Twenty Years of My Life

BY far the greater number of my literary friends have been novelists. I have counted no less than two hundred and seventy male novelists who have visited us at Addison Mansions,...

THE great “Miss Braddon,” who is now one of the most valued of my friends, and a not infrequent visitor, never came to 32 Addison Mansions. She achieved fame before any living n...

AMONG the crowd of humorists who honoured Addison Mansions with their presence it is natural to mention first the famous author of _Three Men in a Boat_. There is no author for...

AT the beginning the Authors’ Club had no exact rivals, but there were two institutions, very much intertwined, which came near it in a way—the Vagabonds Club and the Idler teas...

MY first connection with artists came through my cousin, David Wilkie Wynfield, who was the nephew and godson of the great Sir David Wilkie. He was a popular artist in both sens...

SINCE I came back to London a score of years ago, I have known at least a hundred actors and actresses, but they did not all visit us at Addison Mansions—some, whom I knew quite...

I WAS born on February 5, 1856, in the town-house of my maternal grandfather. My father, a solicitor by profession, who died in the last days of 1910, at the age of eighty-six,...

CONSIDERING the number of years which I have devoted to travel, I have not met a great many explorers, certainly nothing like so many as I should have met if I had been a regula...

WHEN we came back from the United States in 1891, besides our wide American circle, most of whom were in the habit of frequently visiting England in the season, we soon found ou...

TO use the famous expression applied by Dr. Johnson to his College at Oxford, we had quite a nest of singing-birds at 32 Addison Mansions, for, to mention only three of them, Wi...

I WAS well known at authors’ clubs and authors’ receptions long before I was known as an author. In fact, I doubt if many of those who swarmed to our at-homes ever thought of me...

When I settled in London in 1891, I had already done a good deal of journalism in New York and San Francisco. In the latter my writing had chiefly lain in travel-articles on Jap...

MY active literary career dates from my return from America. Hitherto, with the exception of the _Handbook to Japan_ and the potboiler for the North German Lloyd, and a shilling...

HENRY HARLAND, who justly made such a prodigious hit with that exquisite book, _The Cardinal’s Snuff-box_, I knew well in America. Stedman introduced us at one of his at-homes....

AS I lived four or five years in Australia, and have written various books upon Australian poets, and as both my wife and my son are Victorians by birth, it is natural for me to...

THE Admiral’s prognostications were correct. We met such heavy seas passing Cape Flattery that the ship seemed to be trying to turn turtle. We were unable to sit on deck from th...

IT was Benton Fletcher, one of the “identities” of Egypt, equally well known as an artist who does valuable work in connection with excavations and does delightful landscapes, w...

W. B. MAXWELL I hardly knew in those days, though I had met him years before, and, in the long and elaborate review which I wrote of his _Vivien_, had hailed him as a novelist w...

The only literary at-homes I had been to before I went to America were Edmund Gosse’s in Delamere Terrace, Louise Chandler Moulton’s in Weymouth Street, and W. E. Henley’s in an...

OF all the men who used to come to 32, Addison Mansions from our having met them at the Idler teas, none were more identified with the success of Jerome’s two periodicals _The I...

ONE is apt to let fiction speak for itself, as if it represented the whole of literature. But it does not. Several of the men mentioned below are novelists, but they owe their i...

Various biographical dictionaries of living persons were in existence before the new _Who’s Who_ appeared in 1897—_Men of the Time_, _People of the Period_, and so on. But none...

IN 1906 I was busy writing two books into which a good deal of history came, _Carthage and Tunis, the Old and New Gates of the Orient_, and _The Secrets of the Vatican_, the for...

ABOUT this time I was struck with the idea that for a person who intended to make his living by writing books, Travel was a necessity, and while one had no ties, it cost no more...

I WAS for a number of years a member of the Savage Club, and I was an honorary member there for a long time at an earlier period, when I first came home from Australia and the w...

THE Pacific as we crossed it on our return from Japan to America was very different to the Pacific of our outward journey. Instead of being on a small ship, so buffeted by the s...

Distance prevented the great Dr. Boyd of St. Andrews—the famous A.K.H.B., of whom I saw a good deal in the long summer I spent at St. Andrews—from coming. Dr. Boyd possessed the...

THE literary at-home is an American institution. It may not have been invented there, but it has certainly flowered there. I did not visualise the literary at-home at all until...

It was when she was visiting Tunis with us that she first heard the “East a-callin’.” She found it absolutely irresistible. In the short time that we were there she began to lea...