‘Ma God, Galbraith, ye’ve done it this time! You’ll catch it in the neck! Absent for a week wi’out leave, and gettin’ yoursel’ up to look like Harry Lauder! You come along wi’ me!’
‘I’ll come quiet,’ said Galbraith with strange meekness. He was wondering how to spell Omèrine St Marais in case he wanted to write it in his Bible.
The events of the next week were confusing to a plain man. Galbraith was very silent, and made no reply to the chaff with which at first he was greeted. Soon his fellows forbore to chaff him, regarding him as a doomed man who had come well within the pale of the ultimate penalties.
He was examined by his Commanding Officer, and interviewed by still more exalted personages. The story he told was so bare as to be unintelligible. He asked for no mercy, and gave no explanations. But there were other witnesses besides him – the priest, for example, and Monsieur St Marais, in a sober suit of black and very dark under the eyes.
By-and-by the court gave its verdict. Private Peter Galbraith was found guilty of riding roughshod over the King’s Regulations; he had absented himself from his battalion without permission; he had neglected his own duties and usurped without authority a number of superior functions; he had been the cause of the death or maltreatment of various persons who, whatever their moral deficiencies, must be regarded for the purposes of the case as civilian Allies. The Court, however, taking into consideration the exceptional circumstances in which Private Galbraith had been placed, inflicted no penalty and summarily discharged the prisoner.
Privately, his Commanding Officer and the still more exalted personages shook hands with him, and told him that he was a devilish good fellow and a credit to the British Army.
But Peter Galbraith cared for none of these things. As he sat again in the trenches at St Eloi in six inches of water and a foot of mud, he asked his neighbour how many Germans were opposite them.
‘I was hearin’ that there was maybe fifty thoosand,’ was the answer.
Private Galbraith was content. He thought that the whole fifty thousand would scarcely atone for the death of one slim, dark-eyed girl.
Author Biographies
DANIEL DEFOE (c. 1660–1731) was born Daniel Foe in Cripplegate, London. An early career as a merchant ended in failure and debt, and at the turn of the eighteenth century Defoe turned to polemical and other writings. The extent of his writings is hotly debated, and many anonymous pamphlets of Whiggish tendency are ascribed to his name. Certainly his are a group of novels published between 1719 and 1724, including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and Roxana. He died while in hiding from his many creditors.
JONATHAN SWIFT (1667–1745) was born and died in Dublin. He was a clergyman, and only started publishing the fantastical satires for which he became famous in the first years of the eighteenth century. A member of the inner circle of the Tory government under Queen Anne, he spent the last thirty years of his life in a sort of internal exile, writing hilarious, excoriating satires on the new Whig establishment, including Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal and a disconcerting body of poetry. He invented the name ‘Vanessa’. He was a pillar of the Tory Augustan group of writers, with John Gay and Alexander Pope.
HENRY FIELDING (1707–54), one of the greatest of European novelists, began his writing career by writing fifteen plays. His career in prose fiction started almost accidentally, with parodies of Richardson’s wildly popular Pamela. Joseph Andrews, Jonathan Wild and, supremely, Tom Jones stand at the summit of eighteenth-century fiction. He also established, with his brother, the first London police force, and represented humanitarian causes to his age. His health was destroyed at a relatively young age, and he died in Lisbon.
HANNAH MORE (1745–1833) was a poet, religious writer and philanthropist. Born in Bristol, she was first educated and subsequently taught at a boarding school established by her father. After suffering the consequences of a breach of promise suit, she established herself in the London circles of David Garrick and Samuel Johnson. She achieved great success and prominence both as the author of moral tracts and, subsequently, as a generous philanthropist, setting up schools for all classes of person against considerable opposition.
MARY LAMB (1764–1847) was the daughter of a London legal family, and her siblings included the writer Charles Lamb. By the 1790s, her parents were incapacitated and needed constant care by Mary. In a moment of mental collapse, she murdered her mother and was promptly committed to a mental institution. Her brother Charles extracted her, and committed to live with her in a state of celibacy. For the next decades, Mary lived a secure life, with only occasional short periods of insanity. Her career as a writer developed in partnership with her brother, and led to success and financial security.
