Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/8



[.—This novel is the first of a series which Francis Adams intended, had he lived, to complete. In a letter, dated March 23rd, 1893, he says: 'It was my modest little scheme to draw types of all the social life of the day. "A Child of the Age," is the first of a series of novels and tales. Oh, I was going to do as big as Balzac that way! Fancy what a pretty scheme for a jackanapes of eighteen, and to have sweated at it all these years! I finished the last but one of the novels (chronologically) on my way back from Australia [1890]. There are three novels to do yet and about eight short tales.' He also intended to work through the same cycle of characters in his Verse. The early chapters of the 'Poetical Works' correspond to and illustrate this novel.

In 1879, at the of seventeen, Adams left Shrewsbury School—the Glastonbury of this novel—and spent the next two years chiefly in Paris. In 1880 he wrote the first draft of the book, and during the two years following, latterly in London and Ventnor, he recast and corrected his work. Under the title 'Leicester, an Autobiography' it was published in 1884, while the author was in Australia. Some time after, on reading his novel critically as the work of another writer, he was surprised to find how truly he had depicted experiences which at the time of writing he had still to undergo. In another letter [1885] he says: 'I see its faults clearly, but entirely fail to reproduce its excellences. It is a remarkable book and it came to me to write it in a quite spontaneous and inspired way.' He said on another occasion: 'It was an honest attempt to give a candid revelation, but it was crude and morbid and not quite candid. Beware,' he adds, 'of taking-my characters for myself. I am terribly objective; even when I wrote "Leicester," I wrote of one entirely unlike myself.'

The book is now published in its final form as revised and to a great extent rewritten by its author a year or two before his death.]