High Spirits: James Payn, Best of the Journalists

Abstract

James Payn is one of the strangest cases of neglected Victorian minor authors I have come across.¹ Virtually unknown now, he was a hundred years ago ‘the most popular man of letters of his time’.² Today his fame rests largely on one quip in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations declaring the elementary law of breakfast that toast always falls buttered side down. It is the kind of epitaph he would have relished, for he cherished few illusions about his achievements. Yet fate has not been entirely kind to a man who came close to succeeding Trollope in popular favour, who produced, among nearly 160 volumes, forty-six novels, eight collections of short stories, besides seventeen books of essays, and at least four memoirs full of wit and vitality.³ Payn is the most appropriate writer to end this study, for he worked his way to celebrity in the 1860s, that crucial decade of increased commercial forces in publishing, and occupied that ambiguous territory between literature and hackwork. He is the most admirable example I can find of the talented writer who made the best of his abilities within the new demands of the system — dedicated, industrious, and professional to his fingertips — and to the end of his career commanded the respect of his contemporaries.

When he writes a novel, Payn takes a lot of trouble; and when novel-readers want some books, they take a lot of Payn’s.

Punch (10 December 1881)