Margaret Forster. A dream within a dream ... With preface by Mrs. Sala

Front matter

SIX-SHILLING NOYELS. Uniform with this Volume. The Qrey Man. By S. R. Crockett. Elsie tietherington. By Robert Buchanan. 2nd Edition. An Outcast of the Islands. By Joseph Conrad. 2nd Edition. Almayer's Folly. By Joseph Conrad. A First Fleet Family. By Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery. Paddy's Woman, and Other Stories. By Humphrey James. The Ebbing of the Tide. By Louis Becke. Clara Hopgood. By Mark Rutherford. The Tales of John Oliver Hobbes. Portrait of the Author. 2nd Edition. The Stickit Minister. By S. R. Crockett, nth Edition. The Raiders. By S. R. Crockett. 8th Edition. Nancy Noon. By Beniamin Swift. 2nd Edition, Mr. Magnus. By F. Reginald Statham. The Lilac Sunbonnet. By S. R. Crockett. 6th Edition. In a Man'. Mind. By J. R. Watson. A Daughter of the Fen. By J. T. Bealby. 2nd Edition.

The Herb-Moon. By John Oliver Hobbes. 3rd Edition. Trooper Peter tialket of Mashonaland. By Olive Schrf.iner. Photogravure Frontispiece. Mrs. Keith's Crime. By Mrs. W. H. Clifford. With Frontispiece by the Hon. John Collier. Pacific Tales. By Louis Becke. With Portrait. The Gods, Some Mortals and Lord Wickenham. By John Oliver Hobbes. The Outlaws of the Marches. By Lord Ernest Hamilton. London : T. FISHER UNWIN. A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM r,v GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA WITH

Preface

BY MRS. SALA LONDON T. FISHER UNWJN PATERNOSTER SQUARE MDCCCXCVII [All rights reseived.] V

PREFACE.

MY husband used frequently to tell me that he failed to achieve so great a fame as a novelist as he had won as a journalist because he lacked the necessary gift of imagination, and that by reason of this deficiency he could only write on facts. But I differed from him in this opinion of his powers, knowing full well that in many questions touching his everyday and non-literary life his all too vivid imagination had often, and to our sore cost, run away with his sober judgment. Therefore, if this vivid imagination could play such cruel freaks with our poor fortunes in matters other than literary ones, it follows that, given the necessary training, it could have served him brilliantly as an aid to his success in fiction ; and, as all the reading world knows pretty well by this time, it did serve him to very fair ends.

It must be confessed, however, that he never shone so brightly in fiction as in works of travel and in pictures of social life, such as we find in "Gaslight and Daylight" and in "Twice Round the Clock " — pictures of metropolitan life as it then was which brought the name of George Augustus Sala very prominently before the public at a very early stage of his literary career. Neither did he rise to those heights of renown as a novel writer which would have wrung from his public the title of " Prince of Authors" as he afterwards won from that fickle body

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VI the designation of " Prince of Journalists." But knowing as I did the intellectual capacities of this strangely organised man to the fullest extent, I am inclined to think that Sala did not become so great an author as a journalist simply because he elected to devote the major portion of his life to newspaper work instead of to the making and the writing of books. I believe it was our much-valued friend, Mr. T. P. O'Connor, who on more than one occasion publicly expressed his regret that circumstances had chained the intellect of George Augustus Sala to the ever revolving wheel of journalism to the exclusion of more lasting forms of literature. I wish from my heart of heart that Fate had been kinder to my husband in this one respect, since he lived long enough to discern that journalism, even at its best, goes but ill-rewarded, and is naturally more or less ephemeral, born as it is from terrible and unceasing toil only to wither and fade twenty-four hours after its birth.

This ephemeral element, inseparable from journalism, is the common woe of all our newspaper giants of to-day ; and it seems to me that the only consolation these literary Titans can have in their work is the sensation of that power within them which forms, so to speak, a part of the mighty pen dulum of mental activity which keeps the clock of the busy world of to-day in time with all the history and all the developments of human progress. When I speak of journalism, of course I am alluding to journalism as a profession in its highest and most literary sense, and not to the paltry personalities and forms of self-interest which disfigure and deform far too large a portion of our Press of to-day, and which passes for the craft, much to the vexation of many thoughtful writers and readers of newspapers who still wish to look upon their daily journals as

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VII literature. But I am not asked by my publisher to give my views on journalism past and present in this preface, therefore I will hasten on to try and perform to the best of my ability the task he has set before me, viz., to pen a little sketch of my husband as a writer of fiction. Our friend and neighbour at Brighton, Mr. William Black, began his career as a journalist, and later in life very sensibly turned novelist, becoming immediately famous as an author ; while Sir Walter Besant first won his laurels as a novelist and still remains one of the foremost authors of the day ; but Sir Walter, not content with his high seat in the forum of fiction, has of late years devoted much of his time to journalism, as the weekly readers of the £hieen and other papers well know. Now G. A. S., to call him by his own familiar title, like the author of " All Sorts and Conditions of Men," was novelist first, although in a very humble way, and journalist next, for he began his literary campaign as a writer of fiction at the tender age of fourteen with a story entitled " Gerald Moreland ; or, the Forged Will."

