CHAPTER XVI
THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS: PART I
My active literary career dates from my return from America. Hitherto, with the exception of the Handbook to Japan and the potboiler for the North German Lloyd, and a shilling shocker, published anonymously, and the two series of articles on Japan executed for the San Francisco Chronicle and McClure’s Syndicate respectively, my literary aspirations had all been poetical. I had published volumes of my own verse entitled: Frithjof and Ingebjorg, Australian Lyrics, A Poetry of Exiles, A Summer Christmas, In Cornwall and Across the Sea, Edward the Black Prince, The Spanish Armada, Lester the Loyalist, and four anthologies, Australian Ballads and Rhymes, A Century of Australian Song, Australian Poets and Younger American Poets, one of which, Australian Ballads, had a very large sale, though I only had ten pounds for doing it.
THE DINING-ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS.
(From the Painting by Yoshio Markino.)
But in America I had been under the necessity of making money, because my private income was unequal to the increased expense of living in America. The articles for McClure and the San Francisco Chronicle were the outcome of this necessity, and having found that I could add materially to my income by writing about travel when in America, I conceived the idea of making my articles on Japan, a country then but little known in England, into a book. I went to Mr. A. P. Watt, then not many years established, and he procured me a commission from Hutchinson & Co.—the first of a series of commissions which has gone on from that day to this. That book was The Japs at Home, the most successful, in point of sales, of all my books, for not less than a hundred and fifty thousand copies of it have been sold by various publishers. Hutchinson & Co. brought out editions of it at eighteen shillings (two), six shillings, and three-and-six, and then, having got through four editions of it, and believing the sale at an end, gave the book up to me. Another publisher sold fifteen thousand copies of it at half-a-crown, and then exchanged the book rights with me for the serial rights, and since then there has been a shilling edition, an enormous sixpenny edition, and a threepenny-halfpenny edition; the shilling and the threepenny-halfpenny editions are selling still.
Following The Japs at Home came On the Cars and Off, the success of which was ruined by having illustrations which took six weeks to produce. It was a guinea book, and a first edition of a thousand copies was sold directly. But the second edition was not ready till nearly two months later, and by that time the interest in the book was dead.
My next book of travel was Brittany for Britons, published as one of the familiar little half-crown guides of A. and C. Black, of which a great number of copies were sold. I cannot say how many, because I parted with the copyright.
After this my energies were diverted from travel-books for a while, because I wanted to try my hand at novel-writing. The result was A Japanese Marriage, which, after The Japs at Home, has been my most successful book in sales. About ten thousand copies of it were sold in octavo form, and as a sixpenny various publishers have sold a hundred and twenty thousand.
For two years after our return from America we confined ourselves to short excursions to the milder parts of England—Hampshire, chiefly round Norman Christchurch; Devonshire, in the nook of Dartmoor round Drewsteignton, and on the gloriously wild coast round Salcombe; and the woods of the Isle of Wight. During this period I finished The Japs at Home, and wrote On the Cars and Off, which was not published till 1895, about our double journey across America from Halifax to Vancouver’s Island.