No Such Thing as Bad Publicity?: Confirmation of John Hampson’s Book Thieving

Abstract

For a moment, John Hampson Simpson (1901–1955) looked set to be one of the stars of working-class Modernism, and perhaps if he had been more open about his past, he would have been. Published as the work of simply John Hampson, his first novel Saturday Night at the Greyhound (1931) was one of the Hogarth Press’s smash hits, selling 3,000 copies, not quite in the company of Virginia Woolf’s own best-selling The Waves (1931, 10,000 copies), but an impressive debut.1Saturday Night at the Greyhound went on to sell 80,000 more copies after Penguin reprinted it in 1937,2 but Hampson’s second work O Providence (1932) failed to reach the same heights for the Woolfs. In turn, the Hogarth Press ‘likely guided by the market, as well as by the quality of Hampson’s writing’, did not publish Hampson’s later novels.3 Although he was able to place later works at houses of varying prestige, and contribute to John Lehmann’s The Penguin New Writing series in the 1940s, among other publishing activities, he is mainly remembered today as a one-hit wonder. Perhaps he could have found a place in the canon next to his friends, acquaintances, and idols––such as E. M Forster, W. H. Auden, and the Woolfs, respectively––if he had only conquered the fear that his past as a convicted and incarcerated book-thief would catch up to him.