This " tale in one volume," as the small boy called it, has never yet been published ; but it is extant and jealously treasured by its owners after all these long years. The young author wrote it at 29, Silver Street, Golden Square, London, in 1842, where he lived with his mother, Madame Henrietta Catherina Florentina Sala, who was at that time a widow and earning bread for her numerous children by singing in grand opera at Her Majesty's, which historic building is now no more, since Mr. Tree's new theatre, named after the old opera-house, now stands on the site where Madame Sala distinguished herself in " The Beggars' Opera " as Mrs. Peachum. The hero of this maiden effort in the realms of fiction on the part of

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VIII her thirteenth child, George Sala, is a dashing young Irish soldier named Gerald Moreland, and the scenes of his life are laid in Dublin and London. Gerald, of course, goes through many strange and exciting vicissitudes of fortune, first as a man of fashion about town, and next as a private in the ranks — vicissitudes brought about by our hero's love of gambling and by the perfidy of some wily solicitor who had strayed from the paths of rectitude, even so far as the altering of a will which had been made in Gerald Moreland's favour. This fraudulent attorney was one Mr. Grindall ; but it is only fair to say that the wicked Grindall repented him of his evil ways and reinstated our hero and gave him his rights again by " confessing his sin and peaching on his partner in crime." The fourteen -year -old schoolboy author describes this luminary of the much, and, as far as I am personally concerned, unjustly abused legal profession, "as a pettifogging, insignificant, low, cunning six-and-eightpenny, a very Fouche in adroitness and a perfect Robespierre in villainy."

Perhaps the lad's maternal parent, like many another widow, had been greatly bothered in solving the difficult problem as to how she could amass several little sums amounting to six-and-eightpence ; and her woes on this score, and her successful or unsuccessful endeavours to induce her legal creditors to accept three-and-fourpence instead of the larger amount, may have sunk deep into her son's receptive memory. The love interest of the story is not lacking, for it is supplied by Gerald Moreland's passion for the daughter and heiress of Jaspar Mangrove, " a retired Nabob who had returned from India with a countenance of saffron hue, a few lacs of rupees, and a liver complaint." The heroine of the romance, Lucy Mangrove, our author assures us, " waneither a Venus nor a Hebe, but a very pretty girl of

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IX sixteen with a complexion which the burning climate of India had not been able to spoil. It was at a ball at the Mangroves' that Gerald had first seen her, and but a short time elapsed before he became violently enamoured of her, and he soon had the happiness of knowing that the sentiment was reciprocated on the lady's part. He was in the seventh heaven when a sudden and unlooked-for obstacle presented itself to his happiness." But what this "unlooked-for obstacle " was which brought Gerald Moreland so suddenly down from his " seventh heaven " I am not going to say in these pages, for the simple reason that one of these days I hope to tell the whole tale in one volume, if only by way of encouraging some of our schoolboys of fourteen to take up their pens in their Christmas holidays, and try to write stirring stories during wet days instead of teasing and pinching their sisters, persecuting the patient and long-suffering North German holiday governess by means of every Satanically diabolical device known to the juvenile male mind, raiding the cook's domains, hiding the parlour maid's keys and plate-baskets, or imploring their mothers to expend a sovereign or two by treating them to the pan tomime or to the Alhambra ballet for the second time.

In a forthcoming winter number of the Windsor Magazine of this year will be found an article entitled " The First and Last Work of George Augustus Sala," in which I have given a facsimile page of his handwriting as it was in this very first story. With out any flattery to my dead husband as a boy, it may be permissible, I hope, to say that I am con fident the tutors of our boys of to-day will not reprove them if they emulate the neatness of the caligraphy of the author of "Gerald Moreland," both as a lad of fourteen trying his 'prentice hand at fiction, and also as a famous journalist of sixty-five about to lay down i*

