 I cannot follow Mr. Besant with any pitiful story of rejection at the hands of publishers. If refusal is quite the best thing that can happen to the candidate for literary honours, my fate has not been favourable. No tale of mine has yet passed from publishing house to publishing house. Except the first of the series, my stories have been accepted before they have been read. In two or three instances they have been bought before they have been written. It has occurred to me, as to others, to have two or three publishers offering terms for the same book. I have even been offered half-payment in hand on account of a book which I could not hope to write for years, and might never write at all. Thus the most helpful confession which the more or less successful man of letters can make for the comfort and cheer of his younger and less fortunate brethren, it is out of my power to offer. But I reflect that this is true of my literary experiences in the character of a novelist only. I had an earlier and semi-subterranean career that was very different. At eighteen I wrote a poem of a mystical sort, which was printed not at my own risk and published under a pseudonym. Happily no man will ever identify me behind the romantic name wherein I hid my own. Only one literary man knew my secret. That was George Gill Fillon, and he is dead. Then at twenty I wrote an autobiography for another person and was paid ten pounds for it. These were really my first books, and I grow quite hot when I think of them. At five and twenty I came up to London with the manuscript of a critical work which I had written while at Liverpool. Somebody had recommended that I should submit it to a certain great publishing house, and I took it in person. At the door of the office I was told to write my own name and the name of the person whom I wished to see, and to stake the nature of my business. I did so, and the boy who took my message brought back word that I might leave my manuscript for consideration. It seemed to me that somebody might have seen me for a minute, but I had expected too much. The manuscript was carefully tied up in brown paper, and so I left it. After waiting three torturing weeks for the decision of the publishers, I made bold to call again. At the same little box at the door of the office I had once more to fill up the same little document. The boy took it in, and I was left to sit on his table, to look at the desk which he had been whittling away with his pen-knife, to wait and to tremble. After a time I heard a footstep returning. I thought it might be the publisher or the editor of the house. It was the boy back again. He had a pile of loose sheets of white paper in his hands. They were the sheets of my book. The editors complimented, sir, and thank you, said the boy, and my manuscript went sprawling over the table. I gathered it up, tucked it as deep as possible into the darkness under the wings of my Inverness cape, and went downstairs, ashamed, humiliated, crushed, and broken spirited. Not quite that, either, for I remember that as I got to the fresh air at the door my gorge rose within me, and I cried in my heart, I, God usual!—and something proud and vain. I dare say it was all right and proper and in good order. The book was afterwards published, and I think it sold well. I hardly know whether I ought to say that the editor should have shown me more courtesy. It was all a part of the anarchy of things which Mr. Hardy considers the rule of life. But the sequel is worth telling—that editor became my personal friend. He is dead, and he was a good and able man. Of course he remembered nothing of this incident, and I never poisoned one hour of our intercourse by telling him how, when I was young, and a word of cheer would have buoyed me up, he made me drink the waters of Mara. And three times since that day the publishing-house I speak of has come to me with the request that I should write a book for them. I have never been able to do so, but I have outgrown my bitterness, and of course I show no malice. Indeed I have now the best reasons for wishing the great enterprise well. But if literary confessions are worth anything, this one may perhaps be a seed that will somewhere find grateful soil. Keep a good heart, even if you have to knock in vain at many doors, and kick about the back stairs of the House of Letters. There is room enough inside. I wrote and edited sundry things during my first years in London. But not until I had published a story did I feel that I had so much as touched the consciousness of the public. Hence my first novel may very properly be regarded as my first book. And if I have no tale to tell of heartbroken impediments in getting it published, I have something to say of the difficulty of getting it written. The novel is called The Shadow of a Crime, but title it had none until it was finished and a friend christened it. I cannot remember when the story was begun, because I cannot recall a time when the idea of it did not exist in my mind. Something of the same kind is true of every tale I have ever written, or shall ever write. I think it must be in the nature of imagination that an imaginative idea does not spring into being, that it has no spontaneous generation, but as a germinating conception, a shadow of a vision, always comes floating from somewhere out of the back chambers of memory. You are waiting for the central thought that shall link together incidents that you have gleaned from among the stubble of many fields, for the motif that shall put life and meaning into the characters that you have gathered and grouped. And one morning, as you