LETTERS TO THE PRESS - 10

How I Write My Plays

The Pall Mall Gazette (21 September, 1892 - Issue 8581)

“HOW I WRITE MY PLAYS.”

I.—BY MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN.

HAVING elicited from the novelists the various reasons why they do not write plays, we have asked one or two eminent playwrights to supplement what others of the same craft have written on the subject in these columns in former days, and to tell us how they write their plays. The first of these is Mr. Robert Buchanan:—
     You are good enough to ask me to describe “how I make a play,” and to send me at the same time the published reports of such excellent craftsmen as Mr. Pinero and Mr. Sydney Grundy. Mr. Pinero appears very well satisfied to work under existing conditions, while Mr. Grundy adopts a tone of defiant cynicism towards both his own work and the conditions which regulate it. For myself, I make plays because I have been taught no other trade to gain a decent living, and, having more than once frankly confessed as much, I remain at the mercy of the cranks and quidnuncs who do no literary fighting but throng the bastions of minor journals. I think that play-writing, like carpentering, is a trade to be learned, and that a dramatic author, to be successful, must be a master of stage technicalities. I have been in my time actor, stage manager, theatre manager; can at a pinch paint my own scenery, design my own “posters,” and write my own criticisms. I regret, quite as keenly as any of the New Critics, that dramatic art is regulated by commercial considerations, and that experiments on public taste are costly and dangerous. Of the many plays which I have written, only a very few are satisfactory from my point of view as a writer; among these few I include “The Nine Day’s Queen,” “Sophia,” “Clarissa,” and “The Bride of Love,” and only one of these has been phenomenally successful. As regards my modus operandi in making a play, it is, I suspect, much the same as that of other dramatists. Having got my subject, I map out my play act by act and scene by scene, and then fill in the first sketches of the leading characters. Like Mr. Pinero, I have all my work practically done before I commence the actual writing of a drama, which occupies a comparatively short space of time. In “adapting,” as it is called, I first read my original carefully and thoroughly, and then close the book for ever, only using such portions of the work as remain fixed on my memory after reading. As a consequence, I am generally responsible for the dialogue throughout, as well as for all the modifications of the subject. There may be, I believe, quite as much real originality in a so-called “adaptation” as in a play avowedly original—e.g., Shakspeare’s plays are, almost without exception, adaptations, and adaptations, in many instances, of contemporary plays. In making this observation I am quite prepared to hear that I compare myself with Shakspeare; nothing, indeed, would astonish me in this generation of fault-finding. But I will go a little further, and express my opinion that, if “Hamlet” or “Othello” were in the market now, no manager would be bold enough to produce it, and no critic would praise it if produced. “Hamlet” is a very bad play, and “Othello” a very good one; but neither would have any chance against “cocksure” criticism. We dramatists are drowned with tittle-tattle and deluged with impertinencies; and if dramatic art does not thrive, it is because ex cathedrâ criticism flourishes. At the same time, I smile at the cheery optimism which contends that the great public is the best judge of works of art and never passes contemptuously by “a good thing.” The great public is, as it has ever been, a heterogeneous mob, without taste and without ideas. The great public rushed to see “Faust” at the Lyceum and “A Man’s Shadow” at the Haymarket; it set the fashion for the screaming bayadère in Sarah Bernhardt, and for the noisy corybante in Lottie Collins; it clamours for fashion and for sensation, whether at the theatres or at the circulating library. No art can thrive as art which appeals directly to the masses, or to any mixed audience. An example of this may be found in the fact that no manager who knows his business—i.e., the business of making money—will produce a play with a tragic ending. The great public does not want tragedy, does not want “ideas,” does not want any dealings with the great issues of life and death. For this, among other reasons, dramatic writing remains a “trade,” like carpentering. I sincerely wish it were otherwise. I hope, moreover, that things may change. But there is only one cant worse than contending that great work is demanded on the stage, and that is the cant which contends that good work is never neglected.
