At length, in London, on May 24th, the end, which had seemed further off than the end of the world, came. The MS., fairly and beautifully copied,—typewriters being then unborn,—was sent off to Messrs. Sampson Low. In a month it returned, without comment. We then, with, as Dr. Johnson says, “a frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure, or from praise,” placed it in the hands of a friend to do with it as he saw fit, and proceeded to forget all about it.
It was not until the following December that the dormant Shocker suddenly woke to life. It was on Sunday morning, December 2nd, 1888, that the fateful letter came. Messrs. R. Bentley & Son offered us £25 on publication, and £25 on sale of 500 copies of the book, which was to be published in two volumes at half a guinea each.
“All comment is inadequate,” says Martin’s diary; “wrote a dizzy letter of acceptance to Bentley, and went to church, twice, in a glorified trance.”
(Thus did a huntsman of mine, having slain two foxes in a morning, which is a rarer feat in Carbery than—say—in Cheshire, present himself in gratitude at the priest’s night-school.)
Passing over intermediate matters, I will follow the career of the Shocker, which was not published for six months after its assignment to Messrs. Bentley, six months during which Martin had written several admirable articles for The World (then edited by Mr. Edmund Yates), and I had illustrated a picture-book, “The Kerry Recruit,” and written an indifferent short story, and we had begun to think about “The Real Charlotte.” For some reason that I have now forgotten, my mother was opposed to my own name appearing in “An Irish Cousin.” Martin’s nom de plume was ready to hand, her articles in The World having been signed “Martin Ross,” but it was only after much debate and searching of pedigrees that a Somerville ancestress, by name Geilles Herring, was selected to face the music for me. Her literary career was brief, and was given a death-blow by Edmund Yates, who asked “Martin Ross” the reason of her collaboration with a grilled herring; and as well as I remember, my own name was permitted to appear in the second edition.
This followed the first with a pleasing celerity, and was sold out by the close of the year. Any who have themselves been through the mill, and know what it is to bring forth a book, will remember the joys, and fears, and indignations, and triumphings, that accompany the appearance of a first-born effort. Many and various were the letters and criticisms. Our vast relationship made an advertising agency of the most far-reaching and pervasive nature, and our friends were faithful in their insistence in the matter at the libraries.
“Have you ‘An Irish Cousin?’” was demanded at a Portsmouth bookshop.
“No, Madam,” the bookseller replied, with hauteur, “I have no H’Irish relations.”
Looking back on it now, I recognise that what was in itself but a very moderate and poorly constructed book owed its success, not only with the public, but with the reviewers, to the fact that it chanced to be the first in its particular field. Miss Edgeworth had been the last to write of Irish country life with sincerity and originality, dealing with both the upper and lower classes, and dealing with both unconventionally. Lever’s brilliant and extravagant books, with their ever enchanting Micky Frees and Corney Delaneys, merely created and throned the stage Irishman, the apotheosis of the English ideal. It was of Lever’s period to be extravagant. The Handley Cross series is a case in point. Let me humbly and hurriedly disclaim any impious thought of depreciating Surtees. No one who has ever ridden a hunt, or loved a hound, but must admit that he has his unsurpassable moments. “The Cat and Custard-pot day,” with that run that goes with the rush of a storm; the tête-à-tête of Mr. Jorrocks and James Pigg, during which they drank each other’s healths, and the healths of the hounds, and the séance culminated with the immortal definition of the state of the weather, as it obtained in the cupboard; Soapey Sponge and Lucy Glitters “sailing away with the again breast-high-scent pack”—these things are indeed hors concours. But I think it is undeniable that the hunting people of Handley Cross, like Lever’s dragoons, were always at full gallop. With Surtees as with Lever, everyone is “all out,” there is nothing in hand—save perhaps a pair of duelling pistols or a tandem whip—and the height of the spirits is only equalled by the tallness of the hero’s talk. That intolerable adjective “rollicking” is consecrated to Lever; if certain of the rank and file of the reviewers of our later books could have realised with what abhorrence we found it applied to ourselves, and could have known how rigorously we had endeavoured to purge our work of anything that might justify it, they might, out of the kindness that they have always shown us, have been more sparing of it.
Lever was a Dublin man, who lived most of his