Spreadsheets of Sensation

James Payn (1830-1898) was a literary workhorse. He was always in love with literature and it took him several attempts at education (he dropped out of a prep school, Eton and The Royal Military Academy at Woolwich) and a period Cambridge University’s various social clubs, before he found his true place at the coal-face of the Victorian publishing industry. According to Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), “He had taken to literature as some people take to drink, simply because he could not help it. It was in his nature.” (Stephen, xlii, “Introduction” to The Backwater Life:, or, Essays of a Literary Veteran, 1899)

Payn’s literary career began with the publication of his poem “The Poet’s Death” in Leighton’s Journal 15^th March, 1851, when Payn was twenty-one years old. A self-published collection Stories from Boccacio and Other Poems followed in 1852. A year later, he got lucky, “Gentleman Cadet,” a story based on his own unhappy experiences at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, was published in Household Words. Payn used his fee for this article to buy a pig for his tutor in Devonshire. The Royal Military Academy protested about their portrayal, and that is how Payn first made a personal acquaintance of Charles Dickens, who took the side of his young contributor. Payn was a great admirer of Dickens, whose praises he would sing at every opportunity. He was also a friend of Wilkie Collins.

Source: Wikipedia

In 1854 Payn married Louisa Adelaide Edlin (born 1830/1) and the young couple moved to Rydal Cottage in Ambleside. There Payn had two literary neighbours Mary Russel Mitford and Harriet Martineau (Martineau Society conference coming up! http://martineausociety.co.uk/2018-annual-meeting-24th-27th-july-dr-williams-library/ ). Through them, Payn met Matthew Arnold, Thomas DeQuincey and other literary greats of the time.

Payn contributed to the Edinburgh-based Chambers Journal and was invited to become its editor in 1858. The Scottish climate did not agree with the Payns and “A Scottish Sabbath was more than he could bear with composure (Stephen, xxviii). The family were glad to follow the journal down to London when it relocated in 1861. According to Stephen, “Year in year out, he was turning out novels and articles, editing and reading for publishers, with admirable punctuality.” (Stephen, xxx) James Payn became part of the London literary scene. In addition to Dickens and Wilkie Collins he knew Thackeray, Trollope and Charles Reade.

Payn’s first novel The Foster Brothers came out in 1859, his last, Another’s Burden in 1897.

His first best-seller was Lost Sir Massingberd: a Romance of Real Life (1864). It is a traditional sensational mystery, where an unpleasant uncle vanishes. The novel was a great success, it was said it brought the circulation of Chambers Journal up by 20,000. In 1874 Payn left Chamber’s Journal and became a reader for the publisher Smith, Elder. A few years later, he produced his second hit novel: By Proxy (1878). It is another sensational tale, set partly in China.

Payn continued to contribute to various magazines, including Westminster Review, Longman’s Magazine, Nineteenth Century and Illustrated London News. In 1883 he became editor of Cornhill Magazine. He made the magazine cheaper in price and its fiction lighter to boost sales. He published Arthur Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard, among others. Payn rejected Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet in 1887 despite writing several stories of detection himself.

According to Stephen, “Novel succeeded novel with exemplary regularity and Payn could reckon a literary output of more than a hundred volumes.” (Stephen, xxxii).  Overall Payn wrote forty-six novels, eight collections of short stories and two memoirs, in addition to his numerous essays. He left Cornhill Magazine in March 1896 due to ill health and in his last years Payn was housebound. He remained happily married all his life, and he left behind his wife Louisa, two sons and five daughters.

