British Public Research Articles

"[M]easuring from the Standard": Barnaby Rudge's Post-Enlightenment Reading Geography

"[M]easuring from the Standard":Barnaby Rudge's Post-Enlightenment Reading Geography Jeffrey E. Jackson (bio) "measuring from the Standard . . . or rather from the spot on or near to which the Standard used to be in days of yore." -Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1841) The opening of his Child's History of England (1851–53) finds Charles Dickens contemplating a map of Britain, devoting particular attention to Scotland: he writes, "The little neighbouring islands, which are so small upon the Map as to be mere dots, are chiefly little bits of Scotland,—broken off . . . in the course of a great length of time, by the power of the restless water" (129). In this paper, I discuss Barnaby Rudge (1841), a historical novel of London's anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, as Dickens's contribution to what I like to call a post-Enlightenment re-mapping of Britain's reading geography—as Scotland's Enlightenment-era status as the center of British intellectual and publishing work had, itself, broken off in the course of a great length of time. Many have discussed Barnaby Rudge as Dickens's anxious engagement with Scotland's most famous and formidable author, historical novelist Sir Walter Scott. Thus, Kathryn Chittick writes, "to understand Dickens's ambitions in his early manhood is to come round inevitably to Scott" (18). In my essay, however, I read Barnaby Rudge as a larger expression of cultural insecurity. Devised in the 1830s, in the wake of what Chittick summarizes as the "collapse of the Edinburgh publishing scene" (41) and the uncertain, tentative shift of British publishing activities to London, 1841's Rudge is a late contribution to what I think of as a tradition of literary cartography charting England's cultural distance from the world of the Scottish Enlightenment. The distinctiveness of 18th-century Scotland within Britain has long invited commentary. Thus, discussing Edinburgh of the 1700s, historian J. G. A. Pocock notes that in it one could readily find "all the essential elements of an Enlightenment," elements that simply "did not exist" in England at the same time (525). Pocock is arguing here that, unlike the English Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment was embodied in its various institutions: in the universities, debating clubs, and learned societies that so typified the Edinburgh metropolis. These signature material cultures made Scotland what Clifford Siskin has called "the Enlightenment home of philosophical inquiry"—"so much so that . . . [many] routinely [End Page 298] followed the path north from England to the universities of Scotland" (80). Yet, Siskin goes on to note, "by the early nineteenth century, the path no longer seemed so inviting" (80). Thus, an anonymous commentator in Fraser's Magazine laments how "the vaunted Modern Athens [i.e., Edinburgh] is fast dwindling away into a mere spelling book and primer manufactory" (qtd in Chittick 41). I am interested in the terms of the last quotation, which juxtaposes the decline of the Scottish Enlightenment's public sphere with the mass production and distribution of reading matter. The distinctive material cultures of 18th-century Scotland, where publishing and intellectual work had what Jon Klancher calls the quality of "face-to-face relations" (19), yielded ground to what Ina Ferris has called a "less institutionally defined, more stratified and unpredictable readership" (23). The shift, as Patrick Brantlinger notes, in significantly precise wording, raised "the spectre of . . . mass literacy producing the opposite of enlightenment" (2–3, emphasis added). I suggest here that Barnaby Rudge, a Gothic-tinged, London-based novel of urban terrorism and mob violence registers this cultural re-orientation, one I describe in my paper as a shift toward London and away from the onetime standard set by Scotland. I. "Something Very Shocking . . . Will Soon Come Out in London" Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818) finds its heroine Catherine Morland telling Henry and Eleanor Tilney that "something very shocking indeed, will soon come out in London," and she "shall expect murder and every thing of the kind" (77). Henry explains to his confused sister, "Miss Morland has been talking of nothing more dreadful than a new publication which is shortly to come out, in three duo-decimo volumes, two hundred and seventy-six pages in...