awake, just at that moment when you are between a land of light and the mists of sleep, and as your mind is grappling back for the vanishing form of some delicious dream, a dim but familiar ghost of an idea comes up unbidden for the hundredth time, and you say to yourself, with surprise at your own stupidity, that's it! The idea of my first novel moved about me in this way for many years before I recognized it. As usually happens, it came in the shape of a story. I think it was, in actual fact, first of all a tale of a grandfather. My mother's father was a cumberland man, and he was full of the law of the hills and dales. One of the oldest legends of the Lake Mountains tells of the time of the plague. The people were afraid to go to market, afraid to meet at church, and afraid to pass on the highway. When any lonely body was ill, the nearest neighbour left meat and drink at the door of the afflicted house, and knocked and ran away. In these days a widow with two sons lived in one of the darkest of the valleys. The younger son died, and the body had to be carried over the mountains to be buried. This course lay across Styhead Pass, a bleak and brunt place where the winds are often high. The eldest son, a strong-hearted lad, undertook the duty. He strapped the coffin onto the back of a young horse, and they started away. The day was wild, and on the top of the pass, where the path dips into Wasdale, between the breast of Great Gable and the heights of Scorful, the wind rose to a gale. The horse was terrified. It broke away and galloped over the fells, carrying its burden with it. The lad followed and searched for it, but in vain, and he had to go home at last unsatisfied. This was in the spring, and nearly all the summer through, the surviving son of the widow was out on the mountains, trying to recover the runaway horse, but never once did he catch sight of it, though sometimes, as he turned homeward at night, he thought he heard in the gathering darkness, above the sow of the wind, the horse's ney. Then winter came, and the mother died. Once more the dead body had to be carried over the fells for burial, and once again the coffin was strapped on the back of a horse. It was an old mare that was chosen this time, the mother of the young one that had been lost. The snow lay deep on the pass, and from the cliffs of the Scorful pikes it hung in great toppling masses. All went well with the little funeral-party, until they came to the top of the pass, and though the day was dead calm, the sun held the rain with a hand that was like a vice. But just as the mare reached the spot where the wind had frightened the young horse, there was a terrific noise. An immense body of the snow had parted at that instant from the beatling heights overhead, and rushed down into the valley with the movement as of a mighty earthquake, and the deafening sound as of a peel of thunder. The dale echoed and re-echoed from side to side, and from height to height. The old mare was affrighted, she reared, leapt, flung her master away, and galloped off. When they had recovered from their consternation the funeral-party gave chase, and at lengths down in a hollow place they thought they saw what they were in search of. It was a horse with something strapped on its back. When they came up with it they found it was the young horse with the coffin of the younger son. They led it away and buried the body that it had carried so long, but the old mare they never recovered, and the body of the mother never found sepulchre. Such was the legend, sufficiently terrible, and even ghastly, which was the germ of my first novel. Its fascination for me lay in its shadow and suggestion of the supernatural. I thought it had all the grip of a ghost story without ever passing out of the world of reality. Imagination played about the position of that elder son, and ingenuity puzzled itself for the sequel to his story. What did he think? What did he feel? What were his superstitions? What became of him? Did he die mad, or was he a man, and did he rise out of all doubt and terror? I cannot say how many years this ghost of a conception, with various brothers and sisters of a similar complexion, haunted my mind before I recognized it as the central incident of a story, the faggot for a fire from which other incidents might radiate and imaginary characters take life. When I began to think of it in this practical way, I was about six and twenty, and was lodging in a lonely farmhouse in the Vale of St John. Rossetti was with me, for I had been up to London at his request, and had brought him down to my retreat. The story of that sojourn among the mountains I have told elsewhere. It lives in my memory as a very sweet and sad experience. The poet was a dying man. He spent a few hours of every day in painful efforts to paint a picture. His nights were long, for sleep never came to him until the small hours of the morning. His sight was troublesome, and he could not read with ease. He was in that condition of ill health when he could not bear to be alone, and thus he and I were much together. I was just then looking vaguely to the career of a public lecturer, and was delivering a long course of lectures at Liverpool. The subject was prose fiction, and to fortify myself for the work I was reading the masterpieces over again. During this Rossetti suggested that I should read aloud, and I did so. Many an evening we passed in this way. The farmhouse stood at the foot of a fell by the side of the lowest pool of a gill, Fisher's gill, and the roar of the falling waters could be heard from within. On the farther side of the Vale