Ernest William Hornung was a British writer, poet, and novelist. He received popularity for several volumes of short crime and mystery fiction stories about a charming fictional, upper-crust London thief A. J. Raffles published between 1899 to 1906.
Background
Ethnicity:
E. W. Hornung’s father came from Hungary in the 1840s.
Ernest William Hornung was born on June 7, 1866, in Middlesbrough, United Kingdom. He was the third boy and the youngest of eight children in a family of John Peter Hornung, (born Johan Petrus Hornung), a coal and iron merchant, and Harriet Hornung (maiden name Armstrong).
Education
Ernest William Hornung entered Saint Ninian's Preparatory School in Moffat, Dumfriesshire in 1879. A year later, he moved to Uppingham School.
While there, he developed a passion for cricket although he wasn’t very good at it because of bad eyesight, asthma, and other health problems.
A sickly lad, Hornung left the School at the age of seventeen to improve his health in Australia.
Ernest William Hornung started his career in Australia where he came in 1884 to improve his asthmatic disposition. While there, Hornung worked as a tutor to the Parsons family in Mossgiel in the Riverina, and began his career as a writer, contributing to the Sydney Bulletin and beginning his first forays into fiction.
Two years later, he came back to his homeland and pursued writing for magazines and newspapers, often under a pseudonym. It was due to the work and during this time of an unidentified serial killer Jack the Ripper that Horning developed a keen interest in criminal behavior, as violent deeds grew in occurrence and notoriety in urban England. The debut novel signed by the author’s own name, ‘Stroke of Five’, was featured in Belgravia magazine in 1887.
His next story, ‘A Bride from the Bush’, followed three years later. Like much of his early fiction, its theme concerned the span between two linked worlds – England and Australia. The ‘bride’ of the title was an unhappy young Australian woman living in England. The writing firstly appeared in five parts in the Cornhill Magazine, and then was issued as a book. The volume received good reviews from critics.
Several collections of short stories that followed had the same Australian background reflecting his experiences in the country and foreshadowing his ‘Raffles’ themes, including ‘Under Two Skies’, ‘Tiny Luttrell’, and ‘Irralie’s Bushranger: A Story of Australian Adventure’. The latter introduced a character named Stingaree in whom Hornung first honed some of the rascally, anti-hero characteristics that he later gave to Raffles. Hornung’s first collection of Raffles stories, ‘The Amateur Cracksman’ published in 1899, was similar in form to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. The volume contained a dedication “A. C. D.,” with the inscription “This Form of Flattery.”
Other stories about A. J. Raffles and his partner Bunny Manders included in such collections as ‘The Black Mask’ (1901) and ‘A Thief in the Night: The Last Chronicles of Raffles’ (1905) enjoyed great commercial success. Stingaree, the character from ‘Irralie's Bushranger’, appeared the same year in the writer’s own collection, ‘Stingaree’, a book chronicling more adventures in New South Wales.
In between these volumes, Ernest William Hornung collaborated with Eugène Presbrey in the adaptation of the Raffles tales for the stage. The cooperation resulted in a four-act play ‘Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman’ first shown at the Princess Theatre in New York City on 27 October 1903. Then, counting in total 168 performances, it found success among London audience as well.
Hornung published his next book and the last novel about Raffles as the main character in 1909. ‘Mr. Justice Raffles’ did not meet with the same success as the previous short stories.
Among Hornung’s other works, most were novels driven by a crime of some sort, though they did not belong to the crime-fiction genre. They also employed standards common to the fiction of the era, such as false identities, disguises, and disowned heiresses. Hornung’s fiction can also be singled out for portraying women in a rather modern, favorable light. Among the examples were his 1903’s ‘No Hero’ chronicling the life of a divorced woman in Victorian society, and 1913’s ‘The Thousandth Woman’ where a man was falsely accused of murder and his lover made a great sacrifice for him based on her faith in his innocence.
Although too advanced in age and asthmatic to serve in a combat capacity, Ernest William Hornung enlisted in the army at the outbreak of the World War I. The writer drove an ambulance in France and later traveled across battlefields with the Young Men's Christian Association lending library for soldiers. His last writings reflected these experiences – ‘The Young Guard’, published in 1919, a collection of war poems, and ‘Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front’, which appeared the same year.
Ernest William Hornung’s experiences at Uppingham imprinted upon him a respect for the traditions of such schools for the wealthy and titled inspired – of loyalty, sportsmanship, and a high-minded code of honor – as well as a love for the game of cricket. The author’s patriotism was an essential part of many of his stories, including ‘A Jubilee Present’, and ‘The Knees of the Gods’. The writer William Vivian Butler even called him a “super-patriot”. According to Colin Watson, Hornung was “a precursor of Ian Fleming”.
Critics noted the simple style and good structure of Hornung’s prose. Colin Watson said that the author’s “writing has pace. The stories, however ridiculous, carry the readers along briskly”.
According to the academic Nick Rance, the writings of Ernest William Hornung can be divided into three groups, “the rise of the New Woman”, describing the infatuations of a woman, “the rise of the plutocracy”, featuring the nouveau riche and the upper classes, and the novels aimed “to reaffirm or re-establish a sense of middle-class identity”.
Membership
An avid cricketer, Ernest William Hornung joined in 1891 two thematic clubs, the Idlers, and the Strand club. Sixteen years later, he became a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"[Ernest William Hornung] was a Dr. [Samuel] Johnson without the learning but with a finer wit. No one could say a neater thing, and his writings, good as they are, never adequately represented the powers of the man, nor the quickness of his brain." Arthur Conan Doyle, writer
"[Ernest William Hornung] was a very conscientious and on his level a very able writer. Anyone who cares for sheer efficiency must admire his work." George Orwell, writer
Interests
medicine, psychiatry
Sport & Clubs
cycling, cricket
Connections
Ernest William Hornung married Constance Aimée Monica Doyle on September 27, 1893. Constance was a sister of Arthur Conan Doyle.
They had one son, Arthur Oscar, whose name was half from his uncle and also his godfather, and a half from Hornung’s friend Oscar Wilde. Arthur Oscar was killed during the First World War at Second Battle of Ypres in July 1915.