Warwick Deeping

For the anti-submarine trawler, see HMT Warwick Deeping.
Warwick Deeping in 1932

George Warwick Deeping (28 May 1877 – 20 April 1950) was a prolific English novelist and short story writer, whose best-known novel was Sorrell and Son (1925).

Life

Born in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, into a family of doctors, Warwick Deeping was educated at Merchant Taylors' School. He proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study medicine and science (receiving his MA in March 1902[1]), then went to Middlesex Hospital to finish his medical training.[2] During the First World War, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Deeping later gave up his job as a doctor to become a full-time writer.[3] He married Phyllis Maude Merrill and lived for the rest of his life in "Eastlands" on Brooklands Road, Weybridge, Surrey.

He was one of the best-selling authors of the 1920s and 1930s, with seven of his novels making the best-seller list. Deeping was a prolific writer of short stories, which appeared in such British magazines as Cassell's, The Story-Teller, and The Strand. He also published fiction in several US magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post and Adventure.[4] All of the short stories and serialised novels in US magazines were reprints of works previously published in Britain. Well over 200 of his original short stories and essays that appeared in various British fiction magazines were never seen in book form. Those works are now available in the multi-volume "Lost Stories" collection.

Themes

His early work is dominated by historical romances. His later novels more usually dealt with modern life, and were critical of many tendencies of twentieth-century civilisation. His standpoint was generally that of a passionate individualism, distrustful both of ruling elites and of the lower classes, who were often presented as a threat to his embattled middle-class protagonists. His most celebrated hero is Captain Sorrell M.C., the ex-officer who after the First World War is reduced to a menial occupation in which he is bullied by those of a lower social class and less education. Deeping's novels often deal with controversial issues. In her 2009 study, The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping,[5] Mary Grover lists these:

Despite these themes, Deeping got little recognition as a serious writer. George Orwell, whose political beliefs were very different from Deeping's, and who in his dismissal of Deeping was typical of highbrow left-wing critics of the time, dismissed him as being among the 'huge tribe' of writers who 'simply don't notice what is happening'.[7]

Books by Warwick Deeping

The following were published posthumously

Films

Movies based on Deeping's novels belong, with two exceptions, to the silent era. Unrest was filmed in 1920, Fox Farm in 1922, and Doomsday in 1928. Kitty (1929), directed by Victor Saville, was one of the first British talkies (only the second half of the film had a soundtrack).

Sorrell and Son (about an officer who after the First World War finds himself unemployable except in a menial capacity, but who is determined to give his son the best education possible) was filmed three times: It first appeared in 1927 as a silent movie, was remade in 1934 as a sound film, and turned into a TV mini-series in 1984.

References

  1. ↑ "University intelligence". The Times (36711). London. 10 March 1902. p. 11.
  2. ↑ "Deeping, George Warwick (DPN895GW)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  3. ↑ Ruth Franklin. Readers of the Pack: American Best-Selling Bookforum. Summer 2011.
  4. ↑ Jones, Robert Kenneth. The Lure of "Adventure". Wildside Press, 2007, (p.27)
  5. ↑ Mary Grover,The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping(Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009)
  6. ↑ The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping, 60.
  7. ↑ George Orwell, 'Inside the Whale', New Directions in Prose and Poetry (1940).
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