George Chetwynd Griffith-Jones (20 August 1857 – 4 June 1906) was a British writer. He was active mainly in the science fiction genre—or as it was known at the time, scientific romance—in particular writing many future-war stories and playing a significant role in shaping that emerging subgenre. For a short period of time, he was the leading science fiction author in his home country both in terms of popularity and commercial success.
Griffith grew up with his parents and older brother, receiving home-schooling and moving frequently during his childhood due to his father's career as a clergyman. Following his father's death when Griffith was 14 years old, he went to school for a little over a year before leaving England and travelling the world, returning at the age of 19. He then worked as a teacher for ten years before pursuing a career in writing. After an initial setback that left Griffith without the means to provide for himself, he was hired by the publisher C. Arthur Pearson in 1890. Griffith made his literary breakthrough with his debut novel The Angel of the Revolution (1893), which was serialized in Pearson's Weekly before being published in book format. He signed a contract of exclusivity with Pearson and followed it up with the likewise successful sequel Olga Romanoff (1894).
Griffith was highly active as a writer throughout the 1890s, producing numerous serials and short stories for Pearson's various publications. He also wrote non-fiction for Pearson and went on various travel assignments. Among these were an 1894 publicity stunt in which he circumnavigated the world in 65 days, an 1895 journey to South America where he covered the various revolutionary movements active there at the time, and an 1896 trip to Southern Africa that resulted in Griffith writing the novel Briton or Boer? (1897) anticipating the outbreak of the Boer War (1899–1902). Griffith's career declined in the latter part of the 1890s, and he was surpassed by H. G. Wells as the favourite science fiction writer of both Pearson and the reading public. His last outright success was A Honeymoon in Space (1901), and he parted ways with Pearson shortly thereafter. With his health in decline, likely due to alcoholism, he continued writing prolifically up until his death at the age of 48.
Griffith was both successful and influential as a writer at the peak of his career, but he has since descended into obscurity. Retrospective assessments have found his works to have been timely and prescient—in particular with regard to the importance of aerial warfare—but not timeless, and he is commonly regarded as a relatively poor writer, especially when compared to his main rival, Wells. He regularly incorporated his personal viewpoints into his fiction, and anti-American sentiments expressed in this way ensured that he never established a readership in the United States as publishers there would not print his works. He was irreligious and in his youth advocated fiercely for secularism. Politically, Griffith was early an outspoken socialist, though he is believed to have gradually shifted towards more right-leaning sympathies later in his life. Socially, he has been described as embodying Victorian ideals, including social conservatism and staunch pro-British views.
Contents
Biography
Early life
George Chetwynd Griffith-Jones was born in Plymouth, Devon, on 20 August 1857. His parents were the clergyman George Alfred Jones and Jeanette Henry Capinster Jones. The family, which also included Griffith's older brother, moved repeatedly during his childhood due to his father's career. They moved from Plymouth to Tring, Hertfordshire, in 1860, then on to two poverty-stricken parishes in the Greater Manchester area: first to Ashton-under-Lyne in 1861, and then to Mossley, where his father was appointed vicar in 1864.
As the family's financial situation did not allow for the formal education of two sons, Griffith was home-schooled, with his mother teaching him French and his father Latin and Greek. He also spent considerable time exploring his father's extensive library, which was filled with the works of authors who would later serve as Griffith's literary influences, including Walter Scott and Jules Verne. Following the death of his father in January 1872, he started studying at a private school in Southport at the age of 14. There the limits of his home-schooling soon became apparent, the lack of any mathematical proficiency in particular, but through concerted effort he progressed to being the second-best pupil in his class.
Griffith left the school after 15 months, out of economic necessity—his father had left behind less than £300, all of which went to his wife in the absence of a will—and joined a sailing ship as an apprentice at the age of 15. He deserted his ship in Melbourne after 11 weeks at sea, having found the experience highly instructive but the corporal punishment in particular gruelling. He then took various employments in Australia—chiefly manual labour, but also briefly serving as a tutor—before using his earnings to travel. He later claimed both to have received an offer to marry a Polynesian princess and to have circumnavigated the globe six times; about the latter, the science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz says that "the variety of locales for his stories would tend to substantiate this claim." He returned to England at the age of 19.