     Still, with all its drawbacks, dramatic work is not unpleasant; its manifold technicalities redeem it from nothingness, and it is something, after all, to come face to face with the great mass of public simplicity. There is this also to be said, perhaps: that the masterpieces of the world, whether in poetry or the drama, are those which appeal to mankind at large, as well as to the cultivated individual. No great and enduring work was ever written for quidnuncs. There are noble notes to which all human nature responds, and these may be heard just as surely at (say) the Adelphi as at the home of Molière. After twenty-five years of literature, proper and improper, I have found it a relief to try and amuse great grown-up children with anecdotes and nursery tales; and perhaps, when all is said and done, this is a more useful service than attempting to edify disappointed dramatists. Shakspeare condescended to it, at any rate. It is good to feel like Shakspeare!
     I had written the above, at your request, when my attention was attracted to the communications made to your columns by living Novelists, on the subject of the Stage. Frankly, I can imagine nothing more ludicrous than the lofty air of superiority assumed by these much discredited gentlemen in writing of their dramatic brethren. It is simply an example of the shopwalkers despising the men behind the counter! Has Mr. Archer, in approaching them with cynical respect, fooled them so utterly that they forget how much they also, the writers of fiction, are despised by the heads of literary haberdashery? I can well remember the time when Mr. Hardy was producing his best work, and when the critics, smitten dumb before George Eliot, had never a good word for Mr. Hardy. I can remember the time, not at all remote, when the same critics tore Mr. George Meredith tooth and nail, and when the Mr. Archers of the world, the flesh, and the devil had nothing but contempt for him. Experiences of this kind should make men humble and generous, not spiteful and unkind. The Stage and the Novel are two widely different branches of trade, and neither at the present day has much claim to serious consideration. The latter business must certainly be in a very bad way, however, when Mr. W. E. Norris burns incense at the shrine of the author of “The Wreckers”—that stupendous genius whom Mr. Archer, on easy terms of equality, addresses as “my dear Stevenson.” Even the Stage, the poor despised Drama, would not be very hard put to it to equal the flights of the “little masters” of our log-rolling Decadence. Playwriting does require some sense of form, while novel-writing requires none. The Novel is the most incoherent, shapeless, tumble-down, haphazard structure of literary amateurism. Any tiro may attempt it with a certain success, whereas no tiro can shape even a third-rate play. While prose fiction absorbs the folly and fashion of the hour, and dies of its inaptitude to assume any coherent and enduring form, the fine Play survives, in the library if not on the stage. Rail at the Drama as you please, it has been the speech of giants, to which the Novel is the cackle of dwarfs.
     Of the few great Novels which survive there is scarcely one which has any claim whatever to be a work of art at all. The finest, such as “Don Quixote,” or “Tom Jones,” or even “The Heart of Midlothian,” is twenty times too large in bulk for its ideas. Most of the very best works of fiction extant—for example, “David Copperfield,” the “Newcomes,” the “Cloister and the Hearth”—are splendid literary patchwork, a series of brilliant sketches, held together by a carelessly invented plot. What Novel, even the greatest, can be named in the same day with the masterpieces of the Greek dramatists, of Shakspeare and his contemporaries, of Molière and Racine, of Goethe and Schiller? There may be a thousand bad plays, but the type of the play remains the highest expression of human art, whereas the Novel has no type and is of its very nature inchoate, invertebrate, and chaotic. It may, as some of your correspondents suggest, be the literary vehicle of the future; in that case, I beg to say, the last word of Art is said, and the Deluge of Dismal Prose will engulf all that is fine in literature.
     But it is the fashion to throw stones at the dramatists, just as it has been the fashion to throw stones at the novelists; and now the novelists, glad to escape for the time being, try to curry favour with the little stone-throwing boys in our literary street. It is a mean business at the best, only diversified by the quarrels of the small boys among themselves. The novelists, or the shopwalkers, have the easiest life of it, as Mr. “Lucas Malet” very pertinently pointed out; why, then, should they pose as superior to their brethren? In a word, all this fuss about kinds of art, about Literature with a capital “L,” about the divorce between the Stage and Fiction (as if the two were not too consanguineous ever to go through the marriage ceremony!), is meant to edify only one person—the minor Critic, the officious Criticaster. Mr. Archer, good man, eager for the proprieties, would marry the Drama to the lopsided and anæmic Novel. It is time to remember the table of affinities, and to remind Mr. Archer that one cannot marry one’s grandmother!

