 |
| Anthony Blond Ltd UK, 1967 |
It wasn't the girl's fault: she had been a good-natured, unpretentious little Cockney with a warm heart. It was the fault of the Cabinet Minister, the RA, and the man of letters, of their wives and daughters, and of a press that pandered to an idolatry which it privately condemned: it was the fault, in fine, of the age in which she lived.
The Novel: The Position of Peggy Harper is an Edwardian novel set in the shabby genteel world of England's theatrical boarding houses and struggling provincial repertory companies. Its hero, Christopher Tatham, is an aspiring playwright who achieves a minor success with a tawdry little potboiler (from which he earns almost nothing) but continues to dream of writing a serious modern drama in the style of Shaw or Ibsen. Things look grim for Tatham until he meets the charming and shamelessly self-promoting Peggy Harper –– a pretty young actress of limited ability who will clearly stop at nothing to win the fame she's convinced she is one day 'destined' to find. Tatham quickly finds himself engaged to Peggy, only to discover as the day chosen for their nuptials approaches that he doesn't really love her and probably never has.
What makes the book unusual for its time is the way Merrick portrays the seedier side of the Edwardian theatrical world –– a world populated by hack writers, drunken actors, pushy stage mothers, unscrupulous managers and penny-pinching landladies –– without making any attempt to glamourize or romanticize it. This is a world of aspiration and failure, of living in uncomfortable 'digs' where you're forced by lack of money to toast your engagement in unpaid-for ginger beer rather than champagne, of waiting for that ever-elusive 'big break' you probably won't be lucky enough to get.
Peggy is a very modern character in the sense that she ruthlessly puts her career first and allows nothing to distract her from pursuing it, taking full advantage of every opportunity to foist her extremely limited talent on an unsophisticated, easily satisfied playgoing public reluctant to look beyond her most obvious physical attributes for any hint of depth or true dramatic ability. Peggy is alluring and appealing but she's also completely vain and empty, so of course she succeeds beyond her wildest expectations, eventually becoming a star of the theatre and the fiancee of a peer while Tatham, as poor and unsuccessful as ever, finds consolation for the continuing frustration of his artistic ambitions in the arms of her more down-to-earth room-mate.
 |
LEONARD MERRICK, c 1920
|
The Writer: Leonard Merrick was born Leonard Miller in Belsize Park, London on 21 February 1864 to wealthy Jewish parents. He was raised in luxury and educated at Brighton College, after which he expected to go to Germany to read law at Heidelberg University. However, the sudden collapse of his father's business meant that this plan had to be abandoned, forcing him to make his own way in life as best he could from that point onward.
At the age of eighteen he travelled to South Africa with his now bankrupt parents, where he worked as a supervisor in the diamond fields and for a time as a clerk in a local courthouse before almost dying of typhus –– a brush with death that almost certainly hastened his return to England. Stage-struck from an early age, he talked his way into a position in a provincial repertory company (living and acting in the same down-at-heel environment in which so many, but not all, of his novels are set) before abandoning the stage in 1884 to try his luck as a novelist. It was also around this time that he changed his surname by deed poll from 'Miller' to 'Merrick' –– the name he had always been known by as an actor.
His first novel Mr Bazalgette's Legacy was published in 1888 and was not successful. Its poor sales forced Merrick to return to the stage and, after borrowing money from a friend, he sailed for New York, where roles for genteel Englishmen proved as difficult to come by as they had been in London. To keep himself occupied between auditions, he wrote a second novel called Violet Moses for which he was offered $150 by one North American publisher and nothing at all by several others. Rejecting the $150 even though he was sick and could barely scrape together the money required to pay his passage home, he returned to England where Violet Moses was finally accepted and published, again to little acclaim, in 1891. A third novel The Man Who Was Good followed in 1892 and sold well enough (but not well enough to permanently ease his straitened financial circumstances) to encourage him to continue writing.
 |
| LEONARD MERRICK, c 1930 |
In 1894 Merrick married Hope Butler-Wilkins (author of a 1905 novel titled When A Girl's Engaged), fathering a daughter named Lesley who would go on to edit a posthumous 1950 collection of his short fiction titled The Leonard Merrick Omnibus. Shortly after Lesley's birth the family relocated to Paris –– a city that served as the setting for so much of what Merrick wrote about poets, boulevardiers and others striving to live la vie artistique in its cafés and brasseries. His friend, the Irish-born/US based author and journalist Frank Harris, described him during his Paris period as 'a small, handsome man, slight but wiry and healthy, with melancholy, dark, brooding eyes, long straight nose, and large black moustache.'
Although he apparently possessed no gift for self-promotion –– a skill every bit as vital to literary success in Victorian and Edwardian times as it is today –– Merrick nevertheless went on to publish nine more novels, five plays and nine volumes of short stories between 1896 and 1930, many of which were reissued in a 1918 Deluxe Edition featuring specially commissioned introductions (a great honour at the time) penned by famous fellow authors of the day including HG Wells, Arthur Pinero, GK Chesterton and William Dean Howells. Despite being described as a 'writer's writer' by JM Barrie (author of Peter Pan, as portrayed by Johnny Depp in the 2004 film Finding Neverland), Merrick's work, which cleverly combined subtly rendered satire with unsentimental honesty, never attained the popularity it deserved during his lifetime. His wife died in 1917 and Merrick himself died virtually penniless in a London nursing home on 7 August 1939. He was one of George Orwell's favourite novelists and one of the first to write realistically about showbusiness and its associated pitfalls.
His best novels are generally considered to be Cynthia (1896), The Quaint Companions (1903), Conrad in Quest of his Youth (1903) and The Position of Peggy Harper (1911), although any of his early work (ie. anything he published between 1896 and roughly 1915) is worth reading if you can find it. This may not be as difficult as it sounds because much of it is available second-hand and is now beginning to be republished online.
Use the link below to read a free copy of The Position of Peggy Harper in digital format.
The work of LEONARD MERRICK is also being sold in 'new' paperback editions published by Indian print-on-demand companies like BiblioBazaar and the Nabu Press. Be warned, however, that these are often no more than poor quality digital scans of the Hodder and Stoughton 'Collected Edition' which, at prices ranging from US$25–$35, are frankly not worth the money.
A biography by WILLIAM BAKER and JEANETTE ROBERTS SHUMAKER titled Leonard Merrick: A Forgotten Novelist's Novelist was published by the Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press in 2009.
You might also enjoy:
The Actor-Manager (1898) by LEONARD MERRICK
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) by GEORGE MEREDITH
Last updated 25 September 2022
