Page:The Story of the House of Cassell (book).djvu/56

 century and to realize that, in the eyes of the people who most strongly approved of Cassell's formally educational work, fiction was dangerous stuff for the "lower classes." Cassell, to his great credit, broke clear from this point of view. Arguing from universal experience the immortal need of romance, he saw that if they could not get decent fiction the awakening masses would buy bad fiction in a market always well supplied. He therefore made serial novels a leading feature of his new paper, and paid their authors well. One of the prizes he offered for stories, a sum of £250, produced an interesting competition, in which Lord Brougham, Davenport Hill, and Cassell himself were the adjudicators. It was won by Francis H. Keppell with a story called "Contrast, or the Oak and the Bramble." A leading "serialist" of that day was John Frederick Smith. He wrote much for the Illustrated Family Paper. One of his stories may be recalled because of its sequel. During the gloomy time of the Lancashire cotton famine he wrote for Cassell "The Warp and the Weft," a tale of Lancashire mill hands which reproduced the agony of the North so vividly that a relief fund sprang out of it, and the working men and women who read the Illustrated Family Paper contributed out of their poverty £1,900 to relieve the misery of the cotton operatives.

Here is a picture of John Cassell at this strenuous point in his life by Thomas Frost, on the occasion of the visit already mentioned. He found Cassell at La Belle Sauvage "in a sparsely furnished room on the first floor. A tall, sallow-complexioned man, with straight black hair and a pleasant expression of countenance. When I entered he was sitting at a table strewn with letters and papers, smoking as he read, but he rose on my entrance, and, as there was only one chair in the room, leaned against the table, still smoking. He was generally to be found there from eleven to four, smoking a cigar, with which indulgence he solaced himself for his abstinence from wine and beer."