From “Bohemian Days in Fleet Street” By William Mackay.

When “School” had been running for some little time, a letter appeared in the Times, conceived in that spirit of dignified rebuke which, in its correspondents, seems to have appealed to successive editors of that great newspaper. In this communication Robertson was crudely accused of having stolen the play, lock, stock, and barrel, from a play then (or recently) running in Germany. I had no acquaintance with the German language and no time (so insistent on protest was my indignation) to inquire into the facts. But I felt that from the internal evidence afforded by “School” I would be able to make a good case. Even in those remote days many of our most admired articles of so-called British manufacture were “made in Germany,” and most of them bore about with them the ineffaceable signs of their origin. I strongly felt that on internal evidence I should have little difficulty, in that “School” was “quite English, you know,” and that, above all, there was no trace whatever of anything German in the conception or the treatment. I had already seen the play a second time when the Times letter made its appearance. On the night of the day on which it was published I paid a third visit to the pit of the Tottenham Street playhouse. When I got back to my “diggings,” I sat down and commenced to write what I intended to be a letter to Jupiter Tonans of Printing House Square, but what turned out to be my first professional contribution to the London Press. Next day I abandoned my more legitimate studies, and rewrote and polished—as well as I knew how—the essay over which I had burned my first sacrifice of midnight oil. The result was in no way suitable as a letter in the correspondence column of a newspaper. My own poor outlook assured me of that. Where to send the essay? A copy of a weekly magazine called Once a Week lay on a chair in the room. I caught it up, looked for the editorial address, wrote a brief note to the editor apprising him of the drift of my contribution, addressed an envelope, and posted my “stuff,” as I subsequently learned to call my articles in manuscript.

Had a mentor, skilled to advise, been available at that moment, he would no doubt have advised me to send my essay to any other publication, but not to Once a Week, because the paper in question was then under the editorial control of a member of the staff of the Times. So that—a circumstance of which I was happily ignorant—the organ selected haphazard for my venture was the very last that should be likely to serve my purpose. Four days after its despatch I received a proof of the article with a request that it should be “returned immediately” to the printer. A delightful sensation—that of correcting one’s first galleys of matter moist from the press! The following week the article appeared in all the pride of print, though I confess that the pride of print (a mere figurative locution) was as nothing to the pride of the author who already saw himself on the high-road to fame and fortune. Alas! it is a highroad which, while the gayest and cheeriest to travel, rarely leads to fame, and never to fortune. . . . I have no doubt that this first published composition of mine was a tremendously faulty piece of work—immature and pretentious. But the appearance of no subsequent production of mine has afforded me a tithe of the pleasure. And, incidentally, it was the means of my making the acquaintance of “Tom” Robertson.