The Slave of the Lamp

The Slave of the Lamp

Henry Seton Merriman published his first novel, Young Mistley, in 1888, when he was twenty-six years old. Messrs. Bentley's reader, in his critique on the book, spoke of its powerful situations and unconventionality of treatment: and, while dwelling at much greater length on its failings, declared, in effect, its faults to be the right faults, and added that, if Young Mistley was not in itself a good novel, its author was one who might hereafter certainly write good novels. Young Mistley was followed in quick succession by The Phantom Future, Suspense, and Prisoners and Captives. Some years later, considering them crude and immature works, the author, at some difficulty and with no little pecuniary loss, withdrew all these four first books from circulation in England. Their republication in America he was powerless to prevent. He therefore revised and abbreviated them, conscious, as he said himself in a preface, of a hundred defects which the most careful revision cannot eliminate. He was perhaps then, as he was ever, too severe a critic of his own works. But though these four early books have, added to youthful failings, the youthful merits of freshness, vigour and imagination, their author was undoubtedly right to suppress them. By writing them he learnt, it is true, the technique of his art: but no author wishesor no author should wishto give his copy-books to the world. It is as well thenit is certainly as he himself desiredthat these four books do not form part of the present edition. It may, however, be noted that both Young Mistley and Prisoners and Captives dealt, as did The Sowers hereafter, with Russian subjects: Suspense is the story of a war-correspondent in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877: and The Phantom Future is the only novel of Merriman's in which the scene is laid entirely in his own country. In 1892 he produced The Slave of the Lamp, which had run serially through the Cornhill Magazine, then under the editorship of Mr. James Payn. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 9195
Author: Merriman, Henry Seton
Release Date: Oct 1, 2005
Format: eBook
Language: English