William Hope Hodgson

[andalucia]

William Hope Hodgson-Author

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hope_Hodgson

CWGC http://www.cwgc.org/search/certificate.aspx?casualty=836846

Hoping to find out anything about his service or how he died/battle etc.

He is on the memorial i am researching. very interesting guy.

Cheers

Ant

[J Banning]

I have The House on the Borderland and Carnacki, The Ghost Finder in my bookcase. I was recommended them by a friend who has a great WW1 knowledge and we were speaking about some of the lesser known authors/musicians/poets who were killed in the Great War. I can’t help at all but would be most interested to see what you gather. I find his work very strange, but rather compelling. The House on the Borderland is one of those books that seems to stay with you, although it is really, really weird!

[eviltaxman]

Ant,

Can't really help with actual time, place etc but have a look here --> RFA on LLT. Scroll down to the 11th and it will tell you what division and "army" the 11th RFA were part of.... then it's a case of trawling through the LLT to piece together some of their movements.

Also, here's his MIC;

[andalucia]

Cheers Jeremy

I have just talked to a friend who runs a bookstore, He tells me i have to read Hodgson,s books as they are so strange. He tells me he is still a popular author today and he gets a few people asking for his work.

He is dropping off 2 books later, Im going to find out for myself.

Ant

Cheers Taxman, Thanks for that.

[Paul Nixon]

Forum member Dick Flory is one of the Royal Artillery experts here and has a lot of information on Royal Artillery officers. He'd be my first recourse for info on your man.

Paul

[andalucia]

Cheers Paul

Ant

[per ardua per mare per terram]

Hodgson, William Hope (1877–1918), author, was born on 15 November 1877 at Blackmore End, Essex, the second of the twelve children of Samuel Hodgson (1846–1892), an Anglican clergyman, and Lissie Sarah (1852–1933), daughter of Burdett Lambton Brown, an engineer. He attended St Margaret's, a boarding-school in Margate, but ran away at thirteen with the intention of going to sea. An apprenticeship in the mercantile marine was obtained for him in 1891; he was eventually certificated as third mate and rose to the rank of lieutenant. Although short in stature, he took a keen interest in body-building and in 1899 left the sea to found his own school of physical culture in Blackburn, Lancashire. He was also an enthusiastic photographer; he used pictures taken during his travels to illustrate lectures which he gave for commercial reasons and to assist his assiduous campaigning for better conditions for seamen.

When Hodgson's school was forced to close in 1902 he began writing articles for popular magazines, soon branching out into fiction. His first published story was ‘The Goddess of Death’ in the April 1904 issue of the Royal Magazine. He found his métier with weird tales of the sea featuring various kinds of monstrous creatures. His most famous story of this kind was ‘The Voice in the Night’ (1907), and his first published novel, The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907), featured eighteenth-century castaways menaced by a whole series of exotic life forms.

Hodgson's second novel, The House on the Borderland (1908), uses an account of a house ‘haunted’ by swinish invaders from another dimension as a bracketing device for a series of visions, which include a remarkable account of the cosmos revealed by contemporary astronomy and the future evolution of the solar system. The Ghost Pirates (1909) replaces the house with a ship which slips into the borderland between this world and another and is eventually invaded by its horrid inhabitants. Similarly swinish creatures continued to crop up in Hodgson's work; one is glimpsed in ‘The Hog’, the final (posthumously published) adventure of the occult detective whose early adventures were collected as Carnacki the Ghost-Finder (1910), and another such creature assumes command of an experimenter trying to make spiritual contact with the absolute in ‘Eloi, Eloi, sabachthani’ (first published in abridged form as ‘The Baumoff Explosion’ in 1919).

The last novel Hodgson published—though it may have been the first he wrote—was The Night Land (1912), in which a medieval visionary embarks on a hallucinatory odyssey in a far future when mankind is on the brink of extinction. An inhabitant of the ‘Last Redoubt’ must cross an eternally dark landscape inhabited by exceedingly strange and menacing life forms in order to rescue the woman who is the reincarnation of the dreamer's dead lover.

Hodgson always struggled to make a living as a writer, although his less exotic tales of life at sea, collected in Men of the Deep Waters (1914), The Luck of the Strong (1916), and Captain Gault (1917), were better received in his own day than his fantasies. On 26 February 1913 he married Bessie Gertrude Farnsworth (1877–1943) in London. The couple initially settled in the south of France but returned to Britain in 1914 when the First World War broke out. Hodgson joined the University of London Officers' Training Corps and was commissioned in the Royal Field Artillery in 1915. He was discharged from active service in 1916 after a head injury sustained when he was thrown from a horse, but persuaded the RFA to recommission him a year later, and was posted to France in October 1917. He was killed by a shellburst near Ypres on 19 April 1918, while reporting from a forward position on the accuracy of his battery's fire, and was buried at the foot of Mont Kemmel.

Hodgson was eventually recognized as an important pioneer of modern imaginative fiction. He was one of a handful of writers—the others included H. G. Wells, M. P. Shiel, and J. D. Beresford—who produced visionary scientific romances extrapolating from ideas in contemporary science as far as the literary imagination could take them. The figures of menace in his short horror stories are always rationalized by reference to biology or metaphysical speculation; in his longer works he attempted to cultivate a sense of the sublime which recognized the awesome magnitude of the universe revealed by contemporary science.

Brian Stableford

Sources S. Moskowitz, ‘William Hope Hodgson’, in Out of the storm: uncollected fantasies by William Hope Hodgson, ed. S. Moskowitz (1975) · R. A. Everts, ‘Some facts in the case of William Hope Hodgson’, The Shadow (April 1973), 4–11; (Oct 1973), 7–13 · I. Bell, ed., William Hope Hodgson: voyages and visions (1987) [incl. biographical material] · P. Tremayne, ‘W. Hope Hodgson: his life and work’, William Hope Hodgson: a centenary tribute, 1877–1977 (1977)

Likenesses photographs, repro. in Everts, ‘Some facts in the case of William Hope Hodgson’, Shadow (April 1973)

© Oxford University Press 2004–9 Brian Stableford, ‘Hodgson, William Hope (1877–1918)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/56875, accessed 14 June 2009]