Teaching career
Griffith started working as a schoolmaster in 1877, six months after his return to England, teaching English at the preparatory school Worthing College in Sussex. At this time, he had no formal qualifications and studied at night to be able to give lessons in the daytime. He left Worthing to study at a university in Germany, returning a year later to teach at Brighton. He continued to study at nights to get the necessary teaching diplomas for a career in education. He started his writing career while at Brighton, writing for local papers among others. He then took a job teaching at Bolton Grammar School in 1883, and while there published his first two books: the poetry collections Poems (1883) and The Dying Faith (1884), both published under his pen name Lara. There he met Elizabeth Brierly (1861–1933); they married in February 1887 and eventually had two sons and a daughter. He passed the College of Preceptors exam the same year, thus completing his formal education in teaching, and promptly left that line of work in favour of pursuing a career in writing. He would later describe his time working as a teacher as "ten years' penal servitude".
Writing career
Griffith and Brierly moved to London, where he started working as a journalist at a paper in 1888. He worked his way up to become the magazine's editor, and eventually took over as owner. At the time, Griffith was highly politically active, advocating for socialism and secularism. His political activism resulted in the paper being the target of a libel suit. Griffith decided against hiring a lawyer, opting instead to represent himself, and ended up losing the case which led to the paper going out of business. Griffith was thus unemployed, and while he continued to pen political and religious pamphlets for a while as a freelancer, it was not enough to provide a living. In 1889 he was involved in another court case against the Member of Parliament and declared atheist Charles Bradlaugh, whom Griffith and William Stewart Ross had criticized in among other publications a pamphlet titled Ananias, The Atheist's God: For the Attention of Charles Bradlaugh; Griffith won the case and was awarded £30 in damages.
A friend of Griffith's wrote him a letter of introduction to the publisher C. Arthur Pearson. He got a job at the newly founded Pearson's Weekly in 1890, initially tasked by the editor Peter Keary with writing addresses on envelopes for the magazine's competitions. He made a good impression on Keary through his skill as a conversationalist, largely owing to his background travelling the world, and was soon promoted to columnist. He carried on in this capacity for the rest of the decade.
Griffith made his literary breakthrough in 1893 with what was then known as a scientific romance—an exciting adventure story, or "romance", with cutting-edge science playing a key role—and would later be called science fiction. The future war genre had been popular since the publication of George Tomkyns Chesney's novella "The Battle of Dorking" (1871), and the rival magazine Black & White had just had a major success in the genre with the serialized novel The Great War of 1892 (1892) by Philip Howard Colomb. Pearson wanted to capitalize on both of these trends; Pearson's Weekly had from the start published short stories, and when the staff discussed who among them might try their hand at a future-war serial, Griffith volunteered. He brought in a synopsis the following day, and got the assignment. The synopsis was published in Pearson's Weekly on 14 January 1893, before the story itself had been written. The next week's edition saw the publication of the first of 39 weekly instalments of Griffith's story, The Angel of the Revolution. The name of the author was not revealed until the final issue on 14 October 1893. The serial received positive reviews and the magazine saw a sharp increase in number of issues sold. Griffith's first son—Alan Arnold Griffith—was born during the serialization on 13 June 1893 and named after two characters in The Angel of the Revolution.
Death
Griffith died at his home in Port Erin on 4 June 1906, at the age of 48. The death certificate listed his cause of death as cirrhosis of the liver. Moskowitz notes that malaria can have a similar clinical presentation; Griffith had contracted malaria in Hong Kong, and the literary biographer Peter Berresford Ellis writes that it at least contributed to his deteriorating condition. Moskowitz nevertheless concludes—primarily from Griffith's self-description as "a waterlogged derelict"—that his early death was most likely the result of alcoholism. As corroborating evidence, Moskowitz cites an increasing prominence of alcohol in Griffith's later works and the appearance of something akin to Alcoholics Anonymous in one of his books. Stableford, who similarly concludes that Griffith likely started consuming alcohol excessively no later than the mid-1890s, additionally points to what he describes as "a seemingly alcoholic quality about the garrulous fluency of his later works".
