Charles Garvice

Personal life

Charles Andrew Garvice was born on 24 August 1850 in or around Stepney, London, England, son of Mira Winter and Andrew John Garvice, a bricklayer. In 1872, he married Elizabeth Jones, and had two sons and six daughters. Garvice suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on 21 February 1920 and was in a coma eight days until his death on 1 March 1920.

Until recently not much has been known about Garvice's personal life. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography said "Little .. is known of his family origins and personal life. Obscurity envelops [him]." John Sutherland in the Companion to Victorian Literature said "Little is known of Garvice's life.". In 2010, English freelance author and editor Steve Holland did an exhaustive search of baptismal records, genealogy databases and census records to build a picture of his early life.

Garvice died in 1920 and was buried in Richmond Cemetery.

Writing career

Garvice got his professional start as a journalist. His first novel, Maurice Durant (1875) was marginally successful in serialized form, but when published as a novel, it did not sell well. He concluded it was too long and too expensive for popular sales - this early experience taught him about the business side of writing. He would spend the next 23 years writing serialized stories for the periodicals of George Munro, who later bound and sold them as novels. Titles included A Modern Juliet, Woven in Fate's Loom, On Love's Altar, His Love So True, A Relenting Fate. Just a Girl (1898) was very popular in the US and its success brought him attention in the UK - from then on every novel he published became a best-seller in England. By 1913 Garvice was selling 1.75 million books annually, a pace which he maintained at least until his death. Garvice published over 150 novels selling over seven million copies worldwide by 1914. Just a Girl was filmed in 1916. According to Garvice's agent Eveleigh Nash, Garvice's books were as "numerous in the shops and on the railway bookstalls as the leaves of Vallombrosa." He was ‘the most successful novelist in England’, according to Arnold Bennett in 1910.

In 1904, capitalizing on his wealth as a best-selling author, Garvice bought a farm estate in Devon, England, where he wanted to work the land in "the genuine, dirty, Devonshire fashion." Like the characters in his novels, he romantically dreamed of a life happily ever after, lord of a country manor. He wrote about it in his one non-fiction book A Farm in Creamland.

Critical reception

Garvice's novels were formulaic predictable melodramas. They usually told the story of a virtuous woman overcoming obstacles and achieving a happy ending. He could crank out 12 or more novels a year, but "Little beyond the particulars of the heroines' hair color differentiates one from another," says modern critic Laura Sewell Matter, who found his stories "boring". Likewise contemporary critics were almost unanimous in their disregard, but he was hard to ignore because of his best-selling status. As the London Times wrote in his obituary:

"It cannot be said that his work was of a high order; but criticism is disregarded by his own frank attitude towards the possibility of the permanence of his literary reputation. His answer to a captious friend who seemed solicitous to disabuse him on this score was merely to point with a gesture to the crowds on the seaside beach reading. "All my books," he said: "they are all reading my latest." It was a true estimate.

In contemplating why his novels were so popular, Laura Sewell Matter said:

"[Garvice] endured more public ridicule [by critics] than any decent human being deserves. What [Thomas] Moult and other critics failed to acknowledge, but what Garvice knew and honored, are the ways so many of us live emotionally attenuated states, during times of peace as well as war. Stories like the one Garvice wrote may be low art, may not be art at all. They may offer consolation or distraction rather than provocation and insight. But many people find provocation enough in real life, and so they read for something else. One cannot have contempt for Garvice without also having some level of contempt for common humanity, for those readers - not all of whom can be dismissed as simpletons - who may not consciously believe in what they reading, but who read anyway because they know: a story can be a salve."