there were black crags where ravens lived, and in the unseen bed of the dale between lay the dark waters of Thirlmere. The surroundings were striking to the eye and ear in the daylight, but when night came and the lamp was lit and the curtains were drawn, and darkness covered everything outside, they were yet more impressive to the imagination. I remember those evenings with gratitude and some pain. The little oblong room, the dull thud of the gill like faint thunder overhead, the crackle of the wood fire, myself reading aloud, and Rossetti in a long sack painting coat, his hands thrust into its upright pockets, walking with his heavy and uncertain step, to and fro, to and fro, laughing sometimes his big deep laugh, and sometimes sitting down to wipe his moist spectacles, and clear his dim eyes. The autumn was far spent and the nights were long. Not rarely the dead white gleams of the early dawn before the coming of the sun met the yellow light of our candles, as we passed on the staircase going to bed a little window that looked up to the mountains, and over them to the east. Perhaps it was not all pleasure so far as I was concerned, but certainly it was all profit. The novels we read were Tom Jones in four volumes, and Clarissa in its original eight, one or two of Smollett's and some of Scott's. Rossetti had not, I think, been a great reader of fiction, but his critical judgment was in some respect the surest and soundest I have known. He was one of the only two men I have ever met with who have given me in personal intercourse a sense of the presence of a gift that is above and apart from talent, in a word of genius. Nothing escaped him. His alert mind seized upon everything. He had never before, I think, given any thought to fiction as an art, but his intellect played over it like a bright light. It amazes me now, after ten years' close study of the methods of storytelling, to recall the general principles which he seemed to formulate out of the back of his head for the defence of his swift verdicts. Now why, I would say, when the art of the novelist seemed to me to fail, or when the poet's condemnation appeared extreme, because so and so must happen, he would answer. He was always right. He grasped with masterly strength the operation of the two fundamental factors in the novelist's art, the sympathy and the tragic mischief. If these were not working well, he knew by the end of the first chapters that however fine in observation, or racy in humour, or true in pathos, the work as an organism must fail. It was an education in literary art to sharpen one's wits on such a grindstone, to clarify one's thought in such a stream, to strengthen one's imagination by contact with a mind that was of imagination all compact. Now down to that time, though I had often aspired to the writing of plays, it had never occurred to me that I might write a novel. But I began to think of it then as a remote possibility, and the immediate surroundings of our daily life brought back recollection of the old Cumberland legend. I told the story to Rossetti, and he was impressed by it, but he strongly advised me not to tackle it. The incident did not repel him by its ghastliness, but he saw no way of getting sympathy into it on any side. His judgment disheartened me, and I let the idea go back to the dark chambers of memory. He urged me to try my hand at a Manx story. The bard of Manxland, it's worth while to be that, he said. He did not know the author of folksal yarns. I thought so too, but the Cumbrian statesman had begun to lay hold of my imagination. I had been reviving my recollection and sharpening my practice of the Cumbrian dialect, which had been familiar to my ear and even to my tongue in childhood, and so my Manx ambitions had to wait. Two years past, the poet died, I had spent eighteen months in daily journalism in London, and was then settled in a little bungalow of three rooms in a garden near the beach at Sandown in the Isle of Wight. And there, at length, I began to write my first novel. I had grown impatient of critical work, had persuaded myself, no doubt wrongly, that nobody would go on writing about other people's writing, who could do original writing himself, and was resolved to live on little and earn nothing, and never go back to London until I had written something of some sort. As nearly as I can remember, I had enough to keep things going for four months, and if, at the end of that time, nothing had got itself done, I must go back bankrupt. Everything did get done, but at a heavy price of labour and heart-burning. When I began to think of a theme, I found four or five subjects clamouring for acceptance. There was the story of the prodigal's son, which afterwards became the deemster. The story of Jacob and Esau, which in the same way turned into the bondman. The story of Samuel and Eli, which after a fashion moulded itself ultimately into the scapegoat, and half a dozen other stories chiefly Biblical, which are still on the forehead of my time to come. But the Cumbrian legend was first favourite, and to that I addressed myself. I thought I had seen a way to meet Rosetti's objection. The sympathy was to be got out of the elder son. He was to think God's hand was upon him. But whom God's hand rested on had God at his right hand, so the elder son was to be a splendid fellow, brave, strong, calm, patient, long-suffering, a victim of unrequited love, a man standing square on his legs against all weathers. It is said that the young novelist usually begins with a glorified version of his own character, but it must interest my friends to see how every quality of