else would he have seen them?  Hence, I don’t think it is a great leap to think Susannah so suffered.  She died early, only forty four years old assuming she was George’s age, perhaps one or two years younger than her husband.  She may have been only sixteen when she married an eighteen year old George.  Is female characters are quite frequently sixteen.  As Georges work really required him to be in London, the move to Ramsgate probably to make Susannah’s last year more comfortable points to a wasting disease such as breast cancer.

At that time, according to Guy Dicks and his biography of his relative, Georges publisher, John Dicks, the two partners were each pulling down a hundred pounds a week from their business, so that at least at fifty two hundred pounds a year, the Reynolds were prosperous enough to live comfortably and, indeed, George bought a substantial free standing house in Ramsgate.

However George was yet to finish volume four of the  ‘Mysteries of the Court of London’ which work shows definite signs of divided attention.  Thus between making frequent trips to London and tending to his beloved Susannah his writing was definitely affected.

Now, Susannah herself was a novelist with some few titles to her credit including her novel ‘Gretna Green.’  One may assume that with greater leisure in Ramsgate she sought to create her Magnum Opus.  I have a slight acquaintance with Gretna Green in an unreadable OCR copy so I can form no adequate opinion on her earlier work although I do have a readable first edition of her Canonbury House.  That novel is acceptable work although inferior to Georges if only compared to his last work Mary, Queen of Scots published a year after ‘Canonbury House.’  Therefor, comparing hi work before and after ‘Canonbury House’ it isn’t likely that he wrote it.  As a key ingredient of his work hers contains no description of women’s breasts, not even those of Queen Mary.

As stated earlier the book took nearly a year to write, thirty installments in the Miscellany.   My copy of the published book by John Dicks has notes on he fly leaf from a former owner as well as those that appear to be from a book seller.

There is a penciled and erased signature from Arthur Reynolds, perhaps one of Georges sons. There is a full page faint erased text that might be made readable by electronic means.  A strong hand with a good pencil has written ‘First thus 1870- complete in 30 penny parts.’  As the installments were published in the Miscellany there shouldn’t be 30 penny parts unless there was a second publication by Dicks. Between 1857-58 and 1870 and also issued separately in 7 parts.  So, quite a publishing history.

Perhaps a bereaved Reynolds did his best to make it a seller or perhaps Queen Elizabeth was still hot copy.

John Dicks, who controlled the publishing schedule of Reynolds massive output apparently held back the book release until 1870.  It was his habit to date publications only on the initial issue.  The novel is relatively short at 237 double columned pages.  Small print.

Now, the last novel of Georges was an incident in the live of Mary Queen of Scots making it a companion piece to Susannah’.  It follows Susannah’s plan fairly closely.  Comparatively, Georges style is more fluent and the story is better constructed so that is impossible to think both novels came from the same hand.  I think it fairly obvious that Canonbury House must have been written by a failing Susannah. Perhaps Mary, Queen of Scots was Georges love letter to his beloved and deceased wife.  He was desolated.  He never remarried.

Canonbury House is a sort of mystery of which Queen Elizabeth is the central character.  I’m all spoilers here but you will probably never see a copy of the book.  No problem.

The story hinges on the maternity of a off-central character, the beauteous Ada Arundel.  No one knew who her parents were but she had always lived in the household of the richest commoner in England, the honourable Richard Spencer currently the Mayor of the City of London.  A substantial fellow, the Mayor of the City of London.

The Mayor of the City of London isn’t the mayor of the geographical city but of the Square Mile of the financial district.  The rest of London is all suburbs.  The Mayor of the City is independent of the Crown. It is subordinate to Parliament.  Spencer is not a noble but a man of business.  Still, he is the Mayor of the City and the richest commoner of England.

Once the mysteries are cleared up after the reading of the book one can go on and reflect about some of the deeper meanings of the story.

The point is that Queen Elizabeth would never be seen dead in this commoner’s house  except for the circumstances and Spencer’s position.

The subtext here seems to be that Elizabeth was known as the virgin queen but she was not.  Susannah seems to take great pleasure in exposing Elizabeth, except its just her private joke at this point.  Elizabeth had an illegitimate daughter which means that she was a fallen woman no better than any other fallen woman.  According to Susannah the secret began when her child was given to family that had just given birth to a still born and they agreed to take Elizabeth’s child and raise it as their own.

It is now thirty years on and we are not give any information on Ada’s birth.  The queen has been longing to learn what happened to her child.  She has no hint that she is sitting across from her daughter not does Ada know she is looking at her long lost mother.

If we readers had known this the story would have taken quite a different turn.  Perhaps for a better story.  Susannah then wrote the novel without a hint of the true situation keeping it as a surprise.

Without being critical, it is Susannah’s story, I wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to reverse the situation and make Ada’s maternity apparent from the start then basing the story on Elizabeth’s discovery. 

Now, all novels are necessarily auto-biographical.  In Georges case he suffered from logorrhea.  Out of his millions of words one can easily determine the defining events of his life as he works them through a few of his repeating themes. As Susannah is leading us into a situation  in which the result is that the queen isn’t any better than she should be, her case is no different than she should be.  Her case is no different than the tens o thousands, hundreds of thousands of ordinary women who suffered the consequences of fallen women. And that might lead to single woman who fell- that is Susannah herself.  The only possible proof is in the pudding, that is the novel, ‘Canonbury House.’

Susannah’s history prior to her marriage isn’t known, however George consistently portrayed the fallen women, always in a sympathetic manner, who were seduced to their ruin, her greatest treasure stolen.

As far as we can conjecture Susannah Pierson was still with her father when  she met George.  Her age at that time was probably sixteen, George being eighteen.  Most of George’s heroines in his novels are sixteen. The loveliness of the sixteen year old stands out in all his novels.

In his novel ‘The Youthful Impostor’, written in 1932, rewritten and published in 1935, looking back a few years to an early friendship, his protagonist, Crawford, meets a shady character named Pearson, a man of the world in France, possibly Calais, not clear, given the similarity of names that Pearson represented the father of Susannah Pierson.  The names are too similar to be coincidental.

Pearson appears to be some high class grifter who was very wise, as in wiseguy and familiar with all the petty cheats and scams that only a fellow grifter would know.  He and Crawford are in a French gambling hell and the two watch a grifter clean out a mark.   Task done he gets up to leave.  As he does Pearson tells Crawford ‘Watch this.’ 

He then approaches the grifter whispering a few words in his ear,  the grifter, the grifter then follows him to his table and lays down half of his take and casually strolls away.  Crawford is dumbfounded.  Pearson explains:  If a grifter sees another working a mark, to keep his silence the other grifter must pay out half, which is what happened.  Crawford’s, that is Reynolds eyes are opened.  That’s what it means to be a man of the world.

As Crawford was on the way to Paris in company with Pickwick and his friends as well as the grifter Augustus Crashem and a man who was a gendarme closely resembling Pearson in appearance and manner, the Gendarme who will turn out to be the friendly Dumont watches with a know eye but does nothing as Crashem works his scam.  Perhaps he tapped Crashem for half..

Pearson and his daughter associating as they must with a shady crowd if is possible if not probable that a cute fourteen or fifteen year old girl might have been seduced and ruined which seared her soul causing total anguish that expiated itself in slandering a dead Queen Elizabethl by revealing something she knew or thought she knew thereby purifying her soul as she lay dying.  The poor girl and the privileged girl were the same.

‘Canonbury House’ wasn’t Susannah’s only novel; she wrote four or five others.  A batch of kids, running the household, helping George with his novels, writing her own as well as a cookbook,  what a woman.  No wonder George treasured her.  I have a wretched OCR copy of her novel ‘Gretna Green’ that might be a little revealing.  From the title I thought it might have been a biographical novel about a woman named Gretna Green, but study led me to a different conclusion. 

As it was, in the eighteenth century young lords were marrying common girls that infuriated their parents so in 1745 a law was passed making any such marriages invalid.  That was only an impediment not a blockade.  Enterprising souls in Scotland living in a small town called Gretna Green analyzed the situation then some fellow, blacksmiths and such got themselves ordained as ministers and began marrying the young swains and their commoner girlfriends, the marriages were legal in England. 

Thus the roads leading to Gretna Green were well traveled.  As the parents were on the alert ready to prevent such alliances, there was often a mad dash for the Scottish border by the young lovers closely followed by the parents or their agents to prevent such a folly.  Whoever got there first won the race.

If the young lovers won the race they got married; if the parents the ecclesiastic blacksmiths went empty handed.  Such is life.

Now, if opportunity was created for a blacksmith who had a limited number of horses to shoe, that law and its resultant Gretna Green created opportunities  or aspiring novelists as well. Susannah put that shoe on and wrote Gretna Green.

What is the relationship of Gretna Green to Canonsbury House?  You can be that those young lovers didn’t wait for the knot to be tied before they consummated the marriage; hence the young ladies who had given away their greatest treasure were technically ruined women before that marriage.  If the parents won the race the technicality was removed.  The girls were ruined.

Thus Susannah could portray several ruined young ladies by which she could possibly relive her own tragedy.   Gretna Green was apparently pretty racy for the time because it aroused a fair reaction.  It was even suggested that perhaps she knew of that which she spoke.

George complained about this abuse of his wife but it is not known whether he received satisfaction.  I rather suspect that Susannah got a fair amount of satisfaction by exposing the Virgin Queen.  The resolution then of Susannah’s Canonbury House.

How did Ada Arundel react to learning who her mother was and that mother being the Queen of England who embraced her as her long lost daughter?

Rather a tragic ending.  Ada was so overjoyed that she burst a blood vessel in her brain and died from the joy that was so overwhelming.  Let us hope that Susannah felt redeemed if my speculation is correct.

Having finished reading the novel and looking back at the beginning one appreciates the irony that in Canonbury House mother and daughter are looking at each other not realizing that they are seeing their heart’s desire.  One might think that there should have been enough familial resemblance between the Queen and Ada  to create suspicion.

But, in a spiteful admission Susannah mentions that Elizabeth had never been a handsome woman and that Ada was stunningly beautiful so no surprise there. 

I don’t know how contemporaries  would have read the novel or what their reaction might have been.  I don’t know whether Susannah maliciously invented the story or had heard some rumor, in any event Ada died so that the evidence disappeared.

I don’t feel it necessary to detail the development of the novel as it was fairly pedestrian while Susannah was not at her peak for health reasons.

A Review

Canonbury House by Susannah Reynolds

And

Mary Queen Of Scots by George W.M. Reynolds

Review by R.E. Prindle

As you can tell by my attribution of Canonbury House to Susannah Reynolds, Georges wife I’m making a claim that needs explaining.  Let me establish my grounds for such a claim by reviewing circumstances of the couple at the time. 

‘Canonbury House was written from 11 July 1857-1 May 1858, first published in the Reynolds Miscellany in parts.

At the time the Reynolds were living in the resort town of Ramsgate in Georges home shire, Kent.  They had removed from London in 1854.  Susannah died in Ramsgate during 1858.

From those facts I surmise that Susannah was ill, suffering from a wasting disease.  Further, my guess is that she was suffering from breast cancer.  You may think that’s a leap.

Consider, George was  a breast fetishist, quite clearly shown in all his writing.  He was first magnitude.  He writes marvelous descriptions of the female breast, they are frequent and quite detailed.  On a few occasions he mentions breasts disfigured by cancers.  Unless he was unfaithful to Susannah, which I can’t conceive, where else would he have seen them?  Hence, I don’t think it is a great leap to think Susannah so suffered.  She died early, only forty four years old assuming she was George’s age, perhaps one or two years younger than her husband.  She may have been only sixteen when she married an eighteen year old George.  Is female characters are quite frequently sixteen.  As Georges work really required him to be in London, the move to Ramsgate probably to make Susannah’s last year more comfortable points to a wasting disease such as breast cancer.

At that time, according to Guy Dicks and his biography of his relative, Georges publisher, John Dicks, the two partners were each pulling down a hundred pounds a week from their business, so that at least at fifty two hundred pounds a year, the Reynolds were prosperous enough to live comfortably and, indeed, George bought a substantial free standing house in Ramsgate.

However George was yet to finish volume four of the  ‘Mysteries of the Court of London’ which work shows definite signs of divided attention.  Thus between making frequent trips to London and tending to his beloved Susannah his writing was definitely affected.

Now, Susannah herself was a novelist with some few titles to her credit including her novel ‘Gretna Green.’  One may assume that with greater leisure in Ramsgate she sought to create her Magnum Opus.  I have a slight acquaintance with Gretna Green in an unreadable OCR copy so I can form no adequate opinion on her earlier work although I do have a readable first edition of her Canonbury House.  That novel is acceptable work although inferior to Georges if only compared to his last work Mary, Queen of Scots published a year after ‘Canonbury House.’  Therefor, comparing hi work before and after ‘Canonbury House’ it isn’t likely that he wrote it.  As a key ingredient of his work hers contains no description of women’s breasts, not even those of Queen Mary.

