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THE TWELVE NOVELS Reginald Turner (1869-1938) published between 1901 and 1911 are among the least known of the Edwardian years, an era rich in forgettable fiction. The only books more rare than his first editions were his second editions, he would say, although at least three of his novels did become cheap two-shilling reprints. Sadly, Reggie called his ill-fated offspring "stillborn children of my fancy."1 Now the rare copy of any of them which turns up for sale fetches five hundred times its original few shillings.2
Thousands of other novels were commercial or artistic failures during the years Reggie struggled to make his mark in fiction, and they are now equally rare; thus why the unique value of a Turner book? Most of the reason is their association interest, for he was a member of the Oscar Wilde circle, and at his bedside when Oscar died; and he later became a part of the flourishing English expatriate colony in Florence, and a friend of Somerset Maugham, Norman Douglas, and D. H. Lawrence, who fictionalized him in two of his own novels.3 Yet Reggie Turner's novels have an interest in themselves, as they look back upon the fading late-Victorian world Reggie could only view from self-exile.
Turner's unpretentious novels resonate with the wry comic ambience of H. G. Wells's History of Mr. Polly (1910), Arnold Bennett's Buried Alive (1908), and, although Max Beerbohm's style was inimitable, even that of Reggie's bosom friend's Zuleika Dobson (1911). Reggie's obsession with the mystery of his origins permeated his fiction and lent it a between-the-lines pathos aware only to his intimates. He never knew who his mother was, and had been raised by the Levy-Lawson family, proprietors of the Daily Telegraph, on whose income he lived all his life. He assumed that his half-brother was either Frank Lawson, or possibly Lawson's nephew, Edward, who became the 1st Lord Burnham. The device of unknown origins carried on the comic (and sometimes sentimental) tradition in novels and plays about unknown parentage recalled more memorably in The Pinafore (1878) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
Oscar Wilde's death in November, 1900, freed Reggie Turner from the deathbed, and the most onerous responsibilities he had ever borne. But life seemed empty. He felt...