Summary
SHIRLEY BROOKS.
I had some very pleasant conversations and dealings with Mr. Shirley Brooks before and when he was editor of Punch. I might have published one of his best fictions, but I found he could do quite as well, or better, with his old publishers than I could do for him; the fact was, Mr. Brooks, knowing some of the prices I was paying for fiction, had a just right to think he ought to be high up in the list of highest payments. But his very cheery and often almost excellent fiction was in no such demand as the works of Miss Braddon, Mrs. Henry Wood, Ouida, Lawrence, and some others for whom I was publishing. The above-mentioned authors and others of the same kind could in no way interfere with the market value of Thackeray or Dickens, and later on, George Eliot. When a new book by any one of that noble trio of writers came into the market, all other authors stood beneath them.
But if the greater giants were not disturbed in their reign, there were good men and true who had to stand aside when, if I may so term it, the Braddon era of fiction set in, and Shirley Brooks, as a writer of fiction, was one of them; so also was Frank Smedley, and Albert Smith. Mr. Brooks's fictions were by far the most finished works of the three.
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- Random Recollections of an Old Publisher , pp. 313 - 332Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010