my first hero was a rebuke to my own peculiar infirmities. Above this central figure and legendary incident I grouped a family of characters. They were heroic and eccentric, good and bad, but they all operated upon the hero. Then I began to write. Shall I ever forget the agony of the first efforts? There was the ground to clear with necessary explanations. This I did in the way of Scott in a long, prefatory chapter. Having written it I read it aloud, and found it unutterably slow and dead. Twenty pages were gone, and the interest was not touched. During the chapter aside I began with an alehouse scene, intending to work back to the history in a piece of retrospective writing. The alehouse was better, but to try its quality I read it aloud after the rainbow scene in Silas Marner, and then cast it aside in despair. A third time I began, and when the alehouse looked tolerable the retrospective chapter that followed it seemed flat and poor. How to begin by gripping the interest? How to tell all and yet never stop the action? These were agonizing difficulties. It took me nearly a fortnight to start that novel, sweating drops as of blood at every fresh attempt. I must have written the first half volume four times at the least. After that I saw the way clearer and got on faster. At the end of three months I had written nearly two volumes, and then in good spirits I went up to London. My first visit was to J. S. Cotton, an old friend, and to him I detailed the lines of my story. His rapid mind saw a new opportunity. You want pein forte dur, he said. What's that, I said? An old punishment, a beautiful thing, he answered. Where's my dear old Blackstone? And the statute concerning the punishment for standing mute was read to me. It was just the thing I wanted for my hero, and I was in rapture, but I was also in despair. To work this fresh interest into my theme half of what I had written would need to be destroyed. It was destroyed. The interesting piece of ancient jurisprudence took a leading place in my scheme, and after two months more I got well into the third volume. Then I took my work down to Liverpool and showed it to my friend, the late John Lovell, a most able man, first manager of the Press Association, but then editing the local Mercury. After he had read it he said, I suppose you want my candid opinion. Well, yes, I said. It's crude, he said, but it only wants sub-editing. Sub-editing! I took it back to London, began again at the first line, and wrote every page over again. At the end of another month the story had been reconstructed, and was shorter by some fifty pages of manuscript. It had drawn my heart's blood to cut out my pet passages, but they were gone, and I knew the book was better. After that I went on to the end and finished with a tragedy. Then the story was sent back to Lovell, and I waited for his verdict. My home, or what served for it, was now on the fourth floor of New Court in Lincoln's Inn. And one morning Lovell came puffing and blowing and steaming. The good fellow was a twenty-stone man, into my lofty nest. He had reread my novel coming up in the train. Lovell, I asked nervously, it's magnificent, he said. That was all the favourable criticism he offered. All save one practical and tangible bit. We'll give you a hundred pounds for the serial right of the story for the weekly. He offered one unfavourable criticism. The death of your hero will never do, he said. If you kill that man Ralph you'll kill your book. What's the good? Take no more than the public will give you to begin with, and by and by they'll take what you give them. It was practical advice, but it went sorely against my grain. The death of the hero was the natural sequel to the story, the only end that gave meaning and intention and logic to its motif. I had a strong predisposition towards a tragic climax to a serious story. To close a narrative of disastrous events with a happy ending, it always seemed necessary to turn every incident into accident. That was like laughing at the reader. Comedy was comedy, but comedy and tragedy together was farce. Then a solemn close was so much more impressive, a happy end nearly always frayed off into rags and nothingness, but a sad one closed and clasped a story, as with a clasp. And a tragic end might be a glorious and satisfying one, and need by no means be squalid and miserable. But all these arguments went down before my friend's practical assurance, kill that man and you kill your book. With much diffidence I altered the catastrophe and made my hero happy. Then thinking my work complete, I asked Mr. Theodore Watts, a friend to whose wise counsel I owed much in those days, to read some galley slips of it. He thought the rustic scenes good, but advised me to moderate the dialect, and he propounded to me his well-known views on the use of patois in fiction. It gives a sense of reality, he said, and often has the effect of wit, but it must not stand in the way. The advice was sound. A man may know over much of his subject to write on it properly. I had studied Cumbrian to too much purpose, and did not realise that some of my scenes were like sealed books to the general reader. So once again I ran over my story, taking out some of the knobbets, and the dusters, and the wilters. My first novel was now written, but I had still to get it published. In my early days in London, while trying to live in the outer court of a calling wherein the struggle for existence is keenest and bitterest and cruelest, I conceived one day the idea of offering myself as a reader to the publishers. With this view I called on several of that ilk, who have