Arthur St John Adcock

File:St John Adcock Benington.jpg

St. John Adcock (1920s photograph by Walter Benington)

Template:Use dmy dates Template:Use British English Arthur St John Adcock (17 January 1864 in London – 9 June 1930 in Richmond) was an English novelist and poet, known as A. St John Adcock or St John Adcock. He is remembered for his discovery of the then-unknown poet W. H. Davies. His daughters, Marion St John Webb and Almey St John Adcock, were also writers.

Biography

Arthur St John Adcock was born on 17 January 1864 in London. He was a Fleet Street journalist for half a century, as an assiduous freelance writer.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He worked initially as a law office clerk, becoming a full-time writer in 1893. Adcock built up a literary career by unrelenting efforts in circulating his manuscripts, initially also working part-time as an assistant editor on a trade journal.<ref name="Penguin">Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

He was a founder member in 1901 of Paul Henry's literary and performing club, with Robert Lynd, Frank Rutter and others.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The acting editor of The Bookman from 1908, Adcock, according to A. E. Waite who knew him, did all the work of the Bookman, nominally under its founder William Robertson Nicoll.<ref>Arthur Edward Waite, Shadows of Life and Thought: A Retrospective Review in the Form of Memoirs (1992 edition, pp. 82–83.</ref> In 1923, he became its official editor.<ref name="Penguin"/>

As an influential critic, Adcock has been classed with conservatives such as Hilaire Belloc, Edmund Gosse, Henry Newbolt, E. B. Osborn and Arthur Waugh.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Adcock was a friend of the weird fiction writer William Hope Hodgson and wrote an introduction to Hodgson's posthumously published book, The Calling of the Sea.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Adcock married Marion Taylor in 1887, and they settled in Hampstead.<ref name="KempMitchell2002"/> Their daughters Marion St John Webb (1888–1930)<ref>Who was Who 1929–1940, 1941</ref> and Almey St John Adcock (1894–1986),<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> became writers.

He died on 9 June 1930 in Richmond. Adcock's papers are held by the Bodleian Library.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Works

Adcock is considered one of the "Cockney school novelists" (not the earlier Cockney School poets), a group influenced by Charles Dickens and including also Henry Nevinson, Edwin Pugh, and William Pett Ridge.<ref>Template:Cite ODNB</ref> East End Idylls (1897), about the London slums, began an early trilogy, and had an introduction by the Christian Socialist James Granville Adderley, a friend. It drew on Arthur Morrison.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="KempMitchell2002">Template:Cite book</ref>

Adcock published:

• An unfinished martyrdom and other stories (1894)
• Beyond Atonement (1896)
• East End Idylls (1897)
• The Consecration of Hetty Fleet (1898)
• In The Image of God (1898)
• In The Wake of the War (1900)
• Songs of the War (1900)
• The Luck of Private Foster: A Romance of Love and War (1900)
• From a London Garden (1903)
• More Than Money (1903)
• In Fear of Man (1904)
• London Etchings (1904)
• Admissions And Asides (1905)
• Love in London (1906)
• London From The Top of A 'Bus (1906)
• The Shadow Show (1907)
• The World that Never Was. A London Fantasy (1908)
• Billicks (1909)
• Two to Nowhere (1911)
• A Man with a Past (1911)
• Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London (1912)
• The Booklover's London (1913)
• Modern Grub Street and other essays (1913)
• In the Firing Line (1914) as editor, a war reportage anthology, part of the Daily Telegraph War Books series<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• Seeing it through. How Britain answered the call (1915)
• Australasia Triumphant! With the Australians and New Zealanders in the Great War on Land And Sea (1916)
• Songs of The World War (1916)
• For Remembrance. Soldier Poets who have Fallen in the War. With nineteen portraits (1918)
• The ANZAC Pilgrim's Progress: Ballads of Australia's Army (1918) Lance-Corporal Cobber, editor
• Tod MacMammon Sees His Soul (1920)
• Exit Homo (1921)
• The Divine Tragedy (1922)
• Gods of Modern Grub Street: Impressions of Contemporary Authors (1923) on Jeffery Farnol, W. B. Maxwell, W. W. Jacobs et al.
• With the gilt off (1923)
• Robert Louis Stevenson: His Work and His Personality (1924) editor
• The Bookman Treasury of Living Poets [1925) editor, and later editions
• A Book of Bohemians (1925)
• The Prince of Wales' African Book (1926)
• City Songs (1926) editor, poetry anthology
• Wonderful London (1926/7) editor, three volumes; a shorter version (1935) was reissued in one volume, with preface by Almey St John Adcock, his daughter.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• The Glory that was Grub Street – Impressions of Contemporary Authors (1928)
• Collected Poems of St. John Adcock (Hodder and Stoughton, 1929)
• London Memories (1931)
• Hyde Park

Adcock was the last editor of The Odd Volume (1917), an annual that folded during World War I.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

External links

• Template:Gutenberg author
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• Papers of (Arthur) St. John Adcock in the Special Collections at Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
• Portraits of St. John Adcock in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
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