The Shadow of Great Britain

The first time he heard that Arthur wanted to meet him, Lloyd didn’t take it seriously at all.

He even specifically instructed his assistant, ”If that Sir Arthur brings up plagiarism again, just tell him I won the lawsuit and everything I’m doing is perfectly legal.”

In fact, Arthur really hadn’t caused him any more trouble after that, until last October, when he suddenly received a strange envelope.

Inside the envelope was only a little scrap of paper torn off at random, and the sentence on it was very brief: ”Mr. Lloyd, I don’t like wasting time. You can choose to go on being a lucky pirate publisher, provided God still watches over you. Or you can come to No. 4 Whitehall Street to clear up our misunderstanding. I’ll only wait for you until closing time.”

The signature read—Member and Secretary-General of the Police Commissioner Committee of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Sir Arthur Hastings.

We don’t know for sure whether Lloyd went to face him alone; the only thing we do know is this—on that very afternoon, a few young men came to Lloyd’s little print shop. By the next morning, he had become the new editor-in-chief of Spark.

Still more dramatic was that after Lloyd joined Spark, he not only didn’t throw any tantrums, he also stopped playing those shabby back-alley tricks of his.

On the contrary, this small publisher who had originally been one of Fleet Street’s ”shady fringe figures” managed, in just three months, to give Spark a completely new look.

Although Arthur had high hopes for Spark from the moment it was founded, to be honest, that was mostly just his wishful thinking.

In reality, whether it was authors of the pillar-of-the-stage caliber in John Bull such as Dickens, Great Dumas, and Disraeli, or the whole British literary circle, they all regarded Spark as a low-end magazine. Any writer with a bit of a name was reluctant to submit to Spark; if it weren’t for Arthur’s face, people like Dickens wouldn’t have wanted to send even a single piece there.

Precisely because of this, everyone naturally took Spark to be a fill-in magazine for John Bull and Blackwood’s. And its shaky quality and misjudged market positioning meant that even though Spark enjoyed the geographic advantage of occupying the bookstalls at railway stations, its sales were always lukewarm.

But after Lloyd took over, Spark suddenly turned overnight into the literary magazine in London City that best understood the tastes of London’s citizens.

This was something that neither the entire Empire Publishing Company nor the British literary world had anticipated.

After all, the Nobility liked reading Blackwood’s, the middle class liked reading John Bull, and bankers and stockbrokers liked reading Economist.

But what did textile factory workers, dock porters, cobblers’ apprentices, blacksmiths, and household maids like to read?

Very few people had really studied that question.

But Lloyd had, and he understood it better than anyone.

After all, he himself had originally made his living by printing one penny pirated books for exactly these people.

So under Lloyd’s hand, Spark soon began to brim with a large number of brand-new, piping-hot topics.

The villain novel Pearl Necklace: A Domestic Romance, featuring as its protagonist the demonic serial-killer barber Todd of Fleet Street; London Secret History, modeled on the French novel Paris Secret; and Lady Godiva, or, Tom the Peeping Man of Coventry, which won by skirting the edge of propriety—in addition, taking advantage of having Imperial Publishing and Sir Arthur Hastings behind him, Lloyd even personally serialized Lloyd’s Political Joke Collection.

And what delighted the shareholders of Imperial Publishing even more was that compared to the famous authors who often appeared in John Bull, the serial novelists in Spark were asking for fees that were pitifully low.

Because in publishing, although the trade pays lip service to the quality of books, the original reason booksellers care about quality is still for the sake of sales; so in most cases, they are always indulgent toward the books of established star authors, while nitpicking the unknown little writers to death.

So long as those currently popular writers showed an intention to publish, the booksellers could even sign contracts without ever having seen the manuscript. Indeed, even if the author hadn’t yet put pen to paper and the work was only at the conceptual stage, they could still sell the copyright and collect an advance.

Because for publishers, spending three or four hundred Pounds to gamble on a nobody suddenly becoming a hit is actually less attractive than putting in a bit more money to buy steady returns.

After all, not every publishing house is like Imperial Publishing under Sir Arthur Hastings, able to pick out gems from the vast sea of people—to see at a glance who is a pearl covered in dust and who is a worthless dead loss.

However, although publishers unanimously believed that Imperial Publishing represented the industry’s highest standard in manuscript screening, even they, strong as they were, couldn’t guarantee a perfect record.

Especially in the first two years after Spark was founded, Arthur—the greatest talent scout in the British literary world—repeatedly misjudged when it came to recruiting cheap fiction writers; after all, although Sir Arthur had eyes both in the back and the front of his head, the 19th-century British literary works that continued to be passed down from his era definitely did not include the ”poisonous weed novels” so fiercely attacked by John Bull.

If it hadn’t been for those anonymous sketches by Eld propping Spark up beforehand, this new magazine probably wouldn’t have survived long enough to see Lloyd take office before going under.

”Didn’t I say so! London readers don’t have the slightest bit of taste!” Eld slapped his thigh, the contempt in his tone practically overflowing the carriage. ”What do these people like now? Blood! Violence! Heads flying half a street with one clang of the blade! And those absolutely outrageous obscene passages... Tsk, I’m usually not one for moral judgments, but this time when John Bull said these people are writing poisonous-weed literature that corrupts social morals, they really did hit the nail on the head.”