perhaps no recollection of my early application. I recall my interview with one of them. He was sitting at a table when I was taken into his room, and he never once raised his head from his papers to look at me. I just remember that he had a neck like a three-decker, and a voice like a pea-hens. Well, sir? He said. I mentioned the object of my visit. What can you read? Novels and poems, I answered. Don't publish either, good day. He said. And I went out. But one of the very best and quite, I think, the very oldest of publishers now living received me differently. Come into my own room, he said. It was a lovely little place, full of an atmosphere that recalled the publishing house of the old days, half-office, half-study. A workshop where books might be made, not turned out by machinery. I read many manuscripts for that publisher, and must have learned much by the experience. And now that my novel was finished I took it to him first. He offered to publish it the following year. That did not suit me, and I took my book elsewhere. Next day I was offered fifty pounds for my copyright. That was wages at the rate of about four shillings a day for the time I had been actually engaged upon the work, sweating, brain and heart and every faculty. Nevertheless, one of my friends urged me to accept it. Why? I asked. Because it is a story of the past, and therefore not one publisher in ten will look at it. I used strong language, and then took my novel to Chateau and Windus. Within a few hours Mr. Chateau made me an offer which I accepted. The book is now, I think, in its fifteenth edition. The story I have told of many breakdowns in the attempt to write my first novel may suggest the idea that I was merely serving my apprenticeship to fiction. It is true that I was, but it would be wrong to conclude that the writing of a novel has been plain sailing with me ever since. Let me throw a crust to my critics and confess that I am serving my apprenticeship still. Every book that I have written since has offered yet greater difficulties. Not one of the little series but has at some moment been a despair to me. There has always been a point of the story at which I have felt confident that it must kill me. I have written six novels, that is to say, about sixteen, and sworn as many oaths that I would never begin another. Three times I have thrown up commissions in sheer terror of the work ahead of one. Yet here I am at this moment, like half a dozen of my fellow craftsmen, with contracts in hand which I cannot get through for three years. The public expects a novel to be light reading. It may revenge itself for occasional disappointments by remembering that a novel is not always light writing. Let me conclude with a few words that may be timely. Of all the literary camps that I despise and hate, the one I hate and despise the most is that which would have the world believe that greatly gifted men who have become distinguished in literature and are earning thousands a year by it, and have no public existence and no apology apart from it, hold it in pity as a profession and in contempt as an art. For my own part I have found the profession of letters a serious pursuit, of which in no company and in no country have I had need to be ashamed. It has demanded all my powers, fired all my enthusiasm, developed my sympathies, enlarged my friendships, touched, amused, soothed and comforted me. If it has been hard work, it has also been a constant inspiration, and I would not change it for all the glory and more than all the emoluments of the best paid and the most illustrious profession in the world. End of the Shadow of a Crime by Hall Cain Section 6 of my first book by various authors. 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 Ruth Golding The Social Collider Scope 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 truths of the word vanity has applied to human wishes. Hidden away in 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 Messers Smith and Sons a deep debt of gratitude for refusing to take it, and my heart rejoiced within me greatly that the only bookseller's 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 had been announced, entirely without my consent or knowledge, to appear at a hall attached to the Grecian Theatre, with Mrs. Georgina Weldon, and 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. Don 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. Byrons, which I purchased at Lacey and Son's, now French's, in the Strand. A new and original burlesque by Master G. R. Sims. My misguided parents actually had the play-bill 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 play-bill, 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 first-born! 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 felt of 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-width, 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 books 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 am 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. And I had 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 efforts 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 Hapenny Journal, and the other is a copy of the Hapenny Welcome Guest. On the back page of the correspondence column of the former, there is a poem signed G.R.S., addressed to a young lady's initials in affectionately complementary 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 Hapenny 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 confectioner's in all Camden Town that could come within measurable distance of it for strawberry ices. In the correspondence column of the