I, Dynamo

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.

Century Society Minutes 10/2/2023

A Short Review Of Genocides.

by

R.E. Prindle (Sec’y)

The meeting was called to order. A paper was read by member Eric Hobsbawn examining the role of genocide in human history.  A precis follows.  Original in our files.

Rather than considering genocide as an aberration of WWII I hope to show that genocide is a normal activity while the ‘final solution’ is the only reasonable solution of a conquering people seeking ‘lebensraum’.

In early times of the Age of Aries when the population of settlements grew too great for the location to support  young men were selected to emigrate.  Young men in their youthful exuberance are disruptive to the peace of a smallish community so better to send them to find a new home.

These men set out to find their place.  When they found a suitable location they attacked killing all the males while appropriating the women for themselves.  Thus genocide removed later problems while the community was reformed according to the accustomed  mores of their home while being modified by those of the women. 

Transiting from the Age of Taurus to that of Aries the mind of mankind developed accordingly.  As it did the new mindset conflicted with the old mindset  so we had the sort of problem that is developing now between the mindset of Pisces and incoming mindset of Aquarius.

This type of conflict was clearly recorded by the Jews of Moses’ day in the book of Exodus.  In the story Moses came down from the mountain and noticed that his people were worshipping the golden calf or the bull symbolizing the Age of Taurus.  He did more than just get angry, he threw down the tablets of law he was carrying smashing them.  He then stormed up the mountain to obtain a new set.  I would love to have seen the god’s reaction to his incompetent’s demand for a new set.  ‘I’m sorry Sir, but they got a little heavy.’  God cut it down from twenty-five commandants to ten to make the load a little lighter.  Exodus 32: 27-29, King James version:

Quote:

‘And (Moses) said unto them (the people) Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, put every one his sword by his side, and go in and out from every gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man, his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor’.  And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses.  And there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.  For Moses had said.  ‘Consecrate yourselves today to the LORD, even every man his son, and upon his brother that he may be bestow  upon you a blessing this day.’

Unquote.

Thus, to acquire a unity of belief it was necessary to kill all the citizens who still clung to the Taurian religion.  And this, at the command of God., the new god.  The old god to the trashcan.  Moses by this stern rebuke hoped to convert by force his people to his new Arien version of Judaism.  As the twig is bent the tree will incline.

This attitude would be passed on to the Aryans of Europe through the agency of  Roman Catholic Christianity.  Hence the atrocities of the Spanish inquisition during which tens of thousands were burned at the stake.  They were burned because the Catholic Church abjured bloodshed.

Let us pass over innumerable examples to arrive at the French Revolution of 1789.  Thus began  the era of the revolution in which the Monarchy and nobles of what then became the old dispensation were eliminated in favor of the new.  A genocide was also declared on the Vendee because as Karl Marx offhandedly remarked in his ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution that no government could tolerate such counter-revolutionists in its midst.  On the side of the Jew Marx., consider that statement in the  role of the Jews in Germany.

By the time of the French Revolution the Age of Aries had passed and the Age of Pisces was in progress. It is to be noted that the Jewish nation was the most influential people of the French Revolution while the benefits of the carnage mostly favored that nation.  Each stage of this tremendous revolution, 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1905 and 1917 and WWII increased Jewish power.  Their problem was that they lacked a territory, ‘lebensraum.’  Think about the present Russian-Ukraine war now.

In 1917 it appeared that they had succeeded in appropriating Russia as a homeland but they were outmaneuvered by Stalin and were once again forced into a subordinate position.

Turning to a new expedient they chose Germany as their projected homeland.  This required the genocide of the male population leaving only the women not unlike the ancient solution.

They lacked the power themselves to accomplish the fact, however having thoroughly infiltrated the governments of Russia, France, England and the United States they turned those countries against the ‘evil’ Germans, those damnable Prussian ‘Militarists’, while maneuvering the Germans to battle the Communist now Soviet Union, once Russia. which triggered the North Americans to join the war.against the ‘Aggressor’ nations.  That is the non-Communist States of Germany, Italy and Japan.

They made the mistake of proclaiming  their intent to conduct a genocide of German males which caused a counter effort of the Germans.  Refer back to the French Revolution attitude toward the Vendees.

These Jewish subjects, is that to strong a characterization? with massive military machines opened the genocide of Germany in an non-stop night and day bombing campaign against the civilian German people.  It was a holocaust of Germany.  Horrible.  The Germans retorted accordingly.  Equally horrible.

Nothing daunted the Jewish remnant, after the German fiasco conceived the notion of a genocide against ‘Whiteness’, that is, the Aryan race.  That is the final solution we find ourselves in today.

This remarkable reversal of roles will have been achieved over more that four thousand years of unremitting effort, the Ages of Aries, Pisces and now Aquarius.  Using the ‘colored’ peoples as their unwitting agents the whole world is now being directed to the genocide of ‘Whiteness.’

Genocide: As it was and is so it will be.

Thank you for listening.

The gathering stunned and aghast filed out.  The session was closed on that note.

Century Society Minutes 10/2/2023

A Short Review Of Genocides.

by

R.E. Prindle (Sec’y)

The meeting was called to order. A paper was read by member Eric Hobsbawn examining the role of genocide in human history.  A precis follows.  Original in our files.

Rather than considering genocide as an aberration of WWII I hope to show that genocide is a normal activity while the ‘final solution’ is the only reasonable solution of a conquering people seeking ‘lebensraum’.

In early times of the Age of Aries when the population of settlements grew too great for the location to support  young men were selected to emigrate.  Young men in their youthful exuberance are disruptive to the peace of a smallish community so better to send them to find a new home.

These men set out to find their place.  When they found a suitable location they attacked killing all the males while appropriating the women for themselves.  Thus genocide removed later problems while the community was reformed according to the accustomed  mores of their home while being modified by those of the women. 

Transiting from the Age of Taurus to that of Aries the mind of mankind developed accordingly.  As it did the new mindset conflicted with the old mindset  so we had the sort of problem that is developing now between the mindset of Pisces and incoming mindset of Aquarius.