As stated earlier the book took nearly a year to write, thirty installments in the Miscellany.   My copy of the published book by John Dicks has notes on he fly leaf from a former owner as well as those that appear to be from a book seller.

There is a penciled and erased signature from Arthur Reynolds, perhaps one of Georges sons. There is a full page faint erased text that might be made readable by electronic means.  A strong hand with a good pencil has written ‘First thus 1870- complete in 30 penny parts.’  As the installments were published in the Miscellany there shouldn’t be 30 penny parts unless there was a second publication by Dicks. Between 1857-58 and 1870 and also issued separately in 7 parts.  So, quite a publishing history.

Perhaps a bereaved Reynolds did his best to make it a seller or perhaps Queen Elizabeth was still hot copy.

John Dicks, who controlled the publishing schedule of Reynolds massive output apparently held back the book release until 1870.  It was his habit to date publications only on the initial issue.  The novel is relatively short at 237 double columned pages.  Small print.

Now, the last novel of Georges was an incident in the live of Mary Queen of Scots making it a companion piece to Susannah’.  It follows Susannah’s plan fairly closely.  Comparatively, Georges style is more fluent and the story is better constructed so that is impossible to think both novels came from the same hand.  I think it fairly obvious that Canonbury House must have been written by a failing Susannah. Perhaps Mary, Queen of Scots was Georges love letter to his beloved and deceased wife.  He was desolated.  He never remarried.

Canonbury House is a sort of mystery of which Queen Elizabeth is the central character.  I’m all spoilers here but you will probably never see a copy of the book.  No problem.

The story hinges on the maternity of a off-central character, the beauteous Ada Arundel.  No one knew who her parents were but she had always lived in the household of the richest commoner in England, the honourable Richard Spencer currently the Mayor of the City of London.  A substantial fellow, the Mayor of the City of London.

The Mayor of the City of London isn’t the mayor of the geographical city but of the Square Mile of the financial district.  The rest of London is all suburbs.  The Mayor of the City is independent of the Crown. It is subordinate to Parliament.  Spencer is not a noble but a man of business.  Still, he is the Mayor of the City and the richest commoner of England.

Once the mysteries are cleared up after the reading of the book one can go on and reflect about some of the deeper meanings of the story.

The point is that Queen Elizabeth would never be seen dead in this commoner’s house  except for the circumstances and Spencer’s position.

The subtext here seems to be that Elizabeth was known as the virgin queen but she was not.  Susannah seems to take great pleasure in exposing Elizabeth, except its just her private joke at this point.  Elizabeth had an illegitimate daughter which means that she was a fallen woman no better than any other fallen woman.  According to Susannah the secret began when her child was given to family that had just given birth to a still born and they agreed to take Elizabeth’s child and raise it as their own.

It is now thirty years on and we are not give any information on Ada’s birth.  The queen has been longing to learn what happened to her child.  She has no hint that she is sitting across from her daughter not does Ada know she is looking at her long lost mother.

If we readers had known this the story would have taken quite a different turn.  Perhaps for a better story.  Susannah then wrote the novel without a hint of the true situation keeping it as a surprise.

Without being critical, it is Susannah’s story, I wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to reverse the situation and make Ada’s maternity apparent from the start then basing the story on Elizabeth’s discovery. 

Now, all novels are necessarily auto-biographical.  In Georges case he suffered from logorrhea.  Out of his millions of words one can easily determine the defining events of his life as he works them through a few of his repeating themes. As Susannah is leading us into a situation  in which the result is that the queen isn’t any better than she should be, her case is no different than she should be.  Her case is no different than the tens o thousands, hundreds of thousands of ordinary women who suffered the consequences of fallen women. And that might lead to single woman who fell- that is Susannah herself.  The only possible proof is in the pudding, that is the novel, ‘Canonbury House.’

Susannah’s history prior to her marriage isn’t known, however George consistently portrayed the fallen women, always in a sympathetic manner, who were seduced to their ruin, her greatest treasure stolen.

As far as we can conjecture Susannah Pierson was still with her father when  she met George.  Her age at that time was probably sixteen, George being eighteen.  Most of George’s heroines in his novels are sixteen. The loveliness of the sixteen year old stands out in all his novels.

In his novel ‘The Youthful Impostor’, written in 1932, rewritten and published in 1935, looking back a few years to an early friendship, his protagonist, Crawford, meets a shady character named Pearson, a man of the world in France, possibly Calais, not clear, given the similarity of names that Pearson represented the father of Susannah Pierson.  The names are too similar to be coincidental.

Pearson appears to be some high class grifter who was very wise, as in wiseguy and familiar with all the petty cheats and scams that only a fellow grifter would know.  He and Crawford are in a French gambling hell and the two watch a grifter clean out a mark.   Task done he gets up to leave.  As he does Pearson tells Crawford ‘Watch this.’ 

He then approaches the grifter whispering a few words in his ear,  the grifter, the grifter then follows him to his table and lays down half of his take and casually strolls away.  Crawford is dumbfounded.  Pearson explains:  If a grifter sees another working a mark, to keep his silence the other grifter must pay out half, which is what happened.  Crawford’s, that is Reynolds eyes are opened.  That’s what it means to be a man of the world.

As Crawford was on the way to Paris in company with Pickwick and his friends as well as the grifter Augustus Crashem and a man who was a gendarme closely resembling Pearson in appearance and manner, the Gendarme who will turn out to be the friendly Dumont watches with a know eye but does nothing as Crashem works his scam.  Perhaps he tapped Crashem for half..

Pearson and his daughter associating as they must with a shady crowd if is possible if not probable that a cute fourteen or fifteen year old girl might have been seduced and ruined which seared her soul causing total anguish that expiated itself in slandering a dead Queen Elizabethl by revealing something she knew or thought she knew thereby purifying her soul as she lay dying.  The poor girl and the privileged girl were the same.

‘Canonbury House’ wasn’t Susannah’s only novel; she wrote four or five others.  A batch of kids, running the household, helping George with his novels, writing her own as well as a cookbook,  what a woman.  No wonder George treasured her.  I have a wretched OCR copy of her novel ‘Gretna Green’ that might be a little revealing.  From the title I thought it might have been a biographical novel about a woman named Gretna Green, but study led me to a different conclusion. 

As it was, in the eighteenth century young lords were marrying common girls that infuriated their parents so in 1745 a law was passed making any such marriages invalid.  That was only an impediment not a blockade.  Enterprising souls in Scotland living in a small town called Gretna Green analyzed the situation then some fellow, blacksmiths and such got themselves ordained as ministers and began marrying the young swains and their commoner girlfriends, the marriages were legal in England. 

Thus the roads leading to Gretna Green were well traveled.  As the parents were on the alert ready to prevent such alliances, there was often a mad dash for the Scottish border by the young lovers closely followed by the parents or their agents to prevent such a folly.  Whoever got there first won the race.

If the young lovers won the race they got married; if the parents the ecclesiastic blacksmiths went empty handed.  Such is life.

Now, if opportunity was created for a blacksmith who had a limited number of horses to shoe, that law and its resultant Gretna Green created opportunities  or aspiring novelists as well. Susannah put that shoe on and wrote Gretna Green.

What is the relationship of Gretna Green to Canonsbury House?  You can be that those young lovers didn’t wait for the knot to be tied before they consummated the marriage; hence the young ladies who had given away their greatest treasure were technically ruined women before that marriage.  If the parents won the race the technicality was removed.  The girls were ruined.

Thus Susannah could portray several ruined young ladies by which she could possibly relive her own tragedy.   Gretna Green was apparently pretty racy for the time because it aroused a fair reaction.  It was even suggested that perhaps she knew of that which she spoke.

George complained about this abuse of his wife but it is not known whether he received satisfaction.  I rather suspect that Susannah got a fair amount of satisfaction by exposing the Virgin Queen.  The resolution then of Susannah’s Canonbury House.

How did Ada Arundel react to learning who her mother was and that mother being the Queen of England who embraced her as her long lost daughter?

Rather a tragic ending.  Ada was so overjoyed that she burst a blood vessel in her brain and died from the joy that was so overwhelming.  Let us hope that Susannah felt redeemed if my speculation is correct.

Having finished reading the novel and looking back at the beginning one appreciates the irony that in Canonbury House mother and daughter are looking at each other not realizing that they are seeing their heart’s desire.  One might think that there should have been enough familial resemblance between the Queen and Ada  to create suspicion.

But, in a spiteful admission Susannah mentions that Elizabeth had never been a handsome woman and that Ada was stunningly beautiful so no surprise there. 

I don’t know how contemporaries  would have read the novel or what their reaction might have been.  I don’t know whether Susannah maliciously invented the story or had heard some rumor, in any event Ada died so that the evidence disappeared.

I don’t feel it necessary to detail the development of the novel as it was fairly pedestrian while Susannah was not at her peak for health reasons.

A Review

Canonbury House by Susannah Reynolds

And

Mary Queen Of Scots by George W.M. Reynolds

Review by R.E. Prindle

As you can tell by my attribution of Canonbury House to Susannah Reynolds, Georges wife I’m making a claim that needs explaining.  Let me establish my grounds for such a claim by reviewing circumstances of the couple at the time. 

‘Canonbury House was written from 11 July 1857-1 May 1858, first published in the Reynolds Miscellany in parts.

At the time the Reynolds were living in the resort town of Ramsgate in Georges home shire, Kent.  They had removed from London in 1854.  Susannah died in Ramsgate during 1858.

From those facts I surmise that Susannah was ill, suffering from a wasting disease.  Further, my guess is that she was suffering from breast cancer.  You may think that’s a leap.

Consider, George was  a breast fetishist, quite clearly shown in all his writing.  He was first magnitude.  He writes marvelous descriptions of the female breast, they are frequent and quite detailed.  On a few occasions he mentions breasts disfigured by cancers.  Unless he was unfaithful to Susannah, which I can’t conceive, where else would he have seen them?  Hence, I don’t think it is a great leap to think Susannah so suffered.  She died early, only forty four years old assuming she was George’s age, perhaps one or two years younger than her husband.  She may have been only sixteen when she married an eighteen year old George.  Is female characters are quite frequently sixteen.  As Georges work really required him to be in London, the move to Ramsgate probably to make Susannah’s last year more comfortable points to a wasting disease such as breast cancer.

At that time, according to Guy Dicks and his biography of his relative, Georges publisher, John Dicks, the two partners were each pulling down a hundred pounds a week from their business, so that at least at fifty two hundred pounds a year, the Reynolds were prosperous enough to live comfortably and, indeed, George bought a substantial free standing house in Ramsgate.

However George was yet to finish volume four of the  ‘Mysteries of the Court of London’ which work shows definite signs of divided attention.  Thus between making frequent trips to London and tending to his beloved Susannah his writing was definitely affected.

Now, Susannah herself was a novelist with some few titles to her credit including her novel ‘Gretna Green.’  One may assume that with greater leisure in Ramsgate she sought to create her Magnum Opus.  I have a slight acquaintance with Gretna Green in an unreadable OCR copy so I can form no adequate opinion on her earlier work although I do have a readable first edition of her Canonbury House.  That novel is acceptable work although inferior to Georges if only compared to his last work Mary, Queen of Scots published a year after ‘Canonbury House.’  Therefor, comparing hi work before and after ‘Canonbury House’ it isn’t likely that he wrote it.  As a key ingredient of his work hers contains no description of women’s breasts, not even those of Queen Mary.

As stated earlier the book took nearly a year to write, thirty installments in the Miscellany.   My copy of the published book by John Dicks has notes on he fly leaf from a former owner as well as those that appear to be from a book seller.

There is a penciled and erased signature from Arthur Reynolds, perhaps one of Georges sons. There is a full page faint erased text that might be made readable by electronic means.  A strong hand with a good pencil has written ‘First thus 1870- complete in 30 penny parts.’  As the installments were published in the Miscellany there shouldn’t be 30 penny parts unless there was a second publication by Dicks. Between 1857-58 and 1870 and also issued separately in 7 parts.  So, quite a publishing history.

Perhaps a bereaved Reynolds did his best to make it a seller or perhaps Queen Elizabeth was still hot copy.

John Dicks, who controlled the publishing schedule of Reynolds massive output apparently held back the book release until 1870.  It was his habit to date publications only on the initial issue.  The novel is relatively short at 237 double columned pages.  Small print.