رؤية صحيفة التايمز البريطانية لحركة أيلول الكردية (1961 – 1975م)

ئه‌ڤ ڤه‌كۆلینه‌ ده‌رباره‌ى (ڕۆشنگه‌رییا فه‌قێ قادرێ هه‌مه‌وه‌ندى د ئه‌ده‌بێ كوردیدا) یه‌، ژبه‌ركو د بیاڤێ هزرا نه‌ته‌وه‌یى و نیشتمانى و شۆڕه‌شگێڕیێڤه‌ فه‌قێ قادرێ هه‌مه‌وه‌ند خودان شیانه‌كا مه‌زن بو ئه‌ڤه‌ ژ لایه‌كیڤه‌، ژلایه‌كێ دیڤه‌ هه‌مه‌ ڕه‌نگییا بارودۆخ و ڕه‌وشا ژیانا وى وه‌ختى یا هۆزانڤانێ ناڤبرى تێدا ژیایه‌ بویه‌ ئه‌گه‌رێ سه‌ره‌كییا ناڤكرنا ڤێ ڤه‌كۆلینێ. گرنگییا ڤێ ڤه‌كۆلینێ ژ ڤێ چه‌ندێ دا دیاردبیت ; ڤه‌كۆلینه‌كا كاره‌كى و مێژویى و شیكارییه‌ ، هه‌روه‌سا ئه‌ڤ ڤه‌كۆلینه‌ بۆ هه‌ر ڤه‌كۆله‌ره‌كى هاریكاره‌كا باشه‌ د بوارێ ڤه‌كۆلینا ڕۆشنگه‌ریێ د ئه‌ده‌بێ كوردیدا ب گشتى و ڤه‌كۆلینا ئاستێ ڕه‌وشه‌نبیرییا فه‌قێ قادرێ هه‌مه‌وه‌ندى ب تایبه‌تى كاربكه‌ت و هه‌ولا خوه‌ بده‌ت

Prejudice in the pub: How alcohol and ideology loosen the tongue

ABSTRACTThis study (N = 124) tested the main and interactive effects of alcohol consumption, egalitarianism, and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) in relation to prejudice suppression in the natural environment of a British Public House (pub). Employing a quasi-experimental between-subjects design, participants who had consumed alcohol were worse at suppressing their prejudice than participants with no alcohol consumption. Further, the more participants endorsed egalitarian values, the more they were able to suppress their prejudice. This tendency was resistant to the effects of alcohol. By contrast, the stronger participants held RWA beliefs, the less they were able to suppress their prejudice. In addition, this tendency was accentuated by alcohol consumption. Results are discussed in terms of theoretical and practical implications.

What's wrong with ‘expeditioner’?

Some – particularly Australasian – authors who have published in Polar Record may be familiar with the debate around the acceptability of the word ‘expeditioner’. The term is regularly used by Australians and New Zealanders, in both casual and official contexts. In The Antarctic Dictionary, Bernadette Hince (herself Australian) classifies the word as particularly (although not solely) Australian, notes its regular use by the Australian national programme, which publishes an Expeditioner Handbook, and defines it as ‘A member of an [A]ntarctic expedition, including a government expedition’ (Hince 2000: 118–119). However, ‘expeditioner’ appears in the Oxford English Dictionary only as a rare and obsolete term. The sole example cited in the OED Online is from 1758, in a non-polar context; the definition provided is ‘One engaged in an expedition’. Neither The Australian Oxford Dictionary (2nd edition, 2004) nor The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary (2005) includes ‘expeditioner’, although the term is included in the Australian Macquarie Dictionary (5th edition, 2009) and the US-based Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1993). There is clearly significant national variation in the term's acceptability and its use in an academic publication can draw negative attention (Stone 2003: 172 – not coincidentally, a British review of a book by an Australian author). This note argues that ‘expeditioner’ should not be dismissed as an idiolectic ungrammatical term unsuitable for use in British publications. We make a case for the use of ‘expeditioner’ on three grounds: conceptual appropriateness, precedence and convenience of expression.

Dante’s British Public: Readers and Texts, from the Fourteenth Century to the Present, by Nick Havely

Dante’s British Public: Readers and Texts, from the Fourteenth Century to the Present, by Nick Havely

Between Tradition and Innovation: The Case of El Celler De Can Roca

El Celler de Can Roca restaurant in Girona, which is run by the three Roca brothers and was awarded three Michelin stars in November 2009, was named the best restaurant in the world in 2013 and 2015 by the British publication The Restaurant Magazine. However, the history of this restaurant dates back much further. Joan, Josep, and Jordi were raised in a family dedicated to the restaurant business. The three brothers grew up in the kitchen of the family-owned restaurant their parents still run today, learning the wide range of traditional Catalan recipes from their mother. This article presents the creative process followed by the three brothers and how this links tradition and innovation on the basis of 13 key elements: academia, memory, tradition, contrast, landscape, wine, chromaticism, product, audacity, magic, transversality, idealism, and sense of humor. The article demonstrates how the brothers articulate the discourse of the Celler de Can Roca menu, a veritable declaration of principles and philosophy rooted in the local region.