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X his pen for ever. I say " also as a journalist of sixty five," because in the periodical alluded to will be found a facsimile of the handwriting of George Augustus Sala as it was in the last magazine article he wrote, called " Bedrooms on Wheels," which is to be published for the first time in the Windsor, exactly as he left it and gave it to me — unfinished. I could not reproduce a scrap of the original manuscript of " Margaret Forster," this the last novel my husband wrote, for the reason that he did not put his pen to paper over it, but dictated the whole of it, week by week, to our typist in 1893, making me a present of the chapters as he spun them. We used to have very merry times over the writing of " Margaret Foster " ; and it comforts me now to think how happy the author was as he lounged back in his easy chair, puffing away at his big cigar, and his literary throne well banked up and fortified against all intruders on every side by some dozens of illustrated books, together with bound-up volumes and loose copies of Illustrated London News, Graphic, Punch, Art Journal, Petit Journal Pour Rire, Gil Bias, Ladies' Gazette of Fashion, Lady's Pictorial, Gentlewoman, and the Queen.

It sounds an odd conglomeration of illustrated literature ; and still more odd and daring, I daresay, to assert that a man could compose and dictate a novel the while he was scanning the current pictorial periodicals of the hour, and criticising every illustrated book of note of the day sent him by the publishers, and yet dictate coherently. But so it was in those happy days. It was a habit of long standing with G. A. S. to perform this strange intellectual feat, or rather,ifeat of intellect, nearly every working day of his life. For the last seven years of his life I took down from dictation nearly every word of his leading articles — in seven years the number amounted to about 2,100, and per haps more, for he sometimes wrote two leaders a day.

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XI I also took down his " Echoes " every week for the same number of years, and the majority of magazine articles he wrote, to say nothing of several stories and pamphlets he composed during that time, and he never failed when dictating all this work to mean while peruse illustrated books and papers. More over, he would frequently pause in the middle of his discourse to ask me to come over and look at any drawing which particularly interested him. Except during dictation hours he would rarely study illustra tions, although at all times he was eager and ready to discuss the various drawings which had most appealed to his artistic sense ; and he was never weary of com menting on the various characteristics of all the rising young artists who have of later years made their names household words by means of their able work in our weekly periodicals.

Reginald Cleaver, E. R. Reed, Hal Hurst, Dudley Hardy, Bernard Partridge, Louis Wain, and Phil May were men always regarded by him as dear friends and companions, and he declared that all their work, even to the merest turn of their pencils, was familiar to him, although he had not the pleasure of being personally acquainted with these clever young artists, with the exception of Louis Wain and Phil May, who came to see him at times. The others he unfortunately missed, as he was too great an invalid latterly to seek all these new stars as they arose in their turn, and they on their parts did not know, perhaps, how much he admired their pictorial genius, and how gladly he would have welcomed them to his study had they sought him out. The pictures he rejoiced in and studied during working hours must have photographed themselves on the vision of his memory — I don't know whether there is such a phase as " vision of memory," but I cannot describe the case more lucidly just at present — or he could not

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XII have remembered and talked of them afterwards. Many a delightful half an hour's conversation did we have after our working hours with Mr. Marion Spielmann on pictorial art past and present, as he was one of the young men who apparently never tired of coming to have an art chat with G. A. S. For pure mischief, or else from curiosity, I often used to lay traps for my better half during these chats by referring to illustrations I knew he had scanned while dictating a leader, thinking possibly he had looked with eyes that saw not, and had consequently forgotten the subject, or the faults or the merits of certain drawings. But he was not to be caught napping. No doubt when these few little words are in print anonymous letters and postcards from folks too cowardly to sign their names and give their addresses will come my way, couched in terms of would-be witty abuse about these methods of mental relief adopted by my husband, and averring that no wonder some of his writings were so tiresome, so wearisome, so incoherent, so this, so that, and so the other !

Such communications, how ever, do not affect or hurt me now. Familiarity with them in my happy past has bred contempt for the writers of such stupid diatribes. G. A. S. always declared he was the best-abused man of his day. Certainly scarcely a week passed in the days of the " Echoes " without showers, sometimes gentle and sometimes brisk, of anonymous letters and cards falling upon him among the many hundreds of kind and appreciative letters which reached him during every year from friends personally unknown to us, but who admired his works. The kind letters we used to try and answer, but if that were impossible we always treasured and appreciated the spirit of goodwill and friendliness expressed in them ; while the abusive out bursts the receiver used to laugh heartily over and

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XIII throw contemptuously " to the pack " — in other words, to the waste-paper basket. And I have happily learnt to laugh also and send them " to the pack," although when I first married into newspaper life it took some forti tude to look on the humorous side of these nasty little pin-pricks. I often think the cowards who pen anonymous letters are those very snakes in the grass who love to go about in hotels and other public places spreading false and scandalous reports about the private life and domesticity of well-known men and women whom they have not the honour of knowing per sonally ; and these snakes are always particularly busy if their victim happens to be ill and sick and unable to defend himself or herself, or unwilling to spare the time to hunt down the slanderer. When true friends among the listeners in these public places rise up in wrath and defend the absent, the viper invariably refuses to furnish his or her name and address, just as the reptiles omit to add them to their epistolary effusions which they drop into the post-boxes when they are devoid of an audience as ill-conditioned as themselves to suck in their venomous assertions about public people of whom they know absolutely nothing, but would give their eyes almost to be introduced to, and be bidden to dine at their table.