Now, the last novel of Georges was an incident in the live of Mary Queen of Scots making it a companion piece to Susannah’.  It follows Susannah’s plan fairly closely.  Comparatively, Georges style is more fluent and the story is better constructed so that is impossible to think both novels came from the same hand.  I think it fairly obvious that Canonbury House must have been written by a failing Susannah. Perhaps Mary, Queen of Scots was Georges love letter to his beloved and deceased wife.  He was desolated.  He never remarried.

Canonbury House is a sort of mystery of which Queen Elizabeth is the central character.  I’m all spoilers here but you will probably never see a copy of the book.  No problem.

The story hinges on the maternity of a off-central character, the beauteous Ada Arundel.  No one knew who her parents were but she had always lived in the household of the richest commoner in England, the honourable Richard Spencer currently the Mayor of the City of London.  A substantial fellow, the Mayor of the City of London.

The Mayor of the City of London isn’t the mayor of the geographical city but of the Square Mile of the financial district.  The rest of London is all suburbs.  The Mayor of the City is independent of the Crown. It is subordinate to Parliament.  Spencer is not a noble but a man of business.  Still, he is the Mayor of the City and the richest commoner of England.

Once the mysteries are cleared up after the reading of the book one can go on and reflect about some of the deeper meanings of the story.

The point is that Queen Elizabeth would never be seen dead in this commoner’s house  except for the circumstances and Spencer’s position.

The subtext here seems to be that Elizabeth was known as the virgin queen but she was not.  Susannah seems to take great pleasure in exposing Elizabeth, except its just her private joke at this point.  Elizabeth had an illegitimate daughter which means that she was a fallen woman no better than any other fallen woman.  According to Susannah the secret began when her child was given to family that had just given birth to a still born and they agreed to take Elizabeth’s child and raise it as their own.

It is now thirty years on and we are not give any information on Ada’s birth.  The queen has been longing to learn what happened to her child.  She has no hint that she is sitting across from her daughter not does Ada know she is looking at her long lost mother.

If we readers had known this the story would have taken quite a different turn.  Perhaps for a better story.  Susannah then wrote the novel without a hint of the true situation keeping it as a surprise.

Without being critical, it is Susannah’s story, I wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to reverse the situation and make Ada’s maternity apparent from the start then basing the story on Elizabeth’s discovery. 

Now, all novels are necessarily auto-biographical.  In Georges case he suffered from logorrhea.  Out of his millions of words one can easily determine the defining events of his life as he works them through a few of his repeating themes. As Susannah is leading us into a situation  in which the result is that the queen isn’t any better than she should be, her case is no different than she should be.  Her case is no different than the tens o thousands, hundreds of thousands of ordinary women who suffered the consequences of fallen women. And that might lead to single woman who fell- that is Susannah herself.  The only possible proof is in the pudding, that is the novel, ‘Canonbury House.’

Susannah’s history prior to her marriage isn’t known, however George consistently portrayed the fallen women, always in a sympathetic manner, who were seduced to their ruin, her greatest treasure stolen.

As far as we can conjecture Susannah Pierson was still with her father when  she met George.  Her age at that time was probably sixteen, George being eighteen.  Most of George’s heroines in his novels are sixteen. The loveliness of the sixteen year old stands out in all his novels.

In his novel ‘The Youthful Impostor’, written in 1932, rewritten and published in 1935, looking back a few years to an early friendship, his protagonist, Crawford, meets a shady character named Pearson, a man of the world in France, possibly Calais, not clear, given the similarity of names that Pearson represented the father of Susannah Pierson.  The names are too similar to be coincidental.

Pearson appears to be some high class grifter who was very wise, as in wiseguy and familiar with all the petty cheats and scams that only a fellow grifter would know.  He and Crawford are in a French gambling hell and the two watch a grifter clean out a mark.   Task done he gets up to leave.  As he does Pearson tells Crawford ‘Watch this.’ 

He then approaches the grifter whispering a few words in his ear,  the grifter, the grifter then follows him to his table and lays down half of his take and casually strolls away.  Crawford is dumbfounded.  Pearson explains:  If a grifter sees another working a mark, to keep his silence the other grifter must pay out half, which is what happened.  Crawford’s, that is Reynolds eyes are opened.  That’s what it means to be a man of the world.

As Crawford was on the way to Paris in company with Pickwick and his friends as well as the grifter Augustus Crashem and a man who was a gendarme closely resembling Pearson in appearance and manner, the Gendarme who will turn out to be the friendly Dumont watches with a know eye but does nothing as Crashem works his scam.  Perhaps he tapped Crashem for half..

Pearson and his daughter associating as they must with a shady crowd if is possible if not probable that a cute fourteen or fifteen year old girl might have been seduced and ruined which seared her soul causing total anguish that expiated itself in slandering a dead Queen Elizabethl by revealing something she knew or thought she knew thereby purifying her soul as she lay dying.  The poor girl and the privileged girl were the same.

‘Canonbury House’ wasn’t Susannah’s only novel; she wrote four or five others.  A batch of kids, running the household, helping George with his novels, writing her own as well as a cookbook,  what a woman.  No wonder George treasured her.  I have a wretched OCR copy of her novel ‘Gretna Green’ that might be a little revealing.  From the title I thought it might have been a biographical novel about a woman named Gretna Green, but study led me to a different conclusion. 

As it was, in the eighteenth century young lords were marrying common girls that infuriated their parents so in 1745 a law was passed making any such marriages invalid.  That was only an impediment not a blockade.  Enterprising souls in Scotland living in a small town called Gretna Green analyzed the situation then some fellow, blacksmiths and such got themselves ordained as ministers and began marrying the young swains and their commoner girlfriends, the marriages were legal in England. 

Thus the roads leading to Gretna Green were well traveled.  As the parents were on the alert ready to prevent such alliances, there was often a mad dash for the Scottish border by the young lovers closely followed by the parents or their agents to prevent such a folly.  Whoever got there first won the race.

If the young lovers won the race they got married; if the parents the ecclesiastic blacksmiths went empty handed.  Such is life.

Now, if opportunity was created for a blacksmith who had a limited number of horses to shoe, that law and its resultant Gretna Green created opportunities  or aspiring novelists as well. Susannah put that shoe on and wrote Gretna Green.

What is the relationship of Gretna Green to Canonsbury House?  You can be that those young lovers didn’t wait for the knot to be tied before they consummated the marriage; hence the young ladies who had given away their greatest treasure were technically ruined women before that marriage.  If the parents won the race the technicality was removed.  The girls were ruined.

Thus Susannah could portray several ruined young ladies by which she could possibly relive her own tragedy.   Gretna Green was apparently pretty racy for the time because it aroused a fair reaction.  It was even suggested that perhaps she knew of that which she spoke.

George complained about this abuse of his wife but it is not known whether he received satisfaction.  I rather suspect that Susannah got a fair amount of satisfaction by exposing the Virgin Queen.  The resolution then of Susannah’s Canonbury House.

How did Ada Arundel react to learning who her mother was and that mother being the Queen of England who embraced her as her long lost daughter?

Rather a tragic ending.  Ada was so overjoyed that she burst a blood vessel in her brain and died from the joy that was so overwhelming.  Let us hope that Susannah felt redeemed if my speculation is correct.

Having finished reading the novel and looking back at the beginning one appreciates the irony that in Canonbury House mother and daughter are looking at each other not realizing that they are seeing their heart’s desire.  One might think that there should have been enough familial resemblance between the Queen and Ada  to create suspicion.

But, in a spiteful admission Susannah mentions that Elizabeth had never been a handsome woman and that Ada was stunningly beautiful so no surprise there. 

I don’t know how contemporaries  would have read the novel or what their reaction might have been.  I don’t know whether Susannah maliciously invented the story or had heard some rumor, in any event Ada died so that the evidence disappeared.

I don’t feel it necessary to detail the development of the novel as it was fairly pedestrian while Susannah was not at her peak for health reasons.

A Review

Canonbury House by Susannah Reynolds

And

Mary Queen Of Scots by George W.M. Reynolds

Review by R.E. Prindle

As you can tell by my attribution of Canonbury House to Susannah Reynolds, Georges wife I’m making a claim that needs explaining.  Let me establish my grounds for such a claim by reviewing circumstances of the couple at the time. 

‘Canonbury House was written from 11 July 1857-1 May 1858, first published in the Reynolds Miscellany in parts.

At the time the Reynolds were living in the resort town of Ramsgate in Georges home shire, Kent.  They had removed from London in 1854.  Susannah died in Ramsgate during 1858.

From those facts I surmise that Susannah was ill, suffering from a wasting disease.  Further, my guess is that she was suffering from breast cancer.  You may think that’s a leap.

Consider, George was  a breast fetishist, quite clearly shown in all his writing.  He was first magnitude.  He writes marvelous descriptions of the female breast, they are frequent and quite detailed.  On a few occasions he mentions breasts disfigured by cancers.  Unless he was unfaithful to Susannah, which I can’t conceive, where else would he have seen them?  Hence, I don’t think it is a great leap to think Susannah so suffered.  She died early, only forty four years old assuming she was George’s age, perhaps one or two years younger than her husband.  She may have been only sixteen when she married an eighteen year old George.  Is female characters are quite frequently sixteen.  As Georges work really required him to be in London, the move to Ramsgate probably to make Susannah’s last year more comfortable points to a wasting disease such as breast cancer.

At that time, according to Guy Dicks and his biography of his relative, Georges publisher, John Dicks, the two partners were each pulling down a hundred pounds a week from their business, so that at least at fifty two hundred pounds a year, the Reynolds were prosperous enough to live comfortably and, indeed, George bought a substantial free standing house in Ramsgate.

However George was yet to finish volume four of the  ‘Mysteries of the Court of London’ which work shows definite signs of divided attention.  Thus between making frequent trips to London and tending to his beloved Susannah his writing was definitely affected.

Now, Susannah herself was a novelist with some few titles to her credit including her novel ‘Gretna Green.’  One may assume that with greater leisure in Ramsgate she sought to create her Magnum Opus.  I have a slight acquaintance with Gretna Green in an unreadable OCR copy so I can form no adequate opinion on her earlier work although I do have a readable first edition of her Canonbury House.  That novel is acceptable work although inferior to Georges if only compared to his last work Mary, Queen of Scots published a year after ‘Canonbury House.’  Therefor, comparing hi work before and after ‘Canonbury House’ it isn’t likely that he wrote it.  As a key ingredient of his work hers contains no description of women’s breasts, not even those of Queen Mary.

As stated earlier the book took nearly a year to write, thirty installments in the Miscellany.   My copy of the published book by John Dicks has notes on he fly leaf from a former owner as well as those that appear to be from a book seller.

There is a penciled and erased signature from Arthur Reynolds, perhaps one of Georges sons. There is a full page faint erased text that might be made readable by electronic means.  A strong hand with a good pencil has written ‘First thus 1870- complete in 30 penny parts.’  As the installments were published in the Miscellany there shouldn’t be 30 penny parts unless there was a second publication by Dicks. Between 1857-58 and 1870 and also issued separately in 7 parts.  So, quite a publishing history.

Perhaps a bereaved Reynolds did his best to make it a seller or perhaps Queen Elizabeth was still hot copy.

John Dicks, who controlled the publishing schedule of Reynolds massive output apparently held back the book release until 1870.  It was his habit to date publications only on the initial issue.  The novel is relatively short at 237 double columned pages.  Small print.

Now, the last novel of Georges was an incident in the live of Mary Queen of Scots making it a companion piece to Susannah’.  It follows Susannah’s plan fairly closely.  Comparatively, Georges style is more fluent and the story is better constructed so that is impossible to think both novels came from the same hand.  I think it fairly obvious that Canonbury House must have been written by a failing Susannah. Perhaps Mary, Queen of Scots was Georges love letter to his beloved and deceased wife.  He was desolated.  He never remarried.

Canonbury House is a sort of mystery of which Queen Elizabeth is the central character.  I’m all spoilers here but you will probably never see a copy of the book.  No problem.

The story hinges on the maternity of a off-central character, the beauteous Ada Arundel.  No one knew who her parents were but she had always lived in the household of the richest commoner in England, the honourable Richard Spencer currently the Mayor of the City of London.  A substantial fellow, the Mayor of the City of London.

The Mayor of the City of London isn’t the mayor of the geographical city but of the Square Mile of the financial district.  The rest of London is all suburbs.  The Mayor of the City is independent of the Crown. It is subordinate to Parliament.  Spencer is not a noble but a man of business.  Still, he is the Mayor of the City and the richest commoner of England.

Once the mysteries are cleared up after the reading of the book one can go on and reflect about some of the deeper meanings of the story.

The point is that Queen Elizabeth would never be seen dead in this commoner’s house  except for the circumstances and Spencer’s position.

