'Would you mind just reading a bit of it?'
I had never done such a thing before, nor have I since, and the proposal was a little staggering, not to my amour propre, but to my natural modesty. Moreover, I mistrusted my ability to do justice to it, remembering what the poet has said about reading one's own productions:
The chariot wheels jar in the gates through which we drive them forth.
However, I started with it, and notwithstanding that we were subjected to 'jars' (one by the servant, who came to put coals on the fire, just at a crisis, and made me at heart a murderer), the specimen was pronounced satisfactory.
'I think it will suit nicely for the Journal,' said my friend, which I think were the pleasantest words I ever heard from the mouth of man. I might have taken them, indeed, as a good omen; for though I have since written more novels than I can count, I have never failed to secure serial publication for every one of them. 'This gentleman's novels are suitable enough for serial publication,' once wrote a critic of them, intending to be very particularly disagreeable, but it aroused no emotion in my breast warmer than gratitude.
So 'The Family Scapegrace' came out in Chambers's Journal. I do not remember whether it had any effect upon its circulation, but it was well spoken of, and there was at least one person in the world who thought it a masterpiece. The difficulty, which no one but a young and unknown writer can estimate, was to get a publisher to share in this belief. For many years afterwards I published my books anonymously (i.e., 'by the author' of so and so), and many a humorous interview I had with various denizens of Paternoster Row, to whom I (very strongly) recommended them, by proxy. 'If I were speaking to the author,' they said, 'it would be unpleasant to say this (that, and the other of a deprecatory character), but with you we can be quite frank.' And they were sometimes very frank; and, though I didn't much like it at the time, their candour (when I had sold the book tolerably well) tickled me afterwards immensely. For persons who have enjoyed this experience, mere literary criticism has henceforth no terrors.
'The Family Scapegrace,' however, had appeared under my own name, so that concealment was out of the question; it was in one volume, a form of publication which, at that time at all events (though I see they now affirm the contrary), was unpopular with the libraries, and I was quite an unknown novelist. Under these circumstances, I have never forgotten the kindness of Mr. Douglas (of the firm of Edmonston & Douglas), who gave me fifty pounds for the first edition of the book—by which enterprise he lost his money. There were many reasons for it, no doubt, though the story has since done well enough, but I think the chief of them was the alteration of the title to 'Richard Arbour,' which, contrary to the wishes both of myself and my publisher, was insisted upon by a leading librarian. It is difficult, nowadays, to guess his reason, but people were more 'square-toed' in those times, and I fancy he thought his highly respectable customers would scent something Bohemian, if not absolutely scampish, in a Scapegrace. A mere name is not an attractive title for a book; though many books so called—such as 'Martin Chuzzlewit' and 'Robinson Crusoe'—have become immensely popular, they owed nothing to their baptism; and certainly 'Richard Arbour' prospered better when he got rid of his rather commonplace name.