It seems that James Pay was an all round good egg. If any of us inspire the kind of memorial essay written by Leslie Stephen about James Payn, we should count ourselves lucky. This essay appears as an introduction to The Backwater of Life: or, Essays of a Literary Veteran, published by Smith, Elder & Co in 1899, as a memorial after Payn’s death. Stephen’s essay tells us pretty much all we need to know about Payn to appreciate his life and his work.(The ODNB entry for Payn seems to have used Stephen as its main source, too.) Several autobiographical essays by Payn were collected in Some Literary Recollections in 1884. Stephen says: “His spontaneous delight in other men’s merits was one of the most obvious and characteristic of his peculiarities.” (Stephen, xxxvii)

Payn is generally known better for his editorial career than his novels. According to Stephen, Payn knew his own limits, and realized he could never aspire to the literary genius of Dickens. He would always remain an admiring acolyte. Stephen insists that there was no hint of envy in James Payn, instead he was always willing to encourage and advice aspiring authors struggling to get published.

Payn is one of the very few Victorian writers, who have left behind their advice on writing popular fiction. Among his many essays, there are two articles, included Backwater of Life (1899), where Payn describes his own methods of writing his novels and offers some do’s and don’t's for novel writing. There are also a few articles on literature included in Some Private Views (1881).

For Payn novel-writing was straight-forward story-telling. First came an initial anecdote to form the tight core for the novel. There was nothing rambling about Payn’s narratives, for Victorian novels they are focused, and clip-clop on with a single story line at a brisk pace. This is the first lesson to take from Payn: have a clear idea of the whole story from the start. Write it down as an anecdote, have the beginning the middle and the end, have the punch line clearly before you, before you start writing.

After this, came the spreadsheet: Payn would take a piece of cardboard and write the names of the main characters at the top of a row of columns. He was meticulous about their backstories and their present circumstances. Once he knew who and what kind of people his story was about, he would then develop the plot by writing in the columns the actions and reactions of the characters. According to Stephen: “The necessary dates and facts would be inserted in the appropriate columns, till a full scheme was drawn out and all points of genealogy and so forth made abundantly clear.” (Stpehen, xxxiv)

This clearly echoes Wilkie Collins’s (1824-1889) approach stated in his Preface to The Moonstone (1868), where Collins declared that he was going to try something new and different: “to trace the influence of character on circumstances.” This is an indication that both authors shared an interest in character development and portrayal of psychology, not just plot and incident. This goes against the perceived formula of Victorian popular fiction, where, so we are told, plot is everything and sensational twists and dramatic incident is piled high.

The characters in Payn’s novels are not psychologically complex or deep, but they are convincing and behave consistently according to their nature. Importantly, Payn recognizes that personalities and human behaviour are shaped by past experiences as well as innate character. In his novels, both nurture and nature are shown to have formed characters whose actions and reactions, in turn, create the twists and turns in the plot.

According to Stephen, in Payn’s novels “Of course there is always a charming girl to fall in love with, and a happy ending such as the unsophisticated reader desiderates.” (Stephen, xxxv) This is true. But I strongly disagree with another observation by Stephen: that Payn “hates his villains with amusing fervour; and instead of bestowing them some touch of human nature, blackens them so thoroughly that they are only fit for starvation in hollow trees, or at the bottom of Cornish mines, or for boiling and immersion in lava streams” (Stephen, xxxv).

Payn by Ape for Vanity Fair, 8 Sept. 1888. Source: Wikipedia

Perhaps Stephen was distracted by Payn’s sense of humour: “His sense of humour may sometimes lead him to take liberties with his reader; he cannot always resist a bit of downright burlesque, and if incident is dramatic he does not inquire too closely into probabilities.” (Stephen, xxxv). The fate of Payn’s villains, including poor Lord Massingberd, is often spectacular and pathetic at the same time.

Payn’s novels express the sheer joy of story-telling: the more outrageous the incident, the more the narrative seems to revel in it. But this should not blind the reader (or Leslie Stephen) to Payn’s efforts to maintain the integrity and internal logic of his characters throughout.

Payn's display of an awareness of the impact of past experience on present actions and the sufficient backstories he provides for his characters, ensure that his villains and, more significantly, his heroes are not black and white. Instead, they make what is so critical for narrative suspense: bad, but understandable choices. In this regard, Payn despite writing trashy Victorian potboilers, displayed an interest in and sensitivity for human character much closer to George Eliot than your average sensation novelist.