The subtext here seems to be that Elizabeth was known as the virgin queen but she was not.  Susannah seems to take great pleasure in exposing Elizabeth, except its just her private joke at this point.  Elizabeth had an illegitimate daughter which means that she was a fallen woman no better than any other fallen woman.  According to Susannah the secret began when her child was given to family that had just given birth to a still born and they agreed to take Elizabeth’s child and raise it as their own.

It is now thirty years on and we are not give any information on Ada’s birth.  The queen has been longing to learn what happened to her child.  She has no hint that she is sitting across from her daughter not does Ada know she is looking at her long lost mother.

If we readers had known this the story would have taken quite a different turn.  Perhaps for a better story.  Susannah then wrote the novel without a hint of the true situation keeping it as a surprise.

Without being critical, it is Susannah’s story, I wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to reverse the situation and make Ada’s maternity apparent from the start then basing the story on Elizabeth’s discovery. 

Now, all novels are necessarily auto-biographical.  In Georges case he suffered from logorrhea.  Out of his millions of words one can easily determine the defining events of his life as he works them through a few of his repeating themes. As Susannah is leading us into a situation  in which the result is that the queen isn’t any better than she should be, her case is no different than she should be.  Her case is no different than the tens o thousands, hundreds of thousands of ordinary women who suffered the consequences of fallen women. And that might lead to single woman who fell- that is Susannah herself.  The only possible proof is in the pudding, that is the novel, ‘Canonbury House.’

Susannah’s history prior to her marriage isn’t known, however George consistently portrayed the fallen women, always in a sympathetic manner, who were seduced to their ruin, her greatest treasure stolen.

As far as we can conjecture Susannah Pierson was still with her father when  she met George.  Her age at that time was probably sixteen, George being eighteen.  Most of George’s heroines in his novels are sixteen. The loveliness of the sixteen year old stands out in all his novels.

In his novel ‘The Youthful Impostor’, written in 1932, rewritten and published in 1935, looking back a few years to an early friendship, his protagonist, Crawford, meets a shady character named Pearson, a man of the world in France, possibly Calais, not clear, given the similarity of names that Pearson represented the father of Susannah Pierson.  The names are too similar to be coincidental.

Pearson appears to be some high class grifter who was very wise, as in wiseguy and familiar with all the petty cheats and scams that only a fellow grifter would know.  He and Crawford are in a French gambling hell and the two watch a grifter clean out a mark.   Task done he gets up to leave.  As he does Pearson tells Crawford ‘Watch this.’ 

He then approaches the grifter whispering a few words in his ear,  the grifter, the grifter then follows him to his table and lays down half of his take and casually strolls away.  Crawford is dumbfounded.  Pearson explains:  If a grifter sees another working a mark, to keep his silence the other grifter must pay out half, which is what happened.  Crawford’s, that is Reynolds eyes are opened.  That’s what it means to be a man of the world.

As Crawford was on the way to Paris in company with Pickwick and his friends as well as the grifter Augustus Crashem and a man who was a gendarme closely resembling Pearson in appearance and manner, the Gendarme who will turn out to be the friendly Dumont watches with a know eye but does nothing as Crashem works his scam.  Perhaps he tapped Crashem for half..

Pearson and his daughter associating as they must with a shady crowd if is possible if not probable that a cute fourteen or fifteen year old girl might have been seduced and ruined which seared her soul causing total anguish that expiated itself in slandering a dead Queen Elizabethl by revealing something she knew or thought she knew thereby purifying her soul as she lay dying.  The poor girl and the privileged girl were the same.

‘Canonbury House’ wasn’t Susannah’s only novel; she wrote four or five others.  A batch of kids, running the household, helping George with his novels, writing her own as well as a cookbook,  what a woman.  No wonder George treasured her.  I have a wretched OCR copy of her novel ‘Gretna Green’ that might be a little revealing.  From the title I thought it might have been a biographical novel about a woman named Gretna Green, but study led me to a different conclusion. 

As it was, in the eighteenth century young lords were marrying common girls that infuriated their parents so in 1745 a law was passed making any such marriages invalid.  That was only an impediment not a blockade.  Enterprising souls in Scotland living in a small town called Gretna Green analyzed the situation then some fellow, blacksmiths and such got themselves ordained as ministers and began marrying the young swains and their commoner girlfriends, the marriages were legal in England. 

Thus the roads leading to Gretna Green were well traveled.  As the parents were on the alert ready to prevent such alliances, there was often a mad dash for the Scottish border by the young lovers closely followed by the parents or their agents to prevent such a folly.  Whoever got there first won the race.

If the young lovers won the race they got married; if the parents the ecclesiastic blacksmiths went empty handed.  Such is life.

Now, if opportunity was created for a blacksmith who had a limited number of horses to shoe, that law and its resultant Gretna Green created opportunities  or aspiring novelists as well. Susannah put that shoe on and wrote Gretna Green.

What is the relationship of Gretna Green to Canonsbury House?  You can be that those young lovers didn’t wait for the knot to be tied before they consummated the marriage; hence the young ladies who had given away their greatest treasure were technically ruined women before that marriage.  If the parents won the race the technicality was removed.  The girls were ruined.

Thus Susannah could portray several ruined young ladies by which she could possibly relive her own tragedy.   Gretna Green was apparently pretty racy for the time because it aroused a fair reaction.  It was even suggested that perhaps she knew of that which she spoke.

George complained about this abuse of his wife but it is not known whether he received satisfaction.  I rather suspect that Susannah got a fair amount of satisfaction by exposing the Virgin Queen.  The resolution then of Susannah’s Canonbury House.

How did Ada Arundel react to learning who her mother was and that mother being the Queen of England who embraced her as her long lost daughter?

Rather a tragic ending.  Ada was so overjoyed that she burst a blood vessel in her brain and died from the joy that was so overwhelming.  Let us hope that Susannah felt redeemed if my speculation is correct.

Having finished reading the novel and looking back at the beginning one appreciates the irony that in Canonbury House mother and daughter are looking at each other not realizing that they are seeing their heart’s desire.  One might think that there should have been enough familial resemblance between the Queen and Ada  to create suspicion.

But, in a spiteful admission Susannah mentions that Elizabeth had never been a handsome woman and that Ada was stunningly beautiful so no surprise there. 

I don’t know how contemporaries  would have read the novel or what their reaction might have been.  I don’t know whether Susannah maliciously invented the story or had heard some rumor, in any event Ada died so that the evidence disappeared.

I don’t feel it necessary to detail the development of the novel as it was fairly pedestrian while Susannah was not at her peak for health reasons.

A Review

Canonbury House by Susannah Reynolds

And

Mary Queen Of Scots by George W.M. Reynolds

Review by R.E. Prindle

As you can tell by my attribution of Canonbury House to Susannah Reynolds, Georges wife I’m making a claim that needs explaining.  Let me establish my grounds for such a claim by reviewing circumstances of the couple at the time. 

‘Canonbury House was written from 11 July 1857-1 May 1858, first published in the Reynolds Miscellany in parts.

At the time the Reynolds were living in the resort town of Ramsgate in Georges home shire, Kent.  They had removed from London in 1854.  Susannah died in Ramsgate during 1858.

From those facts I surmise that Susannah was ill, suffering from a wasting disease.  Further, my guess is that she was suffering from breast cancer.  You may think that’s a leap.

Consider, George was  a breast fetishist, quite clearly shown in all his writing.  He was first magnitude.  He writes marvelous descriptions of the female breast, they are frequent and quite detailed.  On a few occasions he mentions breasts disfigured by cancers.  Unless he was unfaithful to Susannah, which I can’t conceive, where else would he have seen them?  Hence, I don’t think it is a great leap to think Susannah so suffered.  She died early, only forty four years old assuming she was George’s age, perhaps one or two years younger than her husband.  She may have been only sixteen when she married an eighteen year old George.  Is female characters are quite frequently sixteen.  As Georges work really required him to be in London, the move to Ramsgate probably to make Susannah’s last year more comfortable points to a wasting disease such as breast cancer.

At that time, according to Guy Dicks and his biography of his relative, Georges publisher, John Dicks, the two partners were each pulling down a hundred pounds a week from their business, so that at least at fifty two hundred pounds a year, the Reynolds were prosperous enough to live comfortably and, indeed, George bought a substantial free standing house in Ramsgate.

However George was yet to finish volume four of the  ‘Mysteries of the Court of London’ which work shows definite signs of divided attention.  Thus between making frequent trips to London and tending to his beloved Susannah his writing was definitely affected.

Now, Susannah herself was a novelist with some few titles to her credit including her novel ‘Gretna Green.’  One may assume that with greater leisure in Ramsgate she sought to create her Magnum Opus.  I have a slight acquaintance with Gretna Green in an unreadable OCR copy so I can form no adequate opinion on her earlier work although I do have a readable first edition of her Canonbury House.  That novel is acceptable work although inferior to Georges if only compared to his last work Mary, Queen of Scots published a year after ‘Canonbury House.’  Therefor, comparing hi work before and after ‘Canonbury House’ it isn’t likely that he wrote it.  As a key ingredient of his work hers contains no description of women’s breasts, not even those of Queen Mary.

As stated earlier the book took nearly a year to write, thirty installments in the Miscellany.   My copy of the published book by John Dicks has notes on he fly leaf from a former owner as well as those that appear to be from a book seller.

There is a penciled and erased signature from Arthur Reynolds, perhaps one of Georges sons. There is a full page faint erased text that might be made readable by electronic means.  A strong hand with a good pencil has written ‘First thus 1870- complete in 30 penny parts.’  As the installments were published in the Miscellany there shouldn’t be 30 penny parts unless there was a second publication by Dicks. Between 1857-58 and 1870 and also issued separately in 7 parts.  So, quite a publishing history.

Perhaps a bereaved Reynolds did his best to make it a seller or perhaps Queen Elizabeth was still hot copy.

John Dicks, who controlled the publishing schedule of Reynolds massive output apparently held back the book release until 1870.  It was his habit to date publications only on the initial issue.  The novel is relatively short at 237 double columned pages.  Small print.

Now, the last novel of Georges was an incident in the live of Mary Queen of Scots making it a companion piece to Susannah’.  It follows Susannah’s plan fairly closely.  Comparatively, Georges style is more fluent and the story is better constructed so that is impossible to think both novels came from the same hand.  I think it fairly obvious that Canonbury House must have been written by a failing Susannah. Perhaps Mary, Queen of Scots was Georges love letter to his beloved and deceased wife.  He was desolated.  He never remarried.

Canonbury House is a sort of mystery of which Queen Elizabeth is the central character.  I’m all spoilers here but you will probably never see a copy of the book.  No problem.

The story hinges on the maternity of a off-central character, the beauteous Ada Arundel.  No one knew who her parents were but she had always lived in the household of the richest commoner in England, the honourable Richard Spencer currently the Mayor of the City of London.  A substantial fellow, the Mayor of the City of London.

The Mayor of the City of London isn’t the mayor of the geographical city but of the Square Mile of the financial district.  The rest of London is all suburbs.  The Mayor of the City is independent of the Crown. It is subordinate to Parliament.  Spencer is not a noble but a man of business.  Still, he is the Mayor of the City and the richest commoner of England.

Once the mysteries are cleared up after the reading of the book one can go on and reflect about some of the deeper meanings of the story.

The point is that Queen Elizabeth would never be seen dead in this commoner’s house  except for the circumstances and Spencer’s position.

The subtext here seems to be that Elizabeth was known as the virgin queen but she was not.  Susannah seems to take great pleasure in exposing Elizabeth, except its just her private joke at this point.  Elizabeth had an illegitimate daughter which means that she was a fallen woman no better than any other fallen woman.  According to Susannah the secret began when her child was given to family that had just given birth to a still born and they agreed to take Elizabeth’s child and raise it as their own.

It is now thirty years on and we are not give any information on Ada’s birth.  The queen has been longing to learn what happened to her child.  She has no hint that she is sitting across from her daughter not does Ada know she is looking at her long lost mother.

If we readers had known this the story would have taken quite a different turn.  Perhaps for a better story.  Susannah then wrote the novel without a hint of the true situation keeping it as a surprise.

Without being critical, it is Susannah’s story, I wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to reverse the situation and make Ada’s maternity apparent from the start then basing the story on Elizabeth’s discovery. 

Now, all novels are necessarily auto-biographical.  In Georges case he suffered from logorrhea.  Out of his millions of words one can easily determine the defining events of his life as he works them through a few of his repeating themes. As Susannah is leading us into a situation  in which the result is that the queen isn’t any better than she should be, her case is no different than she should be.  Her case is no different than the tens o thousands, hundreds of thousands of ordinary women who suffered the consequences of fallen women. And that might lead to single woman who fell- that is Susannah herself.  The only possible proof is in the pudding, that is the novel, ‘Canonbury House.’