This type of conflict was clearly recorded by the Jews of Moses’ day in the book of Exodus.  In the story Moses came down from the mountain and noticed that his people were worshipping the golden calf or the bull symbolizing the Age of Taurus.  He did more than just get angry, he threw down the tablets of law he was carrying smashing them.  He then stormed up the mountain to obtain a new set.  I would love to have seen the god’s reaction to his incompetent’s demand for a new set.  ‘I’m sorry Sir, but they got a little heavy.’  God cut it down from twenty-five commandants to ten to make the load a little lighter.  Exodus 32: 27-29, King James version:

Quote:

‘And (Moses) said unto them (the people) Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, put every one his sword by his side, and go in and out from every gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man, his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor’.  And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses.  And there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.  For Moses had said.  ‘Consecrate yourselves today to the LORD, even every man his son, and upon his brother that he may be bestow  upon you a blessing this day.’

Unquote.

Thus, to acquire a unity of belief it was necessary to kill all the citizens who still clung to the Taurian religion.  And this, at the command of God., the new god.  The old god to the trashcan.  Moses by this stern rebuke hoped to convert by force his people to his new Arien version of Judaism.  As the twig is bent the tree will incline.

This attitude would be passed on to the Aryans of Europe through the agency of  Roman Catholic Christianity.  Hence the atrocities of the Spanish inquisition during which tens of thousands were burned at the stake.  They were burned because the Catholic Church abjured bloodshed.

Let us pass over innumerable examples to arrive at the French Revolution of 1789.  Thus began  the era of the revolution in which the Monarchy and nobles of what then became the old dispensation were eliminated in favor of the new.  A genocide was also declared on the Vendee because as Karl Marx offhandedly remarked in his ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution that no government could tolerate such counter-revolutionists in its midst.  On the side of the Jew Marx., consider that statement in the  role of the Jews in Germany.

By the time of the French Revolution the Age of Aries had passed and the Age of Pisces was in progress. It is to be noted that the Jewish nation was the most influential people of the French Revolution while the benefits of the carnage mostly favored that nation.  Each stage of this tremendous revolution, 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1905 and 1917 and WWII increased Jewish power.  Their problem was that they lacked a territory, ‘lebensraum.’  Think about the present Russian-Ukraine war now.

In 1917 it appeared that they had succeeded in appropriating Russia as a homeland but they were outmaneuvered by Stalin and were once again forced into a subordinate position.

Turning to a new expedient they chose Germany as their projected homeland.  This required the genocide of the male population leaving only the women not unlike the ancient solution.

They lacked the power themselves to accomplish the fact, however having thoroughly infiltrated the governments of Russia, France, England and the United States they turned those countries against the ‘evil’ Germans, those damnable Prussian ‘Militarists’, while maneuvering the Germans to battle the Communist now Soviet Union, once Russia. which triggered the North Americans to join the war.against the ‘Aggressor’ nations.  That is the non-Communist States of Germany, Italy and Japan.

They made the mistake of proclaiming  their intent to conduct a genocide of German males which caused a counter effort of the Germans.  Refer back to the French Revolution attitude toward the Vendees.

These Jewish subjects, is that to strong a characterization? with massive military machines opened the genocide of Germany in an non-stop night and day bombing campaign against the civilian German people.  It was a holocaust of Germany.  Horrible.  The Germans retorted accordingly.  Equally horrible.

Nothing daunted the Jewish remnant, after the German fiasco conceived the notion of a genocide against ‘Whiteness’, that is, the Aryan race.  That is the final solution we find ourselves in today.

This remarkable reversal of roles will have been achieved over more that four thousand years of unremitting effort, the Ages of Aries, Pisces and now Aquarius.  Using the ‘colored’ peoples as their unwitting agents the whole world is now being directed to the genocide of ‘Whiteness.’

Genocide: As it was and is so it will be.

Thank you for listening.

The gathering stunned and aghast filed out.  The session was closed on that note.

Century Society Minutes 10/2/2023

A Short Review Of Genocides.

by

R.E. Prindle (Sec’y)

The meeting was called to order. A paper was read by member Eric Hobsbawn examining the role of genocide in human history.  A precis follows.  Original in our files.

Rather than considering genocide as an aberration of WWII I hope to show that genocide is a normal activity while the ‘final solution’ is the only reasonable solution of a conquering people seeking ‘lebensraum’.

In early times of the Age of Aries when the population of settlements grew too great for the location to support  young men were selected to emigrate.  Young men in their youthful exuberance are disruptive to the peace of a smallish community so better to send them to find a new home.

These men set out to find their place.  When they found a suitable location they attacked killing all the males while appropriating the women for themselves.  Thus genocide removed later problems while the community was reformed according to the accustomed  mores of their home while being modified by those of the women. 

Transiting from the Age of Taurus to that of Aries the mind of mankind developed accordingly.  As it did the new mindset conflicted with the old mindset  so we had the sort of problem that is developing now between the mindset of Pisces and incoming mindset of Aquarius.

This type of conflict was clearly recorded by the Jews of Moses’ day in the book of Exodus.  In the story Moses came down from the mountain and noticed that his people were worshipping the golden calf or the bull symbolizing the Age of Taurus.  He did more than just get angry, he threw down the tablets of law he was carrying smashing them.  He then stormed up the mountain to obtain a new set.  I would love to have seen the god’s reaction to his incompetent’s demand for a new set.  ‘I’m sorry Sir, but they got a little heavy.’  God cut it down from twenty-five commandants to ten to make the load a little lighter.  Exodus 32: 27-29, King James version:

Quote:

‘And (Moses) said unto them (the people) Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, put every one his sword by his side, and go in and out from every gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man, his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor’.  And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses.  And there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.  For Moses had said.  ‘Consecrate yourselves today to the LORD, even every man his son, and upon his brother that he may be bestow  upon you a blessing this day.’

Unquote.

Thus, to acquire a unity of belief it was necessary to kill all the citizens who still clung to the Taurian religion.  And this, at the command of God., the new god.  The old god to the trashcan.  Moses by this stern rebuke hoped to convert by force his people to his new Arien version of Judaism.  As the twig is bent the tree will incline.

This attitude would be passed on to the Aryans of Europe through the agency of  Roman Catholic Christianity.  Hence the atrocities of the Spanish inquisition during which tens of thousands were burned at the stake.  They were burned because the Catholic Church abjured bloodshed.