Tell Me Where to Look

(2016). Tell Me Where to Look. Caribbean Quarterly: Vol. 62, Caribbean Literary Archives, pp. 321-330.

After a photograph, before photography (takes command)

The best part of a century separates photography's public unveiling in 1839 and its predominance in architectural representation in the first decades of the 1900s. In the intervening decades, as photography laboured to find its place within architecture's representational economy, photographs frequently made their way into print as engravings. Often bearing the caption ‘after a photograph’, such remediated images challenged the ontological distinction between drawings and photographs. Whilst photographs were understood—at least to a certain extent—to be unmediated objects, they required multiple remediations not only to become reproducible in print but also in order to live up to their promise. Engravings from photographs transmitted photography’s supposed guarantee of facticity whilst correcting its perceived flaws; in so doing, they contributed to the discursive construction of photographic objectivity—in another medium.Drawing on a wide range of examples from British and French publications, including popular magazines such as the Illustrated London News and professional journals such as the Builder and the Revue générale, this article argues that by studying engravings made from photographs—with their numerous additions and omissions in the mediatory process—we are better able to understand photography's appeal to architects as a medium than we would be by merely studying photographs. These constructions of idealised photographic images in another medium challenge myths of technological progress, myths that mask the persistent continuity of existing economies of image making. Whilst photography changed the expectation of what a truthful, accurate and useful image should be, extant means were crucial to meeting this new standard.

The history of participatory practices: rethinking media genres in the history of user-generated content in 19th-century travel guidebooks

This article charts the historical stability and continuity of participatory and crowdsourcing practices. Theoretically, it suggests that the blurring of the boundaries between audiences and producers, with the ensuing result of user-generated content, is by no means solely the upshot of new media technological affordances but largely a function of relatively stabilized, genre-specific formal and functional properties, or ‘genre affordances’. Certain referential and performative genres enable interaction between audiences, texts and producers independently of new media technologies because these genres constitute what matters for both producers and audiences in specific historical circumstances. Genres make available shared cultural, social and pragmatic resources for appropriate and desirable being, doing, feeling and thinking. Empirically, this article builds upon an archival study of co-production related to the specific genre of travel guidebooks. It investigates (a) audience feedback in the form of handwritten letters sent to John Murray, a venerable 19th-century British publishing house, and (b) the ways in which John Murray’s yesteryear guidebook producers actively solicited and implemented reader-authored content in professional production practice.

Relative Poverty, British Social Policy Writing and Public Experience

Relative poverty, a concept developed by left-wing social scientists, categorises as ‘poor’ those who fall seriously behind normal nationwide material standards. This article argues that the widespread view that the word ‘poverty’ means ‘relative poverty’, which in left-dominated social policy academia often extends to implying that those who do not define poverty this way are necessarily misguided, has led to an incomplete portrayal of poorer British people's lived experience. The article examines published empirical work, before presenting findings from British Social Attitudes surveys and interviews with forty unemployed Jobseeker's Allowance claimants and thirty employed people. Both the existing and new findings exposed aspects of public attitudes and experience which resonate with unanswered academic criticisms of defining poverty as relative poverty. These public contributions have tended to be glossed over or treated dismissively by social policy authors, despite them attaching importance to Left-friendly aspects of poorer people's experience and attitudes.

The British Publishing Industry and Commercial Memories of the First World War

British veterans of the First World War were avid writers. From The First Hundred Thousand to The Last Tommy, Britain’s soldiers and aid workers left behind a vast literature of wartime memories. Veteran recollections have been a significant part of the formation of British popular memory of the conflict, as well as part of the ‘cultural turn’ in First World War studies since the 1980s. The war’s literary legacy, it has been argued, has helped to frame the public narrative of the conflict. What has attracted less attention has been the British publishing industry’s role in the dissemination of war memories to the public when those memories were most acute, the interwar period. This article considers the British publishing industry and commercial war memoirs. It assesses the literary marketplace for martial literature and the commercial memory of the First World War in the interwar period.

