Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/403

  weight. It was certainly a marvellous structure, compact with ingenious contrivances, and something like £20,000 was expended on its construction. It consisted of a large central plane with two curved side frames. Its engines and boilers weighed respectively 600 lb. and 1,200 lb., including casing, feed-water heater, dome, and uptake. For a horse power of 300, the total weight of the motive agency, 6 lb. per h.p., was not unreasonable, but, unfortunately, feed-water for an hour's trip added 6,000 lb. to the load.

Maxim had now permanently taken up his residence in England at West Norwood. He became naturalized and, in 1901, was knighted. After a strenuous career he died at Streatham 24 November 1916. Endowed with a powerful frame and strong constitution, he had laboured with untiring energy throughout a long life. His versatility, ingenuity, and skill were amazing. He loved to describe himself as a ‘chronic inventor’. In addition to his gun he invented a smokeless powder, maximite, the predecessor of cordite; and, among innumerable patents, at one time or another produced such diverse contrivances as a mouse-trap, an inhaler for bronchitis, a merry-go-round, an automatic sprinkler, a feed-water heater, and a process for obtaining cheap phosphoric anhydride.

Maxim was married twice: first, to Louisa Jane Budden, by whom he had one son and two daughters; secondly, in 1881 to Sarah, daughter of Charles Haynes, of Boston, Massachusetts, who survived him without issue.

 MAXWELL, MARY ELIZABETH (1887–1915), better known as Miss Mary ELIzABETH BRADDON, novelist, the youngest daughter of Henry Braddon, solicitor and author of several works on sporting subjects, a member of an old Cornish family, of Skisdon Lodge, St. Kew, Cornwall, by his wife, Fanny, daughter of J. White, of county Cavan, was born in London 4 October 1837. Sir Edward Nicholas Coventry Braddon [q.v.], premier of Tasmania, was her brother, and John Thadeus Delane [q.v.], for thirty-six years editor of The Times, her cousin on the mother's side. Mary Braddon received a good private education and when very young showed an eagerness to write. About 1856, when she was living near Beverley in Yorkshire, a local printer offered her ten pounds for a serial story that should combine ‘the humour of Dickens with the dramatic quality of G. W. M. Reynolds’. The girl of nineteen produced a lurid story, Three Times Dead, or The Secret of the Heath, which was prepared for publication in penny numbers illustrated with violent woodcuts. But the printer went bankrupt and, although the whole story was set up in type, it is doubtful whether publication was ever completed. Later on the story was re-written, entitled The Trail of the Serpent, and in 1861 re-issued.

In 1861 Mary Braddon published Garibaldi, and Other Poems, and a short novel, The Lady Lisle. A book of stories appeared in 1862, and in the same year, in response to an eleventh hour request from John Maxwell, a publisher who was preparing to launch a periodical named Robin Goodfellow, she wrote Lady Audley's Secret. Robin Goodfellow, after struggling through twelve numbers, died. Lady Audley was at the last moment transferred to The Sixpenny Magazine, where it attracted the attention of Lionel Brough [q.v.], then acting as literary adviser to the speculative publishing firm of Tinsley Brothers. Late in 1862 it appeared as a three-volume novel and had a success both immediate and irresistible. From 1862 to the present day Lady Audley's Secret has not ceased to sell. In various forms nearly a million copies must have gone into circulation; it has been translated into every civilized tongue, several times piratically dramatized, and twice filmed.

It is a misfortune to any author's reputation that an early book should have a popularity so overwhelming as to obscure later and better work. Lady Audley's Secret, for all its daring imagination and although it is a remarkable production for a young woman of no experience, cannot be reckoned a good novel. Yet Miss Braddon is known primarily as the author of this book, and her reputation has paid the penalty. Her work has been dismissed as without proportion, thought, or character-analysis, by critics who based their judgement solely on this one preposterously successful melodrama.

Ultimate reputation apart, however, Miss Braddon was well served by Lady Audley's Secret. The book which made her publisher's fortune (out of the proceeds William Tinsley built himself a villa at Barnes and called it Audley Lodge) also made her own, and she became before long a wealthy woman. Her continued success was due partly to devoted industry, but mainly to her tireless  377