Susannah’s history prior to her marriage isn’t known, however George consistently portrayed the fallen women, always in a sympathetic manner, who were seduced to their ruin, her greatest treasure stolen.

As far as we can conjecture Susannah Pierson was still with her father when  she met George.  Her age at that time was probably sixteen, George being eighteen.  Most of George’s heroines in his novels are sixteen. The loveliness of the sixteen year old stands out in all his novels.

In his novel ‘The Youthful Impostor’, written in 1932, rewritten and published in 1935, looking back a few years to an early friendship, his protagonist, Crawford, meets a shady character named Pearson, a man of the world in France, possibly Calais, not clear, given the similarity of names that Pearson represented the father of Susannah Pierson.  The names are too similar to be coincidental.

Pearson appears to be some high class grifter who was very wise, as in wiseguy and familiar with all the petty cheats and scams that only a fellow grifter would know.  He and Crawford are in a French gambling hell and the two watch a grifter clean out a mark.   Task done he gets up to leave.  As he does Pearson tells Crawford ‘Watch this.’ 

He then approaches the grifter whispering a few words in his ear,  the grifter, the grifter then follows him to his table and lays down half of his take and casually strolls away.  Crawford is dumbfounded.  Pearson explains:  If a grifter sees another working a mark, to keep his silence the other grifter must pay out half, which is what happened.  Crawford’s, that is Reynolds eyes are opened.  That’s what it means to be a man of the world.

As Crawford was on the way to Paris in company with Pickwick and his friends as well as the grifter Augustus Crashem and a man who was a gendarme closely resembling Pearson in appearance and manner, the Gendarme who will turn out to be the friendly Dumont watches with a know eye but does nothing as Crashem works his scam.  Perhaps he tapped Crashem for half..

Pearson and his daughter associating as they must with a shady crowd if is possible if not probable that a cute fourteen or fifteen year old girl might have been seduced and ruined which seared her soul causing total anguish that expiated itself in slandering a dead Queen Elizabethl by revealing something she knew or thought she knew thereby purifying her soul as she lay dying.  The poor girl and the privileged girl were the same.

‘Canonbury House’ wasn’t Susannah’s only novel; she wrote four or five others.  A batch of kids, running the household, helping George with his novels, writing her own as well as a cookbook,  what a woman.  No wonder George treasured her.  I have a wretched OCR copy of her novel ‘Gretna Green’ that might be a little revealing.  From the title I thought it might have been a biographical novel about a woman named Gretna Green, but study led me to a different conclusion. 

As it was, in the eighteenth century young lords were marrying common girls that infuriated their parents so in 1745 a law was passed making any such marriages invalid.  That was only an impediment not a blockade.  Enterprising souls in Scotland living in a small town called Gretna Green analyzed the situation then some fellow, blacksmiths and such got themselves ordained as ministers and began marrying the young swains and their commoner girlfriends, the marriages were legal in England. 

Thus the roads leading to Gretna Green were well traveled.  As the parents were on the alert ready to prevent such alliances, there was often a mad dash for the Scottish border by the young lovers closely followed by the parents or their agents to prevent such a folly.  Whoever got there first won the race.

If the young lovers won the race they got married; if the parents the ecclesiastic blacksmiths went empty handed.  Such is life.

Now, if opportunity was created for a blacksmith who had a limited number of horses to shoe, that law and its resultant Gretna Green created opportunities  or aspiring novelists as well. Susannah put that shoe on and wrote Gretna Green.

What is the relationship of Gretna Green to Canonsbury House?  You can be that those young lovers didn’t wait for the knot to be tied before they consummated the marriage; hence the young ladies who had given away their greatest treasure were technically ruined women before that marriage.  If the parents won the race the technicality was removed.  The girls were ruined.

Thus Susannah could portray several ruined young ladies by which she could possibly relive her own tragedy.   Gretna Green was apparently pretty racy for the time because it aroused a fair reaction.  It was even suggested that perhaps she knew of that which she spoke.

George complained about this abuse of his wife but it is not known whether he received satisfaction.  I rather suspect that Susannah got a fair amount of satisfaction by exposing the Virgin Queen.  The resolution then of Susannah’s Canonbury House.

How did Ada Arundel react to learning who her mother was and that mother being the Queen of England who embraced her as her long lost daughter?

Rather a tragic ending.  Ada was so overjoyed that she burst a blood vessel in her brain and died from the joy that was so overwhelming.  Let us hope that Susannah felt redeemed if my speculation is correct.

Having finished reading the novel and looking back at the beginning one appreciates the irony that in Canonbury House mother and daughter are looking at each other not realizing that they are seeing their heart’s desire.  One might think that there should have been enough familial resemblance between the Queen and Ada  to create suspicion.

But, in a spiteful admission Susannah mentions that Elizabeth had never been a handsome woman and that Ada was stunningly beautiful so no surprise there. 

I don’t know how contemporaries  would have read the novel or what their reaction might have been.  I don’t know whether Susannah maliciously invented the story or had heard some rumor, in any event Ada died so that the evidence disappeared.

I don’t feel it necessary to detail the development of the novel as it was fairly pedestrian while Susannah was not at her peak for health reasons.

A Review

Canonbury House by Susannah Reynolds

And

Mary Queen Of Scots by George W.M. Reynolds

Review by R.E. Prindle

As you can tell by my attribution of Canonbury House to Susannah Reynolds, Georges wife I’m making a claim that needs explaining.  Let me establish my grounds for such a claim by reviewing circumstances of the couple at the time. 

‘Canonbury House was written from 11 July 1857-1 May 1858, first published in the Reynolds Miscellany in parts.

At the time the Reynolds were living in the resort town of Ramsgate in Georges home shire, Kent.  They had removed from London in 1854.  Susannah died in Ramsgate during 1858.

From those facts I surmise that Susannah was ill, suffering from a wasting disease.  Further, my guess is that she was suffering from breast cancer.  You may think that’s a leap.

Consider, George was  a breast fetishist, quite clearly shown in all his writing.  He was first magnitude.  He writes marvelous descriptions of the female breast, they are frequent and quite detailed.  On a few occasions he mentions breasts disfigured by cancers.  Unless he was unfaithful to Susannah, which I can’t conceive, where else would he have seen them?  Hence, I don’t think it is a great leap to think Susannah so suffered.  She died early, only forty four years old assuming she was George’s age, perhaps one or two years younger than her husband.  She may have been only sixteen when she married an eighteen year old George.  Is female characters are quite frequently sixteen.  As Georges work really required him to be in London, the move to Ramsgate probably to make Susannah’s last year more comfortable points to a wasting disease such as breast cancer.

At that time, according to Guy Dicks and his biography of his relative, Georges publisher, John Dicks, the two partners were each pulling down a hundred pounds a week from their business, so that at least at fifty two hundred pounds a year, the Reynolds were prosperous enough to live comfortably and, indeed, George bought a substantial free standing house in Ramsgate.

However George was yet to finish volume four of the  ‘Mysteries of the Court of London’ which work shows definite signs of divided attention.  Thus between making frequent trips to London and tending to his beloved Susannah his writing was definitely affected.

Now, Susannah herself was a novelist with some few titles to her credit including her novel ‘Gretna Green.’  One may assume that with greater leisure in Ramsgate she sought to create her Magnum Opus.  I have a slight acquaintance with Gretna Green in an unreadable OCR copy so I can form no adequate opinion on her earlier work although I do have a readable first edition of her Canonbury House.  That novel is acceptable work although inferior to Georges if only compared to his last work Mary, Queen of Scots published a year after ‘Canonbury House.’  Therefor, comparing hi work before and after ‘Canonbury House’ it isn’t likely that he wrote it.  As a key ingredient of his work hers contains no description of women’s breasts, not even those of Queen Mary.

As stated earlier the book took nearly a year to write, thirty installments in the Miscellany.   My copy of the published book by John Dicks has notes on he fly leaf from a former owner as well as those that appear to be from a book seller.

There is a penciled and erased signature from Arthur Reynolds, perhaps one of Georges sons. There is a full page faint erased text that might be made readable by electronic means.  A strong hand with a good pencil has written ‘First thus 1870- complete in 30 penny parts.’  As the installments were published in the Miscellany there shouldn’t be 30 penny parts unless there was a second publication by Dicks. Between 1857-58 and 1870 and also issued separately in 7 parts.  So, quite a publishing history.

Perhaps a bereaved Reynolds did his best to make it a seller or perhaps Queen Elizabeth was still hot copy.

John Dicks, who controlled the publishing schedule of Reynolds massive output apparently held back the book release until 1870.  It was his habit to date publications only on the initial issue.  The novel is relatively short at 237 double columned pages.  Small print.

Now, the last novel of Georges was an incident in the live of Mary Queen of Scots making it a companion piece to Susannah’.  It follows Susannah’s plan fairly closely.  Comparatively, Georges style is more fluent and the story is better constructed so that is impossible to think both novels came from the same hand.  I think it fairly obvious that Canonbury House must have been written by a failing Susannah. Perhaps Mary, Queen of Scots was Georges love letter to his beloved and deceased wife.  He was desolated.  He never remarried.

Canonbury House is a sort of mystery of which Queen Elizabeth is the central character.  I’m all spoilers here but you will probably never see a copy of the book.  No problem.

The story hinges on the maternity of a off-central character, the beauteous Ada Arundel.  No one knew who her parents were but she had always lived in the household of the richest commoner in England, the honourable Richard Spencer currently the Mayor of the City of London.  A substantial fellow, the Mayor of the City of London.

The Mayor of the City of London isn’t the mayor of the geographical city but of the Square Mile of the financial district.  The rest of London is all suburbs.  The Mayor of the City is independent of the Crown. It is subordinate to Parliament.  Spencer is not a noble but a man of business.  Still, he is the Mayor of the City and the richest commoner of England.

Once the mysteries are cleared up after the reading of the book one can go on and reflect about some of the deeper meanings of the story.

The point is that Queen Elizabeth would never be seen dead in this commoner’s house  except for the circumstances and Spencer’s position.

The subtext here seems to be that Elizabeth was known as the virgin queen but she was not.  Susannah seems to take great pleasure in exposing Elizabeth, except its just her private joke at this point.  Elizabeth had an illegitimate daughter which means that she was a fallen woman no better than any other fallen woman.  According to Susannah the secret began when her child was given to family that had just given birth to a still born and they agreed to take Elizabeth’s child and raise it as their own.

It is now thirty years on and we are not give any information on Ada’s birth.  The queen has been longing to learn what happened to her child.  She has no hint that she is sitting across from her daughter not does Ada know she is looking at her long lost mother.

If we readers had known this the story would have taken quite a different turn.  Perhaps for a better story.  Susannah then wrote the novel without a hint of the true situation keeping it as a surprise.

Without being critical, it is Susannah’s story, I wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to reverse the situation and make Ada’s maternity apparent from the start then basing the story on Elizabeth’s discovery. 

Now, all novels are necessarily auto-biographical.  In Georges case he suffered from logorrhea.  Out of his millions of words one can easily determine the defining events of his life as he works them through a few of his repeating themes. As Susannah is leading us into a situation  in which the result is that the queen isn’t any better than she should be, her case is no different than she should be.  Her case is no different than the tens o thousands, hundreds of thousands of ordinary women who suffered the consequences of fallen women. And that might lead to single woman who fell- that is Susannah herself.  The only possible proof is in the pudding, that is the novel, ‘Canonbury House.’

Susannah’s history prior to her marriage isn’t known, however George consistently portrayed the fallen women, always in a sympathetic manner, who were seduced to their ruin, her greatest treasure stolen.

As far as we can conjecture Susannah Pierson was still with her father when  she met George.  Her age at that time was probably sixteen, George being eighteen.  Most of George’s heroines in his novels are sixteen. The loveliness of the sixteen year old stands out in all his novels.

In his novel ‘The Youthful Impostor’, written in 1932, rewritten and published in 1935, looking back a few years to an early friendship, his protagonist, Crawford, meets a shady character named Pearson, a man of the world in France, possibly Calais, not clear, given the similarity of names that Pearson represented the father of Susannah Pierson.  The names are too similar to be coincidental.

Pearson appears to be some high class grifter who was very wise, as in wiseguy and familiar with all the petty cheats and scams that only a fellow grifter would know.  He and Crawford are in a French gambling hell and the two watch a grifter clean out a mark.   Task done he gets up to leave.  As he does Pearson tells Crawford ‘Watch this.’ 