Looking for The Illustrated London News in Australian Digital Newspapers

This article will demonstrate that digital newspaper archives can be used to shed new light on the historical readership of nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines. The digital newspaper archive of Australia (Trove) was used to study the distribution and reception of the renowned Illustrated London News (ILN) in the Australian colonies between 1842 and 1872. As a result of this research, this article shows that around 17,000 copies of the magazine reached the Australian colonies by each mail in 1862. This corresponds to 8–11% of the total circulation of the ILN at that time so making it the most widely read British publication in the Australian colonies. By means of a case study into the colonial readership of the ILN, this article will argue that the magazine was an important building block in the formation of the imagined communities both of Britain and its dominions in the period between 1842 and 1872.

Foucault, Discourse, and the Birth of British Public Relations

This article analyzes the emergence of public relations among corporations in interwar Britain. It adopts a discursive approach and applies the philosophy of Michel Foucault. It argues that public relations was a result of state propaganda during World War I, the emergence of a mass-media society, and criticism from a range of groups toward corporations during the period. It acted as an emergent institutional text, which taught corporations how to create corporate identities so as to garner public good will and institutional legitimacy. This was achieved by a range of strategies, including social programs and the creation of corporate narratives.

The Truth about Spain! Mobilizing British Public Opinion, 1936–1939. By Hugo García. Translated by Nick Rider. Sussex Studies in Spanish History. Edited by Nigel Townson.Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010. Pp. xii+338. $49.95.Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War. By Miriam M. Basilio.Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. xvi+304. $119.95.

The Truth about Spain! Mobilizing British Public Opinion, 1936–1939. By Hugo García. Translated by Nick Rider. Sussex Studies in Spanish History. Edited by Nigel Townson.Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010. Pp. xii+338. $49.95.Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War. By Miriam M. Basilio.Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. xvi+304. $119.95.

“By the Author of The Leavenworth Case” or Capitalizing on Reader Appetite for the Bestselling Novelist: Female Detection, Transatlantic Popular Fiction and Anna Katharine Green's The Mill Mystery (1886)

ABSTRACTAnna Katharine Green's The Leavenworth Case (1878) was a bestselling detective novel that found favour on both sides of the Atlantic. Taking this critically neglected American writer as an example, this article considers the creative strategies open to the popular novelist looking to capitalize on her debut work's realization of such a level of commercial success that the title came to constitute a brand in the literary marketplace. The inadequacies in transatlantic copyright during the 1880s left Green susceptible to unauthorized reprinting of her work by English publishers seeking to take advantage of her cachet. This led her to enter into compromise arrangements with said houses, which both elevated and diminished her stock. Probing the roots of Green's appeal in England, this article demonstrates how her work formed part of a pre-Sherlock Holmes wave of detective fiction. While Green was adept at writing absorbing fiction that found favour with diverse reading constituencies, she also sought to use the detective novel as a vehicle for social comment on issues of gender. In her 1886 novel The Mill Mystery, which featured her first fictional female detective, Green sought to reconcile a meditation on female agency with the constraints of working within a genre fiction context and under the shadow of her bestselling debut.

Nick Havely,Dante’s British Public: Readers and Texts, from the Fourteenth Century to the Present.

Nick Havely,<i>Dante’s British Public: Readers and Texts, from the Fourteenth Century to the Present</i>.

