Edwin William Pugh
Edwin William Pugh was an English writer born in 1874 in Marylebone, London, to a theatrical family. He initially worked in a factory, then as a clerk in a lawyer's office, before transitioning to full-time writing in 1896. Despite his literary ambitions, he struggled financially and supplemented his income through journalism and literary criticism. Pugh is associated with the Cockney School of writers, which includes notable figures like William Pett Ridge, and he was particularly influenced by Charles Dickens, authoring two books about him. Pugh's literary contributions include his collection of short stories, *A Street in Suburbia*, and several novels, including *The Man of Straw* and *The Eyes of a Child*, which often reflect his working-class background. His writing is characterized by a sentimental style, diverging from the harsher realism favored by post-World War I literature, which contributed to his eventual neglect by literary historians. Pugh's later life was marred by financial difficulties and alcoholism, and he died in London in 1930 under mysterious circumstances. In recent years, his work has begun to receive renewed attention in cultural studies, highlighting his significance in the literary landscape of his time.
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Edwin William Pugh
Writer
- Born: January 27, 1874
- Birthplace: London, England
- Died: February 5, 1930
- Place of death: London, England
Biography
Edwin William Pugh was born in Marylebone, London, England in 1874, the second of four children born to David Walter Pugh and Emily (Harris). Both parents worked in the theater; his father was a property maker and orchestra player, and his mother was a wardrobe mistress at Covent Garden. Pugh attended a public school until the age of thirteen, when he went to work in a factory producing iron manufactures. However, the work did not suit him and he moved to a lawyer’s office for the next eight years to work as a clerk there. In 1896 he decided to become a full- time writer based on the success of the short stories and a novel he had written. However, being a fiction writer was never lucrative enough for him, and he supplemented his income by journalism, book reviewing, and writing other literary criticism.
Pugh lived all of his life in London. He developed alcohol problems and became chronically short of money, despite obtaining several grants from the Royal Literary Fund and a civil pension. He died in London in somewhat mysterious circumstances in 1930. His friends had to provide the funds to prevent him from receiving a pauper’s funeral.
At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, writers and publishers were producing many fictional works about London. Pugh belongs to a subgroup of London writers often referred to as the Cockney School, which includes authors William Pett Ridge and Henry Nevinson. A cockney is traditionally a working-class inhabitant of the East End of London, and the cockney culture was immortalized in Charles Dickens’s character Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers. Pugh himself revered Dickens and wrote two books about him: Charles Dickens: The Apostle to the People (1908) and The Charles Dickens Originals (1912). The former book began life as a series of articles in the journal New Age under the title “Dickens as Socialist.”
Pugh used New Age as a vehicle for his own socialist ideas rather than using his fiction for that purpose, as exemplified in his article “Why I Joined the Fabian Society.” In addition to writing for New Age, Pugh also contributed to various newspapers and The Bookman, and published his short stories in Chapman’s, the English Illustrated Magazine, and the New Review. Pugh’s first success was an early collection of short stories, A Street in Suburbia (1895), sketches of London working-class life, written in a similar style to Arthur Morrison, another London writer. His first novel, The Man of Straw (1896), is reminiscent of Dickens’s work.
From then on, his output became quite prolific. Tony Drum: A Cockney Boy appeared in 1898, telling the trials and tribulations of a cockney boy who is physically deformed and very naïve. Nothing works out for him and he dies in the end. However, rather than depicting this in a blatantly realistic way, describing the appalling living conditions that still existed in many parts of London, Pugh chooses a more sentimental, even unrealistic and certainly atypical style of storytelling. Pugh’s choice was deliberate. In Slings and Arrows: A Book of Essays (1916), Pugh criticizes writers who dwell only on the sordid, criminal, or brutal aspects of London working- class life. In the debate over what constituted realism in fiction, Pugh erred on the side of sentimentality, which made him unfashionable after World War I and led to his eventual neglect by literary historians.
Two of Pugh’s novels are quite autobiographical: The Eyes of a Child (1917) and The Secret Years (1923). Others move away from working-class themes: The Purple Head (1905), for example, is a mystery novel, while The Heritage (1901), written with Godfrey Burchett, and The Fruit of the Vine (1904) both deal with alcoholism, a favorite Victorian theme. With the growth of urban studies in the field of cultural studies, Pugh’s work is being noticed more critically, perhaps for the first time.