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The Pall Mall Gazette (23 September, 1892 - Issue 8583)

THE PARENTAGE OF THE NOVEL.

To the EDITOR of the PALL MALL GAZETTE.

     SIR,—It seems to me that Mr. Buchanan’s allusion to a man marrying his own grandmother is a singularly unfortunate one. Not only in point of years is the drama the grandmother of the novel, and not the grandson, as Mr. Buchanan would persuade us to think, but, apart from this, it may be fairly considered to be a direct ancestor; and, what is more, the novel is not only its descendant, but perhaps its successor. Before the comparatively modern invention of printing, and the almost recent one of publishing, the dramatists held the field. Now the conditions are changed, and Mr. Buchanan’s attempts to cut off the novelist, so to say, with an adjective, savour a little of jealousy. Before calling the novel inchoate, invertebrate, anæmic, lopsided, or what not, Mr. Buchanan should remember and make allowance for its extreme youth. But it is grotesque, all the same, to see him round on the vulgar little boy who has thrown stones at him, and solemnly curse him with his prophecy of a “Deluge of Dismal Prose.”—I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
     27, Gt. George-street, S.W., Sept. 21                                    RANDALL DAVIES.

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The Pall Mall Gazette (30 September, 1892 - Issue 8589)

THE STORY AND THE PLAY.

To the EDITOR of the PALL MALL GAZETTE.

     SIR,—One of your correspondents objects to my description of the Novel as the “grandmother” of the Play, and suggests that the description might be more correct if the relationships were reversed. His objection, I think, is hasty, and scarcely to be sustained, unless he means to circumscribe the Novel to its life during later generations. In England and in every other country the Story, Narrative, or Novel, whether improvised in vernacular at the fireside or thrown into loose verse and doggerel, dates far back beyond any kind of drama. The earliest form of Narrative is poetical or quasi-poetical, as in the Vedas, the Eddas, Homer, and certain national Ballads. It is, with all its felicities, invariably diffuse and often somewhat nebulous. Not until a far later stage of human art does Man arrive at the highest of all forms, the Dramatic. The radical difference of method between the shapeless Novel and the well-formed Play may be seen at one glance if we compare the dramas of Shakspeare and his contemporaries with the works of fiction from which many of those dramas were adapted; or, to go still further back, the plays of Æschylus and Sophocles with the Iliad of Homer. There is nothing in the latest manifestations of the Novel to distinguish it in form from the very earliest efforts of human story telling; it is still shapeless, awkward, diffuse, and tautological, while it has lost all the qualities of youth, freshness, and simplicity. When the toothless gums now mumble about Realism and Pessimism and every other dismal “ism,” it is hard to conceive that the sound comes from the same mouth which sang to wondering peasants the interminable tale of Troy. The divine life has died for ever out of this skeleton, and only second childhood remains. Once living, fresh, beautiful, and young, the Story is now old, dropsical, and (as I said) shapeless. At its best it is only a revival of a very primitive kind of Art—a “grandmotherly” attempt to remember the narrative feats of its own childhood. Art ever walks most freely when most fettered. The loosest and clumsiest walk of Art is the Novel; its highest and noblest walk is the Play. And that is why the Play fails to be affected by the last new discovery of Disease and Dirt, through which the poor purblind Novel hopes to be saved.—I am, &c.,
     Sept. 27.                                                                                                          ROBERT BUCHANAN.
     P.S.—Being absent from town, I have only just seen the number of the Pall Mall Gazette containing the letter of your correspondent.
                                                 R. B.

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The Wandering Jew

Richard Le Gallienne’s review of Buchanan’s poem, The Wandering Jew, was printed in The Daily Chronicle on 11th. January, 1893 and sparked a debate in that paper which lasted until the end of the month. Buchanan contributed six letters which are available below:

“Is Christianity Played Out?” - The Wandering Jew Controversy.

