Chapter 198: The Rejected Manuscript Controversy

Chapter 197 The Manuscript Rejection Fiasco
From Trafalgar Square through Westminster’s Strand Street, past Our Lady’s Church and St. Claremont’s Church, along this street almost parallel to the flow of the Thames River all the way east, looking up to the south, the Thames River mansions lined up, since William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, defeated King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, has gradually become a major political and religious circles in London. Since William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, defeated King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, Strand Street has gradually become a gathering place for the big names in London’s political and religious circles.

Almost half of the archbishops, who hold 26 spiritual seats in the House of Lords, own property here, and many former or current cabinet ministers have also bought property here.

Because there are so many dignitaries living here, when the local diocese holds a parish meeting to elect a respected church elder, you can occasionally see a few former prime ministers or a group of ex-cabinet ministers appearing on the list of candidates.

Because of the political and religious importance of the Strand in London, it is only natural that other neighborhoods have sprung up in its vicinity.

For example, in the center of the City of London, the Palace of Westminster and Whitehall, but adjacent to the Strand, is the London Templar Church, the 12th-century English regional headquarters of the Knights Templar.

But because Henry VIII fell out with the Holy See for the divorce, this Catholic Templar property was naturally confiscated by his order, and the Templar Church was leased to a group of London lawyers who valued the advantages of the special location.

Although there were several twists and turns, with the clergy and lawyers tugging at each other for centuries over the ownership of the Templar Church, the two groups finally agreed under the mediation and ruling of James I – the church was to be handed over to the lawyers on the condition that the lawyers would always bear the cost of maintaining the church and that it would not interfere with its function of providing religious services. services.

After obtaining the property rights, the lawyers not only opened law firms here, but also organized legal education in the Temple Church, and two of the four major lawyers’ chambers in London, the Middle Temple and the Inner Temple, originated here.

Lawyers took the lead in seizing the Temple Church, and after the improvement of printing technology, a variety of newspapers and tabloids such as springing up in the streets of London, and highly sensitive to the timeliness of the news of the newspaper reporters naturally followed the smell followed by moving to the dignitaries gathered next to the Strand Street, and strive to get the first-hand reliable news, can not be obtained, and then engage in a bit of gossip is also OK.

They gave full play to the fine tradition of Western journalists to run fast, as early as the 17th century began in the Strand Street east of Fleet Street pile, and in the 19th century, Fleet Street has become the heart of the entire British news magazine industry.

Almost every British newspaper you can name was headquartered here, and even those not based in London had to have a permanent office in Fleet Street.

Blackwood’s, the pioneering British literary magazine originating in Edinburgh, was not to be outdone, and they set up a London office with a professional literary editor and a staff of cashiers and accountants.

At this time in the office, Arthur and Elder sat on the chair in the editor-in-chief’s office, looking at the middle-aged man sitting in front of the desk with a big belly wearing gold glasses.

The middle-aged man has all the necessary characteristics of an English gentleman, neat white shirt and black pants, pocketed in the pocket revealing half of the gold chain pocket watch, and that naked glittering with oil, but unusually stubborn lying on the head of three hairs.

Elder’s eyebrows were winking towards Arthur, signaling him to take a look at the three hairs, which were blowing in the wind and fluttering up as if they were the flag of the Royal Navy, but Arthur ignored his hints, not because he didn’t value the friendship between the two, but because he feared that if he looked at them even one more time, he was going to be blinded by the hairs, so that he forgot the purpose of his coming here today.

The middle-aged man leaned back in his office chair, holding Dumas’s manuscript in his hand flipped back and forth, and finally shook his head with some regret.

When Arthur saw this expression on his face, he felt bad, he couldn’t help but inquire, “Mr. Wallace, do you think this manuscript looks okay?”

Wallace put down the manuscript and shook his head with his hands supported on the table, “Before answering this question, I would like to ask you first, do you belong to the loyal readers of Blackwood? Or have you had a preliminary acquaintance with our magazine?”

If it was a while ago when Wallace asked this question, Arthur would not really be able to answer him. Because it was true that he didn’t buy much of Blackwood, and as a Scotland Yard policeman with a meager income and a mortgage, he had to be smart when it came to buying books.

While working as a beat constable, most of Arthur’s paychecks went to newspapers and magazines such as The Scourge, The Police Chronicle, Poor Man’s Political Monthly, and other newspapers and magazines that were a combination of political and entertaining, and that were also relevant to his job.

He had little time or energy to actually care about magazines like Blackwood, which emphasized literary and literary criticism.

After all, very few people would be willing to work fourteen or fifteen hours and then set aside precious rest time to explore the connection between Romanticism and realist literature, the main readership of Blackwood’s basically also shows this, most of those who will buy it are some middle-class and above gentleman and lady.

But it was a good thing that Arthur had gotten his hands on a few issues of Blackwood, which had attacked Mr. Disraeli, in a used bookstore a while back in order to investigate his life, so he wasn’t ignorant when Wallace asked at this point.

After a few brief inquiries, Wallace leaned back in his chair with his arms wrapped around him, ”It seems that you do know what type of magazine we are. Since this is the case, then you should know that just a few issues ago, I personally wrote a major critique of novels like The Count of Monte Cristo in the magazine.”

