 Chapter 6 of my first book. This is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. My First Book by Various. Chapter 6 The Social Kaleidoscope by George R. Sims My first book hardly deserved the title. I have only a dim remembrance of it now, because it is one of those things which I have studiously set myself to forget. I was very proud of it before I saw it. After I had seen it I realised in one swift moment's anguish the concentrated truth of the word vanity as applied to human wishes. Hidden away at the bottom corner of an old box, which is not to be opened until after I am dead, that first book lies at the present moment, that is to say, unless the process of decay which had already set in upon the paper on which it was printed has gone on to the bitter end, and the book has disappeared entirely of its own accord. Before that book was published I used to lie awake at night and fancy how great and how grand a thing it would be for me to see a book with my name on the cover, lying on Smith's bookstores and staring me in the face from the bookseller's windows. After it was published I felt that I owed Mrs. Smith and Sons a deep debt of gratitude for refusing to take it, and my heart rejoiced within me greatly that the only booksellers who exhibited it lived principally in old back streets and half finished suburban thoroughfares. Stay, I will go upstairs to my lumber room, I will open that box, I will dig deep down among the buried memories of the past and I will find that book, and I will summon up my courage and ask the publishers of this volume to kindly allow the cover of that book to be reproduced here. It is only by looking at it as I looked at it that you will thoroughly appreciate my feelings on the subject. I have found the box but my heart sinks within me as I try to open the lid. All my lost youth lies there. The key is rusty and will hardly turn in the lock. So, so, so at last, ghosts of the long ago come forth from your resting places and haunt me once again. Dear me, dear me, how musty everything smells, how old and worn and time-stained everything is. A folded poster. Grecian Theatre, Mr. G. R. Sims, will positively not appear this evening at the entertainment held in the hall. Yes, I remember. I have been announced entirely without my consent or knowledge to appear at a hall attached to the Grecian Theatre with Mrs. Georgina Weldon, and to take part in an entertainment. This notice was stuck about outside the theatre in consequence of my indignant remonstrance. My old friend, Mr. George Conquest, had, I need hardly say, nothing to do with that bill. Someone had taken the hall for a special occasion. I think it was something remotely connected with lunatics. My first play, poor little play, a burlesque written for my brothers and sisters and played by us in the theatre royal, Day Nursery. There were some really brilliant lines in it, I remember. They were taken bodily from a burlesque of H. J. Byron's, which I purchased at Lacey and Sons, now French's, in the Strand. A new and original burlesque by Master G. R. Sims. My misguided parents actually had the playbill printed and invited friends to witness the performance. They little knew what they were doing by pandering to my boyish vanity in such a way. But for that printed playbill and that public performance in my nursery, I might never have taken to the stage and inflicted upon a long-suffering public, a Delphi melodrama and Gayety burlesque, farcical comedy and comic opera. I might have remained all my life an honest, hard-working city man, relieving my feelings occasionally by joining in the autumn discussions in the Daily Telegraph. I was still in the city when my first book was published. I used in those days to get to the city at nine and leave it at six, but I had a dinner hour, and in that dinner hour I wrote short stories and little things that I fancied were funny, and I used to put them in big envelopes and send them to the different magazines. I sent about twenty out in that way. I never had one accepted, but several returned. I wrote my first book in my dinner hour in a city office. I have just found it. Here is the cover. You will observe that it has my portrait on it. I look very ill and thin and haggard. That was perhaps the result of going without my dinner in order to devote myself to literature. If you could look inside that book, if you could see the paper on which it is printed, you would understand the shock it was to me when they laid it in my arms and said, Behold your firstborn. All the vanity in me, and they tell me that I have a good deal, rose up as I gazed at the battered wreck upon the cover, the man with the face that suggested a prompt subscription to a burial club. But I shouldn't have minded that so much if the people who bought my book hadn't written to me personally to complain. One gentleman sent me a postcard to say that his volume fell to pieces while he was carrying it home. Another assured me that he had picked enough pieces of straw out of the leaves to make a bed for his horse with, and a third returned a copy to me without paying the postage, and asked me kindly to put it in my dustbin, because his cook was rather proud of the one he had in his back garden. Still the book sold, the sketches had all previously appeared in the weekly dispatch, and when the first edition was exhausted a new and better one was prepared, without that haggard face upon the cover, and I was happy. The sale ran into thirty thousand the first year of publication, and as I was fortunate enough to have published it on a royalty, I'm glad to say it is still selling. The social kaleidoscope was my first book, with it I made my actual debut between covers. I hadn't done very well before then, since then I have, from a worldly point of view, done remarkably well. Far better than I deserve to do, my good-natured friends assure me, and I cordially agree with them. But I have made a good fight for it, and I had suffered years of disappointment and rebuff. I began to send contributions to periodicals, when I was fourteen years old, and a boy at Hanwell College. Fun was the first journal I favoured with my effusions, and week after week I had a sinking at the heart, as I bought that popular periodical and searched in vain for my comic verses, my humorous sketches, and my smart paragraphs. It took me thirteen years to get something printed and paid for, but I succeeded at last, and it was fun, my early love, that first took me by the hand. When I was on the staff of Fun and its columns were open to me for all I cared to write, I used often to look over the batch of boyish effort that littered the editor's desk, and let my heart go out to the writers who were suffering the pangs that I had known so well. I had had effusions of mine printed before that, but I didn't get any money for them. I had the pleasure of seeing my signature more than once in the columns of certain theatrical journals, in the days when I was a constant first-nighter, and a determined upholder of the privileges of the pit. And I even had some of my poetry printed. In the old box to which I have gone in search of the first edition of my first book, there are two papers carefully preserved because they were once my pride and glory. One is a copy of the Heypony Journal, and the other is a copy of the Heypony Welcome Guest. On the back page of the correspondence column of the former, there is a poem signed GRS, addressed to a young lady's initials in affectionately complimentary terms. Alas, I don't know what has become of that young lady. Probably she is married and is the mother of a fine family of boys and girls, and has forgotten that I ever wrote verses in her honour. I think I sent her a copy of the Heypony Journal, but a few weeks after a coldness sprang up between us. She was behind the counter of a confectioner's shop in Camden Town, and I found her one afternoon giggling at a young friend of mine, who used to buy his butterscotch there. My friend and I had words, but between myself and that fair confectioner, the rest was silence. I was really very much distressed that my pride compelled me never again to cross the threshold of that establishment. There wasn't a confectioners in all Camden Town that could come within measurable distance of it for strawberry ices. In the correspondence column of the Heypony Welcome Guests, which is among my buried treasures, there is an answer instead of the poem which I had fondly hoped to see inserted in its glorious pages. And this is the answer. G. R. S. Your poem is not quite up to our standard, but it gives decided promise of better things. We should advise you to persevere. I'm quoting from memory, for after turning that box upside down I can't lay my hand on this particular welcome guest. Though I know that it is there. I don't know who the editor was who gave me that kindly pat on the head, but whoever he was he earned my undying gratitude. At the time I felt that I should have liked him better had he printed my poem. I was no more fortunate with my prose than I was with my poetry. I began to tell stories at a very early age, but it was not until after I had succeeded in getting a poem printed, among the answers to correspondence, that I took seriously to prose with a view of publication. I was encouraged to try my hand at writing stories by the remembrance of the success which had attended my efforts at Romantic Narrative when I was a schoolboy. There were eight other boys in the dormitory I slept in at Hanwell, the College, not the asylum, and they used to make me tell them stories every night until they fell asleep, and Woby tied me if I cut my narrative short while one of them remained awake. I wasn't much of a boy with a bolster or a boot, but they were all champions, and many a time when I had married the hero and heroine and wound up my story, did I have to start a fresh complication in a hurry to save myself from chastisement. I remember on one occasion when I was dreadfully sleepy, and I had got into a fearful fog as to who committed the murder. I made a wild plunger to ghost to get me out of the difficulty, and the whole dormitory rose to a boy and set about me with bolsters in their indignation at such a lame and impotent conclusion. Night after night did those maddening words, tell us a story, salute my ears as I laid my weary little head upon the pillow, and I had to tell one or run the gauntlet of eight bolsters and 16 slippers to say nothing of the biggest boy of all who kept a reserved pair of boots hidden away under his bed, for purposes not altogether unconnected, with midnight excursions to a neighbouring orchard. It was the remembrance of my early storytelling days that prompted me, when poetry seemed a drug in the market, to try my hand at what is now, I believe, called the complete novelette. I set myself seriously to work, laid in a large stock of apples and jumbles, and spent several consecutive afternoons in completing a story which I called A Pleasant Evening. After I had written it, I copied it out in my best hand, and then, with fear and trembling, I sent it to the family herald. I sent it to the family herald because I had heard a lady who visited at our house say that she knew a lady who knew a lady who had sent a story to the family herald, never having written anything before in her life, and the story had been accepted, and the writer had received five pounds