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Dick Sheridan

The Era (26 August, 1893 - Issue 2866)

MR. BUCHANAN’S “DICK SHERIDAN.”

TO THE EDITOR OF THE ERA.

     Sir,—May I call the attention of English dramatic authors to the following facts:—
     Nearly eighteen months ago Mr Daniel Frohman, of the Lyceum Theatre, New York, read and accepted a comedy from my pen entitled Dick Sheridan. Before finally agreeing to produce it, he desired that Mr Edward Sothern, his leading man, should also read it, which Mr Sothern did, expressing thereupon, verbally and in writing, his unqualified approval. The agreement was then signed, and a small advance on royalties paid down in the customary manner. From that period, the earlier months of 1892, until a few weeks ago, I have been in frequent communication with Mr Frohman without receiving any intimation whatever that he was dissatisfied with the play. On the contrary, he wrote from time to time informing me that Mr Sothern was “studying the period” and “taking fencing lessons.” He also announced, both here and in America, that the play of Sheridan, from my pen, would open his present season. I was considerably surprised, therefore, when, some weeks since, I received a letter from him informing me that he did not think my play would be quite successful, and that he had accepted another by an American author on the same subject. He, however, suggested that he should play my first and last acts, and pay me 2 per cent. of the gross receipts for the use of the same.
     The play of Sheridan will shortly be produced in England at the Comedy Theatre, under the management of Mr Comyns Carr. It is in every respect original, save in so far as it follows certain real incidents of Sheridan’s life. I have Mr Daniel Frohman’s written statement to the effect that it was not until long after his announcement of my play (which he had undertaken to produce) that he received any manuscripts by American authors on the same subject. Sheridan; or, the Maid of Bath, by Mr Paul M. Potter, is now advertised for immediate production at the Lyceum Theatre, New York.
     The facts are very simple. An American manager having read and accepted a play on a particular subject, keeps it by him for eighteen months without any hint of dissatisfaction. His leading actor also reads the play and approves of it; its imminent production is announced in the public press, but at the eleventh hour, when it is too late for the English author to make other arrangements, the American manager announces his intention of altering his mind.
                                          I am, Sir, yours truly,
                                                                ROBERT BUCHANAN.
     London, Aug. 24th, 1893.

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The Era (23 September, 1893 - Issue 2870)

PAUL POTTER AND ROBERT BUCHANAN.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE ERA.

     Sir,—With the virulence which he mistakes for vigour, Mr Robert Buchanan has been abusing me because Mr Daniel Frohman  has preferred my play of Sheridan to his. I know nothing of the differences between Mr Buchanan and Mr Frohman. I know nothing of Mr Buchanan’s manuscript on the subject of Sheridan. Having served my apprenticeship in dramatic criticism, I have no such opinion of Mr Buchanan’s abilities that I should care to borrow his ideas. But in case he is imitating the tactics of the cuttlefish, which darkens the waters to conceal its depredations, I beg to give him notice that my play is protected by international copyright, and that I will prosecute him if he attempts to reproduce the scenes, dialogue, or “business” which I have invented.
                                                           Your obedient servant,
                                                                               PAUL M. POTTER.
     Lyceum Theatre, New York, Sept. 8th.

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The Era (7 October, 1893 - Issue 2872)

DANIEL FROHMAN & ROBERT BUCHANAN.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE ERA.