Kiwi Crime Writing: A Rich Tradition from a Distant Sea

16 WLT JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2016 photo : stephen murphy N ew Zealand is, relatively speaking, a tiny country with a population half the size of New York City and in a location so remote, a commercial flight from Los Angeles takes over fifteen hours to get there. The closest big city, Sydney, is three hours across the almost landless Tasman Sea. Legendary for the beauty of its landscape and the fierce Maori culture that has occupied the islands since the late thirteenth century, Aotearoa, as the Maoris called the north island, had its first European contact in 1642, and its coastline wasn’t mapped extensively crime & mystery Kiwi Crime Writing A Rich Tradition from a Distant Sea by J. Madison Davis WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 17 until Captain Cook arrived in 1769. After that, immigrants began appropriating the land, and today the ethnic population is about three-quarters European. The travel book cliché is that New Zealand is culturally the “most British” of the former British colonies, and we can see that in the influence of Kiwi writers on that most British of literary genres, the mystery, from the very beginnings of the genre. One of the earliest best-selling mysteries in the world was written by Fergus Hume, who is claimed by New Zealand even though he was born in 1859 in the Worcestershire City and County Pauper Lunatic Asylum in England, where his father worked, and only lived in New Zealand from age three to age twenty-five. In 1861, during the Otago gold rush on the south island of New Zealand , his father became superintendent of the Dunedin lunatic asylum. Educated in what is now the Otago Boys’ High School in this remote outpost of the empire, and likely isolated even more by living on the grounds of an asylum, young Fergus must have dreamed of bigger things. Even though Dunedin’s population multiplied fivefold in the 1860s and became New Zealand’s largest city from 1865 to roughly 1900, it was under twenty-five thousand people even then. Hume matriculated to the University of Otago, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1883, but the prospect of a steady career as a lawyer was not enough. He wrote poetry and anonymous reviews that were published in the local press and became involved in local theater. He developed a reputation as a dandy, but being a big fish in a small pond was still not enough. He moved on to Melbourne, Australia, which had a more lively theater culture, but the theater community of Melbourne was basically a closed shop. Hume could not get any of his plays read, let alone produced . Determined to break into writing, he thought perhaps a novel would work for him. He researched what was selling and discovered that the novels of Émile Gaboriau were popular. Edgar Allan Poe is credited with first making the mystery a popular genre, and Poe’s influence on the French was very powerful. Gaboriau ’s L’Affaire Lerouge (1866) began a series of pioneering French mysteries drawing from the memoirs of Eugène François Vidocq (as Poe had) and further popularized and developed the crime novel. Gaboriau died in 1873, but the translations inspired Hume to write The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, which, like his plays, no publisher would touch. They had no faith in a book by a colonial, he was told. The complicated story of its publication was recently researched and recounted in Blockbuster! by Lucy Sussex. When Hume had it privately printed in 1886, the book flew off the shelves. British publishers now came hat in hand, but Hume didn’t believe it would be as successful in Britain and America, so he sold his book rights for fifty pounds. The New York Times reported in Hume’s obituary that the book sold half a million copies. He made money on the dramatic version, however, and moved to England, where he wrote mysteries until his death in 1932. Hansom Cab, it is worth noting, preceded the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes by a year, and thus this backwater colonial deserves major credit as one of the most influential creators of the mystery...

Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers by Caroline Davis

Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers by Caroline Davis

Call of the Atlantic: Jack London’s Publishing Odyssey Overseas, 1902–1916, by Joseph McAleer

Reviewed by: Call of the Atlantic: Jack London’s Publishing Odyssey Overseas, 1902–1916, by Joseph McAleer K. Brandt Kenneth (bio) Call of the Atlantic: Jack London’s Publishing Odyssey Overseas, 1902–1916, by Joseph McAleer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xvi + 208 pp. Cloth, $100. Joseph McAleer’s Call of the Atlantic offers a thorough history of Jack London’s business dealings with his British publishers and agents. London’s relations with the publishing industry outside of North America has received scant attention from scholars, though his interactions with foreign publishing houses regarding agent agreements, translation rights, serializations, and book contracts occupies a sizable portion of his correspondence with editors. The prospect of McAleer’s exhaustive focus on the back-and-forth between London and his publishers and agents may seem like a necessary but arid field of inquiry. But this is Jack London—one of the most complicated literary drama kings of the twentieth century—and McAleer makes good use of his stagey subject. The study quickly develops into a kind of Jamesian saga of a colorful and rowdy upstart from the American West encountering the sober and conservative English publishing world. In his publishing negotiations, London emerges as feisty, mercurial, demanding, distrustful, and, at times, something of an impish fibber. Of course, London was well aware that the publishing world was amply stocked with its own share of plush-footed fabulists. This is one of the reasons why he called his profession the “writing game.” By the early 1900s books had plainly become commodities and publishing was acknowledged as a capitalist enterprise. For London, it becomes a contest where commercial publishers profess that their corporate interests and the author’s welfare are one. Sometimes this is true; however, as London believed, because publisher (capital) and author (labor) both desire maximum profit, it would be dunderheaded to think the association immune from conflict and duplicity. If the author is not vigilant—and fails to push, pry, and promote—publishers will eventually attempt [End Page 89] to exploit or sideline the writer in pursuit of their own capital interests. London’s suspicions about underlying profit motives generated much of his indecision, surliness, and cynicism when it came to playing the game with agents and editors. In recounting London’s many publisher-agent transactions, McAleer’s narrative strategies work well to imbue agents and editors with tangible motives and emotions, attributes one cannot usually glean from reading London’s letters alone. We learn, for instance, of the interesting travel and writing career of the adventurous Harry Parry Robinson, managing director of Isbister & Co., Ltd., who published early London volumes in Britain, including The Son of the Wolf and The People of the Abyss. Robinson, caught in his own naturalistic kink, missed the plum chance to publish The Call of the Wild because he was laid up with diphtheria that rendered him too feeble to reply to the offer for English rights. Similar personal sketching fleshes out other publishing personnel, including Algernon Methuen, William Heinemann, and Hughes Massie. McAleer dutifully foregrounds the commercial facets of the publishing business, but breathing a bit of humanity into players other than London enhances and illuminates his account. Another worthwhile feature are the illustrations of advertisements and early British printings of London’s books—especially the “cheap editions” that are regularly discussed in the author’s correspondence but rarely reproduced visually in biographies, articles, or critical monographs. McAleer’s judicious integration of letters among publishers and agents reveals the dismay that London’s erratic book-to-book sales caused. He produced moneymakers with the likes of The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, and Burning Daylight, but these were offset by weaker sellers such as The People of the Abyss, The Road, and The Iron Heel. Unsurprisingly, British (and American) editors clamored for more “open-air” (71) novels from London in the pattern of his dog and adventure tales. As one editor put it, “The public seems to look upon him as a favourite only when he is writing animal stories” (72). But more often than not, he dodged these constant editorial pleas and opted to write books with sharper sociopolitical...