for it by return of post. I didn't receive anything by return of post, but in about a fortnight my manuscript came back to me. Nothing daunted I carefully cut off the corner on which, declined with thanks, had been written, and I sent the story to Chamber's journal. Here it met with a similar fate, but I fancy it took a little longer to come back and it bore signs of wear and tear. I knew, or I had read, that it was not wise to let your manuscript have the appearance of being rejected. So I spent several unpleasant evenings in writing A Pleasant Evening out again, and I sent it to all the year round. It came back. This time I didn't take the trouble to open it. I knew it, directly I saw it, and as it reached me, so I flung it in my desk and bit my lips, and made up my mind that after all it was better to be accepted as a poet in the Answers to Correspondence column of the Heypony Journal than to be rejected as a story writer by the editors of Higher Priced Periodicals. But though I played with poetry again, I didn't even succeed in getting into the Answers to Correspondence. My vaulting ambition o'er looped itself, and I sent my verses to journals which didn't correspond. In those days I kept a little book in which I ended all the manuscripts I sent to editors, and from it I now copy the following instructive record R stands for Returned. Once a week the Minstrels curse R. Belgravia after the battle R. Broadway after the battle R. Fun, nearer and dearer R. Fun, an unfortunate attachment R. Fun, a song of May R. Banta, nearer and dearer R. Judy, an unfortunate attachment R. London Society, the Minstrels curse R. Owl, nearer and dearer R. Returned, returned, returned. All I got for my pains was the chance of making a joke in my diary on my birthday. In those days of my wild struggles with fate I find written against the second of September many unhappy returns. I believe I should have flung up authorship in despair and never have had a first book, but for the chance remark of the dear old doctor who looked after my health in the days when I hadn't to pay my own doctor's bills. He was talking about me one day in my father's private office, and I happened to be passing, and I heard him say, He's a nice lad. What a pity he scribbles! Scribbles! The word burnt itself into my brain. It seared my heart. It brought the hot blood to my cheeks and the indignant tears to my eyes. Was I not ready to write an acrostic at a moment's notice on the name of the sweetheart of any fellow who asked me to do it? Had I not written a poem on the fall of Napoleon, which my eldest sister had read aloud to her school fellows and made them all mad with jealousy, to think there wasn't a brother among the lot of them who could even rhyme decently? Had I not had stories rejected by the family Herald, or the year-round, and Chamber's Journal, and a letter on the subject of the crossing opposite St Mark's Church, Hamilton Terrace, printed in the Marlborough Mercury, and was I to be dubbed a scribbler and pitted for my weakness? It is nearly twenty years since those words were uttered, and my dear old doctor rests beyond the reach of all human ills, but I can hear them now. They have never ceased to ring in my ears as they rang that day. My pride was wounded, my vanity was hurt, I was put upon my metal. I registered a silent vow there and then that some day I would have a noble revenge on my friendly detractor, and make him confess that he was wrong when he said that it was a pity I scribbled. From that hour I set myself steadily to be an author. I wrote poetry by the mile, prose by the acre, and I sent it to every kind of periodical that I could find in the post office directory. I had to pass through years of rejection but still I wrote on, and still I spent all my pocket money on books and postage stamps and paper. And at last the chance came. I was allowed to write paragraphs in the weekly dispatch by a friend who was a real journalist, and had a column at his disposal to fill with gossip. After doing the work for a month for nothing, I have the whole column given to me, and one day I received my first guinea earned by scribbling. I was a proud man when I went out of the dispatch office that day with a sovereign and a shilling in my hand. I had forced the gates of the citadel at last. I had marched in with the honors of war, and I was marching out with the price of victory in my hand. Soon afterwards there came another chance. The editor of the dispatch wanted a series of short, complete stories. I asked her to be allowed to try if I could do them. Under the title of the social kaleidoscope I wrote a series of short stories or sketches, and from that day no week has passed that I have not contributed something to the columns of a weekly journal. When the sketches were complete the publisher of the dispatch offered to bring them out in book form for me and publish them in the office. The social kaleidoscope was my first book and that is how it came into the world. Years afterwards my chance came with the dear old fellow who had said that it was a pity I scribbled so. Fortune had smiled upon me in one way then, and I was earning an excellent income with my pen. But my health had broken down, and it was thought necessary that I should place myself in the hands of a celebrated surgeon. I had not seen my old doctor for some years, but my people wished that he should be consulted, because he had known me so well in the days of my youth. So I submitted, and he came, and he shook his head and agreed that so and so was the man to take me in hand. I think he'll cure you my dear fellow, said the doctor. He's the most skillful surgeon we have for cases like yours, but his fee is a heavy one. Still, you can afford it. Yes doctor, I replied, thanks to my scribbling I can. That was the hour of my triumph. I had waited for it for fifteen years, but it had come at last. The dear old boy gripped my hand. I was wrong, he said with a quiet smile, and I confess it, but we'll get you well, and you shall scribble for many a year to come. And I am still scribbling. End of chapter six. Chapter seven of my first book. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Phil Shampf. My first book. By various. Chapter seven. Departmental Diddies. By Rudyard Kipling. As there is only one man in charge of a steamer, so there is but one man in charge of a newspaper, and he is the editor. My chief taught me this on an Indian journal, and he further explained that an order was an order to be obeyed at a run, not a walk, and that any notion or notions as to the fitness or unfitness of any particular kind of work for the young had better be held over till the last page was locked up to press. He was breaking me into harness, and I owe him a deep debt of gratitude, which I did not discharge at the time. The path of virtue was very steep, whereas the writing of verses allowed a certain play to the mind, and, unlike the filling end of reading matter, could be done as the spirit served. Now a sub-editor is not hired to write verses. He is paid to sub-edit. At the time this discovery shocked me greatly, but some years later, when I came to be a sort of an editor in charge, Providence dealt me for my subordinate once saturated with elia. He wrote very pretty lamb-like essays, but he wrote them when he should have been sub-editing. Then I saw little of what my chief must have suffered on my account. There is a moral here for the ambitious and aspiring who are oppressed by their superiors. This is a digression, as all my verses were digressions from office work. They came without invitation, unmanneredly in the nature of things, but they had to come, and the writing out of them kept me healthy and amused. To the best of my remembrance no one then discovered their grievous cynicism or their pessimistic tendency, and I was far too busy and too happy to take thought about these things. So they arrived merrily, being born out of the life about me, and they were very bad indeed, and the joy of doing them was payment a thousand times their work. Some, of course, came and ran away again, and the dear sorrow of going in search of these, out of office hours and catching them, was almost better than writing them clear. Bad as they were I burned twice as many as were published, and of the survivors at least two thirds were cut down at the last moment. Nothing can be wholly beautiful that is not useful, and therefore my verses were made to ease off the perpetual strife between the manager extending his advertisements, and my chief fighting for his reading matter. They were born to be sacrificed. Rukundin, the foreman of our side, approved of them immensely, for he was a Muslim of culture. He would say, Your pottery very good sir, just coming proper length today. You giving more soon? One third column just proper, always can take on third page. Mahmud, who set them up, had an unpleasant way of referring to a new lyric as One more thing, which I never liked. The jobs I'd too were unsympathetic, because I used to raid into their type for private proofs, with old English and Gothic headlines. Even a Hindu does not like to find the serifs of his f's cut away to make long s's. And in this manner, week by week, my verses came to be printed in the paper. I was in very good company, for there was always an undercurrent of song, a little bitter for the most part, running through the Indian papers. The bulk of it is much better than mine, being more graceful, and is done by those less than Sir Alfred Lyle, to whom I would apologize for mentioning his name in this gallery. Pican, Latakia, Cigarette, O, T.W., Forsight, and others, whose names come up with the stars out of the Indian Ocean going eastward. Sometimes a man in Bangalore would be moved to Song, and a man on the Bombay side would answer him, and a man in Bengal would echo back, till at last we would all be crowing together, like cocks before daybreak, when it is too dark to see your fellow. And occasionally, some unhappy chaisee, away in the China ports, would lift up his voice among the tea chests, and the queers smelling yellow papers of the far east brought us his sorrows. The newspaper files showed that, forty years ago, the men sang of just the same subjects as we did, of heat, loneliness, love, lack of promotion, poverty, sport, and war. Further back still, at the end of the 18th century, Hickey's Bengal Gazette, a very wicked little sheet in Calcutta, published the songs of the young factors, ensigns, and writers to the East India Company. They too wrote of the same things. But in those days, men were strong enough to buy a bullock's heart for dinner, cook it with their own hands, because they could not afford a servant, and make a rhymed jest of all the squalor and poverty. Lives were not worth too monsoon's purchase, and perhaps the knowledge of this a little colored the rhymes when they sang, In a very short time, you're released from all cares. If the Padres asleep, Mr. Oldham reads prayers. The note of physical diff's comfort that runs through so much Anglo-Indian poetry had been struck then. You will find it most fully suggested in The Long Long Indian Day, a comparatively modern affair. But there is a set of verses called Scanty Ninety-Five, dated about Warren Hastings' time, which gives a lively idea of what our seniors in the service had to put up with. One of the most interesting poems I ever found was written