     Sir,—I am informed that Mr Robert Buchanan declares in the London Telegraph that I have “pirated” his play of Dick Sheridan. The facts are these:—Over a year ago Mr Buchanan sent me a manuscript on the subject of Dick Sheridan. Subsequently I saw him in London, and explained to him that many alterations would be required in his play to make it suitable to our audiences. He agreed that many changes were needed. His letters to me on the subject show his arrangement of his work in the play. I agreed that if the play was not produced I should pay him a forfeit. Later, in considering the manuscript, I found that the play required more than mere alterations for our purposes—it needed radical readjustment. Mr Buchanan forbade us in a letter from making any changes. There was nothing to do but to abide by Mr Buchanan’s instructions. I therefore rejected his play and paid the forfeit.
     But meanwhile a comedy entitled Sheridan; or, the Maid of Bath, written by Mr Paul M. Potter, and designed for Mr Richard Mansfield, had come into my possession. It was largely a fanciful work, introducing some of Sheridan’s originals, some of the scenes in his plays and much of his published wit. It was in every way unlike Mr Buchanan’s play; and yet it occurred to me that one incident in the latter work might strengthen the close of the former work. So I offered to buy this incident from Mr Buchanan. Mr Buchanan refused to sell it, and I proceeded to produce Mr Potter’s play precisely as it was originally written. It cost me considerably more than Mr Buchanan’s play, and I had nothing to gain by making the substitution, save that I now had a piece which has been proved to be good, instead of a piece which the London critics will soon, I understand, have an opportunity of testing.
          Your obedient servant,                           DANIEL FROHMAN.
     Lyceum Theatre, New York, Sept. 21st, 1893.

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The Charlatan

The Pall Mall Gazette (23 January, 1894 - Issue 8997)

THOUGHT TRANSFERENCE EXTRAORDINARY.

To the EDITOR of the PALL MALL GAZETTE.

     SIR,—A really extraordinary instance of “thought transference” has come to pass. Over two years ago I wrote a Theosophistic play, entitled, “An Adept,” which I submitted to Mr. Tree; it was not produced. To-day Mr. Buchanan produces a Theosophistic play entitled “The Charlatan,” at the Haymarket, which in plot bears a curious resemblance to my play, whilst some of the characters are almost identical. My charlatan was an Anglo-Parsee; he had a hypnotic gift, and established an influence over his host’s niece; there was a séance, followed by a next-morning confession, and the charlatan of my story, as in Mr. Buchanan’s, leaves a reformed man, to return another day to the lady he has deceived. It is all such an extraordinary instance of thought-transference that I shall be glad of any light that can be thrown upon it.—Your obedient servant,
     Station Hotel, Inverness, Jan. 21.                                  STUART C. CUMBERLAND.

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The Pall Mall Gazette (23 January, 1894 - Issue 8997)

“THE CHARLATAN.”

To the EDITOR of the PALL MALL GAZETTE.

     SIR,—My attention has been directed to a letter in your issue of this evening, in which Mr. Stuart Cumberland states that he submitted to Mr. Tree, over two years ago, a play very similar in plot to “The Charlatan,” now running at the Haymarket Theatre. I can truthfully say that Mr. Tree has never mentioned any such play to me, and that he first became acquainted with “The Charlatan” some six weeks before its production. The manuscript of my first three acts was in existence nearly two years ago, when it was read by me to Mr. George Alexander, of the St. James’s Theatre. Mr. Alexander no doubt remembers the fact, and can, if necessary, substantiate my statement. Of Mr. Cumberland’s play I, of course, know nothing.
—I am, &c.,
                   ROBERT BUCHANAN.
     Prince of Wales’s Club, Coventry-street, W., Jan. 23.

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To the EDITOR of the PALL MALL GAZETTE.

     SIR,—I notice in this evening’s issue of your paper a letter from Mr. Stuart C. Cumberland referring to the curious resemblance of his play, “An Adept,” to Mr. Buchanan’s “The Charlatan.” May I be allowed to add my cry to the list?
     On Tuesday, December 19, 1893, at St. George’s Hall, I produced a four-act play entitled “An Unpaid Debt,” in which I treated the subject of hypnotism, and in which exactly the same scene occurred—that of a woman being brought from one room to another by the power of hypnotism. I wrote my play three years ago, and it has been read and criticised by Mr. Kendal, Mr. F. H. Macklin, Mr. John Lart, and Miss Geneviève Ward, and is now in the hands of Mr. Willard in America. I merely mention these facts, as some of the dramatic critics have described Mr. Buchanan’s play as being strikingly original.—Yours truly,
     14, Mortimer-crescent, N.W., Jan. 23.                 CHARLES H. DICKINSON.

