Saturday 8 December 2007

Huish or Maginn?

From a response I received regarding the book The Red Barn, I tend to think that Peter Haining has made an error about the authorship of the book. The response I recieved asserts the book is likely to be written by Robert Huish.

Maginn's supposed authorship comes from, according to the response I received about the book, one John Timbs. A book he wrote (Predictions Realized in Modern Times) under the psuedonym Horace Welby asserts that Maginn was the author of the book.

Charles Welch also asserts Maginn's authorship :

Sadleir , notes that 'Halkett & Laing attribute the work to William Maginn on the strength of a paragraph by Charles Welch, published in The Library Journal, vol. v, p. 88, March 1880'.

-from the British Fiction 1800-1829 database

I found a small copy of part of what Welch wrote on Google Books.


I am having trouble finding anything on the internet verifying Huish as the author. A lot of websites assert his authorship, but none provide any evidence. If anyone who might read this knows anything please let me know.




1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm currently writing a dissertation on William Maginn and i've not yet read the Red Barn. Almost everything he wrote was published anonymously, and nobody has yet compiled a full bibliography of his writing. It could be that nobody ever will. I didn't think that he'd be interested enough in a murder story to produce a major piece of writing about it (he was predominantly a humourist), but i might be wrong.