at Mirut, three or four days before the mutiny broke out there. The author complained that he could not get his clothes washed nicely that week, and was very facetious over his worries. My verses had the good fortune to last a little longer than some others, which were more true to facts and certainly better workmanship. Men in the army and the civil service and the railway wrote to me saying that the rhymes might be made into a book. Some of them had been sung to the banjos round campfires, and some had run as far down the coast as Rangoon and Mulmine and up to Mandalay. A real book was out of the question, but I knew that Rukundin and the office plant were at my disposal at a price, if I did not use the office time. Also, I had handled in the previous year a couple of small books, of which I was part owner, and had lost nothing. So there was built a sort of a book, a lean oblong docket, wire stitch, to imitate a D.O. government envelope. Printed on one side only, bound in brown paper, and secured with red tape. It was addressed to all heads of departments and all government officials, and among a pile of papers would have deceived a clerk of twenty years service. Of these books we made some hundreds, and as there was no necessity for advertising, my public being to my hand, I took reply postcards, printed the news of the birth of the book on one side, the blank order form on the other, and posted them up and down the empire from Aden to Singapore, and from Quetta to Colombo. There was no trade discount, no reckoning twelves at thirteens, no commission, and no credit of any kind whatever. The money came back in poor but honest rupees, and was transferred from the publisher, the left hand pocket, direct to the author, the right hand pocket. Every copy sold in a few weeks, and the ratio of expenses to profits, as I remember it, has since prevented my injuring my health, by sympathizing with publishers who talk of their risks and advertisements. The down country departmental diddies papers complained of the form of the thing. The wire binding cut the pages, and the red tape tore the covers. This was not intentional, but Heaven helps those who help themselves. Consequently, there arose a demand for a new edition, and this time I exchanged the pleasure of taking in money over the counter for that of seeing a real publisher's imprint on the title page. More verses were taken out and put in, and some of that edition traveled as far as Hong Kong on the map, and each edition grew a little fatter, and at last the book came to London with a guilt top and a stiff back, and was advertised in the publisher's poetry department. But I loved it best when it was a little brown baby with a pink string rounded stomach, a child's child, ignorant that it was afflicted with all the most modern ailments, and before people had learned, beyond doubt, how its author lay awake of nights in India, plotting and scheming, to write something that should take with the English public. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Jennifer Painter. My first book by Various. Chapter 8. Juvenilia by A. Conan Doyle. It is very well for the master craftsman, with 20 triumphs behind him, to look down the vista of his successes and to recall how he picked out the path which has led him to fame. But for the Tyro whose first book is perilously near to his last one, it becomes a more invidious matter. His past presses too closely upon his present, and his reminiscences, unmellowed by the flight of years, are apt to be rawly and crudely personal. And yet even time helps me when I speak of my first work, for it was written seven and 20 years ago. I was six at the time, and have a very distinct recollection of the achievement. It was written, I remember, upon fool's cap paper, in what might be called a fine, bold hand, four words to the line, and was illustrated by marginal pen and ink sketches by the author. There was a man in it, and there was a tiger. I forget which was the hero, but it didn't matter much, for they became blended into one about the time when the tiger met the man. I was a realist in the age of the Romanticists. I described at some length, both verbally and pictorially, the untimely end of that wayfarer. But when the tiger had absorbed him, I found myself slightly embarrassed as to how my story was to go on. It is very easy to get people into scrapes, and very hard to get them out again, I remarked, and I have often had cause to repeat the precocious aphorism of my childhood. On this occasion, the situation was beyond me, and my book, like my man, was engulfed in my tiger. There is an old family bureau with secret drawers, in which lie little locks of hair tied up in circles, and black silhouettes, and dim daguerreotypes, and letters which seem to have been written in the lightest of straw-colored inks. Somewhere there lies my primitive manuscript, where my tiger, like a many-hooked barrel with a tail to it, still envelops the hapless stranger whom he has taken in. Then came my second book, which was told and not written, but which was a much more ambitious effort than the first. Between the two, four years had elapsed, which were mainly spent in reading. It is rumored that a special meeting of a library committee was held in my honour, at which a by-law was passed, that no subscriber should be committed to change his book more than three times a day. Yet, even with these limitations, by the aid of a well-stocked bookcase at home, I managed to enter my tenth year with a good deal in my head that I could never have learned in the classrooms. I do not think that life has any joy to offer so complete, so soul-filling as that which comes upon the imaginative lad whose spare time is limited, but who is able to snuggle down into a corner with his book, knowing that the next hour is all his own. And how vivid and fresh it all is, your very heart and soul are out on the prairies and the oceans with your hero. It is you who act and suffer and enjoy. You carry the long, small-bore Kentucky rifle with which such egregious things are done, and you rely out upon the topsoil yard and get jerked by the flap of the sail into the Pacific, where you cling on to the leg of an albatross, and so keep afloat until the comic bosom turns up with his crew of volunteers to hands-fight you into safety. What a magic it is, this stirring of the boyish heart and mind. Long ere I came to my teens, I had traversed every sea, and knew the Rockies like my own back garden. How often had I sprung upon the back of the charging buffalo, and so escaped him. It was an everyday emergency to have set the prairie on fire in front of me in order to escape from the fire behind, or to run a mile down a brook to throw the bloodhounds off my trail. I had creased horses, I had shot down rapids, I had strapped on my moccasins, hind foremost to conceal my tracks, I had lain underwater with a reed in my mouth, and I had feigned madness to escape the torture. As to the Indian Braves, whom I slew in single combats, I could have stopped a large graveyard, and, fortunately enough, though I was a good deal chipped about in these affairs, no real harm ever came of it, and I was always nursed back into health by a very fascinating young school. It was all more real than the reality. Since those days, I have in very truth both shot bears and harpooned whales, but the performance was flat compared with the first time that I did it with Mr Ballantyne, or Captain Main Reed at my elbow. In the fullness of time, I was packed off to a public school, and in some way it was discovered by my playmates that I had more than my share of the law after which they hankered. There was my debut as a storyteller. On a wet half holiday, I have been elevated onto a desk, and with an audience of little boys all squatting on the floor with their chins upon their hands, I have talked myself husky over the misfortunes of my heroes. Week in and week out, those unhappy men have battled and striven and groaned for the amusement of that little circle. I was bribed with pastry to continue these efforts, and I remember that I always stipulated for tarts down and strict business, which shows that I was born to be a member of the author society. Sometimes too, I would stop dead in the very thrill of a crisis and could only be set adoing again by appers. When I had got as far as with his left hand in her glossy locks, he was waving the bloodstained knife above her head when, or slowly, slowly, the door turned upon its hinges, and with eyes which were dilated with horror, the wicked mark was sore. I knew that I had my audience in my power, and thus my second book was evolved. It may be that my literary experiences would have ended there, had there not come a time in my early manhood when that good old harsh-faced schoolmistress, Hard Times, took me by the hand. I wrote, and with amazement, I found that my writing was accepted. Chamber's journal it was, which rose to the occasion, and I have had a kindly feeling for its mustard-coloured back ever since. Fifty little cylinders of manuscript did I send out during eight years, which described irregular orbits among publishers, and usually came back like paper boomerangs to the place that they had started from. Yet in time they all lodged somewhere or other. Mr. Hogg of London Society was one of the most constant of my patrons, and Mr. James Payne wasted hours of his valuable time in encouraging me to persevere. Knowing as I did that he was one of the busiest men in London, I never received one of his shrewd and kindly, and most illegible letters, without a feeling of gratitude and wonder. I have heard folk talk as though there were some hidden backdoor by which one may creep into literature, but I can say myself that I never had an introduction to any editor or publisher before doing business with them, and that I do not think that I suffered on that account. Yet my apprenticeship was a long and trying one. During ten years of hard work, I averaged less than £50 a year from my pen. I won my way into the best journals, Cornhill, Temple Bar and so on, but what is the use of that when the contributions to those journals must be anonymous? It is a system which tells very hardly against young authors. I saw with astonishment and pride that Haber Cook Jephson's statement in the Cornhill was attributed by critic after critic to Stevenson, but overwhelmed as I was by the compliment, a word of the most lukewarm praise sent straight to my own address would have been of greater use to me. After ten years of such work, I was as unknown as if I had never dipped a pen into an ink bottle. Sometimes, of course, the anonymous system may screen you from blame as well as rob you of praise. How well I can see a dear old friend running after me in the street, waving a London evening paper in his hand. Have you seen what they say about your Cornhill story? He shouted. No, no, what is it? Here it is, here it is. Eagley he turned over the column, while I, trembling with excitement, but determined to bear my honours meekly, peeped over his shoulder. The Cornhill, this month, said the critic, has a story in it which would have made Thackeray turn in his grave. There were several witnesses about, and the Portsmouth Bench are severe upon assaults, so my friend escaped unscathed. Then first I realised that British criticism had fallen into a shocking state of decay, though when someone