XLVII
Beginnings of Newspaper Illustration
It was during the early seventies that the inevitable happened, or at least began to happen, with regard to newspaper illustration. The excessive cost of illustrating periodicals by wood engraving, and the time required for its slow accomplishment, together with the growing eagerness of the people for pictures, set a multitude of men of clever wits at work to devise some cheaper and speedier process of reproducing drawings and photographic pictures. I myself invented a very crude and imperfect process of that kind, which I thought susceptible of satisfactory development. I engaged a certain journalist of irregular habits and large pretensions, who was clever with his pencil, to join me in the development and exploitation of the process, he to furnish such drawings of various kinds as I needed, and I to experiment in reproduction. Of course I had to explain my process to him, and he, being a shrewd young man whose moral character was far less admirable than his always perfect costume, mastered my secret and sold it for a trifling sum to a man who promptly patented it and, with a few changes which I had not the cleverness to make, brought it into use as his own.
I said some ugly things to my dishonest coadjutor, whose manner of receiving them convinced me that he was well used to hear himself characterized in that way. Then I laughed at myself, went home and read about Moses and the green spectacles, in "The Vicar of Wakefield," and so calmed my spirit.
But mine was an extremely unsatisfactory process, even after the inventor who had bought it from my rascally associate had improved it to the limit of his capacity, and there were far cleverer men at work upon the same problem. By 1874 one of them had so far succeeded that an enterprising firm, owning his patents, decided to set up in New York a daily illustrated newspaper, the Graphic.
The failure of the enterprise was freely predicted from the beginning, and in the end failure came to it, but not for the reasons given by the prophets. The Graphic failed chiefly because it never had an editor or manager who knew how to make a newspaper. An additional cause of its failure was its inability to get itself into that great news-gathering trust, the Associated Press, whose agents, local and general, covered the whole country and the whole world with a minuteness that no single newspaper could hope to approach.
But while the projectors of the Graphic enterprise were full of their first hopefulness, they bought the good will and the subscription list of Hearth and Home, in order to make of that periodical the weekly edition of their illustrated daily newspaper.
This left me "out of a job," but altogether happy. I was very tired. I had had but one week's vacation during my arduous service on Hearth and Home. I had removed to an old Dutch farmhouse in New Jersey because of the impaired health of one dear to me. I had become a contributor to all the great magazines of that time, and a writer of successful books. I was pleased, therefore, to be freed from the Sisyphean labors of the editorial office. I decided to give up newspaper work in all its forms and to devote my future years to literature alone. I retired to my library, the windows of which were overhung by sweet-scented lilacs and climbing roses, beyond which lay an orchard of varied fruits surrounding the old farmhouse. There, I thought I would pass the remainder of my days—that phrase felt good in the mind of a work-weary man of thirty-four or about that—in quiet literary work, unvexed by intruding exigencies of any kind. Of course I would write editorials for those great metropolitan dailies for which I was accustomed to do that sort of work from time to time as impulse and opportunity permitted, but I was resolved never again to undertake editorial responsibility of any kind.
Accident's Part in Literary Life
As illustrative of the part that accident or unforeseen circumstance plays in determining the career of a working man-of-letters, I may relate the story of how I became at that time a writer of boys' fiction as a part of my employment. I was writing at the time for the Atlantic, the Galaxy, Appleton's Journal, and other magazines, and my time was fully occupied, when there came to me a letter asking me upon what terms I would furnish a serial story of adventure for a magazine that made its appeal to boys and girls. Why the editor had thought of me in that connection I cannot imagine. I had never written a boys' story—long or short. I had never written a story of adventure of any sort. I said so in my reply declining to consider the suggestion. A second letter came promptly, urging me to reconsider and asking that I should at any rate name the terms on which I would do the work. Thinking that this opened an easy and certain road of escape, I decided to name terms that I was confident my editor-correspondent would regard as wholly beyond consideration. I wrote him that I would do the story if he would pay me, for serial rights alone, the same price per thousand words that the great magazines were paying me, I to retain the right of book publication, and to have, without charge, the plates of any illustrations the magazine might make for use with my text.
Having thus "settled the matter," as I supposed, I dismissed the subject from my mind as a thing done for. Twenty-four hours later there came a telegram from the editor, saying:
"Terms accepted. Write story. Contracts go by mail for execution."
Those ten telegraphic words determined my career in an important particular. Also they appalled me. They put me under a contract that I had never thought of making. They placed me under obligation to do a species of literary work which I had never dreamed even of trying to do, and for which I felt myself utterly unfit. It was not only that I had never written a boys' story or thought of writing one; I had never acquainted myself with that sort of literature; I "knew not the trick of it," as the poor fellow in "Hamlet" says when urged to play upon a pipe. Nevertheless, I must do the thing and that immediately, for the correspondence had named a date only three weeks off for the delivery of the first instalment of the manuscript.
There was no way of escape. I must set to work upon the story. But what should it be about? Where should its scene be laid? What should be its plot and who its personages? I had not so much as the shadowy ghost of an idea, and during the next twenty-four sleepless hours all my efforts to summon one from the vasty deep or elsewhere brought no result.
