The Hocking Collection contains novels, short stories, and other writings by the Cornish siblings Silas Kitto Hocking (1850-1935), Salome Hocking (1859-1927) and Joseph Hocking (1860-1937), as well as three novels by Joseph’s daughter, the crime writer Anne Hocking (1889-1966). Most of the collection, assembled by Michael Thorne and listed by his brother Roger, was donated to the Methodist Archives and Research Centre (MARC) in 1978. It has now been fully catalogued by our indefatigable colleague Joe Devlin and is available for the first time through our online library catalogue.
Silas, Joseph, and Salome were the children of James Hocking, who discovered and opened two of Cornwall’s most productive tin mines, and his wife Elizabeth Kitto, a member of one of Cornwall’s oldest families and relative of John Kitto, editor of The Pictorial Bible.
The brothers, Silas and Joseph, entered the ministry of the United Methodist Free Churches (UMFC). Silas began his career as a minister in Newport in 1869 and spent many years in north-west England, serving in Liverpool, Burnley, Manchester, and Southport, before moving to London in 1896 as a ‘minister without charge’. He resigned from the ministry in 1906. He was politically engaged and a lifelong pacifist, protesting against the Boer War, standing unsuccessfully for the Liberal Party in two parliamentary elections, and advocating for the League of Nations. Silas also travelled widely, spending time in North America, North Africa, and Europe. In Switzerland around 1893 he befriended Arthur Conan Doyle, who by this time was tiring of Sherlock Holmes. In his memoir My Book of Memory (1923), Hocking writes that he suggested Conan Doyle bring Holmes to Switzerland and ‘drop him down a crevasse’, although he was uncertain if his idea had anything to do with Holmes’s disappearance a few months later at the Reichenbach Falls.
Joseph, who attended Victoria Park College in 1882-3 and sat exams (in logic, English Language, and English Literature) at Owens College in Manchester before entering the ministry in 1884, spent much of his career in London circuits. He left the ministry in 1910 because of ill health, after which he devoted much of his time to writing. His support for the First World War brought an invitation from the War Office to conduct a recruitment campaign in Cornwall as well as many speaking engagements and new novels, such as Dearer Than Life: A Romance of the Great War (1915).
Both brothers were prolific authors whose work was informed by their faith, politics, and Cornish background. Silas published 88 novels and short story collections, as well as several volumes of non-fiction. Joseph, who said he began writing his first – unpublished – novel when he was a young teenager, produced an equally impressive number of books – seventy of which form part of the Hocking Collection – and contributed to various newspapers and periodicals. His early novel Elrad, the Hic: A Romance of the Sea of Galilee (1890) drew on his travels in the Middle East, which were also the subject of a travel book, From London to Damascus (1889). Joseph’s first commercially successful novel was Jabez Easterbrook: A Religious Novel (1890), the story of a Wesleyan Methodist minister who moves to a Yorkshire village.
Salome Hocking is described by A.M. Kent as a ‘progressive thinker, a Socialist, a feminist’ and ‘Cornwall’s most important, early, female Anglo-Cornish novelist’. The Hocking Collection includes two of Salome’s ten novels: Jacky: a story of everyday life and Some Old Cornish Folk, first published in 1887 and 1903, respectively.
She began writing after the death of her father in 1883. The mid to late 1880s were particularly industrious: Salome published Granny’s Hero (1885), The Fortunes of Riverside or Waiting or Winning (1885), Norah Lang: the mine girl (1886), Jacky, and Chronicles of a Quiet Family: a temperance story (1888). Some Old Cornish Folk, Salome’s most successful book, was based on her experiences of life in St Stephen-in-Brannel. Salome lived in Cornwall until her mother’s death in 1891, after which she alternated between living with Silas and Joseph. Like her brothers, she wrote for Methodist periodicals. A series of witty articles, ‘Chats with Girls’, was published in The Methodist Monthly throughout 1894. That same year Salome married the publisher Arthur Charles Fifield and would later write the novel Belinda the Backward or the Romance of Modern Idealism (1905), inspired by their involvement with a Tolstoyan community at Whiteway Colony in Gloucestershire.
Of the three writers, Silas Hocking was the most successful commercially. By 1900 sales of his novels exceeded one million.
(Hocking S52)
His first great success, and the novel that made him famous, was Her Benny (1879), a story about street children in Victorian Liverpool inspired by his pastoral work in some of the city’s poorest areas and a nineteenth century trend of ‘waif stories’, such as Hesba Stretton’s Jessica’s First Prayer (1866).
Title page, Her Benny (1890 edition) (Hocking S38-1)
Its publication in book form received a brief, low-key notice in The Wesleyan Methodist Magazine in August 1880: ‘A highly improbable but not uninteresting story of street-life. The moral is good, and the binding most attractive’. It would be translated into several languages and, as Hocking recalled, ‘sold not by the score but by the hundred thousand’. Hocking appeared in the opening scenes of a well-received film adaptation released in British cinemas in 1920. (Hocking has another – indirect – connection with film: his name is engraved on one of foundation stones, laid by Hocking himself in September 1912, of a former Salvation Army citadel in Crouch End which is now a cinema.) An award-winning stage musical version by Anne Dalton proved popular in Liverpool in the early 1990s.