has a pat on the back for you, you understand that, after all, there are some very smart people upon the literary press. And so at last it was brought home to me that a man may put the very best that is in him into magazine work for years and years, and reap no benefit from it, save, of course, the inherent benefits of literary practice. So I wrote another of my first books and sent it off to the publishers. Alas, for the dreadful thing that happened, the publishers never received it, the Post Office sent countless blue forms to say that they knew nothing about it, and from that day to this, no word has ever been heard. Of course, it was the best thing I ever wrote. Who ever lost a manuscript that wasn't? But I must in all honesty confess that my shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again in print. If one or two other of my earlier efforts had also been lost in the Post, my conscience would have been the lighter. This one was called The Narrative of John Smith, and it was of a personal, social, political complexion. Had it appeared, I should have probably awakened to find myself infamous, for it steered, as I remember it, perilously near to the libelous. However, it was safely lost, and that was the end of another of my first books. Then I started upon an exceedingly sensational novel, which interested me extremely at the time, though I had no idea what it was. Though I have never heard that it had the same effect upon anyone else afterwards, I may urge an extenuation of all shortcomings that it was written in the intervals of a busy, though ill-paying practice, and a man must try that and combine it with literary work before he quite knows what it means. How often have I rejoiced to find a clear morning before me, and settle down to my task, or rather, dashed ferociously at it, knowing how precious were those hours of quiet? Then to me enter my housekeeper, with tidings of dismay. This is Thurston's little boy wants to see you, Doctor. Show him in, say I, striving to fix my scene in my mind, that I may splice it when this trouble is over. Well, my boy. Please, Doctor, Mother wants to know if she's to add water to that medicine. Certainly, certainly. Not that it matters in the least, but it is well to answer with decision. Exit the little boy, and the splice is about half accomplished when he suddenly bursts into the room again. Please, Doctor, when I got back, Mother had taken the medicine without the water. Tuck, tut, my answer. It really does not matter in the least. The youth withdraws with a suspicious glance, and one more paragraph has been written when the husband puts in an appearance. There seems to have been some misunderstanding about that medicine, he remarks coldly. Not at all, I say. It really didn't matter. Well, then, why did you tell the boy that it should be taken with water? And then I try to disentangle the business, and the husband shakes his head gloomily at me. She feels very queer, says he. We should all be easier in our minds if you came and looked at her. So I leave my heroine in the four-foot way with an express thundering toward her, and trudge sadly off with the feeling that another morning has been wasted, and another seam left visible to the critic's eye in my unhappy novel. Such was the genesis of my sensational romance, and when publishers wrote to say that they could see no marriage in it, I was heart and soul of the same way of thinking. And then, under more favourable circumstances, I wrote Micah Clarke, the patients had become more tractable, and I had married, and in every way, I was a brighter man. A year's reading and five-months writing finished it, and I thought I had a tool in my hands that would cut a path for me. So I had, but the first thing that I cut with it was my finger. I sent it to a friend, whose opinion I deeply respected in London, who read for one of the leading houses, but he had been bitten by the historical novel, and very naturally, he distrusted it. From him, it went to house after house, and house after house would have none of it. Clarke would find that the people did not talk so in the 17th century. Bentley, that its principal defect was that there was a complete absence of evidence was that there was a complete absence of interest. Castles, that experience had shown that an historical novel could never be a commercial success. I remember smoking over my dog-eared manuscript when it returned for a whiff of country air after one of its descents upon town, and wondering what I should do if some sporting, reckless kind of publisher was suddenly to stride in and make me a bid of 40 shillings or so for the lot. And then suddenly, I bethought me to send it to Mrs Longman's, where it was fortunate enough to fall into the hands of Mr Andrew Lang. From that day, the way was smooth to it, and as things turned out, I was spared that keenest sting of ill success, that those who had believed in your work should suffer pecuniarily for their belief. A door had been opened for me into the temple of the Muses, and it only remained that I should find something that was worthy of being borne through it. End of Chapter 8 Chapter 9 of my first book This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. My first book by Various. The Trail of the Serpent by M. E. Braddon. My first novel, far back of the book, far back in the distinctness of childish memories, I see a little girl who has lately learned to write, who has lately been given a beautiful, brand-new mahogany desk with a red velvet slope and a glass ink bottle, such a desk as might now be bought for three and six pints, but which in the forties cost at least half a guinea. Very proud is the little girl with the Kenwigs pigtails and the Kenwigs frills of that mahogany desk and its infinite capacities for literary labor. Above all, gem of gems, its stick of variegated ceiling wax, brown, speckled with gold, and its little glass seal with an intaglio representing two doves, Pliny's doves, perhaps, famous in Mosaic. Only the little girl had never heard of Pliny, or his Lorntine villa. Armed with that desk and its supply of stationery, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, very fond of writing her name at full length, and her address also at full length, though the word middle sex offered difficulties, began that pilgrimage on the broad high road of fiction, which was destined to be a longish one, so much for the little girl of eight years old, in the third person, and now to become strictly autobiographical. My first story was based on those fairy tales which first opened to me the world of imaginative literature. My first attempt in fiction and in round hand on carefully penciled double lines was a story of two sisters, a good sister and a wicked, and I fear, adhered, more faithfully to the lines of the archetypal story that the writers pen kept to the double fence, which should have ensured neatness. The interval between the ages of eight and twelve was a prolific period, fertile and unfinished MSS, among which I can now trace an historical novel on the Siege of Calais, an Eastern story suggested by a passionate love of Miss Pardo's Turkish Tales, and Byron's Bride of Epidos, which my mother, a devoted Byron worshiper, allowed me to read aloud to her, and doubtless murder in the reading, a story of the heart's mountains, with adacious flights in German Diablory, and lastly, very seriously undertaken, and very perseveringly worked upon, a domestic story, the outline of which was suggested by the same dear and sympathetic mother. Now it is a curious fact, which may or may not be common to other story spinners that I have never been able to take kindly to a plot or the suggestion of a plot offered to me by anybody else. The moment a friend tells me that he or she is desirous of imparting a series of facts, strictly true, as if truth and fiction mattered one jot, which in his or her opinion would make the ground plan of an admirable startling, an altogether original three-volume novel I know in advance that my imagination will never grapple with those startling circumstances, that my thoughts will begin to wonder before my friend has got half through the remarkable chain of events, and that if the obliging purveyor of romantic incidents were to examine me at the end of the story, I should be spun ignominiously. For the most part, such subjects as have been proposed to me by friends have been hopelessly unfit for the circulating library, or where not immoral have been utterly dull, but it is, I believe, a fixed idea in the novel reader's mind that any combination of events out of the beaten way of life will make an admirable subject for the novelist's art. My dear mother, taking into consideration my tender years and perhaps influenced in some ways by her own love of picking up odd bits of Sheridan or Chippendale furniture in the storehouses of the less ambitious secondhand dealers of those simpler days, offered me the following scenario for a domestic story. It was an incident which, I doubt not, she had often read at the tail of a newspaper column, and which certainly savors of the gigantic gooseberry, the sea serpent, and the agricultural laborer who unexpectedly inherits half a million. It was imminently a simple story and far more worthy of that title than Mrs. Inchbald's long and involved romance. An honest couple, in humble circumstances, possess among their small household gear a good old easy chair which has been the pride of a former generation and is the choices of their household gods a comfortable cushioned chair, snug and restful, albeit the chins covering though clean and tidy, as virtuous people's furniture always is in fiction, is worn thin by long service, while the dear chair itself is no longer the chair it once was, as to legs and framework. Evil days come upon the praiseworthy couple and their dependent brood, among whom I faintly remember the love interest of the story to have lain, and that direful day arrives when the average landlord of juvenile fiction whose heart is of adamant and brain of brass destrains for the rent. The rude broker swoops upon the humble dove-cut a cart or hand-barrow waits on the carefully hearth-stone doorstep for the household gods. The family gather round the cherished chair on which the rude broker has already laid his grimy fingers. They hang over the back and fondle the padded arms and the old grandmother with clasped hands and treats that. If able to raise the money in a few days they may be allowed to buy back that loved heirloom. The broker laughs the plea to scorned. They might have their chair and cheap enough. He had no doubt. The cover was darned and patched as only the virtuous poor of fiction do darn and do patch, and he may no doubt the stuffing was nothing better than brown wool. And with that coarse taunt the coarser broker dug his clasp knife into the cushion against which grandfatherly backs had leaned in happier days and lo! An avalanche of banknotes fell out of the much maligned coarser and the family was lifted from pinurey to wealth. Nothing more simple or more natural, a prudent but eccentric ancestor had chosen this mode of putting by his savings. Assured that, whenever discovered, the money would be useful to somebody. So ran the scenario, but I fancy my juvenile pen hardly held on to the climax. My brief experience of boarding school occurred at this time, and I well remember writing