Let us pass over innumerable examples to arrive at the French Revolution of 1789.  Thus began  the era of the revolution in which the Monarchy and nobles of what then became the old dispensation were eliminated in favor of the new.  A genocide was also declared on the Vendee because as Karl Marx offhandedly remarked in his ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution that no government could tolerate such counter-revolutionists in its midst.  On the side of the Jew Marx., consider that statement in the  role of the Jews in Germany.

By the time of the French Revolution the Age of Aries had passed and the Age of Pisces was in progress. It is to be noted that the Jewish nation was the most influential people of the French Revolution while the benefits of the carnage mostly favored that nation.  Each stage of this tremendous revolution, 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1905 and 1917 and WWII increased Jewish power.  Their problem was that they lacked a territory, ‘lebensraum.’  Think about the present Russian-Ukraine war now.

In 1917 it appeared that they had succeeded in appropriating Russia as a homeland but they were outmaneuvered by Stalin and were once again forced into a subordinate position.

Turning to a new expedient they chose Germany as their projected homeland.  This required the genocide of the male population leaving only the women not unlike the ancient solution.

They lacked the power themselves to accomplish the fact, however having thoroughly infiltrated the governments of Russia, France, England and the United States they turned those countries against the ‘evil’ Germans, those damnable Prussian ‘Militarists’, while maneuvering the Germans to battle the Communist now Soviet Union, once Russia. which triggered the North Americans to join the war.against the ‘Aggressor’ nations.  That is the non-Communist States of Germany, Italy and Japan.

They made the mistake of proclaiming  their intent to conduct a genocide of German males which caused a counter effort of the Germans.  Refer back to the French Revolution attitude toward the Vendees.

These Jewish subjects, is that to strong a characterization? with massive military machines opened the genocide of Germany in an non-stop night and day bombing campaign against the civilian German people.  It was a holocaust of Germany.  Horrible.  The Germans retorted accordingly.  Equally horrible.

Nothing daunted the Jewish remnant, after the German fiasco conceived the notion of a genocide against ‘Whiteness’, that is, the Aryan race.  That is the final solution we find ourselves in today.

This remarkable reversal of roles will have been achieved over more that four thousand years of unremitting effort, the Ages of Aries, Pisces and now Aquarius.  Using the ‘colored’ peoples as their unwitting agents the whole world is now being directed to the genocide of ‘Whiteness.’

Genocide: As it was and is so it will be.

Thank you for listening.

The gathering stunned and aghast filed out.  The session was closed on that note.

Century Society Minutes 10/2/2023

A Short Review Of Genocides.

by

R.E. Prindle (Sec’y)

The meeting was called to order. A paper was read by member Eric Hobsbawn examining the role of genocide in human history.  A precis follows.  Original in our files.

Rather than considering genocide as an aberration of WWII I hope to show that genocide is a normal activity while the ‘final solution’ is the only reasonable solution of a conquering people seeking ‘lebensraum’.

In early times of the Age of Aries when the population of settlements grew too great for the location to support  young men were selected to emigrate.  Young men in their youthful exuberance are disruptive to the peace of a smallish community so better to send them to find a new home.

These men set out to find their place.  When they found a suitable location they attacked killing all the males while appropriating the women for themselves.  Thus genocide removed later problems while the community was reformed according to the accustomed  mores of their home while being modified by those of the women. 

Transiting from the Age of Taurus to that of Aries the mind of mankind developed accordingly.  As it did the new mindset conflicted with the old mindset  so we had the sort of problem that is developing now between the mindset of Pisces and incoming mindset of Aquarius.

This type of conflict was clearly recorded by the Jews of Moses’ day in the book of Exodus.  In the story Moses came down from the mountain and noticed that his people were worshipping the golden calf or the bull symbolizing the Age of Taurus.  He did more than just get angry, he threw down the tablets of law he was carrying smashing them.  He then stormed up the mountain to obtain a new set.  I would love to have seen the god’s reaction to his incompetent’s demand for a new set.  ‘I’m sorry Sir, but they got a little heavy.’  God cut it down from twenty-five commandants to ten to make the load a little lighter.  Exodus 32: 27-29, King James version:

Quote:

‘And (Moses) said unto them (the people) Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, put every one his sword by his side, and go in and out from every gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man, his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor’.  And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses.  And there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.  For Moses had said.  ‘Consecrate yourselves today to the LORD, even every man his son, and upon his brother that he may be bestow  upon you a blessing this day.’

Unquote.

Thus, to acquire a unity of belief it was necessary to kill all the citizens who still clung to the Taurian religion.  And this, at the command of God., the new god.  The old god to the trashcan.  Moses by this stern rebuke hoped to convert by force his people to his new Arien version of Judaism.  As the twig is bent the tree will incline.

This attitude would be passed on to the Aryans of Europe through the agency of  Roman Catholic Christianity.  Hence the atrocities of the Spanish inquisition during which tens of thousands were burned at the stake.  They were burned because the Catholic Church abjured bloodshed.

Let us pass over innumerable examples to arrive at the French Revolution of 1789.  Thus began  the era of the revolution in which the Monarchy and nobles of what then became the old dispensation were eliminated in favor of the new.  A genocide was also declared on the Vendee because as Karl Marx offhandedly remarked in his ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution that no government could tolerate such counter-revolutionists in its midst.  On the side of the Jew Marx., consider that statement in the  role of the Jews in Germany.

By the time of the French Revolution the Age of Aries had passed and the Age of Pisces was in progress. It is to be noted that the Jewish nation was the most influential people of the French Revolution while the benefits of the carnage mostly favored that nation.  Each stage of this tremendous revolution, 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1905 and 1917 and WWII increased Jewish power.  Their problem was that they lacked a territory, ‘lebensraum.’  Think about the present Russian-Ukraine war now.

In 1917 it appeared that they had succeeded in appropriating Russia as a homeland but they were outmaneuvered by Stalin and were once again forced into a subordinate position.

Turning to a new expedient they chose Germany as their projected homeland.  This required the genocide of the male population leaving only the women not unlike the ancient solution.

They lacked the power themselves to accomplish the fact, however having thoroughly infiltrated the governments of Russia, France, England and the United States they turned those countries against the ‘evil’ Germans, those damnable Prussian ‘Militarists’, while maneuvering the Germans to battle the Communist now Soviet Union, once Russia. which triggered the North Americans to join the war.against the ‘Aggressor’ nations.  That is the non-Communist States of Germany, Italy and Japan.