Kiwi Crime Writing: A Rich Tradition from a Distant Sea

16 WLT JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2016 photo : stephen murphy N ew Zealand is, relatively speaking, a tiny country with a population half the size of New York City and in a location so remote, a commercial flight from Los Angeles takes over fifteen hours to get there. The closest big city, Sydney, is three hours across the almost landless Tasman Sea. Legendary for the beauty of its landscape and the fierce Maori culture that has occupied the islands since the late thirteenth century, Aotearoa, as the Maoris called the north island, had its first European contact in 1642, and its coastline wasn’t mapped extensively crime & mystery Kiwi Crime Writing A Rich Tradition from a Distant Sea by J. Madison Davis WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 17 until Captain Cook arrived in 1769. After that, immigrants began appropriating the land, and today the ethnic population is about three-quarters European. The travel book cliché is that New Zealand is culturally the “most British” of the former British colonies, and we can see that in the influence of Kiwi writers on that most British of literary genres, the mystery, from the very beginnings of the genre. One of the earliest best-selling mysteries in the world was written by Fergus Hume, who is claimed by New Zealand even though he was born in 1859 in the Worcestershire City and County Pauper Lunatic Asylum in England, where his father worked, and only lived in New Zealand from age three to age twenty-five. In 1861, during the Otago gold rush on the south island of New Zealand , his father became superintendent of the Dunedin lunatic asylum. Educated in what is now the Otago Boys’ High School in this remote outpost of the empire, and likely isolated even more by living on the grounds of an asylum, young Fergus must have dreamed of bigger things. Even though Dunedin’s population multiplied fivefold in the 1860s and became New Zealand’s largest city from 1865 to roughly 1900, it was under twenty-five thousand people even then. Hume matriculated to the University of Otago, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1883, but the prospect of a steady career as a lawyer was not enough. He wrote poetry and anonymous reviews that were published in the local press and became involved in local theater. He developed a reputation as a dandy, but being a big fish in a small pond was still not enough. He moved on to Melbourne, Australia, which had a more lively theater culture, but the theater community of Melbourne was basically a closed shop. Hume could not get any of his plays read, let alone produced . Determined to break into writing, he thought perhaps a novel would work for him. He researched what was selling and discovered that the novels of Émile Gaboriau were popular. Edgar Allan Poe is credited with first making the mystery a popular genre, and Poe’s influence on the French was very powerful. Gaboriau ’s L’Affaire Lerouge (1866) began a series of pioneering French mysteries drawing from the memoirs of Eugène François Vidocq (as Poe had) and further popularized and developed the crime novel. Gaboriau died in 1873, but the translations inspired Hume to write The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, which, like his plays, no publisher would touch. They had no faith in a book by a colonial, he was told. The complicated story of its publication was recently researched and recounted in Blockbuster! by Lucy Sussex. When Hume had it privately printed in 1886, the book flew off the shelves. British publishers now came hat in hand, but Hume didn’t believe it would be as successful in Britain and America, so he sold his book rights for fifty pounds. The New York Times reported in Hume’s obituary that the book sold half a million copies. He made money on the dramatic version, however, and moved to England, where he wrote mysteries until his death in 1932. Hansom Cab, it is worth noting, preceded the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes by a year, and thus this backwater colonial deserves major credit as one of the most influential creators of the mystery...