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.' 'Tut, tut!' I
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 towards 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.
[Illustration: MR. ANDREW LANG]
And then, under more favourable circumstances, I wrote 'Micah Clarke,'
for 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. 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; Cassells 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 were suddenly to stride in and
make me a bid of forty shillings or so for the lot. And then suddenly I
bethought me to send it to Messrs. 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 borne through it.
'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 learnt 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
round-hand, on carefully pencilled 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 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 Pardoe's Turkish tales, and Byron's 'Bride of
Abydos,' which my mother, a devoted Byron worshipper, allowed me to read
aloud to her--and doubtless murder in the reading--a story of the Hartz
Mountains, with audacious flights in German diablerie; 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.
[Illustration: LICHFIELD HOUSE, RICHMOND]
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 jot!--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.
[Illustration: THE HALL]
My dear mother, taking into consideration my tender years, and perhaps
influenced in somewise 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 savours 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. 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 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.
[Illustration: THE DINING-ROOM]
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 dovecot; a cart or
hand-barrow waits on the carefully hearth-stoned 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, entreats that, if able to raise the money in a few days, they may
be allowed to buy back that loved heirloom.
[Illustration: THE DRAWING-ROOM]
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 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 horsehair, 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 well 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.
[Illustration: THE EVENING ROOM]
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 well 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 youth and inexperience
of the book world. Poring 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 Speke 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 Beverley, who had seen my poor little verses in the _Beverley
Recorder_, made me the spirited offer of ten pounds for a serial story,
to be set up and printed at Beverley, and published on commission by a
London firm in Warwick Lane. I cannot picture to myself, in my
after-knowledge of the bookselling 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 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 Mæcenas in Beverley, 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 Poet's 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.
[Illustration: THE SMOKING-ROOM]
The Beverley printer suggested that my Warwick Lane serial should
combine, as far as my powers 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 foolscap, 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 Beverley, as 'Three Times
Dead.' In 'Three Times Dead' I gave loose to all my leanings to the
violent in melodrama. Death stalked 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
re-issue 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.
[Illustration: THE LIBRARY]
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 MS. dropping through the open letter-box on to 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 Beverley-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 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 Beverley 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
Beverley printer should squander his own or his children's fortune in
the obscurity of Warwick Lane, I immediately acceded to his request,
shortened sail, 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 Beverley 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 under way, I went with my mother
to farmhouse lodgings in the neighbourhood of that very Beverley, 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
Spenserian metre.
[Illustration: MISS BRADDON'S FAVOURITE MARE]
My chief business at Beverley was to complete the volume of verse
commissioned by my Yorkshire Mæcenas, 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.
[Illustration: THE ORANGERY]
With the business-like punctuality of a salaried clerk, I went every
morning to my file of the _Times_, and pored and puzzled over Neapolitan
revolution and Sicilian campaign, and I can only say that if Emile Zola
has suffered as much over Sedan as I suffered in the freshness of my
youth, when flowery meadows and the old chestnut mare invited to summer
idlesse, 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 Spenserian metre, 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 allusion and local colour were both
wanting to that dry-as-dust record of heroic endeavour! I had only the
_Times_ correspondent; where he was picturesque I could be
picturesque--allowing always for the Spenserian straining--where he was
rich in local colour I did my utmost to reproduce his colouring,
stretched always on the Spenserian rack, and lengthened out by the
bitter necessity of finding triple rhymes. Next to Giuseppe Garibaldi I
hated Edmund Spenser, 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 _naïveté_ of Chaucer, I
have refrained from reading more than a casual stanza or two of the
'Faëry Queen.' When I lived at Beverley, Spenser was to me but a name,
and Byron's 'Childe Harold' was my only model for that exacting verse. I
should add that the Beverley Mæcenas, 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 racecourse of Parnassus.
[Illustration: MISS BRADDON'S COTTAGE AT LYNDHURST]
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
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, learnt to love the Yorkshire people, and left Yorkshire almost
broken-heartedly on a dull, grey October morning, to travel Londonwards
through a landscape that was mostly under water.
[Illustration: MISS BRADDON'S INKSTAND]
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 eglantine and honeysuckle.
[Illustration: signature: Very truly yours,
M. E. Braddon]
'_THE HOUSE OF ELMORE_'
BY F. W. ROBINSON
[Illustration]
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 prize
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 clergyman 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 in 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, and hence it is part and parcel of the
history of my first book--a link in the chain.
[Illustration: AT TWENTY]
[Illustration: drawing by Geo. Hutchinson
signed: Yours Very Truly,
F. W. Robinson
(_From a photograph by Elliott & Fry_)]