The Man and the Moment

Autumn 1894: A Writer Under Attack

By the autumn of 1894, Samuel Rutherford Crockett was among the most talked-about writers in Britain. The Stickit Minister (1893) had made his name overnight. The Raiders, The Lilac Sunbonnet, The PlayActress, and Mad Sir Uchtred of the Hills were all before the public. He was giving lectures on 'Scottish National Humour' and being welcomed in literary London as the most exciting new voice in Scottish fiction.

The atmosphere around that success was febrile. Robert Louis Stevenson was still alive  (although he would die in December) and Crockett’s rapid rise had already attracted a particular kind of attention. Comparisons were made. Resentments formed.

The rumblings had begun earlier in 1894. Accusations of plagiarism had already circulated in connection with The Raiders, Mad Sir Uchtred and The Lilac Sunbonnet — not yet in The Academy, but through other channels, among critics who knew one another and shared a common view of how Scottish fiction ought to look.

One figure in that network was W.E. Henley — poet, editor, and fierce partisan of a particular vision of Stevenson’s literary legacy. In March 1894, Henley had published a hostile review of The Raiders. In a private letter he was candid about his motives: the review was a deliberate broadside aimed not truly at Crockett but at Stevenson himself, with whom Henley had recently and bitterly fallen out. The attack on Crockett was personal before it was literary.

By the time William Wallace’s review appeared in The Academy on 3 November, the ground had been carefully prepared. The cast assembled for this exhibition is: Wallace (Glasgow journalist, Burns scholar, Academy reviewer); Andrew Lang (scholar and man of letters, who will intervene with decisive authority); W. Robertson Nicoll (editor of The Bookman, whose prior publication will prove crucial); and the anonymous “X.” — whose identity was never proven in print but whose shadow falls across the whole sequence.