the old armchair in a penny account book in the school room of Creswell Lodge, and that I was both surprised and offended at the laughter of the kindly music teacher who, coming into the room to summon a pupil, and seeing me gravely occupied, inquired what I was doing and was intensely amused at my stolid method of composition, plotting on undisturbed by the voices and occupations of the older girls around me. The old armchair was certainly my first serious, painstaking effort in fiction, but as it was abandoned on finish before my eleventh birthday and as no line thereof ever achieved the distinction of type, it can hardly rank as my first novel. There came a very few years later the sentimental period in which my unfinished novels assumed a more ambitious form and were modeled chiefly upon Jane Eyre with occasional tentative imitations of Thackery, stories of gentle hearts that loved in vain, always ending in renunciation, one romance there was, I well remember, begun with resolute purpose after the first reading of Esmond and in the endeavor to give life and local color to a story of the Restoration Period, a brilliantly wicked interval in the social history of England which, after the lapse of thirty years, I am still as bent upon taking for the background of a love story as I was when I began Master Anthony's record in Esdmondese and made my girlish acquaintance with the reading room of the British Museum where I went in quest of local color and where much kindness was shown to my youth and experience of the book world. Pouring over a folio edition of the state trials at my uncle's quiet rectory and sleepy sandwich, I had discovered the passionate romantic story of Lord Grey's elopement with his sister-in-law next in sequence to the trial of Lauren Spratton and Hugh Speak for Conspiracy At the risk of seeming disloyal to my own race, I must add that it seemed to me a very ten-pot order of plot to which these two learned gentlemen bent their legal minds and which cost the Braden family a heavy fine inland near Camelford. Confiscation which I have heard my father complain of as especially unfair. Lawrence being a younger son, the romantic story of Lord Grey was to be the subject of Master Anthony's record but Master Anthony's sentimental autobiography went the way of all my earlier efforts. It was but a year or so after the collapse of Master Anthony that a blindly enterprising printer of Beverly who had seen my poor little verses in the Beverly recorder made me the spirited offer of ten pounds for a serial story to be set up and printed at Beverly and published on commission by a London firm in Warwick Lane. I cannot picture to myself in my after knowledge of the book-selling trade any enterprise more futile in its inception or more feeble in its execution but to my youthful ambition the actual commission to write a novel with an advance payment of 50 shillings to show good faith on the part of my Yorkshire speculator seemed like the opening of that penning paradise which I had sighed for ever since I could hold a pen. I had previously to this date found a messiness in Beverly in the person of a learned gentleman who volunteered to foster my love of the muses by buying the copyright of a volume of poems and publishing the same at his own expense which he did poor man without stint and by which noble patronage of poets corner verse he must have lost money he had however the privilege of dictating the subject of the principal poem which was to sing however feebly Garibaldi's Sicilian campaign the Beverly printer suggested that my Warwick Lane serial should combine as far as my power is allowed the human interest and genial humor of Dickens with the plot waving of GWR Reynolds and furnished with these broad instructions I filled my ink bottle spread out my fool's cab and on a hopelessly wet afternoon began my first novel now known as The Trail of the Serpent but published in Warwick Lane and later in the stirring high street of Beverly as three times dead in three times dead I gave loose to all my leanings to the violent in melodrama death stocked in ghastliest form across my pages and villainy reigned triumphant till the nemesis of the last chapter I wrote with all the freedom of one who feared not the face of a critic and indeed thanks to the obscurity of its original production and its reissue as the ordinary two shilling railway novel this first novel of mine has almost entirely escaped the critical lash and has pursued its way as a chartered libertine people buy it and read it and its faults and follies are forgiven as the exuberances of a pin unchastened by experience but faster and more facile at that initial stage than it ever became after long practice I dashed headlong at my work conjured up my images of horror or of mirth and boldly built the framework of my story and sent my puppets moving to me at least they were living creatures who seemed to follow impulses of their own to be impelled by their own passions to love and hate and plot and scheme of their own accord there was unalloyed pleasure in the composition of that first story and in the knowledge that it was to be actually printed and published and not to be declined but thanks by adamantine magazine editors like a certain short story which I had lately written and which contained the germ of lady oddly secret indeed at this period of my life the postman's knock had become associated in my mind with the sharp sound of a rejected ms dropping through the open letterbox onto the floor of the hall while my heart seemed to drop in sympathy with that book post packet short of never being printed at all my beaverly born novel could have hardly entered upon the world of books in a more profound obscurity that one living creature ever bought a number of three times dead I greatly doubt I can recall the thrill of emotion with which I tore open the envelope that contained by complementary copy of the first number folded across and an aspect inferior to a gratis pamphlet about a patent medicine the miserable little wood block which illustrated that first number would have disgraced a baker's whitey brown bag would have been unworthy to illustrate a penny bun my spirits were certainly dashed at the technical shortcomings of that first serial and I was hardly surprised when I was informed a few weeks later that although my admirers at beaverly were deeply interested in the story it was not a financial success and that it would be only obliging on my part and in accordance with my known kindness of heart if I were to restrict the development of the romance to half its intended length and to accept five pounds in lieu of ten as my reward having no desire that the rash beaverly printer should squander his own or his children's fortune in the obscurity of warwick lane I immediately exceeded to his request shortened sale and went on with my story perhaps with a shade less enthusiasm having seen the shabby figure it was to make in the book world I may add that the beaverly publishers payments began and ended with his noble advance of 50 shillings the balance was never paid and it was rather hard lines that on his becoming bankrupt in his poor little way a few years later a judge in the bankruptcy court remarked that as miss bradden was now making a good deal of money by her pen she ought to come to the relief of her first publisher and now my volume of verses being well underway I went with my mother to farmhouse lodgings in the neighborhood of that very beaverly where I spent perhaps the happiest half year of my life half a year of tranquil studious days far from the madding crowd with the mother whose society was always all sufficient for me half a year among level pastures with unlimited books from the librarian hall an old farm horse to write about the green lanes the breath of summer with all its sweet odors of flower and herb around and about us half a year of aneloid bliss had it not been for one dark shadow the heroic figure of garibaldi the sailor soldier looming large upon the foreground of my literary labors as the hero of a lengthy narrative poem in the spincerian meter my chief business at beaverly was to complete the volume of verse commissioned by my yorkshire musiness at the time a very rich man who paid me a much better price for my literary work than his town's man the enterprising printer and who had the first claim on my thought and time with the businesslike punctuality of a celery clerk I went every morning to my file of the times and poured and puzzled over the apolleton revolution and sicilian campaign and I can only say that if Emil Zolo has suffered as much over sedan as I suffered in the freshness of my youth when flower re meadows and the old chestnut mare invited to summer I bless over the fighting in Sicily has dogged perseverance in uncongenial labor should place him among the immortal 40 how I hated the great joseph g and the spincerian meter with its exacting demands upon the rhyming faculty how I hated my own ignorance of modern italian history and my own eyes for never having looked upon italian landscape whereby historical illusion and local color were both wanting to that dryest dust record of heroic endeavor I had only the times correspondent where he was picturesque I could be picturesque allowing always for the spincerian straining where he was rich in local color I did my utmost to reproduce his coloring sketched always on the spincerian rack and lengthened out by the bitter necessity of finding triple rhymes next to Giuseppe Garibaldi I hated Edmund Spencer and it may be from a vengeful remembrance of those early struggles with a difficult form of versification that although throughout my literary life I have been a lover of England's earlier poets and have delighted in the quaintness and naivete of Chaucer I have refrained from reading more than a casual stanza or two of the fairy queen when I lived at Beverly Spencer was to me but a name and Byron's child Harold was my only model for that exacting verse I should add that the Beverly messiness when commissioning this volume of verse was less superb in his ideas than the literary patron of the past he looked at the matter from a purely commercial standpoint and believed that a volume of verse such as I could produce would pay a delusion on his part which I honestly strove to combat before accepting his handsome offer of remuneration for my time in labor it was with this idea in his mind that he chose and insisted upon the Sicilian campaign as a subject for my muse and thus started me heavily handicapped on the race course of Parnassus the weekly number of three times dead was thrown off in brief intervals of rest from my magnum opus and it was an infinite relief to turn from Garibaldi and his brothers in arms to the angels and the monsters which my own brain had engendered and which to me seemed more alive than the good great man whose arms I so laboriously sang my rustic pipe far better loved to sing of melodramatic poisoners and ambiguous detectives a fine houses in the west of London and dark dens in the east so the weekly chapter of my first novel ran merrily off my pen while the printer's boy waited in the farmhouse kitchen happy happy days so near to memory and yet so far in that peaceful summer I finished my first novel knocked Garibaldi on the head with a closing rhapsody saw the York spring and summer races and hopelessly wet weather learned to