Hapenny Welcome Guest, 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 am 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 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 woe betide 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 plunge at a 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 sixteen slippers, to say nothing of the biggest boy of all, who kept a reserve 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 Chambers 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 Haykney 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 overleaped itself, and I sent my verses to journals which didn't correspond. In those days I kept a little book, in which I entered all the manuscripts I sent to editors, and from it now I 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 2nd of September, many unhappy returns. I believe that 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 his 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 a lot of them who could even rhyme decently? Had I not had stories rejected by the family herald, all 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 Marilibone Mercury? And was I to be dubbed a scribbler, and pitted for my weakness? It is nearly twenty years since those words were uttered, 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 had 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 honours 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 to be allowed to try if I could do them. Under the title of The Social Collider Scope 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 Collider Scope 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 is 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 scribbling still. End of The Social Kaleidoscope by George R. Sims. Section 7 of my first book by various authors. 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 Ruth Golding. Departmental Ditties 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 in 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 one saturated with Iliah. He wrote very pretty, lamb-like essays, but he wrote them when he should have been sub-editing. Then I saw a 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 worth. 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. Rook and Din, 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 to-day. You giving more soon? One-third column just proper. Always can take on third page. Mahmoud, who set them up, had an unpleasant way of referring to a new lyric as Ek Archis, one more thing which I never liked. The job-side, 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 effs cut away to make long esses. And in this manner, week by week, my verses came to be printed in the paper. I was in very good company, for there is 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 apologise for mentioning his name in this gallery, Pekin, Letakya, Sigaret, 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 Charsey away in the China ports would lift up his voice among the tea-chests, and the queer-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 two monsoons' purchase, and perhaps the knowledge of this a little coloured the rhymes when they sang, In a very short time you're released from all cares if the party's asleep, Mr. Oldham reads prayers. The note of physical discomfort 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 Scamty 95, 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 Mayrutt, 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 coast as Rangoon and Mulmain, and up to Mandalay. A real book was out of the question, but I knew that Rook and Din 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 stitched, to imitate a Dio-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 as 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 sympathising with publishers who talk of their risks and advertisements. The down country 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 travelled 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 gilt 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 round its stomach, a child's child, ignorant that it was afflicted with all the most modern ailments, and before people had learned beyond doubt how it's also their wake of nights in India, plotting and scheming to write something that should take with the English public. End of Departmental Ditties by Rudyard Kipling Section 8 of my first book by various authors. 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 Ruth Golding Juvenilia by A. Conan Doyle It is very well for the master craftsman with twenty 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 twenty years ago. I was six at the time, and have a very distinct recollection of the achievement. It was written, I remember, upon full-scat 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 lengths 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 draws 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-coloured inks. Somewhere there lies my primitive manuscript, where my tiger, like a many-hooped 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 rumoured 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 permitted to change his book more than three times a day. Yet even with these limitations, by the aid of a well-stocked book case 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 lie 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 boson turns up with his crew of volunteers to hand-spike 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 to 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 under water 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 combat, I could have stocked 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 squaw. It was all more real than the reality. Since those days I have in very truth both shot bears and harpooned wales, but the performance was flat compared with the first time that I did it with Mr Ballantine, 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 tart down and strict business, which shows that I was born to be a member of the author's society. Sometimes too I would stop dead in the very thrill of a crisis, and could only be said to going again by apples. 