They made the mistake of proclaiming  their intent to conduct a genocide of German males which caused a counter effort of the Germans.  Refer back to the French Revolution attitude toward the Vendees.

These Jewish subjects, is that to strong a characterization? with massive military machines opened the genocide of Germany in an non-stop night and day bombing campaign against the civilian German people.  It was a holocaust of Germany.  Horrible.  The Germans retorted accordingly.  Equally horrible.

Nothing daunted the Jewish remnant, after the German fiasco conceived the notion of a genocide against ‘Whiteness’, that is, the Aryan race.  That is the final solution we find ourselves in today.

This remarkable reversal of roles will have been achieved over more that four thousand years of unremitting effort, the Ages of Aries, Pisces and now Aquarius.  Using the ‘colored’ peoples as their unwitting agents the whole world is now being directed to the genocide of ‘Whiteness.’

Genocide: As it was and is so it will be.

Thank you for listening.

The gathering stunned and aghast filed out.  The session was closed on that note.

The Enigmatic Bob Dylan

by

R.E. Prindle

Before we begin this sketch of a part of Bob Dylan’s career it is necessary to set the stage on which he strutted about. 

Bob’s career began at the beginning of the nineteen sixties when he was a mere twenty years old, green, from the back woods, fresh out of high school. That means that his mind was formed from 1950 to 1959.  He was born on the edge of civilization in Hibbing Minnesota, up in the far North, deep in the woods.

In 1961 he left the woods, or, rather, the campus of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for the bright lights of New York City.  For an unsophisticated boy from the back country that was one giant leap.  Culture shock.  His guitar slung over his shoulder he meant to make it big in the Big Bagel as a phonograph record star.

Nineteen sixty was a seminal year in the history of the United States.  The country shifted gears and if you were paying attention you realized that you had just dropped through the rabbit hole.  Hello Alice, goodbye John Wayne.

The country was sort of born again leaving the United States as it had been from c. 1900 to that present.  The old guard was outraged that people like Bob Dylan could mix with them.  Two different worlds were clashing.

The US got big and very, very rich and degenerate.  There were certain big changes in the sixties.  Nineteen-sixty to nineteen sixty-four was a transitioning port into a crazy future that no one could have imagined.

2.

At the end of nineteen sixty-three the President of the United States was assassinated.  A couple months later in Berkeley, California the Jewish students of the University staged the misnamed Free Speech Movement which was in fact an insurrection, or revolution.  That campus disturbance quickly spread across the country finding its center in NYC and Columbia University where it was stated that the issue wasn’t the issue, in other words free speech was not the issue but something else was.  Bob Dylan would represent that something although he wasn’t aware of it, but he quickly became the figurehead, the ‘voice of his generation.’  There was something happening but Bob didn’t know what it was.

Also, shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy in November of 1963 a strange thing happened in January of 1964 to the consciousness of the people of the US and perhaps the world.  The returning soldiers of World War two in which sixteen million men were impressed returned to a US that was in a shambles beginning in 1946.  Imagine 16 million men looking for jobs. The period from 1946 to 1956 was a realignment of the country.  The pre-war country no longer existed.  The ex-soldiers had to remake it and that meant suppressing the crazy youth who danced to rock and roll.  The doors closed for the young.  Elvis Presley blew them open.  In January of 1964 the youths of the world burst through the doors.

The charge was led from the country of England in the person of four yobboes, a rock group calling themselves The Beatles.  Numerous groups followed them and that was called the British invasion of the US.  The incredible thing was that the Beatles dominated the airwaves of radio and TV.  Politicians and everything else were pushed aside for musicians over the mind of the US.  The Beatles pushed US musicians aside and the best seller charts were dominated by English groups.  Music publishing profits crossed the Atlantic leaving US publishers holding an empty bag.

The US had no answer to these English yabboes so it pumped up Bob Dylan.  What great timing on the part of Bob.  He became America’s answer to the Beatles.  Bob carried the banner for the US but he had no idea what was happening.  So English yobboes and a hick from the backwoods changed the face of the world.  Wasn’t that amazing?

The next big step in the grand parade of the Sixties  was four years later in 1968.  The future had become the present.

The Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964 had expanded into a full scale social revolution.  This exuberance of 1968 would end the next year of 1969 at an abandoned destruction derby race track just outside of Oakland California called the Altamont.  The boil broke open and the pus flowed out.  That was end of the fabled Sixties.

Bobs’ position in this charade was to last for only five years but his impact was enormous.  What a five years for a nobody kid from the Minnesota backwoods.  He went from a high school student to the spokesman for his generation, a force to worshipped as a cult.  But the role was too difficult for him.  In 1966 after releasing what was the most sensational record set that the world had ever seen, ‘Blonde On Blonde, he disappeared from view becoming a reclusive in the village of Woodstock, New York.  He left a world panting for his next blockbuster LP.  While it seemed like a long wait his next record was released in 1967, more or less a year later, John Wesly Harding.  It wasn’t worth waiting for.  It was a bomb at the time. As were several other records he rushed out.  The magic was gone; his muse had moved on.

Still, his reputation was so strong as the spokesman of the generation he was still the Bob Dylan of his heyday in the minds of his followers.

.3.

Now let is gp back into the sixties and expand our horizon.

In 1954 the Supreme Court declared their decision of the case of Brown vs. The Schoolboard of Topeka Kansas compelling White People to accept the integration of Black People into public schools.  The Negro revolution was released.  Naturally the decision was resisted.  There was an eerie silence from 1954 to 1957 when the resistance was violently stamped out when then President Eisenhauer  mobilized the US Army to conduct a little Black girl dressed in pink into a school in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The US Army was mobilized in a sort of Martial Law to escort one little Black girl in pink into a school building.  The revolution was on and within ten years bombs were bursting in New York City while the Democratic convention of 1968 in Chicago was an active war zone.  The war called the Civil Rights Movement.