Legacy
Place in science fiction history
In his time, Griffith was both successful and influential in his home country. Following the publication of The Angel of the Revolution in 1893, he was the most popular science fiction writer in England until the appearance of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine in 1895, and the best-selling one until Wells's The War of the Worlds was released in book format in 1898. E. F. Bleiler, in the 1990 reference work Science-Fiction: The Early Years, comments that Griffith may be considered the first professional English-language science fiction author. He is credited by among others The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Don D'Ammassa with shaping the burgeoning future war genre, in particular by engaging more with the political aspects, and Darren Harris-Fain similarly writes that he played a key role in the development of the scientific romance genre. More modestly, Brian Stableford writes that Griffith contributed to the establishment of a new literary niche and laid the groundwork for more sophisticated exponents of the craft, but concludes that it is likely that somebody else would have played that part if Griffith had not done so. On the subject of specific authors who were influenced by Griffith, Peter Berresford Ellis lists several including M. P. Shiel and Fred T. Jane, and Sam Moskowitz posits that George du Maurier drew direct inspiration from The Angel of the Revolution sequence for Trilby (1895) and The Martian (1898). The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction credits Griffith with the first known use of several terms, including "death ray", "homeworld", and "space explorer".
In spite of all this, Griffith and his works have now descended into obscurity, something several modern writers have remarked upon as being peculiar. A commonly cited explanation is that his works were timely but not timeless; Moskowitz writes that "He has not survived because his literary output was for the most part a reflection, not a shaper, of the feelings of the period. He danced to the beat of the nearest drummer." The antiquarian bookseller Jeremy Parrott comments that the outbreak of World War I in 1914, along with the development of powered flight and emergence of submarine warfare, quickly rendered Griffith's visions of the future obsolete. Robert Godwin and the publishing house Collector's Guide Publishing further attribute it in part to the bankruptcy of the Tower Publishing Company in 1896 leaving his successful first three novels without a publisher thereafter. Griffith's failure to establish himself in the US has also been proposed as a contributing factor.
Literary proficiency
Later appraisals of Griffith's skill as a writer have often found it to be lacking. Bleiler summarizes Griffith as "Historically important, but a bad writer technically"; Harris-Fain outlines his principal failings as "an uninspired, if not clichéd, style, poor characterization, weak ideas, and repetition". Stableford calls Griffith "rather inept" and views him as lacking originality, noting that he would often name his sources of inspiration outright; The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction similarly describes him as borrowing themes "more conspicuously from earlier texts than was the custom then". Many have noted an apparent prioritization of quantity over quality especially in the later years of his career, and his earlier works are commonly regarded as broadly superior to his later ones, with some critics such as Stableford and Darko Suvin opining that he peaked as early as his debut novels in The Angel of the Revolution sequence. Stableford comments that Griffith's second novel Olga Romanoff left no room for further escalation in scope, and that toning the extravagance down for later works drained his stories of their initial vibrancy. Michael Moorcock, in the introduction to the 1975 anthology Before Armageddon, calls Griffith "the first 'professional' science-fiction writer", inasmuch as he wrote primarily for money and in service of his employers, and comments that "any integrity that his earlier fiction had possessed was soon lost". The serial format has also been noted as detrimental to the quality of several of his works: they were written piece-by-piece to meet tight deadlines and provide cliffhangers, which resulted in uneven pacing, poor structure, and unsatisfying resolutions. Stableford further identifies Griffith's apparent alcoholism as a likely cause of declining quality over time.
Among Griffith's strengths, a certain prescience is often cited. John McNabb writes that "Griffith was conscious of the possibilities of science and his technological descriptions were informed by contemporary debate". He is noted for predicting technologies that had not yet been invented; among these are heavier-than-air aircraft, radar, sonar, and air-to-surface missiles. He is similarly credited with anticipating developments in warfare, in particular the coming importance of aerial warfare, but also in terms of military tactics including the use of poison gas. He is recognized as having correctly predicted the outbreak of the Boer War, though Moskowitz comments that this did not require particularly keen foresight. Ellis writes that while Griffith's repeated motif of a war between Britain and the US never came to pass, it has since been revealed that both countries did in fact plan for such an eventuality up until the lead-up to World War II. Godwin finds Griffith to display a keen understanding of various concepts relevant to space travel in A Honeymoon in Space, and credits him with inventing the countdown to zero in "The Great Crellin Comet". Beyond this, Moskowitz finds Griffith to exhibit "a fine imagination, a reasonably good flair for characterization, and an excellent storyteller's sense of pace" while acknowledging that he lacked "the literary touch". McNabb similarly opines that "what Griffith lacked in literary style, he made up for in imaginative and exuberant story telling", comparing him in this regard to Edgar Rice Burroughs. Moskowitz and Ellis both commend Griffith for portraying women as equals to men, commenting that he was ahead of his contemporaries on that point. Barbara Arnett Melchiori, by contrast, finds Griffith to portray women as little more than the private property of men.