Truly the nasty, ill-conditioned scribes and scandalmongers who delight in writing anonymous letters, and backbite and slander those people whom they do not know, and who have never done them any harm, are greatly to be pitied, since, poor things, they must suffer agonies from spleen ; and that complaint, I am told, is nearly as painful as gout. But for all those agonies they ought to be well and soundly thrashed when bowled out in their calumnious attacks on absent and defenceless folks. But let us leave the future and its postal delights alone. It is the past I am invited to write about at present.

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XIV The next fragment of fiction which emanated from the busy brain of George Sala, as he was invariably called in his youth — the Augustus not then being deemed worthy a place in his nomenclature — was a short story called " Li Lu Chang ; or, the Stags of Pekin," a tale touching the bubble companies and their disastrous effects on "sundry," although not on " all " concerned. This story was published in about his sixteenth year, when he was trying to pick up a living by his pencil in and around the Strand, and working out his self-imposed apprenticeship to an engraver. At this early stage of his literary life Sala evidently did not regard fiction as likely to be a remune rative employment, since he dropped the story into the editorial box of the Family Herald as he was passing the office on the way to his engraver's stool, omitting to attach his name and address to the manu script in question.

He thought no more about " Li Lu Chang " until some friend pointed out the story to him in the pages of the Family Herald, and even then he was too green to reveal his identity and ask for payment of his work. Some few years afterwards he laughingly alluded in public to his youthful verdancy, acknowledging the joy and rapture he felt at seeing himself in print for the very first time in his life ; and it was through this speech that the author of " Li Lu Chang " was revealed to the proprietors of the Family Herald, who hastened to make his acquaintance. The acquaintance thus strangely begun resulted in a life-long friendship, which was broken only by death. The owners of the Family Herald pressed payment on the writer of " Li Lu," which was declined by him on the score that if at the age of sixteen he was too stupid to call for his money he richly deserved to lose it. But the Messrs. Stevens paid over and over again for that story, since at Christmas greeting came to the writer

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XV of it on more than one occasion in the form of a case of extra extra sec champagne ; and from the day of the discovery of the authorship of " the Stags of Pekin" until the last month of his life, they never omitted to send G. A. S. the monthly part of the Family Herald. This courteous kindness, I hasten to say, is still continued to me, and affords me the sincerest pleasure, as the dear old Family Herald has been the pleasantest of reading to me from my earliest childhood, when I used to watch for the copies which fell from my elder sisters' rooms, when I ought to have been reading my " Peep o' Day " and " Line upon Line," and cognate publica tions intended for the edification of the youthful mind. So much for the second story written by George Augustus Sala. His next essay into the maze of fiction brought forth an immensely fat volume containing about half a dozen novels in one, called " The Baddington Peerage," a wonderfully vivid series of pictures descriptive of the social life of nearly all classes of the community as it was in that day.

Some day I hope to be entrusted with the re-editing of this bulky volume, and to divide it into sections for republication. It is out of print now, like a great number of Sala's other early works. After " The Baddington Peerage " came " The Seven Sons of Mammon" — my favourite novel among my hus band's books — which ran serially through Temple Bar, afterwards appearing in three-volume form — a novel which added considerable lustre to the then already well-known name of Sala. Then followed "The Adventures of Captain Dangerous," which, I believe, also ran serially through Temple Bar, and then came " The Two Prima Donnas." The next novel was, to me, the very fascinating "Quite Alone;" but whether this story first appeared in any periodical I

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XVI am at present unable to say. I remember reading it first as a "yellow back," when as a schoolgirl I bought it surreptitiously at a railway bookstall, attracted by the spirited drawing on the cover of a circus lady of the haute ecole order mounted on a black and apparently untamed steed. In my youth I had an intense and yearning ambition to become a circus rider of this school, and used to draw pictures of myself careering round the ring attired in the regulation flowing habit, tall hat, and gauze veil jauntily wound round the silken crown with the ends coquettishly lapping over an immense yellow chignon. I read "Ouite Alone" with great delight in secret, hiding the precious book in fear and trembling in the depths of the chest of drawers allotted to me for my wardrobe in the bedroom shared with my schoolmates.