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 Marquess saw, 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's 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 was 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 fifty pounds a year from my pen. I won my way into the best journals, Corn Hill, 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 Habakkuk Jeffson's statement in the Corn Hill 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 Corn Hill story? He shouted. No, no, what is it? Here it is, here it is! Eagerly he turned over the column, while I, trembling with excitement, but determined to bear my honours meekly, peeped over his shoulder. The Corn Hill 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 it. Of course it was the best thing I ever wrote, whoever 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 was 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 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 have never heard that it had the same effect upon anyone else afterwards. I may urge, in 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 settled down to my task, or rather dashed ferociously at it, as knowing how precious were those hours of quiet. Then to me enter my housekeeper with tidings of dismay. Mrs. 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 is 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. Tutt, tutt, I answer. It really does not matter in the least. The use 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 mind 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 merit in it, I was heart and soul of the same way of thinking. And then, under more favourable circumstances, I wrote Micah Clarke, for patience 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. Blackwood found that the people did not talk so in the seventeenth century. Bentley, that its principal defect was that there was a complete absence of interest. Castles that experienced had shown that an historical novel could never be a commercial success. I remember smoking over my doggiered manuscript when it returned for a whiff of country air, after one of its dissents 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 forty shillings also for the lot. And then suddenly I bethought me to send it to Messas Longmans, where it was fortunate enough to fall into the hands of Mr Andrew Lang. From that day the way was smoothed 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 born through it. End of Juvenilia by A. Conan Doyle Section 9 of My First Book by various authors 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 Ruth Golding. The Trail of the Serpent by M. E. Braddon My first novel. 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 sixpence, 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 labour. Above all, gem of gems, its stick of variegated sealing-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 Laurentine 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 Middlesex 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 roundhand, 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 than the writer's 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 in unfinished manuscripts, 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 Abidas, which my mother, a devoted Byron worshipper, allowed me to read aloud to her and doubtless murder in the reading. A story of the heart's mountains, with audacious flights in German Diablery. 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 in fiction mattered one job, which, in his or her opinion, would make the ground-plan of an admirable startling and 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 wander 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 wise by her own love of picking up odd bits of Sheraton or Chippendale furniture in the storehouses of the less ambitious second-hand 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 labourer who unexpectedly inherits half a million. It was eminently a simple story, and far more worthy of that title than Mrs. Inchboard'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 choicest of their household gods. A comfortable cushioned chair, snug and restful, albeit the chintz 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, distrains for the rent. The rude broker swoops upon the humble dove-cott. 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, in 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 scorn. 