love the Yorkshire people and left Yorkshire almost broken heartedly on a dull gray October morning to travel London words through a landscape that was mostly underwater and behold since that October morning I have written 53 novels I have lost your old friends and found new friends who are also dear but I have never looked on a Yorkshire landscape since I turned my reluctant eyes from those level meadows and green lanes where the old chestnut mare used to carry me plottingly to and fro between tall tangled hedges of aglentine and honeysuckle very truly yours Emmy bread and end of chapter nine chapter 10 of my first book this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org my first book by various the house of Elmore by F. W. Robinson it is a far cry back to 1853 when dreams of writing a book had almost reached the boundary line of probable events I was then a pale long haired consumptive looking youth who had been successful in prized poems for there were prize competitions even in those far off days and in acrostics and in the acceptance of one or two short stories which had been actually published in a magazine that did not pay for contributions it was edited by a clergy man of the church of england and the chaplain to a real duke which magazine has gone the way of many magazines and is now as extinct as the dodo it was in the year 1853 or a month or two earlier that I wrote my first novel which upon a moderate computation I think would make four or five good-sized library volumes but I have never attempted to scale the manuscript it is in my possession still although I have not seen it for many weary years it is buried with a heap more rubbish and a respectable old oak chest the key of which is even lost to me and yet that ms was the turning point of my small literary career and it is the history of that manuscript which leads up to the publication of my first novel my first step though I did not know it enhance it as part and parcel of the history of my first book a link in the chain when that manuscript was completed it was read aloud night after night to an admiring audience of family members and pronounced as fit for publication as anything of dickens or thackery or bulwer who were then in the full swing of their mighty capacities alas I was a better judge than my partial and amiable critics I had very grave doubts qualms I think they are called and I had read that it was uphill work to get a book published and swagger through the world as a real live being who had actually written a novel there was a faint hope that was all and so with my ms under my arm I stalled into the palatial premises of masseur's hearst and blacket successors to Henry Colburn they proudly designated themselves at that period laid my heavy parcel on the counter and waited with fear and trembling for someone to emerge from the galleries of books and rows of desks beyond and inquire the nature of my business and here ensued my first surprise quite a dramatic coincidence for the tall spare middle-aged gentleman who advanced from the shadows towards the counter proved to my intense astonishment to be a constant chest antagonist of mine at clings chess rooms around the corner in new oxford street rooms which have long since disappeared together with Horwitz Horwitz Lowenthal Williams and other great chess lights of those far away times who were to be seen there night after night prepared for all comers clings was a great chess house and I was a chess enthusiast as well as a youth who wanted to get into print failing literature I had made up my mind to become a chess champion if possible although I knew already by quiet observation of my antagonists that in that way madness lay sheer uncontrollable raging madness for me at any rate and the grave middle-aged gentleman behind the counter of 13 great Marlboro Street proved to be the cashier of the firm and used being chest mad with the rest of us to spend his evenings at clings he was a player of my own strength and for 12 months or so had I skirmished with him over the chess board and fought innumerable battles with him he had never spoken of his occupation nor eye of my restless ambitions chess players never go beyond the checkered board hello Robinson he exclaimed in his surprise you don't mean to say that you and then he stopped and regarded my youthful appearance very critically yes mr. Kenny it's a novel I said modestly my first there's plenty of it he remarked dryly I'll send it upstairs at once and I'll wish you luck too but he added kindly preparing to soften the shock of a future refusal we have plenty of these come in about seven a day and most of them go back to their writers again yes I suppose so I answered with a sigh for a while however I regarded the meeting as a happy augury a lucky coincidence I even had the vain hopeless notion that mr. Kenny might put in a good word for me ask for special consideration out of that kindly feeling which we had for each other and which chess antagonists have invariably for each other I am inclined to believe but though we met three or four times a week from that day forth not one word concerning the fate of my manuscript escaped the lips of mr. Kenny it is probable the incident had passed from his memory he had nothing to do with the novel department itself and the delivery of mss was a very common every day proceeding to him I was too bashful perhaps too proud an individual to ask any questions but every evening that I encountered him I used to wonder if he had heard anything if any news of the book's fate had reached him directly or indirectly occasionally even as time went on I was disposed to imagine that he was letting me win the game out of kindness for he was a gentle kindly soul always in order to soften the shock of a disappointment which he knew perfectly well was on its way towards me some months afterwards the fateful letter came to me from the firm regretting its inability to make use of the mss and expressing many thanks for a perusal of the same a polite concise all-round kind of epistle which a publisher is compelled to keep in stock and to send out when rejected literature pours forth like a waterfall from the dusky caverns of a publishing house in a large way of business it was all over then I had failed from that hour I would turn chess player and soften my brain in a quest for silver cups or champion amateur stakes I could play chess better than I could write fiction I was sure still after some days of dead despair I sent the mss once more on its travels this time to smith and elders whose reader Mr. Williams had leapt into singular prominence since his favorable judgment of charlotte bronte's book and to whom most mss flowed spontaneously for many years afterwards and in due course of time Mr. Williams acting for mss smith and elder asked me to call upon him for the mss at corn hill and there I received my first advice my first thrill of exaltation presently and probably and with perseverance he said you will succeed in literature and if you will remember now that to write a good novel is a very considerable achievement years of short story writing is the best apprenticeship for you write and rewrite and spare no pains I thanked him and I went home with tears in my eyes of gratitude and consolation though my big story had been declined with thanks but I did not write again I put away my mss and went on for six or eight hours a day at chess for many idle months before I was in the vein for composition and then with a sudden dash I began the house of elmore it was half finished when another strange incident occurred I received one morning a letter from LaSalle's Raxall afterwards Sir LaSalle's Raxall Bart as the reader may be probably aware informing me that he was one of the readers for monsieur's hearst and blackette and that it had been his duty some time ago to decide unfavorably against a story which I had submitted to the notice of his firm but that he had intended to write to me a private note urging me to adopt literature as a profession his principal object in writing at that time was to suggest my trying the fortunes of the novel which he had already read with Messer's root ledge and he kindly added a letter of introduction to that firm in the Broadway an introduction which by the way never came to anything poor LaSalle's Raxall clever writer and editor press man and literary advisor real bohemian and true friend indeed everybody's friend but his own I look back at him with feelings of deep gratitude he was a rolling stone and when I met him for the first time in my life years afterwards he had left Marlboro Street for the Crimea he had been given a commission in the turkish contingent at Kerch he had come back and atomizing the surface and chock full of grievances against the government and he became once more editor and sub editor and publishers hack even until he stepped into his baronnessy an empty title for he had sold the reversion of the estates for a mere song long ago and became special correspondent in Austria for the daily telegraph and in Vienna he died young in years still not 40 I think closing a life that only wanted one turn more of application I have often thought to have achieved very great distinction there are still a few writing men about who remember LaSalle's Raxall but they are the boys of the old brigade it was to the cells Raxall I sent when finished the house of Elmore as the reader may very easily guess Raxall had stepped so much out of his groove for the busy literary man that he was to take me by the hand and point the way along the perilous road he had given me so many kind words that I wrote my hardest to complete my new story before I should fade from his recollection the book was finished in five weeks and in hot haste and for months again I was left wondering what the outcome of it all was to be whether Raxall was reading my story or whether oh horror some other reader less kindly disposed and more austere and critical and heart please had been told off to sit in judgment upon my second ms I went back to chess for a distraction till the fate of that book was pronounced or sealed it was always chess in the hours of my distress and anxiety and I once again faced Charles Kenny and once again wondered if he knew and how much he knew whilst he was deep in his king's gambit or his geoco piano but he was not even aware that I had sent in a second story I learned afterwards and then at last came the judgment the pleasant informal notice from Marlboro Street that the novel had been favorably reported upon by the reader and that Missouri's Hurston blackhead would be pleased to see me at Marlboro Street to talk the matter of its publication over with me ah what a letter that was what a surprise after all what a good omen and some three months afterwards at the end of the year 1854 my first book but my second novel was launched into the reading world and I have hardly got over the feeling yet that I had actually a right to dub myself a novelist when the first three notices of the book appeared wild dreams of a brilliant future beset me they were all favorable notices too favorable but john bull the press and bell's messenger I think they were the papers scattered favorable notices indiscriminately at that time presently the athenaeum sobered me a little but wound up with a kindly pat on the back and the saturday review then at its seventh number drenched me