My First Boys' Book
While I was thus searching a mind vacant of suggestion, my two little boys climbed upon my knees and besought me to tell them "an Injun story." I was in the habit of entertaining their very juvenile minds with exceedingly juvenile fictions manufactured on the spur of the moment, fictions without plot, without beginning or ending of any recognizable sort. Sometimes these "stories" were wholly imaginary; sometimes I drew upon some boyish experience of my own for a subject. This time the specific demand of my exigent little masters for "an Injun story" led me to think of the Creek War in Alabama and Mississippi. It so happened that some years before the time of this story telling, I had lived for a good many weeks among the Cherokees, Muscogees, and Choctaws in the Indian Territory, hunting with them by day and sleeping with them around a camp-fire by night. I had in that way become interested in their very dramatic history, and on my return to civilization I had read all the literature I could find on the subject of the war in which their power in our Southern states was overthrown, and they themselves, taken by the neck and heels, as it were, out of the very hopefully advancing civilisation they had in part borrowed but in greater part wrought out for themselves, and thrown back into the half-savage life from which they had struggled to escape.
As I told my little fellows the story they wanted, it occurred to me that here was my subject and inspiration for the larger story I had agreed to write. Within a week or two "The Big Brother" was done and its manuscript delivered.
Its serial publication was never completed. When about half the chapters had been printed, the new and ambitious juvenile magazine, St. Nicholas, bought and suppressed the periodical that was publishing it. The Putnams brought my story out in book form, and its success prompted them to ask me for further boys' books, and as the subject of the Creek War was by no means exhausted, I drew upon it for the materials of "Captain Sam" and "The Signal Boys," thus making a trilogy that covered the entire period between the massacre at Fort Mims and the battle of New Orleans.
Then I decided that my wholly unintended incursion into the field of youths' fiction should end there. I had never intended to write literature of that kind, and now that I had exhausted the subject of the Creek War, I had no impulse to hunt for other themes for such use. Besides, I had by that time become absorbed in newspaper work again, and had no time for the writing of books of any sort.
It was not until the eighties that I wrote another book of juvenile fiction, and that also came about by accident rather than intention. I had again given up newspaper work, again meaning never to return to it. I was conducting a literary shop of my own in Brooklyn, writing for the magazines, reading for the Harpers, editing the books of other people whose work needed that sort of attention, and doing other things of the kind.
One night I was entertaining the younger of the two boys who had suggested the subject of my first work in juvenile fiction. I was telling him of some adventures of my own and others' on the Carolina coast, when suddenly he asked: "Why can't we put all that into a story book?" That evening I received a letter from Mr. George Haven Putnam, saying that while my three "Big Brother" books were still selling pretty well, it would stimulate them helpfully if I could add a new one to the series. In brief, he wanted me to write a new boys' story, and the proposal fitted in so nicely with the suggestion of my little boy that I called the child to me and said:
"I think we'll write that story book, if you'll help me."
He enthusiastically agreed. I can best tell the rest of that book's story by quoting here from the brief prefatory dedication I wrote for it when it was published in 1882, under the title of "The Wreck of the Redbird":
"I intended to dedicate this book to my son, Guilford Dudley Eggleston, to whom it belonged in a peculiar sense. He was only nine years old, but he was my tenderly loved companion, and was in no small degree the creator of this story. He gave it the title it bears; he discussed with me every incident in it; and every page was written with reference to his wishes and his pleasure. There is not a paragraph here which does not hold for me some reminder of the noblest, manliest, most unselfish boy I have ever known. Ah, woe is me! He who was my companion is my dear dead boy now, and I am sure that I only act for him as he would wish, in inscribing the story that was so peculiarly his to the boy whom he loved best, and who loved him as a brother might have done."
One Thing Leads to Another
It was eighteen years after that that I next wrote a work of fiction for youth, and again the event was the result of suggestion from without. "The Wreck of the Redbird" seems to have made a strong impression upon Elbridge S. Brooks, at that time the literary editor of the Lothrop Publishing Company of Boston, and in the year 1900 he wrote to me asking on what terms I would write for that firm "a boys' story as good as 'The Wreck of the Redbird.'" I had no story in mind at the time. For eighteen years my attention had been absorbed by newspaper work and by literary activities of a sort far removed from this. Moreover, I was at the time working night and day as an editorial writer on the staff of the New York World, with a good deal of executive duty and responsibility added. But the thought of calling a company of boy readers around me again and telling them a story appealed to my imagination, and, as the terms I suggested were accepted, I employed such odd moments as I could find between other tasks in writing "The Last of the Flatboats." Its success led to other books of the kind, so that since this accidental return to activities of that sort, I have produced six books of juvenile fiction in the intervals of other and more strenuous work.
Perhaps an apology is needed for this setting forth of affairs purely personal. If so, it is found in the fact that the illustration given of the part that accident and external suggestion play in determining the course and character of a professional writer's work, seems to me likely to interest readers who have never been brought into close contact with such things. I have thought it of interest to show visitors through the literary factory and to explain somewhat its processes.