He then approaches the grifter whispering a few words in his ear,  the grifter, the grifter then follows him to his table and lays down half of his take and casually strolls away.  Crawford is dumbfounded.  Pearson explains:  If a grifter sees another working a mark, to keep his silence the other grifter must pay out half, which is what happened.  Crawford’s, that is Reynolds eyes are opened.  That’s what it means to be a man of the world.

As Crawford was on the way to Paris in company with Pickwick and his friends as well as the grifter Augustus Crashem and a man who was a gendarme closely resembling Pearson in appearance and manner, the Gendarme who will turn out to be the friendly Dumont watches with a know eye but does nothing as Crashem works his scam.  Perhaps he tapped Crashem for half..

Pearson and his daughter associating as they must with a shady crowd if is possible if not probable that a cute fourteen or fifteen year old girl might have been seduced and ruined which seared her soul causing total anguish that expiated itself in slandering a dead Queen Elizabethl by revealing something she knew or thought she knew thereby purifying her soul as she lay dying.  The poor girl and the privileged girl were the same.

‘Canonbury House’ wasn’t Susannah’s only novel; she wrote four or five others.  A batch of kids, running the household, helping George with his novels, writing her own as well as a cookbook,  what a woman.  No wonder George treasured her.  I have a wretched OCR copy of her novel ‘Gretna Green’ that might be a little revealing.  From the title I thought it might have been a biographical novel about a woman named Gretna Green, but study led me to a different conclusion. 

As it was, in the eighteenth century young lords were marrying common girls that infuriated their parents so in 1745 a law was passed making any such marriages invalid.  That was only an impediment not a blockade.  Enterprising souls in Scotland living in a small town called Gretna Green analyzed the situation then some fellow, blacksmiths and such got themselves ordained as ministers and began marrying the young swains and their commoner girlfriends, the marriages were legal in England. 

Thus the roads leading to Gretna Green were well traveled.  As the parents were on the alert ready to prevent such alliances, there was often a mad dash for the Scottish border by the young lovers closely followed by the parents or their agents to prevent such a folly.  Whoever got there first won the race.

If the young lovers won the race they got married; if the parents the ecclesiastic blacksmiths went empty handed.  Such is life.

Now, if opportunity was created for a blacksmith who had a limited number of horses to shoe, that law and its resultant Gretna Green created opportunities  or aspiring novelists as well. Susannah put that shoe on and wrote Gretna Green.

What is the relationship of Gretna Green to Canonsbury House?  You can be that those young lovers didn’t wait for the knot to be tied before they consummated the marriage; hence the young ladies who had given away their greatest treasure were technically ruined women before that marriage.  If the parents won the race the technicality was removed.  The girls were ruined.

Thus Susannah could portray several ruined young ladies by which she could possibly relive her own tragedy.   Gretna Green was apparently pretty racy for the time because it aroused a fair reaction.  It was even suggested that perhaps she knew of that which she spoke.

George complained about this abuse of his wife but it is not known whether he received satisfaction.  I rather suspect that Susannah got a fair amount of satisfaction by exposing the Virgin Queen.  The resolution then of Susannah’s Canonbury House.

How did Ada Arundel react to learning who her mother was and that mother being the Queen of England who embraced her as her long lost daughter?

Rather a tragic ending.  Ada was so overjoyed that she burst a blood vessel in her brain and died from the joy that was so overwhelming.  Let us hope that Susannah felt redeemed if my speculation is correct.

Having finished reading the novel and looking back at the beginning one appreciates the irony that in Canonbury House mother and daughter are looking at each other not realizing that they are seeing their heart’s desire.  One might think that there should have been enough familial resemblance between the Queen and Ada  to create suspicion.

But, in a spiteful admission Susannah mentions that Elizabeth had never been a handsome woman and that Ada was stunningly beautiful so no surprise there. 

I don’t know how contemporaries  would have read the novel or what their reaction might have been.  I don’t know whether Susannah maliciously invented the story or had heard some rumor, in any event Ada died so that the evidence disappeared.

I don’t feel it necessary to detail the development of the novel as it was fairly pedestrian while Susannah was not at her peak for health reasons.

A Review

Canonbury House by Susannah Reynolds

And

Mary Queen Of Scots by George W.M. Reynolds

Review by R.E. Prindle

As you can tell by my attribution of Canonbury House to Susannah Reynolds, Georges wife I’m making a claim that needs explaining.  Let me establish my grounds for such a claim by reviewing circumstances of the couple at the time. 

‘Canonbury House was written from 11 July 1857-1 May 1858, first published in the Reynolds Miscellany in parts.

At the time the Reynolds were living in the resort town of Ramsgate in Georges home shire, Kent.  They had removed from London in 1854.  Susannah died in Ramsgate during 1858.

From those facts I surmise that Susannah was ill, suffering from a wasting disease.  Further, my guess is that she was suffering from breast cancer.  You may think that’s a leap.

Consider, George was  a breast fetishist, quite clearly shown in all his writing.  He was first magnitude.  He writes marvelous descriptions of the female breast, they are frequent and quite detailed.  On a few occasions he mentions breasts disfigured by cancers.  Unless he was unfaithful to Susannah, which I can’t conceive, where else would he have seen them?  Hence, I don’t think it is a great leap to think Susannah so suffered.  She died early, only forty four years old assuming she was George’s age, perhaps one or two years younger than her husband.  She may have been only sixteen when she married an eighteen year old George.  Is female characters are quite frequently sixteen.  As Georges work really required him to be in London, the move to Ramsgate probably to make Susannah’s last year more comfortable points to a wasting disease such as breast cancer.

At that time, according to Guy Dicks and his biography of his relative, Georges publisher, John Dicks, the two partners were each pulling down a hundred pounds a week from their business, so that at least at fifty two hundred pounds a year, the Reynolds were prosperous enough to live comfortably and, indeed, George bought a substantial free standing house in Ramsgate.

However George was yet to finish volume four of the  ‘Mysteries of the Court of London’ which work shows definite signs of divided attention.  Thus between making frequent trips to London and tending to his beloved Susannah his writing was definitely affected.

Now, Susannah herself was a novelist with some few titles to her credit including her novel ‘Gretna Green.’  One may assume that with greater leisure in Ramsgate she sought to create her Magnum Opus.  I have a slight acquaintance with Gretna Green in an unreadable OCR copy so I can form no adequate opinion on her earlier work although I do have a readable first edition of her Canonbury House.  That novel is acceptable work although inferior to Georges if only compared to his last work Mary, Queen of Scots published a year after ‘Canonbury House.’  Therefor, comparing hi work before and after ‘Canonbury House’ it isn’t likely that he wrote it.  As a key ingredient of his work hers contains no description of women’s breasts, not even those of Queen Mary.

As stated earlier the book took nearly a year to write, thirty installments in the Miscellany.   My copy of the published book by John Dicks has notes on he fly leaf from a former owner as well as those that appear to be from a book seller.

There is a penciled and erased signature from Arthur Reynolds, perhaps one of Georges sons. There is a full page faint erased text that might be made readable by electronic means.  A strong hand with a good pencil has written ‘First thus 1870- complete in 30 penny parts.’  As the installments were published in the Miscellany there shouldn’t be 30 penny parts unless there was a second publication by Dicks. Between 1857-58 and 1870 and also issued separately in 7 parts.  So, quite a publishing history.

Perhaps a bereaved Reynolds did his best to make it a seller or perhaps Queen Elizabeth was still hot copy.

John Dicks, who controlled the publishing schedule of Reynolds massive output apparently held back the book release until 1870.  It was his habit to date publications only on the initial issue.  The novel is relatively short at 237 double columned pages.  Small print.

Now, the last novel of Georges was an incident in the live of Mary Queen of Scots making it a companion piece to Susannah’.  It follows Susannah’s plan fairly closely.  Comparatively, Georges style is more fluent and the story is better constructed so that is impossible to think both novels came from the same hand.  I think it fairly obvious that Canonbury House must have been written by a failing Susannah. Perhaps Mary, Queen of Scots was Georges love letter to his beloved and deceased wife.  He was desolated.  He never remarried.

Canonbury House is a sort of mystery of which Queen Elizabeth is the central character.  I’m all spoilers here but you will probably never see a copy of the book.  No problem.

The story hinges on the maternity of a off-central character, the beauteous Ada Arundel.  No one knew who her parents were but she had always lived in the household of the richest commoner in England, the honourable Richard Spencer currently the Mayor of the City of London.  A substantial fellow, the Mayor of the City of London.

The Mayor of the City of London isn’t the mayor of the geographical city but of the Square Mile of the financial district.  The rest of London is all suburbs.  The Mayor of the City is independent of the Crown. It is subordinate to Parliament.  Spencer is not a noble but a man of business.  Still, he is the Mayor of the City and the richest commoner of England.

Once the mysteries are cleared up after the reading of the book one can go on and reflect about some of the deeper meanings of the story.

The point is that Queen Elizabeth would never be seen dead in this commoner’s house  except for the circumstances and Spencer’s position.

The subtext here seems to be that Elizabeth was known as the virgin queen but she was not.  Susannah seems to take great pleasure in exposing Elizabeth, except its just her private joke at this point.  Elizabeth had an illegitimate daughter which means that she was a fallen woman no better than any other fallen woman.  According to Susannah the secret began when her child was given to family that had just given birth to a still born and they agreed to take Elizabeth’s child and raise it as their own.

It is now thirty years on and we are not give any information on Ada’s birth.  The queen has been longing to learn what happened to her child.  She has no hint that she is sitting across from her daughter not does Ada know she is looking at her long lost mother.

If we readers had known this the story would have taken quite a different turn.  Perhaps for a better story.  Susannah then wrote the novel without a hint of the true situation keeping it as a surprise.

Without being critical, it is Susannah’s story, I wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to reverse the situation and make Ada’s maternity apparent from the start then basing the story on Elizabeth’s discovery. 

Now, all novels are necessarily auto-biographical.  In Georges case he suffered from logorrhea.  Out of his millions of words one can easily determine the defining events of his life as he works them through a few of his repeating themes. As Susannah is leading us into a situation  in which the result is that the queen isn’t any better than she should be, her case is no different than she should be.  Her case is no different than the tens o thousands, hundreds of thousands of ordinary women who suffered the consequences of fallen women. And that might lead to single woman who fell- that is Susannah herself.  The only possible proof is in the pudding, that is the novel, ‘Canonbury House.’

Susannah’s history prior to her marriage isn’t known, however George consistently portrayed the fallen women, always in a sympathetic manner, who were seduced to their ruin, her greatest treasure stolen.

As far as we can conjecture Susannah Pierson was still with her father when  she met George.  Her age at that time was probably sixteen, George being eighteen.  Most of George’s heroines in his novels are sixteen. The loveliness of the sixteen year old stands out in all his novels.

In his novel ‘The Youthful Impostor’, written in 1932, rewritten and published in 1935, looking back a few years to an early friendship, his protagonist, Crawford, meets a shady character named Pearson, a man of the world in France, possibly Calais, not clear, given the similarity of names that Pearson represented the father of Susannah Pierson.  The names are too similar to be coincidental.

Pearson appears to be some high class grifter who was very wise, as in wiseguy and familiar with all the petty cheats and scams that only a fellow grifter would know.  He and Crawford are in a French gambling hell and the two watch a grifter clean out a mark.   Task done he gets up to leave.  As he does Pearson tells Crawford ‘Watch this.’ 

He then approaches the grifter whispering a few words in his ear,  the grifter, the grifter then follows him to his table and lays down half of his take and casually strolls away.  Crawford is dumbfounded.  Pearson explains:  If a grifter sees another working a mark, to keep his silence the other grifter must pay out half, which is what happened.  Crawford’s, that is Reynolds eyes are opened.  That’s what it means to be a man of the world.

As Crawford was on the way to Paris in company with Pickwick and his friends as well as the grifter Augustus Crashem and a man who was a gendarme closely resembling Pearson in appearance and manner, the Gendarme who will turn out to be the friendly Dumont watches with a know eye but does nothing as Crashem works his scam.  Perhaps he tapped Crashem for half..

Pearson and his daughter associating as they must with a shady crowd if is possible if not probable that a cute fourteen or fifteen year old girl might have been seduced and ruined which seared her soul causing total anguish that expiated itself in slandering a dead Queen Elizabethl by revealing something she knew or thought she knew thereby purifying her soul as she lay dying.  The poor girl and the privileged girl were the same.

‘Canonbury House’ wasn’t Susannah’s only novel; she wrote four or five others.  A batch of kids, running the household, helping George with his novels, writing her own as well as a cookbook,  what a woman.  No wonder George treasured her.  I have a wretched OCR copy of her novel ‘Gretna Green’ that might be a little revealing.  From the title I thought it might have been a biographical novel about a woman named Gretna Green, but study led me to a different conclusion. 

