Edwin Pugh
Edwin William Pugh (1874 - 5 February 1930) was an English writer. He published 33 books, primarily novels and short story collections, and focused on working-class "cockney school" storylines.
The Modernist Journals Project finds that "Pugh's fiction largely goes unread today, and those critics who have read him generally accuse him of sentimentality and melodrama."[1] He also wrote literary criticism praising the works of Charles Dickens.[2]
Life
After positive reviews of his first two books, A Street in Suburbia (1895) (a collection of short stories, published when he was 21 years old)[3] and The Man of Straw (1896), Pugh left his job as a clerk to write full-time.[1] After a few years of good fortune, however, Pugh's working class output lost favor, and he struggled with poverty for the rest of his life.[4] He died in London on 5 February 1930.[5]
Bibliography
Works published by Pugh include:[6]
- A Street In Suburbia (1895)
- The Man of Straw (1896)
- Tony Drum: a Cockney Boy (1898)
- King Circumstance (1898)
- The Rogue's Paradise: An Extravaganza (1898) (with Charles Gleig)
- Mother-sister (1900)
- The Heritage (1901) (with G. Burchett)
- The Stumbling-Block (1903)
- The Fruit of the Vine (1904)
- The Purple Head (1905)
- The Spoilers (1906)
- The Shuttlecock (1907)
- The Broken Honeymoon (1908)
- Charles Dickens: The Apostle of the People (1908)
- The Enchantress (1908)
- Peter Vandy: a biography in outline (1909)
- The Mockingbird (1910)
- The Charles Dickens Originals (1912)
- The City of the World: A Book About London and the Londoners (1912)
- Harry the Cockney (1912)
- The Proof of the Pudding (1913)
- Punch and Judy (1914)
- The Cockney at Home: Stories and Studies of London Life and Character (1914)
- The Phantom Peer: An Extravaganza (1914)
- The Quick and The Dead: A Tragedy of Temperaments (1914)
- A Book of Laughter (1916)
- Slings and Arrows: A Book of Essays (1916)
- The Eyes of a Child (1917)
- The Great Unborn: A Dream of To-morrow (1918)
- The Way of the Wicked (1921)
- The Secret Years: Further Adventures of Tobias Morgan (1923)
- The World Is My Oyster (1924)
- Empty Vessels (1926)
See also
- Boll, Theophilus Ernest Martin. The works of Edwin Pugh (1874-1930): a chapter in the novel of humble London life (1934)
- Brome, Vincent. Four Realist Novelists : Arthur Morrison, Edwin Pugh, Richard Whiteing, William Pett Ridge (1965)
References
- Edwin William Pugh (1874-1930), Modernist Journals Project (Retrieved 8 August 2012)
- Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction, p. 514 (1989)
- Advertising for A Street in Suburbia (1897)
- Cross, Nigel. The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street, p. 235-37 (1985)
- (6 February 1930). Edwin Pugh, Novelist, Dies in London at 56: Author of Many Volumes Worked in a City Office Before He Took Up Writing, The New York Times
- The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Vol. 4 (1900-1950), p. 718 (1972)
External links
- The Man of Straw (1896) (Google books full text online)
- King Circumstance (1898) (Google books full text online)