JAMES HOGG (1770–1835) was born into a very humble family near Ettrick, Scotland. He taught himself to read while working as a shepherd, and was given encouragement by enlightened employers. Discovering the work of Burns, he published a volume of Scottish pastorals in 1801, attracting the attention of Scott, Galt and other literary figures. He was regarded as an uncouth and somewhat problematic figure by his society. His major work, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, only ascended into the status of classic on its being discovered by the French novelist André Gide in the mid-twentieth century.
JOHN GALT (1779–1839) was born in Ayrshire, the son of a sea captain. Moving to London in 1804 and travelling in Europe, he befriended Lord Byron. His writing was carried out between business ventures worldwide. In 1824, Galt was appointed secretary to the Canada Company. His employers complained of his lack of basic business skills, and he was dismissed from his post. Back in Britain, he was imprisoned for his debts. A city in Ontario, no longer extant, was named after him.
FREDERICK MARRYAT (1792–1848) went to sea at the age of thirteen, subsequently seeing action against Napoleon, designing a lifeboat, carrying out important scientific endeavour, and behaving with admirable bravery throughout. He resigned his commission in 1830 and wrote a series of splendidly outgoing novels, of which Mr Midshipman Easy was the most successful and remains highly readable.
WILLIAM THACKERAY (1811–63) was born in Calcutta. He turned to writing after he had squandered his inheritance on gambling and other pastimes. After his marriage to Isabella Shawe and the birth of three daughters, Thackeray wrote very prolifically to support them. His wife plunged into a serious depression after the birth of their third child. His biggest success, Vanity Fair (1847–8) transformed his fortunes. He was the first editor of the Cornhill Magazine and died of a stroke at fifty-two.
ELIZABETH GASKELL (1810–65) was born in Cheyne Walk, London, but was sent as a tiny child to live in Cheshire. In 1832, she married a Unitarian minister, and her thinking and work thereafter expressed the human aspects of social idealism. Subsequently, her husband was appointed professor of history, literature and logic at Manchester New College, introducing her to intense theological and philosophical debate. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was initially attacked by local and national press on the grounds of its hostility to employers and ignorance of economics. Her new fame introduced her to a wider circle; her considerable network of acquaintances of all classes created a world in her novels unusual even among Victorian novelists for its solidity and breadth. She was much admired by her contemporaries, and wrote the first biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE (1815–82) was the son of a failed barrister, and had it impressed upon him that, despite any lack of means, he was a gentleman. In 1834 he took a job at the Post Office, subsequently transferring to Ireland to avoid trouble with his employer. He started publishing novels in 1847, reaching great success with the first of the ‘Barchester’ novels, The Warden, in 1855. Thereafter, he became a novelist of celebrated efficiency, publishing nearly four dozen novels in thirty-five years. He wrote one of the best of authors’ autobiographies, and was one of the first users of the term ‘short story’.
WILKIE COLLINS (1824–89) was o
ne of the first, and is still among the most outstanding, writers of sensational fiction. He was a friend of Dickens, who encouraged him with commissions and joint endeavours, and his novels of the 1860s are some of the most enduring and compelling of the century. In later years, after Dickens’s death, his fiction took on an increasing interest in physical grotesquerie and writing to a set topic. By Victorian standards, Collins’s private life was extremely unconventional: he divided his time between two mistresses, taking on a false name for life with one of them.
CHARLES DICKENS (1812–70) is one of the greatest of all writers in the English language. A traumatic childhood at the hands of chaotic parents, including a stint in a blacking factory, fed his imagination and his fierce sense of injustice. Working as a journalist, he published his first sketches in 1834, and in 1836 The Pickwick Papers introduced him to a colossal audience which never left him. Even the irregularity of his private life, in which he was much condemned for leaving his wife, did not dent his immense popularity. He was the busy editor of a series of journals, a keen performer, as well as the author of his incomparable novels. He died, worn out by touring and his workload, at fifty-eight.