The so-called Free Speech Movement intensified in New York City moving downtown from Columbia University becoming the Civil Rights movement in Greenwich Village which would then involve the homosexual revolt which took shape in the homosexual battle with the police at the Stonewall bar in Greenwich Village in 1969.  The battle was decisive.  The homosexuals won the battle and the war while the effect was immediately accepted country wide.  The phonograph industry turned gay overnight.  Soon gay records termed Disco had replaced the Beatles and Bob Dylan over the airwaves of America.

All of these revolutions became one in the minds of Americans and were gathered into the rubric of a revolutionary group called the Weathermen originally morphing into the Weather Underground.  They broadened out into The Students for a Democratic Society they exploded unto campuses across the country.  They, in turn aligned themselves with the Cultural Revolution of Maoist China.  Thus by 1968 the whole US was in turmoil.  Bombs going off in NYC was nearly incessant while Negroes in Oakland California and the Bay Area were in shoot outs with government forces on a daily basis.

Nineteen sixty-eight, as has been noted was an election year.  Chicago was the designated convention city for the Democrats.  The Democratic Party was the revolutionary party and the revolutionists put on quite a show.  Now, the revolutionists were very organized and they saw that musicians could be used to convert the youth of America to a revolutionary state of mind.  They took over the recording industry.  The artists were susceptible to social pressure.  They were led into a mindset by the Negro revolution and the Civil Rights Movement.  It quickly became impossible to be a success unless you became subservient to the Civil Rights attitude thus they were easily led into aligning themselves with groups such as he Weathermen.  Bob Dylan, on his arrival in NYC had been co-opted into the Negro revolution and the Civil Rights Movement because the NYC Folk Music scene was unanimous in their support of both.  Hence to succeed he had to go along to get along.  Thus his early songs catered to the Negro psychology while he personally involved himself in civil rights activities.

In my opinion he wasn’t entirely sincere but there was no going back.  The Weathermen centered in NYC took Bob’s lyrics seriously and when formed they made Bob their figurehead, their idol.  Bob seemed to go along with it participating in some way with the group.  Thus he would probably have met the lunatic leader of the group, Bomber Bill Ayers, still active today (2023) while being drawn into the circle.

While the Weather Underground was extreme enough a group desiring even more action  splintered off from the Weather Underground under the name the Weather Organization.  These guys were a holy terror.  Bob also began to pal around with them.  Now,  the Jews of New York tolerated the Weather Underground but the Weather Organization was off the charts likely to create anti-Semitism  so they sacrificed the social acceptance of the Underground to commit major crimes.  The Organization was composed primarily of Jews so that the Jews disowned the Organization and Bob was quietly informed that he should not associate with them.  Bob thought it out and complied.  Still, he could move in the revolutionary circles.  This will become important for the year2001.

Bob was an important person in what was then known as the Counter Culture.  To be accepted in the Counter Culture one had to be or appear to be in sympathy with the revolutionary goals. People like Bill Ayers ingratiated themselves with him as did the music critic Greil Marcus and Rolling Stone Magazine editor Jan Wenner.

There were consequences for this revolutionary activity that was unsettling the United States, one might almost say, dissolving the Union, domestically while injuring the country’s international affairs by revolutionary interference in Viet Nam. 

John Lennon of the Beatles, who had been co-opted by the revolution mainly through the machinations of his looney girl friend Yoko Ono had come under the surveillance of the US government.  It was thought that he would lead an insurrection at the Republican presidential convention of 1972.  If he had thought to it didn’t come off.  Nevertheless the Nixon administration that won the election strenuously tried to have Lennon deported and banned from the country.  They were unable to do this but then Lennon was assassinated in 1980 ostensibly by a deranged fan but there were many who blamed President Nixon.

Bob, thoroughly tuned in and turned on had dropped out in mid-1966, he’d had enough, he threw it all away although coming back to life in 1967.  It was a new start, a New Morning as an album title said but the old Dylan had died metaphorically in 1966 when his muse kissed him goodbye and moved on to other lovers. 

The luck that had blessed Bob throughout those golden five years from 1961 -1966 was a thing of the past.  The new Bob begun by his record ‘John Wesly Harding’ was not embraced by the fans.  His sales, that were never robust dwindled away as a series of lackluster albums followed one after the other.  You had to be one of the cult.  The glitter of those five golden years had left a wonderful memory in the cult following.

However, the United States changed quickly after the immigration laws were changed in 1965 to allow the entire world to emigrate to US shores.  The Moslem world reacted enthusiastically sending hordes of immigrants from Iran to Yemen, from Algeria  to Palestine.  Millions flooded over the Southern border from Mexico, the Central American States and South America.  Chinese ships landed tens of thousands surreptitiously.  The United States began to dissolve and cease to be America.

All this was applauded by the revolutionaries and Bob seemed to be among them.  The Beatles had inaugurated a revolution of their own.  For the first time the world tour by musical groups was inaugurated.  In 1963 a tour of England was thought to be the acme of success.  Then in ’64 the tour was expanded to include the US and then in1966 came the around the world tour to cheering crowds.  For the Beatles that included the Philippines where their customary insouciance that had worked so well in Britain and the US almost cost them their lives.  The casual remark had incensed the authorities  causing the Beatles to make a run for their lives to the airport.  It was close.  Their passports were stamped ‘no return.’

The glamor of a world tour was such that Bob Dylan had to follow suit so that soon relatively insignificant groups were trooping around the world.  Ed Sullivan, on his TV show, after introducing the Beatles to America  brought musical act after musical act to his show from England with the quality diminishing until he brought Freddie and the Dreamers.  They should have been left dreaming in England.

Freddie more or less completed the British Invasion.  All these Yobboes  set an example for American youth.  High school drop outs were pontificating about international politics while promoting drug use.

Now the Left had captured the entire phonograph industry. An artist or group had to go along with the agenda to get along.  Any itinerant artist or group that has need to travel and especially any that to travel around the world is going to recruited by some organization whether the CIA, Mossad or MI6 or the revolutionaries to carry messages and coordinate activities.  The revolutionaries were all infiltrated by the authorities who kept close tabs.

Eric Burdon formerly of the Animals (a recording group) made a suspicious comment on German TV and was held for weeks in prison by the authorities before being released.  It may be believed that Bob Dylan was such a courier.  He was firmly coopted by the group around Jan Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine.  He was definitely involved with Greil Marcus and through Marcus with Bomber Billy Ayers, hence the Weather Underground, and through Ayers he was introduced to the soon to be President of the United States, Barack Obama. Then back to Jan Wenner and Rolling Stone magazine.   Being Jewish he was also protected.  Wenner and Marcus were also Jewish.  Barack Obama was a protégée of Bomber Billy.

