[Illustration: (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY MESSRS. ELLIOTT AND FRY.)]

My First Book.

BY F. W. ROBINSON.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY GEO. HUTCHINSON.

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[Illustration]

[Illustration: AT TWENTY.]

It is a far cry back to 1853, when dreams of writing a book had almost
reached the boundary line of "probable events." I was then a pale,
long-haired, consumptive-looking youth, who had been successful in prize
poems--for there were prize competitions even in those far-off days--and
in acrostics, and in the acceptance of one or two short stories, which
had been actually published in a magazine that did not pay for
contributions (it was edited by a clergyman of the Church of England,
too, and the chaplain to a real Duke), and which magazine has gone the
way of many magazines, and is now as extinct as the Dodo. It was in the
year 1853, or a month or two earlier, that I wrote my first
novel--which, upon a moderate computation, I think, would make four or
five good-sized library volumes, but I have never attempted to "scale"
the manuscript. It is in my possession still, although I have not seen
it for many weary years. It is buried with a heap more rubbish in a
respectable old oak chest, the key of which is even lost to me. And yet
that MS. was the turning-point of my small literary career. And it is
the history of that manuscript which leads up to the publication of my
first novel; my first step, though I did not know it, and hence it is
part and parcel of the history of my first book--a link in the chain.

[Illustration: ELMORE HOUSE.]

When that manuscript was completed, it was read aloud, night after
night, to an admiring audience of family members, and pronounced as fit
for publication as anything of Dickens or Thackeray or Bulwer, who were
then in the full swing of their mighty capacities. Alas! I was a better
judge than my partial and amiable critics. I had very grave
doubts--"qualms," I think they are called--and I had read that it was
uphill work to get a book published, and swagger through the world as a
real live being who had actually written a novel. There was a faint
hope, that was all; and so, with my MS. under my arm, I strolled into
the palatial premises of Messrs. Hurst and Blackett ("successors to
Henry Colburn" they proudly designated themselves at that period), laid
my heavy parcel on the counter, and waited, with fear and trembling, for
someone to emerge from the galleries of books and r