with vitriolic acid and brought me to a lower level altogether and finally the morning herald blue allowed blast to my praise and glory that last notice I believe having been written by my old friend sir edward clark then a very young reviewer on the herald staff with no dreams of becoming her majesty's solicitor general just then the house of elmore actually paid its publishers expenses and left a balance and brought me in a little check and thus my writing life began in sober earnest end of chapter 10 chapter 11 of my first book this is a labor fox recording all labor fox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit labor fox dot org my first book by various dawn by h rider haggard I think that it was in an article by a fellow scribe where doubtless more in sorrow than in anger that gentle man exposed the worthlessness of the productions of sundry of his brother authors in which I read that whatever success I had met with as a writer of fiction was due to my literary friends and nepotic criticism this is scarcely the case since when I began to write I do not think that I knew a single creature who had published books blue books alone accepted nobody was ever more outside the ring or less acquainted with the art of rolling logs than the humble individual who pens these lines but the reader shall judge for himself to begin at the beginning my very first attempt at imaginative writing was made while I was a boy at school one of the masters promised a prize to that youth who should best describe on paper any incident real or imaginary I entered the lists and selected the scene at an operation in a hospital as my subject the fact that I had never seen an operation nor crossed the doors of a hospital did not deter me from this bold endeavor which however was justified by its success I was declared to have one in the competition though probably through the forgetfulness of the master I remember that I never received the promised prize my next literary effort written in 1876 was an account of a zulu war dance which I witnessed when I was on the staff of the governor of natal it was published in the gentle man's magazine and very kindly noticed in various papers a year later I wrote another article entitled a visit to the chief see koko any which very nearly got me into trouble I was then serving on the staff of surtheophilus shep stone and the article signed with my initials reached South Africa in its printed form shortly after the annexation of the transfall young men with a pen in their hands are proverbially indiscreet and in this instance I was no exception in the course of my article I had described the transfall bore at home with a fidelity that should be avoided by members of a diplomatic mission and had even gone the length of saying that most of the Dutch women were fat needless to say my remarks were translated into the african der papers and somewhat extensively read especially by the ladies in question and their male relatives nor did the editors of those papers for bear to comment on them in leading articles shortly afterwards shortly afterwards there was a great and stormy meeting of bores at Pretoria as matters began to look serious somebody ventured among them to ascertain the exciting cause and returned with the pleasing intelligence that they were all talking of what the English man had written about the physical proportions of their women kind and domestic habits and threatening to take up arms to avenge it of my feelings on learning this news I will not discourse but they were uncomfortable to say the least of it happily in the end the gathering broke up without bloodshed but when the late Sir Bartle Frey came to Pretoria some months afterwards he administered to me a sound and well deserved lecture on my indiscretion I excused myself by saying that I had set down nothing which was not strictly true and he replied to the effect that therein lay my fault I quite agree with him indeed there is little doubt but that these bald statements of fact as to the stoutness of the transfall frows and the lack of cleanliness in their homes went near to precipitating a result that as a chance was postponed for several years well it is all done with now and I take this opportunity of apologizing to such of the ladies in question as may still be in the land of life this unfortunate experience cooled my literary ardor yet as a chance when some five years later I again took up my pen it was in connection with african affairs these pages are no place for politics but I must allude to them in explanation it will be remembered that the transfall was annexed by great britain in 1877 in 1881 the boars rose in rebellion and administered several thrashings to our troops where on the government of this country came suddenly to the conclusion that a wrong had been done to the victors and subject to some paper restrictions gave them back their independence as a chance at the time I was living on some african property belonging to me in the center of the operations and so disgusted was I in common with thousands of others at the turn which matters had taken that I shook the dust of south africa off my feet and returned to england now the first impulse of an aggrieved english man is to write to the times and if I remember right I took this course but my letter not being inserted I enlarged upon the idea and composed a book called set way in his white neighbors this semi-political work or rather history was very carefully constructed from the records of some six years experience and by the help of a shelf full of boo books that stare me in the face as I write these words and the fact that it still goes on selling seems to show that it has some value in the eyes of students of south african politics but when I had written my book I was confronted by a difficulty which I had not anticipated being utterly without experience in such affairs that of finding somebody willing to publish it I remember that I purchased a copy of the atheneum and selecting the names of various firms at hazard wrote to them offering to submit my manuscript but strange to say none of them seemed anxious to peruse it at last how I do not recollect it came into the hands of messers troubner who after consideration wrote to say that they were willing to bring it out on the half profit system provided that I paid down 50 pounds towards the cost of production I did not at all like the idea of parting with the 50 pounds but I believed in my book and was anxious to put my views on the transfall rebellion and other african questions before the world so I consented to the terms and in due course that way all was published in a neat green binding somewhat to my astonishment it proved a success from a literary point of view it was not largely purchased indeed that 50 pounds took several years on its return journey to my pocket but it was favorably and in some instances almost enthusiastically reviewed especially in the colonial papers about this time the face of a girl whom I saw on a church at norwood gave me the idea of writing a novel the face was so perfectly beautiful and at the same time so refined that I felt I could fit a story to it which should be worthy of a heroine similarly endowed when next I saw mr. troubner I consulted him on the subject you can write it is certain that you can write yes do it and I will get the book published for you he answered thus encouraged I said to work how to compose a novel I knew not so I wrote straight on trusting to the light of nature to guide me my main object was to produce the picture of a woman perfect in mind and body and to show her character ripening and growing spiritual under the pressure of various afflictions of course there is a vast gulf between a novice's aspiration and his attainment and I do not contend that angela she appears in dawn fulfills this ideal also such a person in real life might and probably would be a bore something too bright and good for human nature's daily food still this was the end I aimed at indeed before I had done with her I became so deeply attached to my heroine that in a literary sense I have never quite got over it I worked very hard at this novel during the next six months or so but at length it was finished and dispatched to mr. troubner who as his firm did not deal in this class of book submitted it to five or six of the best publishers of fiction one and all they declined it so that by degrees it became clear to me that I might as well have saved my labor mr. troubner however had confidence in my work and submitted the manuscript to mr. john courty defferson for report and here I may pause to say that I think there is more kindness in the hearts of literary men than is common in the world it is not a pleasant task in the face of repeated failure again and again to attempt the adventure of persuading brother publishers to undertake the maiden effort of an unknown man is still less pleasant is it as I can vouch from experience to wade through a lengthy and not particularly legible manuscript and write an elaborate opinion there on for the benefit of a stranger yet mr. troubner and mr. jefferson did these things for me without fear reward mr. jefferson's report I have lost or mislaid but I remember its purport well it was to the effect that there was a great deal of power in the novel but that it required to be entirely rewritten the first part he thought so good that he advised me to expand it and the unhappy ending he could not agree with if I killed the heroine it would kill the book he said he may have been right but I still hold to my first conception according to which Angela was doomed to an early and pathetic end as the fittest crown to her career that the story needed rewriting there is no doubt but I believe that it would have been better as a work of art if I had dealt with it on the old lines especially as the expansion of the beginning in accordance with the advice of my kindly critic took the tale back through the history of another generation always a most dangerous experiment still I did as I was told not presuming to set up a judgment of my own in the matter if I had worked hard at the first draft of the novel I worked much harder at the second especially as I could not give all my leisure to it being engaged at the time in reading for the bar so hard did I work that at length my eyesight gave out and I was obliged to complete the last hundred sheets in a darkened room but let my eyes ache as they might I would not give up till it was finished within about three months from the date of its commencement recently I went through this book to prepare it for a new edition chiefly in order to cut out some of the mysticism and tall writing for which it is too remarkable and was pleased to find that it still interested me but if a writer may be allowed to criticize his own work it is two books not one also the hero is a very poor creature evidently I was too much occupied with my heroines to give much thought to him moreover women are so much easier and more interesting to write about for whereas no two of them are alike in modern men or rather in young men of the middle and upper classes there is a paralyzing sameness as a candid friend once said to me there is nothing manly about that chap Arthur he is the hero except his bulldog with Angela herself I am still in love only she ought to have died which on the whole would have been a better