Twenty Years of My Life

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

Wilkins was a man of strong likes and dislikes, very affectionate to his friends. Like E. H. Cooper, he was a well-known figure in society as well as in literary circles—and, curiously enough, he, too, was lame.

Joseph Shaylor, the managing secretary of the Whitefriars Club, and the managing director of Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., the largest wholesale booksellers in the world, I have known almost as long. It is interesting to note that Shaylor, besides being the largest dealer in books commercially, has a most intimate and discriminating knowledge of all the books which are worth reading, and issues delightful little books on books, including his dear little annual From Friend to Friend.

Every one knows his volume called The Fascination of Books. His career is a romance; it reminds one of Dick Whittington. He has himself told us that he is a self-made man—i. e. he has had nothing but his own intelligence and grit to help him. He was born in Stroud in 1844, where he was apprenticed to a bookseller named Clark. It was part of Shaylor’s duty to fetch the London papers from the train in the morning. In 1864 he came to London, at once entering the firm of Simpkin, Marshall & Co. His diligence and business acumen generally was noted, and after a while he was given charge of one of the departments. It became increasingly evident to his employers that their confidence in, and judgment of, this young man from the country had not been misplaced, and within five or six years after the formation of the company, as it now stands, Shaylor was elected to the position of one of the managing directors.

Shaylor is an authority on the history of books and bookselling, and has many interesting stories to tell of how things were done in the trade years ago, when life was more leisurely. In those golden days, reviewers had some power; a good review in The Times sold two hundred thousand copies of The Fight at Dame Europa’s School, timidly brought out in the very smallest way, and an article in The World sold four hundred copies of Called Back. How a book sells depends very much upon the original subscription before publication, of which Shaylor, as head of the world’s biggest buyers, thinks it worthy. Of him it may be justly said that he has his finger on the pulse of English literature and that his diagnosis is accepted by the world.

Ernest Thompson Seton—who took for his pen-name Ernest Seton Thompson—came to us first many years ago, when he became engaged to a friend of ours, the beautiful Grace Gallatin, daughter of the Speaker of the California House of Representatives. A descendant of the last Earl of Winton, he went to Canada when he was only five, and lived in the backwoods for ten years. Then he went to school and college in Canada, and had two years’ art-training in London before he returned to Manitoba to study natural history, eventually becoming naturalist to the Manitoba Government. In 1898, when he was thirty-eight years old, he published his Wild Animals I have Known—the Biographies of Eight Wild Animals, which went through ten editions in the first year, and was the foundation of his fame and large fortune. He founded the outdoor-life movement, known as The Woodcraft Indians, which has a membership of nearly a hundred thousand, and in addition to his soundness as a naturalist, he is the most dramatic lecturer I have ever heard. He lectures on the psychology of wild animals as if they were human beings, and is said to be the most popular lecturer living. His books about wild animals have delightful sketches of animal playfulness and humanness in their margins, some of which are by himself, and some by his wife.

Dr. Dillon, whose articles in the Daily Telegraph on the Balkan question during the war formed the most illuminating comment on the subject, I have been meeting for years at Violet Hunt’s. He is an elderly man, who looks more the scholar and the recluse than the publicist with his finger on the pulse of all Eastern Europe.

Max Beerbohm, Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree’s brother, is recognised as one of the most brilliant wits and intuitive critics of the day, as well as our most inspired caricaturist. There are few educated people in England who are not familiar with his work. I met him first at a dinner of the Women Journalists. We were both guests of the Club, and Mrs. T. P. O’Connor, who was in the chair, said to me, “You know Max Beerbohm, don’t you?”

I did not know him, though I had always wanted to know him, because I was a great admirer of his work and his wit. I said, “No, I don’t,” and was about to add what pleasure it would give me, when he took the words out of my mouth by saying, “I refuse not to be known by Mr. Douglas Sladen.” That was our introduction.

He was in splendid form that night. He and a man with an unpronounceable Polish name, who was one of the leading foreign journalists in London, were deputed to reply for the visitors. The Pole, who spoke very broken English, at interminable length, made Max Beerbohm very angry, because he hated the idea of speaking to a jaded audience, so when at length his colleague sat down, and he rose to make his speech, he began, “I, too, am a foreigner. I go about in holy terror of the Tariff Reform League.”

The audience recognised that he was really alluding to the Aliens Act, and rocked with laughter.