Arnold Bennett, in Fame and Fiction: An Enquiry into Certain Popularities (1901), devoted a whole chapter to Silas Hocking, an author whose remarkable sales figures ‘enshrine a dazzling and marvellous secret’: namely, the reason for Hocking’s popularity at the turn of the twentieth century. Bennett, who found this popularity ‘in its essence, inexplicable’, believed it was in the ‘industrial districts of mid and northern England, and perhaps also in Cornwall, that Mr Hocking chiefly flourishes’. In a bookseller’s shop of ‘a small provincial town’ Bennett found ‘whole rows of Her Benny, God’s Outcast, Ivy, For Abigail.’ In Chris Baggs’s survey of the top fifty authors found in the fiction sections of twenty miners’ institute libraries in South Wales between 1902 and 1931, Silas Hocking is in ninth place, behind Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Marie Corelli and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others, but ahead of Thomas Hardy, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot and his own brother, Joseph.
A bookseller in London’s West End told Bennett that he had never been asked for Hocking’s novels. ‘I should have known as much’, writes Bennett. ‘Mr Hocking is a minister of the Methodist Free Church. His fame is rooted in Dissent, and Kensington never dissents’. Hocking was ‘the Methodist million made vocal’. A few years later, writing in the New Age under the pen name ‘Jacob Tonson’, Bennett observed that in ‘a town of forty thousand inhabitants there will be a couple of stationers, whose chief pride is that they are “steam printers” or lithographers. Enter their shops, and you will see a few books. […] Of new books no example except the brothers Hocking’.
Bennett thought the attitude of religious Nonconformists towards literature ‘antagonistic, because Puritanism and the Arts have by no means yet settled their quarrel’. An article by Joseph Hocking on ‘Novels and Novel Writers’, published in the Methodist Monthly in October 1894, provoked a negative reaction in its pages, as well as a pamphlet by Samuel Ramsbottom, The Diamond Ring; or Novels and Novel Writers (1895), criticising ‘preacher novel writers’, the distracting ‘frivolities of novel reading’ and the commerciality of fiction. In My Book of Memory, Silas Hocking recalls a conversation with the editor of a Methodist magazine with whom he shared the finished version of Her Benny:
“I like the story immensely,” he said, “and am strongly tempted to publish it. But –“
“Yes?”
“Well, you see, from the very first number no editor has ever admitted fiction to
its pages.”
“What about the obituary notices?”
Hocking also describes the reaction of an older generation of parishioners in Burnley, where he was a minister, to the publication of his first novel Alec Green: ‘Novels and the theatre they placed in the same category. Both were agents of the devil. How could I preach the Gospel and at the same time write what was not true?’ While the ‘young people of the town at any rate regarded me as something a little out of the common’.
D.W. Bebbington has observed that to novels ‘there was probably always more opposition in theory than in practice’, and that ‘by 1876 a Methodist novel was published and fiction was being serialised in The Wesleyan Methodist Magazine’. For Martin Wellings, the Hockings owed their success, in part, to the growth of literate Nonconformity (there were, writes Welling, approximately a million members in the Baptist, Congregational, Wesleyan and Primitive Methodist Churches by 1901) and its ‘evolving attitude’ to novels and novel-reading. Christopher Pittard has argued that Silas Hocking’s adoption of a plain style was perhaps a way of balancing the requirements of novel-writing with the view, expressed by some within Methodism at the time, such as Ramsbottom, that fiction is synonymous with falsehood.
Hocking’s novels were out of fashion by the time of his death in September 1935. Some obituaries quoted remarks he reportedly made earlier that year on the effect of the First World War on novel writing. It had ‘killed manners’ and ‘vulgarized the people’: ‘The new generation only seem to care for three types [of novel] – crook stories, detective stories, and books in which sex is discussed in a most daring and vulgar way’.
George Bowling, the narrator of George Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air (1939), to satisfy his youthful appetite for books, takes out a ‘subscription at Mudie’s and another at a library in Bristol’:
And what I read during the next year or so! Wells, Conrad, Kipling, Galsworthy,
Barry Pain, W. W. Jacobs, Pett Ridge, Oliver Onions, Compton Mackenzie, H. Seton
Merriman, Maurice Baring, Stephen McKenna, May Sinclair, Arnold Bennett, Anthony
Hope, Elinor Glyn, O. Henry, Stephen Leacock, and even Silas Hocking and Jean
Stratton Porter. How many of the names in that list are known to you, I wonder?
Half the books that people took seriously in those days are forgotten now.
Some readers were still keen, though. In ‘Single-handed and Untrained’ (1977), an essay about his first job as a librarian in the 1940s, Philip Larkin recalls that a ‘substantial body of the readers were elderly people, who found the stairs difficult, but were still prepared to face them for Mrs Henry Wood, Florence L. Barclay, Silas K. Hocking, Rosa N. Carey and many others’.
The Hocking Collection is available to view in the Special Collections Reading Room of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library.
See our website for further information on the Methodist Archives and Research Centre (MARC), as well as the Library’s other Methodist and Nonconformist collections:
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