Mr. George Manville Fenn
Mr. George Manville Fenn is an article published in The Bystander on 4 january 1905.
Mr. George Manville Fenn
If you had seen, a few nights ago, the erect, spare figure of Mr. George Manville Fenn, ruddy of face, his straggling beard and hair tinged only with grey, as he spoke to a gathering of literary men, you would hardly have expected that to-day (Tuesday) we may wish him many happy returns on his seventy-fourth birthday. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has said that the septuagenarian author is as rare as a white-lead worker who has reached the allotted span. We have Meredith still with us, though no longer active, at seventy-six; Sir Theodore Martin, who has always been an amateur of letters, is eighty-six; Dr. Russel Wallace will be eighty-two on the eighth of this month, and it is just a year since he gave us one of his most important works, "Man's Place in the Universe"; but Sir Arthur is right, and Mr. Fenn is almost entitled to be regarded as the doyen of living authors who are still producing. This season has seen at least two new books from his pen. Although first favourite with boy-readers, unlike his old friend, the late G. A. Henty, he has never exclusively devoted himself to the writing of juvenile books, a score or two of novels being included in his remarkable total of some hundred and fifty volumes.