As it was, in the eighteenth century young lords were marrying common girls that infuriated their parents so in 1745 a law was passed making any such marriages invalid.  That was only an impediment not a blockade.  Enterprising souls in Scotland living in a small town called Gretna Green analyzed the situation then some fellow, blacksmiths and such got themselves ordained as ministers and began marrying the young swains and their commoner girlfriends, the marriages were legal in England. 

Thus the roads leading to Gretna Green were well traveled.  As the parents were on the alert ready to prevent such alliances, there was often a mad dash for the Scottish border by the young lovers closely followed by the parents or their agents to prevent such a folly.  Whoever got there first won the race.

If the young lovers won the race they got married; if the parents the ecclesiastic blacksmiths went empty handed.  Such is life.

Now, if opportunity was created for a blacksmith who had a limited number of horses to shoe, that law and its resultant Gretna Green created opportunities  or aspiring novelists as well. Susannah put that shoe on and wrote Gretna Green.

What is the relationship of Gretna Green to Canonsbury House?  You can be that those young lovers didn’t wait for the knot to be tied before they consummated the marriage; hence the young ladies who had given away their greatest treasure were technically ruined women before that marriage.  If the parents won the race the technicality was removed.  The girls were ruined.

Thus Susannah could portray several ruined young ladies by which she could possibly relive her own tragedy.   Gretna Green was apparently pretty racy for the time because it aroused a fair reaction.  It was even suggested that perhaps she knew of that which she spoke.

George complained about this abuse of his wife but it is not known whether he received satisfaction.  I rather suspect that Susannah got a fair amount of satisfaction by exposing the Virgin Queen.  The resolution then of Susannah’s Canonbury House.

How did Ada Arundel react to learning who her mother was and that mother being the Queen of England who embraced her as her long lost daughter?

Rather a tragic ending.  Ada was so overjoyed that she burst a blood vessel in her brain and died from the joy that was so overwhelming.  Let us hope that Susannah felt redeemed if my speculation is correct.

Having finished reading the novel and looking back at the beginning one appreciates the irony that in Canonbury House mother and daughter are looking at each other not realizing that they are seeing their heart’s desire.  One might think that there should have been enough familial resemblance between the Queen and Ada  to create suspicion.

But, in a spiteful admission Susannah mentions that Elizabeth had never been a handsome woman and that Ada was stunningly beautiful so no surprise there. 

I don’t know how contemporaries  would have read the novel or what their reaction might have been.  I don’t know whether Susannah maliciously invented the story or had heard some rumor, in any event Ada died so that the evidence disappeared.

I don’t feel it necessary to detail the development of the novel as it was fairly pedestrian while Susannah was not at her peak for health reasons.

A Review

Canonbury House by Susannah Reynolds

And

Mary Queen Of Scots by George W.M. Reynolds

Review by R.E. Prindle

As you can tell by my attribution of Canonbury House to Susannah Reynolds, Georges wife I’m making a claim that needs explaining.  Let me establish my grounds for such a claim by reviewing circumstances of the couple at the time. 

‘Canonbury House was written from 11 July 1857-1 May 1858, first published in the Reynolds Miscellany in parts.

At the time the Reynolds were living in the resort town of Ramsgate in Georges home shire, Kent.  They had removed from London in 1854.  Susannah died in Ramsgate during 1858.

From those facts I surmise that Susannah was ill, suffering from a wasting disease.  Further, my guess is that she was suffering from breast cancer.  You may think that’s a leap.

Consider, George was  a breast fetishist, quite clearly shown in all his writing.  He was first magnitude.  He writes marvelous descriptions of the female breast, they are frequent and quite detailed.  On a few occasions he mentions breasts disfigured by cancers.  Unless he was unfaithful to Susannah, which I can’t conceive, where else would he have seen them?  Hence, I don’t think it is a great leap to think Susannah so suffered.  She died early, only forty four years old assuming she was George’s age, perhaps one or two years younger than her husband.  She may have been only sixteen when she married an eighteen year old George.  Is female characters are quite frequently sixteen.  As Georges work really required him to be in London, the move to Ramsgate probably to make Susannah’s last year more comfortable points to a wasting disease such as breast cancer.

At that time, according to Guy Dicks and his biography of his relative, Georges publisher, John Dicks, the two partners were each pulling down a hundred pounds a week from their business, so that at least at fifty two hundred pounds a year, the Reynolds were prosperous enough to live comfortably and, indeed, George bought a substantial free standing house in Ramsgate.

However George was yet to finish volume four of the  ‘Mysteries of the Court of London’ which work shows definite signs of divided attention.  Thus between making frequent trips to London and tending to his beloved Susannah his writing was definitely affected.

Now, Susannah herself was a novelist with some few titles to her credit including her novel ‘Gretna Green.’  One may assume that with greater leisure in Ramsgate she sought to create her Magnum Opus.  I have a slight acquaintance with Gretna Green in an unreadable OCR copy so I can form no adequate opinion on her earlier work although I do have a readable first edition of her Canonbury House.  That novel is acceptable work although inferior to Georges if only compared to his last work Mary, Queen of Scots published a year after ‘Canonbury House.’  Therefor, comparing hi work before and after ‘Canonbury House’ it isn’t likely that he wrote it.  As a key ingredient of his work hers contains no description of women’s breasts, not even those of Queen Mary.

As stated earlier the book took nearly a year to write, thirty installments in the Miscellany.   My copy of the published book by John Dicks has notes on he fly leaf from a former owner as well as those that appear to be from a book seller.

There is a penciled and erased signature from Arthur Reynolds, perhaps one of Georges sons. There is a full page faint erased text that might be made readable by electronic means.  A strong hand with a good pencil has written ‘First thus 1870- complete in 30 penny parts.’  As the installments were published in the Miscellany there shouldn’t be 30 penny parts unless there was a second publication by Dicks. Between 1857-58 and 1870 and also issued separately in 7 parts.  So, quite a publishing history.

Perhaps a bereaved Reynolds did his best to make it a seller or perhaps Queen Elizabeth was still hot copy.

John Dicks, who controlled the publishing schedule of Reynolds massive output apparently held back the book release until 1870.  It was his habit to date publications only on the initial issue.  The novel is relatively short at 237 double columned pages.  Small print.

Now, the last novel of Georges was an incident in the live of Mary Queen of Scots making it a companion piece to Susannah’.  It follows Susannah’s plan fairly closely.  Comparatively, Georges style is more fluent and the story is better constructed so that is impossible to think both novels came from the same hand.  I think it fairly obvious that Canonbury House must have been written by a failing Susannah. Perhaps Mary, Queen of Scots was Georges love letter to his beloved and deceased wife.  He was desolated.  He never remarried.

Canonbury House is a sort of mystery of which Queen Elizabeth is the central character.  I’m all spoilers here but you will probably never see a copy of the book.  No problem.

The story hinges on the maternity of a off-central character, the beauteous Ada Arundel.  No one knew who her parents were but she had always lived in the household of the richest commoner in England, the honourable Richard Spencer currently the Mayor of the City of London.  A substantial fellow, the Mayor of the City of London.

The Mayor of the City of London isn’t the mayor of the geographical city but of the Square Mile of the financial district.  The rest of London is all suburbs.  The Mayor of the City is independent of the Crown. It is subordinate to Parliament.  Spencer is not a noble but a man of business.  Still, he is the Mayor of the City and the richest commoner of England.

Once the mysteries are cleared up after the reading of the book one can go on and reflect about some of the deeper meanings of the story.

The point is that Queen Elizabeth would never be seen dead in this commoner’s house  except for the circumstances and Spencer’s position.

The subtext here seems to be that Elizabeth was known as the virgin queen but she was not.  Susannah seems to take great pleasure in exposing Elizabeth, except its just her private joke at this point.  Elizabeth had an illegitimate daughter which means that she was a fallen woman no better than any other fallen woman.  According to Susannah the secret began when her child was given to family that had just given birth to a still born and they agreed to take Elizabeth’s child and raise it as their own.

It is now thirty years on and we are not give any information on Ada’s birth.  The queen has been longing to learn what happened to her child.  She has no hint that she is sitting across from her daughter not does Ada know she is looking at her long lost mother.

If we readers had known this the story would have taken quite a different turn.  Perhaps for a better story.  Susannah then wrote the novel without a hint of the true situation keeping it as a surprise.

Without being critical, it is Susannah’s story, I wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to reverse the situation and make Ada’s maternity apparent from the start then basing the story on Elizabeth’s discovery. 

Now, all novels are necessarily auto-biographical.  In Georges case he suffered from logorrhea.  Out of his millions of words one can easily determine the defining events of his life as he works them through a few of his repeating themes. As Susannah is leading us into a situation  in which the result is that the queen isn’t any better than she should be, her case is no different than she should be.  Her case is no different than the tens o thousands, hundreds of thousands of ordinary women who suffered the consequences of fallen women. And that might lead to single woman who fell- that is Susannah herself.  The only possible proof is in the pudding, that is the novel, ‘Canonbury House.’

Susannah’s history prior to her marriage isn’t known, however George consistently portrayed the fallen women, always in a sympathetic manner, who were seduced to their ruin, her greatest treasure stolen.

As far as we can conjecture Susannah Pierson was still with her father when  she met George.  Her age at that time was probably sixteen, George being eighteen.  Most of George’s heroines in his novels are sixteen. The loveliness of the sixteen year old stands out in all his novels.

In his novel ‘The Youthful Impostor’, written in 1932, rewritten and published in 1935, looking back a few years to an early friendship, his protagonist, Crawford, meets a shady character named Pearson, a man of the world in France, possibly Calais, not clear, given the similarity of names that Pearson represented the father of Susannah Pierson.  The names are too similar to be coincidental.

Pearson appears to be some high class grifter who was very wise, as in wiseguy and familiar with all the petty cheats and scams that only a fellow grifter would know.  He and Crawford are in a French gambling hell and the two watch a grifter clean out a mark.   Task done he gets up to leave.  As he does Pearson tells Crawford ‘Watch this.’ 

He then approaches the grifter whispering a few words in his ear,  the grifter, the grifter then follows him to his table and lays down half of his take and casually strolls away.  Crawford is dumbfounded.  Pearson explains:  If a grifter sees another working a mark, to keep his silence the other grifter must pay out half, which is what happened.  Crawford’s, that is Reynolds eyes are opened.  That’s what it means to be a man of the world.

As Crawford was on the way to Paris in company with Pickwick and his friends as well as the grifter Augustus Crashem and a man who was a gendarme closely resembling Pearson in appearance and manner, the Gendarme who will turn out to be the friendly Dumont watches with a know eye but does nothing as Crashem works his scam.  Perhaps he tapped Crashem for half..

Pearson and his daughter associating as they must with a shady crowd if is possible if not probable that a cute fourteen or fifteen year old girl might have been seduced and ruined which seared her soul causing total anguish that expiated itself in slandering a dead Queen Elizabethl by revealing something she knew or thought she knew thereby purifying her soul as she lay dying.  The poor girl and the privileged girl were the same.

‘Canonbury House’ wasn’t Susannah’s only novel; she wrote four or five others.  A batch of kids, running the household, helping George with his novels, writing her own as well as a cookbook,  what a woman.  No wonder George treasured her.  I have a wretched OCR copy of her novel ‘Gretna Green’ that might be a little revealing.  From the title I thought it might have been a biographical novel about a woman named Gretna Green, but study led me to a different conclusion. 

As it was, in the eighteenth century young lords were marrying common girls that infuriated their parents so in 1745 a law was passed making any such marriages invalid.  That was only an impediment not a blockade.  Enterprising souls in Scotland living in a small town called Gretna Green analyzed the situation then some fellow, blacksmiths and such got themselves ordained as ministers and began marrying the young swains and their commoner girlfriends, the marriages were legal in England. 

Thus the roads leading to Gretna Green were well traveled.  As the parents were on the alert ready to prevent such alliances, there was often a mad dash for the Scottish border by the young lovers closely followed by the parents or their agents to prevent such a folly.  Whoever got there first won the race.

If the young lovers won the race they got married; if the parents the ecclesiastic blacksmiths went empty handed.  Such is life.

Now, if opportunity was created for a blacksmith who had a limited number of horses to shoe, that law and its resultant Gretna Green created opportunities  or aspiring novelists as well. Susannah put that shoe on and wrote Gretna Green.

What is the relationship of Gretna Green to Canonsbury House?  You can be that those young lovers didn’t wait for the knot to be tied before they consummated the marriage; hence the young ladies who had given away their greatest treasure were technically ruined women before that marriage.  If the parents won the race the technicality was removed.  The girls were ruined.

Thus Susannah could portray several ruined young ladies by which she could possibly relive her own tragedy.   Gretna Green was apparently pretty racy for the time because it aroused a fair reaction.  It was even suggested that perhaps she knew of that which she spoke.