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 made no doubt the stuffing was nothing better than brown wool. And with that course 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 horse-hair, and the family was lifted from penury 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 will remember writing the old arm-chair in a penny account-book in the schoolroom of Cresswell 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, plodding on undisturbed by the voices and occupations of the older girls around me. The old arm-chair was certainly my first serious, painstaking effort in fiction. But as it was abandoned unfinished 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 modelled chiefly upon Jane Eyre with occasional tentative imitations of Thackeray. Stories of gentle hearts that loved in vain, always ending in renunciation. One romance there was, I will remember, begun with resolute purpose after the first reading of Esmond, and in the endeavour to give life and local colour 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 Esmondese, and made my girlish acquaintance with the reading-room of the British Museum, where I went in quest of local colour, and where much kindness was shown to my youths and inexperience of the book world. Pouring over a folio edition of the State Trials at my uncle's quiet rectory in 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 Lawrence Braddon and Hugh's Speak for Conspiracy. At the risk of seeming disloyal to my own race, I must add that it seemed to me a very tinpot order of plot, to which these two learned gentlemen bent their legal minds, and which cost the Braddon family a heavy fine in land 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 advanced payment of fifty shillings to show good faith on the part of my Yorkshire speculator seemed like the opening of that pen and ink paradise which I had sighed for ever since I could hold a pen. I had, previously to this date, found a myscenus in Beverly in the person of a learned gentleman who volunteered to foster my love of 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 powers are allowed, the human interest and genial humour of Dickens, with the plot weaving of G. W. R. Reynolds. And furnished with these broad instructions, I filled my ink bottle, spread out my full-scap, 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. In Three Times Dead I gave loose to all my leanings to the violent in melodrama. Death stalked in ghastly 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 pen 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 set 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 with thanks by adamantine magazine editors, like a certain short story which I had lately written, and which contained the germ of Lady Audley's 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 manuscript dropping through the open letter-box 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 bevelly-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 my complimentary copy of the first number, folded across, and in aspect inferior to a gratis pamphlet about a patent medicine. The miserable little woodblock 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 bevelly 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 bevelly-printer should squander his own or his children's fortune in the obscurity of Warwick Lane, I immediately acceded to his request, shortened sale, and went on with my story, perhaps with a shadeless enthusiasm, having seen the shabby figure it was to make in the book world. I may add that the bevelly-publisher's payments began and ended with his noble advance of fifty 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 Braddon 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 neighbourhood of that very bevelly, 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 library in Hull, an old farm-horse to ride about the green lanes, the breath of summer with all its sweet odours of flower and herb around and about us. Half a year of unalloyed 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 labours, as the hero of a lengthy narrative poem in the Spenssyrian meter. My chief business at Bevelly was to complete the volume of verse commissioned by my Yorkshire Mycenus, at that time a very rich man, who paid me a much better price for my literary work than his townsman, the enterprising printer, and who had the first claim on my thought and time. With the business-like punctuality of a salaried clock, I went every morning to my file of the Times, and poured and puzzled over Neapolitan Revolution and Sicilian Campaign. And I can only say that if Emile Zola suffered as much over Sedan as I suffered in the freshness of my youth, when flowery meadows and the old Chesnut mare invited to summer Idlis over the fighting in Sicily, his dogged perseverance in uncongenial labour should place him among the immortal Forty. How I hated the great Joseph G. and the Spenssyrian 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 colour were both wanting to that dry as dust record of heroic endeavor. I had only the Times correspondent, where he was picturesque, I could be picturesque, allowing always for the Spenssyrian straining. Where he was rich in local colour I did my utmost to reproduce his colouring, stretched always on the Spenssyrian 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 naivety 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 Mycenus, 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 and labour. 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 poisonous and ubiquitous detectives of 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 in hopelessly wet weather, learned to love the Yorkshire people, and left Yorkshire almost broken heartedly on a dull gray October morning to travel Londonwards through a landscape that was mostly under water. And behold, since that October morning I have written fifty-three novels. I have lost dear 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 ploddingly to and fro, between tall, tangled hedges of eglentine and honeysuckle. Very truly yours, M. E. Braddon. End of The Trail of the Serpent by M. E. Braddon