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The Moral Effect of the Drama

The Westminster Budget (29 June, 1894 - p.14)

THE MORAL EFFECT OF THE DRAMA.

A QUESTION of perennial interest—for its discussion began more than 2,000 years ago, and still continues—was raised afresh the other day by Mr. Hall Caine in a speech at the dinner of the Royal Theatrical Fund.

Mr. Hall Caine.

     Mr. Hall Caine’s contribution to the discussion, which has called forth the letters subjoined, was as follows:—

     As to the moral effect of the drama upon the world—a well-known Nonconformist preacher, who was an enemy of the stage, once said that he had noticed that the young people of his congregation who went most to the theatre and wept most at the imaginative woes of the afflicted heroine in melodrama were precisely those who were hardest to move to pity and sympathy when a case of actual distress came their way in real life. I can only say this (said Mr. Caine), it is exactly the opposite of my own experience. My experience has been that the tears that are shed in the theatre do not exhaust the fount of tears; that the exercise of the muscles of the soul which the drama requires is good for the growth of the soul; and that if you want to test the moral effects of the drama on the world at large you cannot do better than look at the people who come closest to it; and that it is impossible to find a class more tender of heart, more easily moved to pity, more ready to respond to the cry of trouble than actors and actresses themselves. At all events, I should like to see the point discussed by ministers of religion generally. It is the very pith and marrow of a question of great importance to the drama and to society.

The following letters show that any general agreement on the question is as far off as ever. One aspect of it, however, seems to have been overlooked. If the moral drama has the effect of exhausting the moral feelings, then does it not follow that the immoral drama must similarly exhaust the immoral feelings? And if that be so, “the playhouse,” even with its “objectionable features,” should, rightly understood, be the minister’s valuable ally.

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Mr. Robert Buchanan.

To the EDITOR of THE WESTMINSTER BUDGET.
     SIR,—The question asked by Mr. Hall Caine, and which you ask me to assist in answering, appears to me essentially trivial and purposeless, and worthy of serious attention only from the sort of people who interest themselves in conundrums and double acrostics. Who doubts for a moment that good literature and good drama tend to make men both better and happier, at least for the time being? But who can say how great or how little is the outcome of this good influence in actual conduct? Unfortunately, Art is like Religion, and appears to be more a luxury than a serious business, which is saying, in other words, that both Religion and Art are only small parts of life. Many strong and good men do very well without either, just as most wise men do very well without newspapers. The tendency of writers like Mr. Caine is to exaggerate the importance of their own vocation, and to assume that work done primarily for their own benefit and amusement is a department of practical philanthropy. The reductio ad absurdum comes when we are asked to leave the settlement of any artistic question to the “ministers of religion,” and when a novelist seriously quotes the platitudes of a “Nonconformist clergyman.” No true artist under the sun cares twopence what the ministers of religion think about him or his work. A man who strains at the gnat of the drama, and yet pretends to have swallowed the whole camel of theology, can have no opinion worth hearing on any really human subject. The drama exists because it amuses, not because it does good; and Mr. Hall Caine exists as an author for the same reason. If, in addition to amusement there comes a little edification, so much the better; but let it always be understood that the edification is secondary, not primary. There will soon be no Art at all, and less Drama, if authors, instead of sticking to their profession, which is to write books which will be read or plays which will be seen, delude themselves into the belief that they are social benefactors. Cant is excusable in the professors of Religion, since no religion yet invented has been able to thrive thoroughly without it. It is inexcusable in the professors of Literature, which is practically independent of both religion and ethics, though by privilege it embraces both.
                                                                                                                   ROBERT BUCHANAN.

[The other contributions, from the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes, Rev. Dr. Thain Davidson and Rev. F. B. Meyer, as well as the views of Herbert Spencer on the matter, can be read if you click the picture below.]

Publishers

The Leeds Mercury (1 September, 1894 - Issue 17600)

MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN ON
PUBLISHERS.

