In 1874 Mr. Sims joined the staff of Fun, and about the same time he also became connected with the Weekly Dispatch, to which he communicated the humorous papers, entitled: “Mary Jane’s Memoirs.”
Since 1877 he has written much in The Referee, over the pseudonym of “Dagonet,” and most of his Ballads, which have now a worldwide fame, first appeared in the columns of that journal.
As a dramatic author Mr. Sims has also been both prolific and successful. “Crutch and Toothpick,” “Mother-in-Law,” “The Member for Slocum,” “The Gay City,” “The Half-Way House,” “The Lights o’ London,” “The Romany Rye,” and “The Merry Duchess,” are titles well-known to every modern play-goer.
Judging by the vast amount of work in essays, dramas, and poems, produced by Mr. Sims, he must be possessed of extraordinary energy, powerful imagination, and of rapid composition. Some of his prose articles and ballads display an intimate knowledge of the inner life of the miserable, and the poor of London, such as could only have been acquired by one having keen powers of observation, after considerable time spent in the haunts of dirt, danger, and disease.
In short, since Dickens left us, no writer has been so successful in this difficult and trying branch of literature, and Dickens himself was never so popular, nor were his works so widely read by the people as are those of Mr. Sims.
Although there is much that is both droll and humorous in his prose writings, the principal feature in his Ballads is homely pathos, of which the following poem is one of the best known examples.
It is one of the Ballads of Babylon (London. John P. Fuller, 1880), and is given by Mr. Sims’s kind permission:—
OSTLER JOE.
I stood at eve, as the sun went down, by a grave where a woman lies,