THOMAS HARDY (1840–1928) trained as an architect, but his principal work is his spectacularly horrible house in Dorset, Max Gate. From 1871 to 1895, he published novels, the last two of which, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, attracted fierce criticism on moral grounds. Thereafter, he wrote nothing but poetry. His first marriage ended with a long estrangement and the sudden death of his wife, much commemorated in a sequence of remorseful poetry; his second, to his secretary, putting up with the remorseful poetry, lasted the rest of his life. She published his autobiography under her own name, as a biography, according to his wishes. His coffin was carried by the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the greatest writers of the day, including Kipling and Housman. His heart was buried with his first wife; the rest of him in Westminster Abbey.
MARGARET OLIPHANT (1828–97) was a keen writer in childhood, publishing her first novel in her very early twenties. She married her cousin, a stained-glass artist of delicate health, who died in 1859, leaving her with three children and no income. For the rest of her life, she wrote prolifically to support her family, including, after the late 1860s, her ruined brother and his family. She lived for most of her life in Windsor. Of her nearly 100 novels, the best-regarded are the ‘Chronicles of Carlingford’, including the classic Miss Marjoribanks.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850–94) was born the son of an Edinburgh lighthouse engineer. A sickly child, he was a compulsive teller of stories before he could read or write. He abandoned the family trade of engineer, first for law and then for life in the London literary world. Required to travel for the sake of his health, he met an American woman, Fanny Osbourne, in the South of France. He followed her to California, bringing himself near death with the strains of the journey. After marrying her in 1880, Stevenson travelled in search of an ideal climate for his health, writing his most successful works on the way. In 1888, he sailed into the Pacific, settling in 1890 in Samoa, where he took the native title of a teller of tales. He sank from critical esteem after his death until quite recently, but his popularity among readers never declined.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (1859–1930) was, like many great writers, originally a doctor. Born in Edinburgh, he took his medical career very seriously, undertaking research and serving as the medical officer on whalers and African ships. During an unsuccessful period as a GP and an ophthalmologist, he took to writing fiction. In 1886 he published his first Sherlock Holmes adventure, A Study in Scarlet. The Holmes and Watson stories were colossally popular, as were many of Doyle’s other works, including historical novels and fantasy adventures. He was an accomplished sportsman, who once took W. G. Grace’s wicket, an advocate of justice and, after the Great War, a committed spiritualist.
ARTHUR MORRISON (1863–1945) was the son of an engine fitter at the London docks, a detail he later sought to conceal. His entry into publishing was as the author of comic verse for a magazine covering bicycling. In the 1890s, he turned away from genre fiction towards highly authentic stories of working-class London life, collected as Tales of Mean Streets (1894). This and the novel A Child of the Jago (1896) attained a classic status which comes and goes in public awareness. After 1909 he retired from writing and devoted himself to the collection and study of Chinese and Japanese works of art. Very little is known of the last twenty-five years of Morrison’s life, which were spent very quietly in Buckinghamshire.
‘MRS ERNEST LEVERSON’ (ADA LEVERSON) (1862–1933) came from a mercantile family with racy offspring. One sibling refused to marry Sir Arthur Sullivan and was one of the first translators of Proust; another had an affair with Puccini. Leverson ran off with her husband at nineteen, immortalizing the bizarre atmosphere of her marriage in a trilogy of novels, The Little Ottleys. She was a famous wit and friend to many of the great, including Beerbohm, the Sitwells and, most famously, Oscar Wilde, whom she loyally stood by and who called her ‘Sphinx’.
EVELYN SHARP (1869–1955) is best known as a militant suffragette. Her career as a novelist preceded that, however, including novels such as All the Way to Fairyland. She boldly took a flat in London on her own at the age of twenty-four, encouraging Whistler to ask her, ‘Not understood at home, I suppose?’ An interest in the 1890s topic of the New Woman led to a career as a journalist and campaigner for women’s rights, an effective speechmaker and fighter for the rights of working-class women. A promise made to her mother never to go to prison in support of the suffrage was lifted in 1911, and she subsequently was imprisoned for smashing Government windows. She was one of the few suffragettes to continue the militant campaign during the Great War.