Speaking here, Wallace even directly pulled out a magazine from the pile of magazines laid out by the table, skillfully flipping to the marked page and pointing to the original text quoted above.

“Thousands of readers open their wallets and spend their money on paid reading, anxiously awaiting the production of one crude, sickly, disgusting conjecture after another like garbage from the ‘literary factories.’ These fashionable novels, claiming to encapsulate the essence of refined living and written by talented masters, have made a mess of the literary scene in Britain.”

At the end of his speech, Wallace could not help but follow up with a few more words of criticism, saying, “Sir, what we mainly publish here are poems, prose, incisive literary criticism, reflections and satire on social phenomena.

Perhaps this Count of Monte Cristo is very interesting to you, but in my eyes, it’s just a pile of rushed garbage.

There is no thought in the book, it opens with a love story of a French sailor, is it going to be followed by a love-hate relationship between several families? Come on! That was written in Shakespeare’s time. Times have changed. I’m not asking you to come up with new ideas, but let’s at least write some new plots. Secondly, the diction of the writing is not flashy, one could even say it’s bad. The syntax used in this book is so simple that it makes me wonder if perhaps it was written by a child still in grammar school, but the author uses a lot of short sentences to cover it up, but that fools others, not me.

And this guy doesn’t pay attention to detail, often describing things where they’re not necessary… a simple dinner… why write about lobster shells so clearly? He likes lobster shells so much, he might as well be a cook. I have a deep suspicion that the author may have done this just so he could print two more pages and sell them for a good price.

Of course, if you still insist on submitting your article after hearing all this, I won’t continue to advise you, but I do suggest that you should change magazines. As you are a friend of Mrs. Norton’s, I will recommend a suitable one, and you will try to submit to the Monthly Magazine, where the requirements are comparatively liberal.”

If Arthur hadn’t had a surprise tutorial on literary magazines some time ago, he might have really thought that Wallace was doing himself a favor.

However, according to his understanding, Monthly Magazine was the main competitor of Blackwood, and the two sides often trolled each other in their own magazines, so the subtext of Wallace’s words was actually no different from telling him to hurry up and take the manuscript and get lost.

He was about to argue with the other party, but unexpectedly Elder spoke up first: “That’s right, Mr. Wallace. I think ‘Blackwood’ really should maintain its high standards of manuscript acceptance, and in that, I am with you. That Count of Monte Cristo book, I actually don’t see anything good in it, and I’ve written a special literary criticism about it, what do you think?”

After saying that, Elder handed over the manuscript with a smile.

Wallace originally did not intend to scrutinize it, but seeing as Elder agreed with him, he only had to pinch his nose and scan it twice.

Not a moment later, his brows furrowed, and he slapped the manuscript over the desktop, “Now I feel like maybe The Count of Monte Cristo isn’t so bad after all.”

“What do you mean?” Elder sprang up from his chair in a heap, he picked up the other man by the collar and nearly bonked him twice, “Do you believe I’m going to throw you straight out of the window into the Fleet River next door?”

Wallace was stunned by Elder’s Royal Navy temper, he warned, “I …… I advise you to better calm down, we are here in a literary magazine, not some kind of gangster’s fighting place. If you insist on doing this, I’ll call the police!”

“Police? You can’t even fucking call the superintendent over today!”

Elder looked genuinely pissed off, and he was about to raise his hand to give the fat man a couple of slaps, but stopped Arthur before he could do so.

Arthur grabbed him by the collar and dragged him back to his chair, “Forget it, since he doesn’t want to earn money, we don’t have to force him.”

At that, he spoke again at Wallace, “So, sir, I’ll see you around.”

He dragged a disgruntled Elder outside, and just as he opened the door, both Arthur and Elder froze as they looked at the small man standing outside the door with a surprised eyebrow, “Charles, what are you doing here?”

Dickens, who was holding a copy of the manuscript for Pickwick’s Outward Bound in his hand, looked at the two of them in surprise, “Arthur, Elder, are you two here to submit your manuscripts as well?”

Arthur shrugged his shoulders, he got up and took the manuscript from Dickens’ hand and scanned it, then snorted, “Charles, don’t bother, I’ve just inquired, people don’t accept fashion novels here.”

“Is that so? …… Ugh, that can’t be helped, big deal, I’ll submit it to another magazine.”

Dickens sniffed, but he was a little disappointed, but he still quickly accepted the reality, after all, he has experienced things much bigger than this blow over the years.

He turned his head and shouted at a young man sitting in the hall, “Mr. Tennyson, I’ve been rejected, it’s your turn next.”

“Tennyson?”

Elder heard the name and stuck his head out to look out, his eyes just met the face and he couldn’t help but spit down, “What a fucking unlucky day! Why it’s really that Cambridge kid!”

But when Arthur saw Tennyson, he didn’t react as violently as Elder did, he first looked at The Count of Monte Cristo in his hand, and then took a look at Dickens’ Pickwick’s Gaiden, and finally his wandering eyes coalesced on Tennyson, who possessed an introspective smile.

Suddenly, Arthur slapped his palm and could not help exclaiming, “There.”

(End of chapter)