Suspicions of concealed and contraband goods were first aroused in the minds of those in authority over me by the unusual neatness in the arrangement of my clothes chest ; for while the precious yellow book was hidden far below my wearing apparel it was my habit to lay over the whole drawerful a clean white towel, very pleasing to the eye of any matron who loved tidy schoolgirls. I believe there was some little talk on account of this unexpected development of neatness on my part of giving me a French Testament as a prize at the end of the term, which at this time was drawing near. Alas ! the day of reckoning came, and I laughed no more ; and, what was still worse, read no more. Neatness had been my undoing. The clean white linen cloth was deftly raised one summer morn by a lynx-eyed schoolmistress who personally made a domestic tour of inspection before finally making up her mind as to the rightful distribution of the prizes, while I was struggling with the intricacies of Colenso below stairs. My entire wardrobe was

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XVII ruthlessly overhauled by indefatigable and relentless fingers, and my infamy revealed when " Ouite Alone" in its jonquil cover turned up, together with a volume of Mark Twain which I had secreted for a school fellow with a taste for Transatlantic humour. I had been so careful, too, in covering the offending yellow backs with a large, flat, red volume of " Plants of the Bible," which I had gained in a composition prize the previous term. Needless to say the unauthorised books were promptly confiscated, and some other damsel got the French Testament intended originally for me. It has been stated in print on several occasions that Sala did not finish " Ouite Alone " himself, on account of some difference of opinion between him and Charles Dickens, and that Andrew Halliday was called upon by the great author of " Pickwick " and asked to complete the novel.

There is very often smoke without fire. But in this instance there was certainly some fire, although the cause of the smoke which arose from it was not the quarrel with Dickens. Russia was to blame for the smoke. " Ouite Alone " was running serially through Household Words, or Welcome Guest, or in Once a Week ; and as G. A. S. was always too busy to write anything, fiction or otherwise, except on the eve of its going to press, Fate played him a little trick when he was writing the last chapters of this particular novel. He had been hurried off to Petersburg on some mission of moment at a few hours' notice and he penned the concluding chapters of " Quite Alone " en route, posting them on his arrival at the Russian capital, little thinking that the package would be delayed by being opened and minutely examined by Government officials and probably the half of its contents erased with a thick, heavy postal blacking kept always in readiness for the express purpose of suppressing any words or sentences unpleasing to the Tartar powers. I do not

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know whether all the actual sheets eventually reached the editorial sanctum for which they were intended ; but at any rate some of them did not arrive in time for press, and from the piecemeal Sala " copy at command it is true that Andrew Halliday came to the rescue and helped out with the last chapters of "I Quite Alone." No doubt the absent author was much obliged to him for so doing, and thanked Mr. Halliday on his return for the kindly services rendered when he learnt the cause which had made such kindly assistance a necessity. I fancy the next volume from the pen of George Augustus Sala was a booklet called " How I Tamed Mrs. Cruiser," but of this I am not sure without referring to a list of his books, nor can I remember the titles of any more of his novels. Short stories were legion from his pen at this particular period, and appeared in nearly all the prominent periodicals of his day ; and it is to be hoped that these stories will sometime or another get collected and republished in book form, for the majority of them will bear republication.

To bear out this statement I may say that only a short time before my husband died we noticed one of his earlier stories with a new title boldly affixed and a new author tailed on in an American paper. " One doesn't mind giving a man a story if the beggar is hard up and comes to ask for it like a man," G. A. S. flashed out to me, "but I do object to have one stolen from me." And he forthwith dictated a letter to his lawyers on the vexed question ; but he was much too ill to follow up the matter, and I was glad to notice he soon forgot all about the theft, and so did not vex his kind soul much about the injury done to him. My husband's anger was always short-lived, and his disposition as forgiving as that of a woman who is

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XIX asked to pardon an error committed against her by the man of her heart, and pardons it. Such sweet ness of disposition, I have noticed, is invariably its own reward in this world and encourages the smiter to smite again. It was so in his case, as since George Augustus Sala's death a similar theft has occurred, and again an article of his was served up in "another way" as the cooks say ; but in this instance the purloiner was " promptly squashed," warned not to commit the offence again, and was made to pay compensation to the holder of the property in question. Now let me return to " Margaret Forster." As I said before, we had some very merry times over the fashioning of that novel, in spite of more days of sickness and ill-health perhaps than fall to the share of most workers. " George Augustus " looked upon the writing of this novel partly as a labour of love, since it was written expressly as a present for me, and partly as a recreation to " blow off," as he was wont to remark, the fumes of journalistic work.