Now, US relations with the Moslem world had been strained and tenuous for decades even as hordes entered the United States after 1965, Thus even as tensions were flaring between the two the US elected to bring millions of hostile Moslems into the country.  Suddenly Moslems were everywhere.  Once inside the US Moslems would become familiar with methods and customs.  They saw how easy it was to play upon our attitudes.  Protected from criticism on religious grounds as Semites, Moslems went to work to undermine the US.  Their prime target was the symbol of superiority, the Twin Towers of New York Citiy’s World Trade Center, the then tallest buildings of the world. The fit with Bill Ayers Weather Underground was perfect.  Both agreed:  Those towers had to come down.

A first attempt in the 1990s to bomb the foundations was futile although the bomb was powerful.  The Moslems fumed While domestic dissidents such as the Weather Organization and Underground saw opportunities.  This would include Bomber Billy Ayers and his Chicago auxiliaries, along with his protegee Barack Obama, Greil Marcus and mascot, Bob Dylan, while revolution central was Rolling Stone Magazine with Jan Wenner.  What happened to the Towers seems to be very simple.  The connection is Saudi Arabia. 

There is a strong probability that the US administration of George Bush was involved.  As amazing as it may seem, after the first bombing precautions seemed to have been relaxed rather than being reinforced.  No effort was made to find the bombers.  A free pass. The US seemed to have opened its arms to the conspirators if not allied with them.  Watching as citizens many of us were holding our breath waiting for the other shoe to drop.  There had to be a second attempt.  The shoe hit the floor on 9/11/01/.   The fall of the Towers  signaled the beginning of the New World Order; the United States had participated in it own decline from leadership of the ‘arsenal of democracy..’  The Great Reset, the New World Order was underway.   

The Towers were a powerful symbol of American Supremacy.  After their fall the symbols was replicated all over East Asia and amazing towers were erected.  Malaysia created a new Twin Towers with an actual sky bridge symbolically connecting the two perhaps indicating that East and West were then connected.  In a fit of supreme madness the Moslems erected a half mile high useless building built on sands dredged from the Persian Gulf. As a symbol it trumpeted the supremacy of the Moslem World.

The US couldn’t compete; it threw in the towel settling for a 1776  foot tower that feebly symbolized I know not what.

The conspiratorial web is too complex to unravel in detail.  That it should be almost an open secret with so many disparate groups involved seems to be incredible.  An active Moslem clique then connected up with revolutionary US groups in New York City.  Their obvious plan included the recruitment of a non-entity named Barack Obama to make him the first Negro president of the United States.  You can see Ayers mind at work here.

It was such an improbable and audacious plan as to make an observer laugh. But…the plan worked.  Consider that Obama was a complete nobody who had never done anything including graduating from college. 

As a first move they succeeded in entering him in the Harvad Law School.  Obama had never even thought of becoming a lawyer.  The promotion began quickly when they persuaded a publisher to give this non-entity a hundred thousand dollar advance for Obama’s  rather slender auto-biography.  One would think that the publisher was wasting the money but lo! And behold, their money was returned a thousand fold.  You know even at this point and we’re just beginning, although we know the outcome, especially because we know the outcome, Obama’s story may be the most preposterous and incredible story ever told.

Did Obama ‘graduate’ from Harvard Law School?  Maybe.  But maybe   the most prestigious university in the US just gave him the diploma at the prescribed time and sent him on his way to Chicago.  In the fold with Ayers and his Chicago consortium Obama was given a professor ship at the second most prestigious University in the US, the University of Chicago, founded by the Rockefellers.  From then on it was the Yellow Brick Road that led to Washington DC and the Presidency.  So easy it was ridiculous.

As I say, the Moslems connected up with the US revolutionary groups of the Weather organizations including Rolling Stone Magazine to give them advice and planning.  The whole scheme would be done in the open, at least, beneath the observation of the FBI.  There may be a question as to whether the FBI knew when the attack would take place although they certainly knew how and from where.

Twenty domestic Moslems were recruited as suicide bombers, they would direct the planes once in the air from the Boston airport.  These fellows weren’t particularly discreet, there was a tension in the air that something was imminent.  It was a very strange time.  Nevertheless, as immigrants, the airport clerks were given strict orders to let them pass.  In those days, as now,  the immigrants were given very preferential treatment as natives assumed a second class role.

Once in the air the Arabs, they were all Saudis seized control of the planes. 

As the intended bombing was a sort of open secret, a lot of people knew that the Towers were to be bombed on that day, preparatory to the bombing motion picture cameras were set up in an advantageous place to film the actual collision of the planes with the towers. The cameras were filming well before the crashes so that perhaps the bombers were in contact with the land crews.

The first plane could be seen tracking into the first tower just below the top.  The plane was turning into a fire ball as it entered the building.  The tower didn’t even quiver from the contact as it was built to withstand to withstand just such an event.  The cameras remained filming as the operators knew a second plane was on the way.  Some minutes later it too was filmed tracking into the second tower.  As the first tower hadn’t fallen, as obviously was anticipated,  the second plane entered a few stories lower, in an incredible fire ball.

The towers did fall into own footprints, down within seconds. The only possible way for that to happen was for the four corner points to fall simultaneously for each floor.  That was made possible by the bombing of the points on each floor that exploded synchronously.  A very successful piece of work that only could have been done from inside operators.  In other words, everybody that should have known, knew, and did nothing to prevent it.  An inside job.

We, the nation, watched the instant replays, over and over as though someone was laying back smoking a cigar and chuckling to themselves.  This was dirty work.

The explosive puffs appeared at all four corners  and each floor in accelerating speed as the buildings disappeared in an incredible cloud of dust that drifted over the island of Manhattan.  We watched with horror as the towers evaporated, over and over again in endless replays on our TVs, from coast to coast, from North to South.  We had the sickening feeling that nothing would be done and nothing was.  Over the TV we heard out President say, ‘Oh pooh, it’s nothing go out shopping.’  And the day after was one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

To repeat, obviously the corners on each floor of both towers had been mined.  Radio signals from some distance must have synchronously set the mines off.  The hijackers who couldn’t even fly the big Mainliners could not have coordinated the bombings.  They were just tools sent to their deaths.  Thus the US government must have been involved in the destruction.  Were they too tools of the Saudis.

