The Chronicles of Count Antonio – Anthony Hope
Mr. Anthony Hope is finding out his enviable position. Do what he will, he has the power to please most people. Whatever be his moods, and whatever the quality of his performance, he is never awkward, and elegance of form in any literary matter popularly interesting is so uncommon that gratitude and admiration are widespread and intense in proportion. Now that he is finding this out, it is not surprising that he should take advantage of it, and give pleasure to his numerous admirers as frequently and with as little trouble to himself as possible. It is impertinent to pry into the state of Mr. Hope’s soul to see if it is growing demoralised by easy triumphs, but it is quite justifiable to say that a little more effort than is to be found in this book is wanted to keep to the estimate which some sincere but discreet admirers have formed of his powers. The stories here are entertaining, and the youth of fourteen who should disapprove of them would do so from mere dulness. But there are features in it that would lead one to believe they were not written for lads in their early teens. Yet it is not exactly a book for men and women, to whom the tales, excellent in imagining as many of them are, must be spoilt by the artificiality of the mechanism, and the conventionality of all the motives, feelings, and expressions, of the human beings concerned. Mr. Hope is a novelist of power, and he gives us an unimpeachable gift-book of a quality equalled by a dozen boys’ story writers any Christmas. His Antonio he calls an outlaw ; but he is the outlaw of a maiden-aunt’s or a schoolmaster’s imagination—compounded of demi-god and family pastor. True, he appears to us through the narrative of a holy father, but Mr. Hope chose that medium, and if it was unsuitable for the rough record of the wild men who took to the hills, he is responsible. There is no lack of blows and battling, but all the rough play is carried on in so genteel an atmosphere that it sounds like sham-fighting all the time.
The Chronicles of Count Antonio
Format: Paperback.
The Chronicles of Count Antonio.
ISBN: 9783849694715
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Biography of Anthony Hope (from Wikipedia):
Hope was educated at St John’s School, Leatherhead, Marlborough College and Balliol College, Oxford. Hope trained as a lawyer and barrister, being called to the Bar by the Middle Temple in 1887. He served his pupillage under the future Liberal Prime Minister H H Asquith, who thought him a promising barrister and who was disappointed by his decision to turn to writing.
Hope had time to write, as his working day was not over full during these early years and he lived with his widowed father, then vicar of St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street. Hope’s short pieces appeared in periodicals but for his first book he was forced to resort to a self-publishing press. A Man of Mark (1890) is notable primarily for its similarities to Zenda: it is set in an imaginary country, Aureataland and features political upheaval and humour. More novels and short stories followed, including Father Stafford in 1891 and the mildly successful Mr Witt’s Widow in 1892. He stood as the Liberal candidate for Wycombe in the election of 1892 but was not elected. In 1893 he wrote three novels (Sport Royal, A Change of Air and Half-a-Hero) and a series of sketches that first appeared in the Westminster Gazette and were collected in 1894 as The Dolly Dialogues, illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Dolly was his first major literary success. A.E.W. Mason deemed these conversations “so truly set in the London of their day that the social historian would be unwise to neglect them,” and said that they were written with “delicate wit [and] a shade of sadness.”
The idea for Hope’s tale of political intrigue, The Prisoner of Zenda, being the history of three months in the life of an English gentleman, came to him at the close of 1893 as he was walking in London. Hope finished the first draft in a month and the book was in print by April. The story is set in the fictional European kingdom of ‘Ruritania’, a term which has come to mean ‘the novelist’s and dramatist’s locale for court romances in a modern setting.’ Zenda achieved instant success and its witty protagonist, the debonair Rudolf Rassendyll, became a well-known literary creation. The novel was praised by Mason, literary critic Andrew Lang, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The popularity of Zenda convinced Hope to give up the “brilliant legal career [that] seemed to lie ahead of him” to become a full-time writer but he “never again achieved such complete artistic success as in this one book.” Also in 1894, Hope produced The God in the Car, a political story.
Hope wrote 32 volumes of fiction over the course of his lifetime and he had a large popular following. In 1896 he published The Chronicles of Count Antonio, followed in 1897 by a tale of adventure set on a Greek island, entitled Phroso. He went on a publicity tour of the United States in late 1897, during which he impressed a New York Times reporter as being somewhat like Rudolf Rassendyll: a well-dressed Englishman with a hearty laugh, a soldierly attitude, a dry sense of humour, “quiet, easy manners,” and an air of shrewdness.
In 1898, he wrote Simon Dale, an historical novel involving actress and courtesan Nell Gwyn. Marie Tempest appeared in the dramatisation, called English Nell. One of Hope’s plays, The Adventure of Lady Ursula, was produced in 1898. This was followed by his novel The King’s Mirror (1899), which Hope considered one of his best works; and Captain Dieppe (1899). In 1900, he published Quisanté and he was elected chairman of the committee of the Society of Authors. He wrote Tristram of Blent in 1901, “The Intrusions of Peggy” in 1902, and Double Harness in 1904, followed by A Servant of the Public in 1905, about the love of acting.
In 1906, he produced Sophy of Kravonia, a novel in a similar vein to Zenda which was serialised in the Windsor Magazine; Roger Lancelyn Green is especially damning of this effort. Nevertheless, the story was filmed twice, in Italy in 1916 as Sofia De Kravonia, and in the USA in 1920 as Sophy of Kravonia or, The Virgin of Paris. Both adaptations featured the actress Diana Karenne in the title role (billed as “Diana Kareni” in the latter film).
In 1907, a collection of his short stories and novelettes was published under the title Tales of Two People; as well as the novel “Helena’s Path”. In 1910, he wrote Second String, followed by Mrs Maxon Protests the next year.
Hope wrote and co-wrote many plays and political non-fiction during the First World War, some under the auspices of the Ministry of Information. Later publications included The Secret of the Tower, and Beaumaroy Home from the Wars, in 1919 and Lucinda in 1920. Lancelyn Green asserts that Hope was “a first-class amateur but only a second-class professional writer.
Hope married Elizabeth Somerville (1885/6–1946) in 1903 and they had two sons and a daughter. He was knighted in 1918 for his contribution to propaganda efforts during World War I. He published an autobiographical book, Memories and Notes, in 1927. Hope died of throat cancer at the age of 70 at his country home, Heath Farm at Walton-on-the-Hill in Surrey. There is a blue plaque on his house in Bedford Square, London.
(The text of the last section was taken from a Wikipedia entry and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)
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