fate than being married to Arthur more especially if he was anything like the illustrator's conception of him in the current edition in its new shape Don was submitted to monsieur's Hearst and Blackett and it once accepted by that firm why it was called Don I am not now quite clear but I think it was because I could find no other title acceptable to the publishers the discovery of suitable titles is a more difficult matter than people who do not write romances would suppose most of the good ones having been used already in copyrighted in due course the novel was published in three fat volumes and a pretty green cover and I sat down to await events at the best I did not expect to win a fortune out of it as if every one of the 500 copies printed were sold I could only make 50 pounds under my agreement not an extravagant reward for a great deal of labor as a matter of fact but 450 sold so the net proceeds of the venture amounted to 10 pounds only and 40 surplus copies of the book which I bored my friends by presenting to them but as the copyright of the work reverted to me at the expiration of a year I cannot grumble at this result the reader may think that it was mercenary of me to consider my first book from this financial point of view but to be frank though the story interested me much in its writing and I had a sneaking belief in its merits it never occurred to me that I an utterly inexperienced beginner could hope to make any mark in competition with the many brilliant writers of fiction who were already before the public therefore so far as I was concerned any reward in the way of literary reputation seemed to be beyond my reach it was on the occasion of the publication of this novel that I made my first and last attempt to roll a log with somewhat amusing results almost the only person of influence whom I knew in the world of letters was the editor of a certain society paper I had not seen him for 10 years but at this crisis I ventured to recall myself to his memory and to ask him not for a favorable notice but that the book should be reviewed in his journal he exceeded to my prayer it was reviewed but after a fashion for which I did not bargain this little incident taught me a lesson and the moral of it is never trouble an editor about your immortal works he can so easily be even with you I commended to all literary tiros even if you are in a position to command puffs the public will find you out in the second edition and revenge itself upon your next book here is a story that illustrates the accuracy of this statement it came to me on good authority and I believe it to be true a good many years ago the relation of an editor of a great paper published a novel it was a bad novel but a desperate effort was made to force it upon the public and in many of the leading journals appeared notices so laudatory that readers fell into the trap and the book went through several additions encouraged by success the writer published a second book but the public had found her out and it fell flat being a person of resource she brought out a third work under a nom which as at first was accorded an enthusiastic reception by previous arrangement and forced into circulation a fourth followed under the same name but again the public had found her out and her career as a novelist came to an end to return to the fate of dawn in most quarters it met with the usual reception of a first novel by an unknown man some of the reviewers sneered at it and some slated it and made merry over the misprints a cheap form of wit that saves those who practice at the trouble of going into the merits of a book two very good notices fell to its lot however in the times and in the morning post the first of these speaking about the novel in terms of which any amateur writer might feel proud though unfortunately it appeared too late to be of much service also i discovered that the story had interested a great many readers and none of them more than the late mr. Trubner through whose kind offices it came to be published who i was told paid me the strange compliment of continuing its perusal till within a few hours of his death a sad event that the enemy might say was hastened thereby in this connection i remember that the first hand i received that my story was popular with the ordinary reading public whatever reviewers might say of it came from the lips of a young lady a chance visitor at my house whose name i have forgotten seeing the book lying on the table she took a volume up saying oh have you read dawn it is a first rate novel i have just finished it somebody explained and the subject dropped but i was not a little gratified by the unintended compliment these facts encouraged me and i wrote a second novel the witch's head this book i endeavored to publish serially by posting the ms to the editors of various magazines for their consideration but in those days there were no literary agents or authors societies to help young writers with their experience and advice and the bulky manuscript always came back to my hand like a boomerang till at length i worried of the attempt of course i sent the wrong people afterwards the editor of a leading monthly told me that he would have been delighted to run the book had it fallen into the hands of his firm in the end as in the case of dawn i published the witch's head in three volumes its reception astonished me for i did not think so well of the book as i had done of its predecessor in that view by the way the public has borne out my judgment for to this day three copies of dawn are absorbed for every two of the witch's head a proportion that has never varied since the two works appeared in one volume form the witch's head was very well reviewed indeed in one or two cases the notices were almost enthusiastic most of all when they dealt with the african part of the book which i had inserted as padding the fight between jeremy and the bore giant being singled out for a special praise whatever it may lack one merit this novel has however that was overlooked by all the reviewers omitting the fictitious incidents introduced for the purposes of the story it contains an accurate account of the great disaster inflicted upon our troops by the zulus at ills and alwana i was in the country at the time of the massacre and heard its story from the lips of survivors also in writing of it i studied the official reports in the blue books and the minutes of the court marshal the witches head attained the dignity of being pirated in america and in england went out of print in a few weeks but no argument that i could use would induce my publishers to reissue it in a one volume edition the risk was too great they said then it was i came to the conclusion that i would abandon the making of books the work was very hard and when put to the test of experience the glamour that surrounds this occupation vanished i did not care much for the publicity it involved and like most young authors i failed to appreciate being sneered at by anonymous critics who happened not to admire what i wrote and whom i had no opportunity of answering it is true that then as now i liked the work for its own sake indeed i have always thought that literature would be a charming profession if its conditions allowed of the depositing of manuscripts when completed in a drawer there to language in obscurity or of their private publication only but i could not afford myself these luxuries i was too modest to hope for any renown worth having and for the rest the game seemed scarcely worth the candle i had published a history and two novels on the history i had lost 50 pounds on the first novel i had made 10 pounds and on the second 50 net profit on the three 10 pounds which in the case of a man with other occupations and duties did not appear to be an adequate return for the labor involved but i was not destined to escape thus from the toils of romance one day i chanced to read a clever article in favor of boy's books and it occurred to me that i might be able to do as well as others in that line i was working at the bar at the time but in my spare evenings more from amusement than from any other reason i entered on the literary adventure that ended in the appearance of king Solomon's minds this romance has proved very successful although three firms including my own publishers refused even to consider it but as it can scarcely be called one of my first books i shall not speak of it here in conclusion i will tell a moving tale that it may be a warning to young authors far ever after my publishers declined to issue the witch's head in a six shilling edition i tried many others without success and at length in my folly signed an agreement with a firm since deceased under this document the firm in question agreed to bring out don and the witch's head in a two shilling edition and generously to remunerate me with a third share in the profits realized if any in return for this concession i on my part undertook to allow the said firm to republish any novel that i might write for a period of five years from the date of the agreement in a two shilling form and on the same third profit terms of course so soon as the success of king Solomon's minds was established i received a polite letter from the publishers in question asking when they might expect to republish that romance at two shillings then the matter came under the consideration of lawyers and other skilled persons with the result that it appeared that if the courts took a strict view of the agreement ruins dared me in the face so far as my literary affairs were concerned to begin with either by accident or design this artful document was so worded that prima facie the contracting publisher had a right to place his cheap addition on the market whenever it might please him to do so subject only to the payment of a third of the profit to be assessed by himself which practically might have meant nothing at all how could i expect to dispose of work subject to such a legal servitude for five long years i was a slave to the framer of the hanging claws of the agreement things looked black indeed when thanks to the diplomacy of my agent and to a fortunate change in the personnel of the firm to which i was bound i avoided disaster the fatal agreement was canceled and in consideration of my release i undertook to write two books upon a moderate royalty thus then did i escape out of bondage to be just it was my own fault that i should ever have been sold into it but authors are proverbially guileless when they are anxious to publish their books and a piece of printed paper with a few editions written in a neat hand looks innocent enough now no such misfortunes need happen for the authors society is ready and anxious to protect them from themselves and others but in those days it did not exist this is the history of how i drifted into the writing of books if it saves one beginner so inexperienced and unfriended as i was in those days from putting his hand to a hanging agreement under any circumstances whatsoever it will not have been set out in vain the advice that i give to would be authors if i may presume to offer it is to think for a long while before they enter it all upon a career so hard and hazardous but having entered on it not to be easily cast down there are great virtues in perseverance even though critics sneer and publishers prove unkind yours very truly h writer haggard end of chapter 11