Edwin Pugh

Portrait of 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

Pugh was born at 47, Foley Street, Marylebone, London, the second of four children of David Walter Pugh (1843-1887), a theatrical property maker and player with the Covent Garden orchestra.[3] 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)[4] 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.[5] He died in London on 5 February 1930.[6]

Bibliography

Works published by Pugh include:[7]

  • 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

References

  1. ^ a b Edwin William Pugh (1874-1930), Modernist Journals Project (Retrieved 8 August 2012)
  2. ^ Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction, p. 514 (1989)
  3. ^ Atkinson, Damian (2004). "Pugh, Edwin William (1874–1930), novelist, short-story writer, and critic". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/56887. ISBN 978-0-19-861412-8. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  4. ^ Advertising for A Street in Suburbia (1897)
  5. ^ Cross, Nigel. The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street, p. 235-37 (1985)
  6. ^ (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
  7. ^ The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Vol. 4 (1900-1950), p. 718 (1972)