In relation to H. G. Wells
During Griffith's lifetime, comparisons were frequently made between his works and those of H. G. Wells—to the chagrin of Wells, who viewed himself as producing literature of a higher class than Griffith. Wells reviewed Griffith's The Outlaws of the Air in Saturday Review in 1895, finding it passable but not living up to its potential. Wells quickly overtook Griffith in reputation, and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction writes that Griffith attempted in vain to garner critical praise by covering different literary ground in order to get out of Wells's shadow.
Comparisons have continued to be made long after both men's deaths. Wells is known to have read Griffith's works and is widely believed by scholars on Griffith to have been influenced by them. Scholars on Wells, by contrast, usually do not consider Griffith to have been an important influence. Wells's The War in the Air (1908) contains a passage that describes Griffith's The Outlaws of the Air as an "aeronautic classic"; Griffith's biographer Moskowitz takes this as evidence that Wells held professional respect for Griffith, while Harry Wood in The Wellsian: The Journal of the H. G. Wells Society instead interprets the apparent praise as backhanded. Wood argues that although the two were contemporaries chronologically, that term may be considered inappropriate when considering their ideological differences, with Griffith embodying Victorian ideals and Wells embracing Edwardian ones. Says Wood, "Where Wells critically analysed the present and offered shrewd insight on the future, Griffith celebrated the present as the glorious inheritance of a reified Victorian past". Wood nevertheless identifies several similarities in their works, including a focus on speculative aeronautics with a grounding in contemporary science and the use of fiction as a vehicle for social commentary. Steven Mollmann, in a 2015 Science Fiction Studies article comparing The Angel of the Revolution and The War in the Air, characterizes both books as examples of what he terms "revolutionary sf", where technological revolution (here in the form of airships) brings about political revolution.
Wells is generally regarded as the superior writer. Harris-Fain states that while both writers had "imaginative ideas and exciting stories", only Wells was able to incorporate "serious themes and philosophical speculations". Wood and Mollmann both comment that Wells more accurately predicted the future of warfare than did Griffith. Wood focuses on Wells depicting aerial warfare as insufficient to maintain control on the ground and draws comparisons to strategic bombing during World War II. Mollmann focuses on Wells portraying technological developments being adopted by all warring parties roughly at the same time—thus leading to more destructive warfare but not to anybody having a decisive technological advantage—and draws comparisons to World War I.
Personal views
Religion
Griffith was irreligious, and in his youth he wrote for the freethinker magazine Secular Review. Stableford comments that being a freethinker whose father was a clergyman was a background Griffith shared with many other scientific romance authors. He advocated fiercely for secularism as a young man; Stableford writes that he evidently tempered his opinions on this later in his life, as he wrote the serial "Thou Shalt Not—" for a religious audience in Pearson's The Sunday Reader in 1899. Moskowitz further writes that Griffith appears to have taken up an interest in the occult in the later years of his life.
Politics
Early in his career, Griffith was an outspoken socialist. He incorporated his political views into his fiction, and much has been written about what can be gleaned from his writings about his viewpoints. Melchiori writes that there are a number of inconsistencies in his debut novel The Angel of the Revolution which indicate to her that Griffith "had by no means fully absorbed the doctrine that he was preaching". In particular, Melchiori highlights Griffith's vision of the abolition of private property as incomplete, suggesting that the concept was so deeply ingrained in his worldview that he could not properly imagine its absence. Bleiler similarly describes Griffith's works as characterized by "ambivalence toward various social movements of the day". Stableford writes that Griffith's works reveal a successive shift to increasingly right-leaning sympathies, with anarchists being portrayed positively alongside socialists in his very earliest stories but quickly rejected afterwards, and the socialists in turn being displaced by capitalists in the later works.
Social matters
On Griffith's social views, Stableford contrasts Griffith's gradually shifting views on economics with the observation that he consistently portrayed aristocrats positively from the very start. Wood writes that "Griffith's fiction celebrates social conservatism and British global predominance, preaching the maintenance of this status quo". McNabb identifies themes of social Darwinism, eugenics, and outright race war, while commenting that there is a notable lack of the antisemitism that often accompanied such stories. He writes that Griffith's works reinforced then-common beliefs among his readers about their own inherent superiority. Melchiori similarly says about Griffith's views on internationalism that "In theory he accepts it, but in practice he is very strongly pro-British", and Wood comments that "Irishness could only exist for Griffith, it seems, as a constituent part of Britishness". Bleiler summarizes Griffith as "in ideology, the embodiment of what was wrong with the British Victorian Weltanschauung".