     The “Chronicle” publishes a letter from Mr. Robert Buchanan, who says—I have been frequently informed that publishers are entitled to large pecuniary gains because they risk their capital in a very precarious business. In my experience this is altogether untrue. As a rule, a publisher risks nothing. He gives the very lowest price possible for a certain marketable commodity, and he is utterly indifferent to its quality as long as it sells. The Society of Authors has done the State good service by issuing statistics of the bare-faced robberies daily and hourly practised by Barrabas and his kin, and though I personally decline to have my private transactions regulated by any society or Trades Union whatever, I am fully alive to the importance of the facts so issued. Publishers, like lawyers, are thieves within the shadow of the law. They toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon, in his glory, was not attired like one of them.

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James Read

[On the evening of Monday, 25th June, 1894, the body of Florence Dennis, aged 23, was discovered in a brook near the village of Prittlewell. She had died from a single bullet wound to the head. Miss Dennis was eight months pregnant and had been staying with her sister, Mrs. Ayriss, in Southend and on her sister’s evidence at the inquest, James Canham Read, a married man who had had a relationship with Miss Dennis, was arrested for the murder. As well as Read’s home in Stepney where he had a wife and several children (accounts varied from four to eight), he also rented another house in Mitcham, under the name Mr. Benson, where he was living with another woman, Miss Kempton, with their young child. In the course of the trial it was revealed that he had also had a relationship with Mrs. Ayriss and was probably the father of one of her children. Read was not a very sympathetic character but maintained throughout the trial that he was innocent of the crime. He was convicted on purely circumstantial evidence and was executed on 4th December, 1894.

Buchanan’s letter was published in the Daily Chronicle and was also copied in full in The Essex County Standard, West Suffolk Gazette and Eastern Counties’ Advertiser and The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post. I feel it should also be noted that Buchanan wrote the letter at the end of November, 1894 - the year of his bankruptcy and the month of his mother’s death.

The newspapers, both national and provincial, followed the story of James Read avidly, but for the sake of adding some background to the case I have just used the item from The Pall Mall Gazette and have placed the accounts of the trial and the execution from The Essex County Standard, West Suffolk Gazette and Eastern Counties’ Advertiser and the illustrated trial account from Reynolds’s Newspaper below. The final item in the account of Read’s execution, relating to his appeal to the Home Secretary, is particularly interesting.]

      The Essex County Standard, West Suffolk Gazette ...                                    Reynolds’s Newspaper
Read’s Trial: page 1                        page 2              Read’s execution                                   Read’s Trial
                    (17 November, 1894)                   (8 December, 1894 - p.7)                    (18 November, 1894)

The Pall Mall Gazette (16 November, 1894)

     There rests not a shadow of doubt upon the verdict which the jury found in the Southend murder case. Not one circumstantial link was missing in the chain connecting the crime with the convict Read. The defence was wild and imaginary; its theory was extravagant and unsupported by a single fact of evidence, and its coincidences were too remarkable to influence judge or jury for a moment. Beyond question James Read murdered Florence Dennis in the most horrible circumstances and in the coldest blood. His reasons for the act were obvious, the outcome of an extremely vicious, cruel life. His career was an infamous career of seduction. He added victim to victim without scruple, and, hardened in the end by his own successful villainies, conceived the idea of ridding himself of the woman who had become a burden to him, in order the better to satisfy his evil passion for another. Rarely is so squalid a case discovered in our courts. To be guilty of such infamy a man must lack even the first elements of humanity. When the girl’s condition claimed his remorseful pity and his aid he could think of nothing better than a bloody butchery. If there was ever a criminal worthy of the rope it is James Canham Read.

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The Essex County Standard, West Suffolk Gazette ... (1 December, 1894 - p.3)

MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN INTERCEDES
FOR THE CONVICT.

“ANOTHER VICTIM WHOSE GUILT HAS NOT
BEEN PROVED.”

