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| Francis William Lauderdale Adams |
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Francis William Lauderdale Adams ( 1862-1893 )
Miscellaneous Writer
 was born at Malta on 27 September 1862. His father, Andrew Leith Adams, then
an army surgeon, became afterwards well known as a scientist, a fellow of the
Royal Society, and an author of travel books. His mother wrote novels, and his
father's father, Francis Adams, was a distinguished classical scholar. Adams was
educated at Shrewsbury school and in 1884 published a volume of poems, Henry
and Other Tales. In the same year he married and went to Australia.
In 1885 Leicester, An Autobiography was published in London, and in
1886 Australian Essays appeared in Melbourne, where Adams lived for a
short period. In these essays we find one on "Melbourne and her Civilization"
and another on "Sydney and her Civilization". The first was dated 1884 the
second October 1885, and presumably Adams had gone to Sydney in the interim.
There he began writing for the Bulletin and other Australian
publications. He then went to Brisbane, where his wife died, and remained there
until the early part of 1887. In this year he published a novel, Madeline
Brown's Murderer, at Melbourne, and his Poetical Works at Brisbane, a
quarto volume of over 150 pages printed in double columns. This was followed in
1888 by Songs of the Army of the Night, his best known book. After a
short stay at Sydney Adams married again, returned to Brisbane, and remained
there until about the end of 1889 writing leaders for the Brisbane
Courier. He then returned to England and published two novels, John
Webb's End, a Story of Bush Life (1891), and The Melbournians (1892).
A volume of short stories, Australian Life, came out a year later. His
health was failing rapidly and he was obliged to spend his last two winters in
the south of France and in Egypt. After his return to England, realizing he had
no hope of recovery, he shot himself on 4 September 1893. He left a widow but
had no children. He had nearly completed another volume, The New Egypt,
which was published at the end of 1893. His early novel, Leicester, had
been largely rewritten towards the close of his life, and it was republished in
1894 as A Child of the Age. The original book was called "an
autobiography" but in a prefatory note to the new edition Adams said:--"Beware
of taking my characters for myself . . . even when I wrote Leicester I
wrote of one entirely unlike myself." Tiberius: a Drama, which has been
highly praised, was also published in this year. A collection of his literary
criticism, Essays in Modernity, did not appear until 1899.
Adams crammed an immense amount of work into a short life. He often wrote
quickly and he revised little. Though most of his prose work is interesting, not
much of it is of outstanding merit. Some of his short poems of about 12 lines
have a certain Heine-like simplicity which is pleasing, and the blank verse of
some of his longer poems is graceful if a little too facile. His Songs of the
Army of the Night has often been reprinted, but the reputation of these
poems arises from their sentiments rather than their value as pure poetry. Adams
felt passionately about all downtrodden races and men. At a time when London
Dock labourers worked for fourpence an hour he could not help but raise his
voice, and the rhetoric of his "At the West India Docks" echoed throughout the
world of labour. Some of his verses caused resentment in Conservative circles,
but Adams realized, as few did in those times, how deep was the poverty and
misery of a large part of the British nation. It was a time when even such
ameliorations as unemployment insurance and old-age pensions were scarcely
thought of, and the change that has come about is largely due to men like Adams
who were not afraid to express what they so passionately felt.
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