R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

Novelists of the 'Seventies 41body's hands. Oliphant himself was an extraordinaryfigure and can be ranged with Reade and Henry Kingsley,also extraordinary figures, in his adventurous audacity,eccentricity and half-baked mysticism. He travelled theworld over, had a brief sensational career in Londonsociety, was, like Henry Kingsley, a war correspondentin the Franco-Prussian War and was utterly subject to acrazy charlatan of an American prophet.His attack on the fashionable 'sixties (it could beargued that he killed the mid-Victorian society novel) isbrilliant, inconsequent, crazy and always alive. You seemas you read Piccadilly to sniff the air of a passing phaseof social life. There is corruption, decadence, all theelements of transition. Its gaiety is bitter, its satiresavage, the spirit behind it closely allied to madness.Erewhon also is or should be in everybody's hands.Samuel Butler is not a typical 'seventies figure nor isErewhon greatly concerned with the satirising of thefiction of that period. But we feel in Erewhon, as inanother way we feel in Piccadilly, the emphasis of a dyingfashion. It is always certain that if a period is changingsocially, politically, morally, these changes will be foundin all the interesting art of that period, and so Piccadillyand Erewhon are portents that concern us. Ginx's Baby,however, is a more direct portent still. Of its author,Mr Jenkins, I fear I know nothing. He is not in theDictionary of National Biography although he oughtto be. His book is the story of the son of Mr andMrs Ginx. He was their thirteenth child, one of triplets,and Mr Ginx, feeling himself overburdened with family,desired to drown him. The baby is rescued by a nun whotakes him to a Sister's Home. The matter is then made apublic quarrel between different religious sects, spreadsto the Law, to Parliament and so on. Finally, the babygrows up and, badgered on every side by Society, drowns