Four planes had been hijacked simultaneously, the other two planes of which one’s destination was the pentagon and the other the White house required more skill while the targets were not that simple. The plane destined for the Pentagon had to come in at ground level which it did causing minimal damage.  The last plane destined for the White House crashed in Pennsylvania as brave passengers attempted to reclaim the plane from the hijackers.  May a monument be erected to them.  May their names be, at least, recorded.

A sheer coincidence of course, but President Bush was absent from DC at that time reading fairy tales to kindergartners in Florida. He too was televised reading to the children as an agent entered the room to advise him of the towers.  He didn’t seem to dismayed, he just got up and left those poor children in midstory. 

Now, the number of people who knew in advance what was to happen was fairly enormous and wide spread.  The FBI had to have known, you can’t even begin to form a conspiratorial group of patriots that isn’t immediately infiltrated by numerous agents, as wide spread as informed people were the FBI simply refused to act.  The Israeli Mossad knew, the British intelligence knew, US intelligence must have known.  Hell, President Bush knew or he wouldn’t have been in Florida reading fairy tales to kindergartners.  The US revolutionists knew well in advance and were involved at some level, possibly as camera crews and such.  Specifically I’m referring to Bomber Billy Ayers, Barack Obama, Greil Marcus, Bob Dylan and Jan Wenner of Rolling Stone Magazine.

‘Well, but how do you know that? You ask incredulously.  I will explain.

On April 5^th, 2009 I published an article on my WordPress blog titled Greil Marcus, Bob Dylan, Bill Ayers and Barack Obama.

Bomber Billy Ayers was and is the most evil person in America.  His is a vast empire probably involving tens of thousands of people, you may be sure he has something to do with antifa.  I don’t know what his involvement is with the ‘woke’ conspirators  but I’m sure it can be traced back to the Weathermen.  You can see the power of ‘wokeism’ in the fact that they can burn down whole cities with impunity as in Minneapolis, you can see that they can terrorize a great city for months on end while attempting to destroy federal courthouses, you can see them attack the police with extreme brutality and the fully armed police back down as they are told to do by the local politicians.  You can see them frame police officers and have them sent to prison with unconscionable long sentences merely for attempting to do the job they were hired to do, that is, deal with the criminal element of society. 

The criminals are protected from above in our society.

Bill Ayers, the Bomber Boy, began his criminal career based on the songs of Bob Dylan.  He most certainly was involved in the bombing of the towers.  As he said when through the influence of a cadre of his Chicago influential people after being tried for many of his crimes and exonerated:  ‘Guilty as hell and free as a bird.’  Only in America.  He may be seen trampling on a flat in a dirty Chicago alley.

Greil Marcus, a Rock and Roll critic and associate of Bob Dylan and Jan Wenner, his publisher, became revolutionary for an odd reason.  During the Pacific theater his mother conceived him during a brief affair with a Navy officer resulting in the birth of Greil.  As fate would have it his father, that he had never known died,       quite honorably when his ship sank in a typhoon off the Philippines.  A real whopper.  Greil blamed the US Navy as a cold blooded murderer developing a hatred of the US.

His mother later married his stepfather who gave Greil his name.  his stepfather was wealthy living in the most expensive city on the San Francisco Peninsula. He provided Greil with the means of a great life.  One should have such a step-father.

Greil then attended the University of California at Berkeley, the envy of every California student, where he saw Bob Dylan perform, was entranced, and more or less then devoted his life to promote Bob and his supposed vision of America.  They were both Jews, thus indoctrinated and conditioned in the same way.  As a revolutionist he was first a member of the French revolutionary group, the Situationists, became its leader on the death of its former leader.  He as well as Bob Dylan received the French Legion of Honor award upon the accession of Sarkozy as President,  thus those three were on the same wave length.  What they did for France to receive the honor is not clear to me, but there must have been a reason, as the awards were one of Sarkozy’s first acts much as Obamas giving Dylan the American equivalent award on his election as President of the United States.

Greil would write an article for Jan Wenner of Rolling Stone Magazine commemorating the bombing of the Towers, to be discussed presently.

Dylan’s inclusion in the group is due to the release of his Love and Theft album on, yes, 9/11//01.Coincidence?  Well, we have too many coincidences going on here and all within the same small group.

And then we have the hapless next president of the United States, Barack Obama, who was part of this group. Obama at the time he was recruited was a student at Columbia University of New York City.  How he came to anyone’s attention is a matter for wonder.  Remember his impressionable years had been spent as a Moslem in Indonesia.  Naturally he fell in with Mohammadans  and the violent US hating Weather people, thus thee conspirators came together.  In one of the most audacious plots in history Ayers, the Weather Underground and Moslem activists conspired to make Obama President of the US.  Obama at Occidental College in LA and at Columbia had been a mediocre student.  There is a question as to whether he ever graduated from Columbia, yet he found himself entered as  a law student at prestigious Harvard University from which he did graduate giving him instant credibility.  What the machinations were that got him there aren’t clear but he got all the honors, plus he was sought out by a publisher and given a one hundred thousand dollar advance for his autobiography.  Thus he had money to live in the appropriate style.  We’re talking miracles here and we’re just beginning.

Graduating from law school his backers, perhaps by now being, I’m guessing, the Saudis and most likely a consortium of moneyed Chicagoans, obtained for him a professorship at the University of Chicago to, get this, lecture on Constitution law.  From there to the Senate of Illinois and within a couple years the Senate of the United States. And at one bound straight to the Presidential office.  What kind of odds would Vegas have given when at Occidental  that he was going to be Pres.  Just think about this in real terms and it will boggle your mind.  Jesus never had so easy.

On 9/11/01 he was palling around with Greil Marcus and the prince of the Boomers. Bob Dylan.

