Railwayman Author.

How many railway workers know that Pett Ridge is an ex-railwayman? In the early “'Nineties,” while still a young man, he went to London as a Railway Goods Clerk. Almost immediately he started story writing, and soon found his feet. Sensing, somehow, that literature is a good walking stick, but a bad crutch, he continued to write out way-bills by day and stories by night, until such time as he was earning by his stories a sum equal to three times his wages as a Railway Goods Clerk. When this point was reached he walked out of the “Goods” office and took on authorship as a profession. What of his books? The high figures to which almost every one of them has attained is answer sufficient. We of the older school love our Dickens so well, that we instinctvely resent anyone trying to poach upon his preserves. In our opinion no one could come near him in the delineation of London life and character. In that realm of fact and fancy the last word was with Dickens—or so we thought. Then along comes a “Goods” clerk and shows us that, while Dickens is still supreme, there are a hundred and one types of London life that Dickens left untouched. These it has fallen to the luck of Pett Ridge to see and note, subsequently reproducing them in one or other of his books. I don't know just how many books Pett Ridge has written, but I'm sure I've read nearly three dozen of them—all good. There are some hypercritical persons who speak of Pett Ridge as “merely a humorous writer,” and who declare that “his stories are not of much account as literature.” Perhaps not; but the average man in this, as in so many other instances, will please to differ from the so-called experts, and will lose nothing by so differing.

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