T. BARON RUSSELL (1865–1931) was primarily an advertising consultant, son of the librarian of a circulating library. Russell wrote memorable advertisements for liver pills and other patent medicines, and restructured the way in which agents for advertising were paid. As advertising manager of The Times, he inaugurated the newspaper’s book club, and became the first advertising consultant in the UK. Aside from his single contribution to the Yellow Book, he published two novels of life in drapers’ shops. His second novel was rather remarkably reviewed for the Daily Express by James Joyce, who observed that it had ‘unsentimental vigour’ but that the book’s binding was ‘as ugly as one could reasonably expect’. After the publication of this review, the editor of the Daily Express threatened to kick Joyce down the stairs, and Russell’s career turned to advertising.
JOSEPH CONRAD (1857–1924) was born ethnically Polish in what is now Ukraine, but a Russian subject, and grew up in an atmosphere of political activism. Orphaned at eleven, at thirteen he decided to become a sailor. He went to sea at sixteen, serving for almost twenty years. In 1886, he became a British subject, and from 1894 started publishing fiction in English, his third language. His critiques of imperialism specify Belgian and French endeavours, not the British. His novels were critically acclaimed for many years before he achieved any serious success in the marketplace. His first bestseller was the intricate Chance (1913). A writer of melancholy elegance, he continues to be vividly controversial among readers.
H. G. WELLS (1866–1946) was born in Kent of lower-middle-class stock. He benefited from the spread of libraries and, after an apprenticeship as a draper, became first a pupil-teacher in a school and later a scholar of biology at the Normal School of Science, subsequently Imperial College, under T. H. Huxley. He took up teaching and began to write. A marriage to a cousin was succeeded by one to a student, and subsequently a large number of affairs, including one with Rebecca West that resulted in a child. His works include major early inventions in science fiction as well as penetrating studies of society, especially the superb Tono-Bungay, and non-fiction drawing on Fabian principles; in The Shape of Things to Come (1933) he predicted, accurately enough, that the next world war would break out in January 1940. He lived long enoug
h, and remained argumentative enough, to call George Orwell ‘you shit’.
M. R. JAMES (1862–1936) was director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, provost of King’s College, Cambridge and Eton College successively between 1893 and 1936. He was a mediaevalist and antiquarian by trade. His ghost stories remain peerless, and he codified the important rules of the genre, including ‘Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it.’ The outbreaks of terror in his stories often unwittingly reveal the fastidiousness of a bachelor don who could, clearly, imagine nothing worse than being intimately touched by another.
‘SAKI’ (HECTOR HUGH MONRO) (1870–1916) was born in Burma but was brought up in England by a puritanical grandmother and aunts, whose presence is made clear in his malevolent short stories. He was a journalist and foreign correspondent in the Balkans and Russia. The often macabre and decidedly camp qualities of his stories descend from Wilde and, especially, Ada Leverson, and were published to an appreciative Tory-anarchist readership. His pen-name may come from a boy in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He volunteered at forty-three as an ordinary trooper for the Great War, and was shot by a sniper during the Battle of the Ancre in 1916. His last words are reliably reported as ‘Put that bloody cigarette out.’
G. K. CHESTERTON (1874–1936) was an all-round man of letters, writing poetry, novels, journalism, essays, criticism and dramas. Initially an Anglican, he turned increasingly to an energetic and noisy Roman Catholicism. He became very popular in the radio age. His writing has been seen as tawdry as well as ingenious; his brilliantly paradoxical fiction includes The Man Who Was Thursday, in which God turns out to be an anarchist bowling bombs at the populace, his disciples policemen in heavy disguise. He was a colossal man of 6′4″ and, in his prime, weighing 20 stone. He was preserved by P. G. Wodehouse in a celebrated simile, when a shattering noise is described as sounding ‘like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin’.
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