Now, the Bomber, Billy Ayers had his own biography scheduled to be released on 9/11/01 but because of a slip up it was released a day early.  Dylans Love And Theft LP was released on schedule on 9/11 so as the Towers were falling and sinking into the ground the conspirators could have been reading the Bombers autobiography and listening to Bob Dylan singing his song of triumph ‘High Water’.   In 1963 he sang to the congressmen that the waters were rising in his song ‘The Times They Are A ‘Changin.’ An now he sang that the waters were six inches over their heads.  They were drowning men and women.  Is your head spinning yet?

Greil Marcus’ and Jan Wenner’s contributions were on the way.  Marcus’ contribution was an article in Wenner’s Rolling Stone Magazine titled in reference to Dylan’s song, ‘High Water Everywhere.’  Marcus was reviewing neither the album or the song however..  He was celebrating the triumph of the destruction of the symbols of the US world hegemony. 

What Marcus did was extract 14 quotes from various places that essentially celebrated the World Trade Center catastrophe as the sinking of the United States, ‘high water everywhere.’  Thus he quotes Dylan’s ‘High Water Rising’ night and day:

All the gold and silver being stolen away,

Big Joe Turner (Negro singer) looking east and west

From the dark rooms of his mind.

He made it to Kansas City, Twelfth Street and Vine.

Nothing standing there.

Another telling quote, almost deranged considering the circumstances was from an obscure 1998 novel ‘The Last Good Kiss’ by James Crumbly.  Note the extreme sadism in its quoting.  The intense hatred is stunning.

Quote:

‘You don’t know where she is?’ I asked.  He shrugged again, and I said, ‘OK!’  I let the automatic dangle from my hand as a I waited for a jet making the final approach over the motel.  ‘Last chance,’  I said.  He shook his head, but his eyes smiled.  He might be a piece of shit but Jackson had some balls on him.  Either that or he was more frightened of his associates than he was of me.  That was a real mistake on his part.  When the landing jet swept over the motel, I leaned down and pumped two rounds into his right foot.

“You don’t have to shoot him twice,”  Traherne said.

“Once to get his attention,’ I said, and once to let him know I was serious.”

Unquote.

Greil then follows this with his Dylan quote ‘High water rainin’ night and day…’  Now that he has our attention, the second shot, ie. the second tower.   Also reaffirming his connection to Bob Dylan.

Dylan and Marcus were great friends, both Jews,  Greil might be called a sycophant of Dylan.  Dylan later said that they weren’t that close but Marcus was the only rock critic he mentioned in his novel cum memoir ‘Chronicles One.’ of 2004

Ayers named his Weathermen after Dylan’s song ‘Ain’t Gonna Work On Maggie’s Farm No More.’  Maggie’s Farm being a stand in for the US, at least in Ayers’ mind. 

I find it difficult that these people didn’t know each other and fairly well.  Wenner of Rolling Stone claims to know each of them as though they were great buddies.  Of course Marcus was a regular contributor to Rolling Stone while Wenner interviewed Dylan more than once; Ayers drew Dylan in through the Weathermen with whom Dylan associated while Ayes sponsored Obama in Chicago; he would naturally introduce Obama to the others as the first Black President to which they all would accord their approval.

All obviously knew beforehand that the Towers would be bombed and were enthusiastic for it.  Mind, I don’t say that they participated  in setting up the plan, except possibly Ayers.  The Saudi wouldn’t have been familiar enough with American customs and mores to manage the complexities of the plan so that Ayers and his Weather Underground may have been complicit on that level.  It was a gleeful moment when the towers fell.

Listen to Ayers talking:  ‘Everything was ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.’  As the autobiography of Ayers, from which this quote was taken was intended for issue on 9/11, the Pentagon was bombed and Ayers might have fantasied he did it.  Indeed it is not impossible that the Pentagon was included at his behest.

In Marcus’ quote from Crumbly’s novel  the two shots in the foot are symbols of the twin towers.  Once to get our attention and twice to show the conspirators were serious.  And serious they have turned out to be.

And then Greil Marcus closes his article with the line from Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick after the Great White Whale Moby Dick had sunk Ahab’s ship.  ‘The ship?  Great God, where is the ship.’  The ship   was gone but then a coffin that had been on deck broke free and shot up erupting into the air then settling back into the ocean as the last remaining evidence of the ship.  Ahab’s ship being a symbol for the United States  in Marcus’, Ayers’s, Dylan’s, Wenner’s and Obama’s minds.

Note: George W.M. Reynolds And Alexander Dumas

by

R.E. Prindle

It’s always interesting to find a source for George Reynolds’ ideas.  He was a wide reader and his reading finds a way into his writings.  In his novel ‘Lady Saxondale’s Crimes’, or Harriet to use her first name, has his physician, Dr. Ferney, create a birth mark on Harriet’s  adopted son to emulate that on her lost son.  This is an elaborate deception that runs through the novel

I recently acquired a copy of Alexander Dumas’ eight volume ‘Celebrated Crimes’.  In his account of the crime of ‘Martin Guerre’ we find the inspiration for George Reynolds’ tale.  Dumas’ Martin Guerre is based on a true story, as all the celebrated crimes are.

In Martin Guerre two unrelated men are identical look alikes. Except that the real Martin Guerre has a small birthmark on his lower neck in the exact location Reynolds places his on Harriets adopted son.  As a birth mark is needed for Reynolds’ story he has Harriet employ Dr. Ferney to create the mark on her adopted son.  Unlike in Dumas’ story the birth mark is missing at the critical moment, in Reynold’s the birthmark is on her real son.

In Dumas’ story the two men are soldiers in which the real Martin Guerre is critically wounded.  His look alike then steals his identity expecting him to die.  Some eight years later he shows up at Guerre’s dwelling to begin a life as Guerre’s wife’s husband.  All goes well until the real Martin Guerre reappears.  This is a tragic story.

In Reynolds’ story Harriet’s imposture is discovered when the real son is discovered and her counterfeit is revealed.   Reynolds’ story is obviously a variation of Duma’s.

Duma’s ‘Celebrated Crimes’ was issued over 1839 and 1840.  Reynolds probably read the books at that time treasuring the detail to be used later.  That time came about in 1852 when he was writing ‘Lady Saxondales Crimes’.  The title itself is a reflection on ‘Celebrated Crimes.’  He was obviously impressed by Dumas, but more at a later time.

Discovering Reynolds’ sources is amusing.