Fame and Fiction

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 Excerpt: ...else. He fancies he is outside the dull nursery of his own existence, and watching brighter scenes; yet the window-bars were never more secure or the air less free. Pathetic and extraordinary self-deception! Mr Silas Hocking XII Mr Silas Hocking The case of Mr Silas Hocking deserves consideration. He is probably the most popular of living novelists. By comparison with him Miss Marie Corelli is esoteric, Mr Hall Caine the fad of a mere coterie, and Mr Kipling a timid emerger from the unknown. Mr Hocking has been writing for over twenty years, and during the whole of that extended period the sale of his novels has averaged one thousand copies per week. The exact total of sales, as officially furnished to me by the courtesy of Messrs Frederick Warne & Co., was last year one million and ninety-three thousand one hundred and eighty-five copies, exclusive of publications other than fiction. Such figures astound. They do not ask, they silently compel attention. They enshrine a dazzling and marvellous secret. When in my thoughtlessness I began to sound a leading West End bookseller as to the first cause of Mr Hocking's popularity, the austere reply was: "We have never been asked for his novels; we have never, so far as our recollection goes, had a copy of any of them in our shop." I should have known as much. Mr Hocking is a minister of the Methodist Free Church. His fame is rooted in Dissent, and Kensington never dissents. Though he is doubtless well-known in less orthodox London, it is in the industrial districts of mid and northern England, and perhaps also in Cornwall, that Mr Hocking chiefly flourishes. I have found in the bookseller's shop of a small provincial town whole rows of Her Benny, God's Outcast, Ivy, For Abigail; and the comment of the...