IN 1924, LESLIE CHAUNDY, who compiled the first bibliography of Graham’s writings, wrote that Graham had told him that his works were written largely for his own amusement, since he was not a professional writer, and Graham admitted to Garnett, ‘I am an essayist and an impressionist, and secondly a storyteller but have the story telling faculty very weakly. Therefore if you cut out my reflections, nothing remains.’ He also eschewed what he termed ‘invention’, stating:

Thus, no longer able to write overtly polemical pieces, however unconventional, for his new, more conservative readership, and lacking, or unwilling to employ, a storytelling talent, he was now obliged to find another form. Fortuitously, he had already tentatively prototyped the hybrid ‘sketch’ form in his foreign reports for the Labour Elector and the People’s Press, and this, by necessity, now became his medium. These occasional contributions to the Saturday Review and other periodicals were known as ‘middles’, vivid descriptions of locations that he had experienced at first hand, knew about, or was interested in, in South America, Morocco, and later, Scotland, which eventually comprised a unique literary legacy. Chris GoGwilt wrote:

GoGwilt believed that these more literary offerings were in fact heavily disguised critiques of the advance of so-called civilisation, mediums for anger and nostalgia, which implicitly regretted the destruction of environments, lifestyles, and traditions. In other words, they were political, and this is how most of them should be interpreted.