George complained about this abuse of his wife but it is not known whether he received satisfaction.  I rather suspect that Susannah got a fair amount of satisfaction by exposing the Virgin Queen.  The resolution then of Susannah’s Canonbury House.

How did Ada Arundel react to learning who her mother was and that mother being the Queen of England who embraced her as her long lost daughter?

Rather a tragic ending.  Ada was so overjoyed that she burst a blood vessel in her brain and died from the joy that was so overwhelming.  Let us hope that Susannah felt redeemed if my speculation is correct.

Having finished reading the novel and looking back at the beginning one appreciates the irony that in Canonbury House mother and daughter are looking at each other not realizing that they are seeing their heart’s desire.  One might think that there should have been enough familial resemblance between the Queen and Ada  to create suspicion.

But, in a spiteful admission Susannah mentions that Elizabeth had never been a handsome woman and that Ada was stunningly beautiful so no surprise there. 

I don’t know how contemporaries  would have read the novel or what their reaction might have been.  I don’t know whether Susannah maliciously invented the story or had heard some rumor, in any event Ada died so that the evidence disappeared.

I don’t feel it necessary to detail the development of the novel as it was fairly pedestrian while Susannah was not at her peak for health reasons.

A Review

Canonbury House by Susannah Reynolds

And

Mary Queen Of Scots by George W.M. Reynolds

Review by R.E. Prindle

As you can tell by my attribution of Canonbury House to Susannah Reynolds, Georges wife I’m making a claim that needs explaining.  Let me establish my grounds for such a claim by reviewing circumstances of the couple at the time. 

‘Canonbury House was written from 11 July 1857-1 May 1858, first published in the Reynolds Miscellany in parts.

At the time the Reynolds were living in the resort town of Ramsgate in Georges home shire, Kent.  They had removed from London in 1854.  Susannah died in Ramsgate during 1858.

From those facts I surmise that Susannah was ill, suffering from a wasting disease.  Further, my guess is that she was suffering from breast cancer.  You may think that’s a leap.

Consider, George was  a breast fetishist, quite clearly shown in all his writing.  He was first magnitude.  He writes marvelous descriptions of the female breast, they are frequent and quite detailed.  On a few occasions he mentions breasts disfigured by cancers.  Unless he was unfaithful to Susannah, which I can’t conceive, where else would he have seen them?  Hence, I don’t think it is a great leap to think Susannah so suffered.  She died early, only forty four years old assuming she was George’s age, perhaps one or two years younger than her husband.  She may have been only sixteen when she married an eighteen year old George.  Is female characters are quite frequently sixteen.  As Georges work really required him to be in London, the move to Ramsgate probably to make Susannah’s last year more comfortable points to a wasting disease such as breast cancer.

At that time, according to Guy Dicks and his biography of his relative, Georges publisher, John Dicks, the two partners were each pulling down a hundred pounds a week from their business, so that at least at fifty two hundred pounds a year, the Reynolds were prosperous enough to live comfortably and, indeed, George bought a substantial free standing house in Ramsgate.

However George was yet to finish volume four of the  ‘Mysteries of the Court of London’ which work shows definite signs of divided attention.  Thus between making frequent trips to London and tending to his beloved Susannah his writing was definitely affected.

Now, Susannah herself was a novelist with some few titles to her credit including her novel ‘Gretna Green.’  One may assume that with greater leisure in Ramsgate she sought to create her Magnum Opus.  I have a slight acquaintance with Gretna Green in an unreadable OCR copy so I can form no adequate opinion on her earlier work although I do have a readable first edition of her Canonbury House.  That novel is acceptable work although inferior to Georges if only compared to his last work Mary, Queen of Scots published a year after ‘Canonbury House.’  Therefor, comparing hi work before and after ‘Canonbury House’ it isn’t likely that he wrote it.  As a key ingredient of his work hers contains no description of women’s breasts, not even those of Queen Mary.

As stated earlier the book took nearly a year to write, thirty installments in the Miscellany.   My copy of the published book by John Dicks has notes on he fly leaf from a former owner as well as those that appear to be from a book seller.

There is a penciled and erased signature from Arthur Reynolds, perhaps one of Georges sons. There is a full page faint erased text that might be made readable by electronic means.  A strong hand with a good pencil has written ‘First thus 1870- complete in 30 penny parts.’  As the installments were published in the Miscellany there shouldn’t be 30 penny parts unless there was a second publication by Dicks. Between 1857-58 and 1870 and also issued separately in 7 parts.  So, quite a publishing history.

Perhaps a bereaved Reynolds did his best to make it a seller or perhaps Queen Elizabeth was still hot copy.

John Dicks, who controlled the publishing schedule of Reynolds massive output apparently held back the book release until 1870.  It was his habit to date publications only on the initial issue.  The novel is relatively short at 237 double columned pages.  Small print.

Now, the last novel of Georges was an incident in the live of Mary Queen of Scots making it a companion piece to Susannah’.  It follows Susannah’s plan fairly closely.  Comparatively, Georges style is more fluent and the story is better constructed so that is impossible to think both novels came from the same hand.  I think it fairly obvious that Canonbury House must have been written by a failing Susannah. Perhaps Mary, Queen of Scots was Georges love letter to his beloved and deceased wife.  He was desolated.  He never remarried.

Canonbury House is a sort of mystery of which Queen Elizabeth is the central character.  I’m all spoilers here but you will probably never see a copy of the book.  No problem.

The story hinges on the maternity of a off-central character, the beauteous Ada Arundel.  No one knew who her parents were but she had always lived in the household of the richest commoner in England, the honourable Richard Spencer currently the Mayor of the City of London.  A substantial fellow, the Mayor of the City of London.

The Mayor of the City of London isn’t the mayor of the geographical city but of the Square Mile of the financial district.  The rest of London is all suburbs.  The Mayor of the City is independent of the Crown. It is subordinate to Parliament.  Spencer is not a noble but a man of business.  Still, he is the Mayor of the City and the richest commoner of England.

Once the mysteries are cleared up after the reading of the book one can go on and reflect about some of the deeper meanings of the story.

The point is that Queen Elizabeth would never be seen dead in this commoner’s house  except for the circumstances and Spencer’s position.

The subtext here seems to be that Elizabeth was known as the virgin queen but she was not.  Susannah seems to take great pleasure in exposing Elizabeth, except its just her private joke at this point.  Elizabeth had an illegitimate daughter which means that she was a fallen woman no better than any other fallen woman.  According to Susannah the secret began when her child was given to family that had just given birth to a still born and they agreed to take Elizabeth’s child and raise it as their own.

It is now thirty years on and we are not give any information on Ada’s birth.  The queen has been longing to learn what happened to her child.  She has no hint that she is sitting across from her daughter not does Ada know she is looking at her long lost mother.

If we readers had known this the story would have taken quite a different turn.  Perhaps for a better story.  Susannah then wrote the novel without a hint of the true situation keeping it as a surprise.

Without being critical, it is Susannah’s story, I wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to reverse the situation and make Ada’s maternity apparent from the start then basing the story on Elizabeth’s discovery. 

Now, all novels are necessarily auto-biographical.  In Georges case he suffered from logorrhea.  Out of his millions of words one can easily determine the defining events of his life as he works them through a few of his repeating themes. As Susannah is leading us into a situation  in which the result is that the queen isn’t any better than she should be, her case is no different than she should be.  Her case is no different than the tens o thousands, hundreds of thousands of ordinary women who suffered the consequences of fallen women. And that might lead to single woman who fell- that is Susannah herself.  The only possible proof is in the pudding, that is the novel, ‘Canonbury House.’

Susannah’s history prior to her marriage isn’t known, however George consistently portrayed the fallen women, always in a sympathetic manner, who were seduced to their ruin, her greatest treasure stolen.

As far as we can conjecture Susannah Pierson was still with her father when  she met George.  Her age at that time was probably sixteen, George being eighteen.  Most of George’s heroines in his novels are sixteen. The loveliness of the sixteen year old stands out in all his novels.

In his novel ‘The Youthful Impostor’, written in 1932, rewritten and published in 1935, looking back a few years to an early friendship, his protagonist, Crawford, meets a shady character named Pearson, a man of the world in France, possibly Calais, not clear, given the similarity of names that Pearson represented the father of Susannah Pierson.  The names are too similar to be coincidental.

Pearson appears to be some high class grifter who was very wise, as in wiseguy and familiar with all the petty cheats and scams that only a fellow grifter would know.  He and Crawford are in a French gambling hell and the two watch a grifter clean out a mark.   Task done he gets up to leave.  As he does Pearson tells Crawford ‘Watch this.’ 

He then approaches the grifter whispering a few words in his ear,  the grifter, the grifter then follows him to his table and lays down half of his take and casually strolls away.  Crawford is dumbfounded.  Pearson explains:  If a grifter sees another working a mark, to keep his silence the other grifter must pay out half, which is what happened.  Crawford’s, that is Reynolds eyes are opened.  That’s what it means to be a man of the world.

As Crawford was on the way to Paris in company with Pickwick and his friends as well as the grifter Augustus Crashem and a man who was a gendarme closely resembling Pearson in appearance and manner, the Gendarme who will turn out to be the friendly Dumont watches with a know eye but does nothing as Crashem works his scam.  Perhaps he tapped Crashem for half..

Pearson and his daughter associating as they must with a shady crowd if is possible if not probable that a cute fourteen or fifteen year old girl might have been seduced and ruined which seared her soul causing total anguish that expiated itself in slandering a dead Queen Elizabethl by revealing something she knew or thought she knew thereby purifying her soul as she lay dying.  The poor girl and the privileged girl were the same.

‘Canonbury House’ wasn’t Susannah’s only novel; she wrote four or five others.  A batch of kids, running the household, helping George with his novels, writing her own as well as a cookbook,  what a woman.  No wonder George treasured her.  I have a wretched OCR copy of her novel ‘Gretna Green’ that might be a little revealing.  From the title I thought it might have been a biographical novel about a woman named Gretna Green, but study led me to a different conclusion. 

As it was, in the eighteenth century young lords were marrying common girls that infuriated their parents so in 1745 a law was passed making any such marriages invalid.  That was only an impediment not a blockade.  Enterprising souls in Scotland living in a small town called Gretna Green analyzed the situation then some fellow, blacksmiths and such got themselves ordained as ministers and began marrying the young swains and their commoner girlfriends, the marriages were legal in England. 

Thus the roads leading to Gretna Green were well traveled.  As the parents were on the alert ready to prevent such alliances, there was often a mad dash for the Scottish border by the young lovers closely followed by the parents or their agents to prevent such a folly.  Whoever got there first won the race.

If the young lovers won the race they got married; if the parents the ecclesiastic blacksmiths went empty handed.  Such is life.

Now, if opportunity was created for a blacksmith who had a limited number of horses to shoe, that law and its resultant Gretna Green created opportunities  or aspiring novelists as well. Susannah put that shoe on and wrote Gretna Green.

What is the relationship of Gretna Green to Canonsbury House?  You can be that those young lovers didn’t wait for the knot to be tied before they consummated the marriage; hence the young ladies who had given away their greatest treasure were technically ruined women before that marriage.  If the parents won the race the technicality was removed.  The girls were ruined.

Thus Susannah could portray several ruined young ladies by which she could possibly relive her own tragedy.   Gretna Green was apparently pretty racy for the time because it aroused a fair reaction.  It was even suggested that perhaps she knew of that which she spoke.

George complained about this abuse of his wife but it is not known whether he received satisfaction.  I rather suspect that Susannah got a fair amount of satisfaction by exposing the Virgin Queen.  The resolution then of Susannah’s Canonbury House.

How did Ada Arundel react to learning who her mother was and that mother being the Queen of England who embraced her as her long lost daughter?

Rather a tragic ending.  Ada was so overjoyed that she burst a blood vessel in her brain and died from the joy that was so overwhelming.  Let us hope that Susannah felt redeemed if my speculation is correct.

Having finished reading the novel and looking back at the beginning one appreciates the irony that in Canonbury House mother and daughter are looking at each other not realizing that they are seeing their heart’s desire.  One might think that there should have been enough familial resemblance between the Queen and Ada  to create suspicion.

But, in a spiteful admission Susannah mentions that Elizabeth had never been a handsome woman and that Ada was stunningly beautiful so no surprise there. 

I don’t know how contemporaries  would have read the novel or what their reaction might have been.  I don’t know whether Susannah maliciously invented the story or had heard some rumor, in any event Ada died so that the evidence disappeared.

I don’t feel it necessary to detail the development of the novel as it was fairly pedestrian while Susannah was not at her peak for health reasons.