     Mr. Robert Buchanan, the well known poet and writer, has addressed the following letter to the Press. dated Nov. 28:—I have waited silently from day to day in the hope that some more authoritative voice than mine might be raised in protest against the judicial murder which will take place, unless the royal prerogative is exercised, on Tuesday next. To my surprise and sorrow, the leading newspapers are still silent concerning the sentence of death pronounced on James Canham Read, the reputed murderer of Florence Dennis. I say the “reputed” murderer, because in my opinion, and in that of many thinking men, the Crown failed utterly to establish its case against the prisoner. Every one who has followed the case for himself, or who has read the admirable letter of “An ex-Chief of Police” in a contemporary, must admit that the chain of so-called circumstantial evidence was imperfect in many of its links. If the life of a human being is to be taken on such evidence as that, no English citizen is safe, and the hideous and barbaric system of judicial murder, which is already the despair of those who work for human civilization, will have secured for itself another victim whose guilt has not been proved.

IMMORALITY NOT A CAPITAL OFFENCE.

     In such a case as the present, in every case which involves the exaction of the extreme penalty, it is infinitely better that a guilty man should escape scot-free than that an innocent man should die upon the gallows. I am quite aware that the popular feeling, at least in London, runs strongly against Read, on the score that he is a man of immoral life; but until we execute men for being immoral (as in God’s good time we may yet do if English Calvinism obtrudes on legislation at its present rate) it is well to reflect that a man of immoral life is not of necessity a murderer, or a man capable of murder. Much of the animus against the condemned man, however, is based upon the assumption that he betrayed and deserted Florence Dennis, even if he did not take her life; yet beyond the statements of the perjured witness, Mrs. Ayriss, there is no proof, whatever, that he was in the company of the murdered girl on one solitary occasion during the eighteen months which followed their first acquaintance, and ended in her death. The Crown was utterly unable to prove a single meeting during that period, and in the solitary written communication between them, Florence Dennis addressed her supposed lover as “Dear sir,” surely a not very probable kind of address from a seduced girl to her betrayer.

“ARGUING IN A CIRCLE.”

     At a first glance, Read’s own failure to account for his time on the day of the murder seems to furnish a certain negative proof against him. It is urged on his behalf that he cannot and will not do so because the so doing would involve the honour, perhaps the life, of another woman. Would a man like Read, it is asked with derision, be so chivalric? But here, again, those who clamour for Read’s life are arguing in a circle, for their chief argument to prove that Read is phenomenally immoral is based upon the assumption that he seduced Florence Dennis, an assumption of which, as I have pointed out, there is no legal proof whatever. Here, as everywhere, the Crown failed to prove his guilt.

“ULTRA-PURITANS CRYING FOR BLOOD.”

     It is fortunate perhaps for humanity that we possess now, at the head of the Home Office, a Minister who, unlike his immediate predecessor, is not afraid to temper justice with mercy, and who is not likely to be carried away by the fevered and prejudiced clamour of ultra-Puritans who cry for blood. If James Canham Read is executed on Tuesday next, he will have been sacrificed to the Mænads of English morality, not to the stern spirit of Justice which cries “a life for a life.” I repeat again, and I refer to the whole case again for my corroboration, that this man’s guilt has not been proved.

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Note the funny colour - this is because this bit treads into the realm of wild speculation and is solely due to my fondness for American TV crime shows. When looking in the online newspaper archives I accidentally came across another ‘Southend Murder’, which occurred almost exactly a year before the Read case. On Saturday 20th May, 1893, Emma Hunt (aged 38) was found in a brook near the village of Rochford (which lies two and a half miles north of Prittlewell), with her throat cut. The youth who found the body, Alfred Hazell, was later arrested, but the case never came to court, the charges were dropped and the crime remained unsolved.

I found it odd that none of the newspaper accounts of the Read case mentioned this earlier murder and I do think Read’s Q.C. missed a trick by not referring to it in his address to the jury, if only to sow some seeds of doubt in their minds. I’m not suggesting that Read was innocent, or that Jack the Ripper had moved to Southend, I just thought it strange that no one mentioned the similarities with the earlier crime. If your curiosity has been piqued the picture below will take you to a report of the murder from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (4 June, 1893).

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Oscar Wilde

Extracts from the letters Buchanan wrote to The Star in April 1895, in support of Oscar Wilde are available here.

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Letters to the Press - continued

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