Aet. 42, to Alfred Ewen Fletcher, editor of the Daily Chronicle. On 22 April 1894 the Chronicle reported that the boycott of Esther Waters by one of the circulating libraries could lead to legal action by the Society of Authors.
In letters to the Daily Chronicle (1 and 3 May 1894), Arthur Conan Doyle wrote that Esther Waters was a “great and very serious book” which must be made available everywhere. He attacked the monopoly of W.H. Smith & Son, who were preventing the sale of Esther Waters at all of Britain’s railway bookstalls.
Interviewed in the Daily Chronicle (2 May 1894), William Faux (1833-1909) of W.H. Smith & Son stated that his company wished to sell George Moore’s books, for the author was “an excellently clever fellow, which nobody can deny,” but his novels were too mean.
Asked why W.H. Smith sold Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Faux said: “Tess, let us say, is an exact parallel, only how far an exact parallel? Up to a point only where a whole world of distinction arises. Tess is delicately inferential; Esther Waters is precisely positive.” He was certain ladies and gentlemen would not want to read Esther Waters.
Also in the Daily Chronicle (2 May 1894), Frederick Pollack, Chairman of the Society of Authors, wrote that at George Moore’s request Esther Waters would not be the subject of a test case against W.H. Smith’s right to boycott.
In the Daily Chronicle (3 May 1894), Sarah Grand wrote that Esther Waters was morally blameless and clearly a modern literary classic. Hugh Chisolm attacked W.H. Smith & Son and demanded the lifting of the ban on Esther Waters.
George Moore’s letter of 3 May was published in the Daily Chronicle (4 May 1894) near one from William Archer, who derided Faux’s comparison of George Moore with Thomas Hardy. If “morality consists in the discouragement of sexual impulse, or even of its unlicensed manifestations, I think they should clamour for Esther Waters and demand the suppression of Life’s Little Ironies.”
In an interview in the Daily Chronicle (5 May 1894), George Moore regretted the controversy and explained: “I wrote Esther Waters in sincere love of humanity, out of a sincere wish to serve humanity. My books are not stories of adventure —stories telling merely what befalls this character and the other. Essentially, they are the raiment of a moral idea, the throwing of a moral idea into the form of a story. Here the human instinct dealt with is the love of a mother for her child through all things — an instinct battling amid our civilization, which is a far more terrible struggle than that of a tiger protecting her young in an Indian jungle.”
The controversy, with amusing highlights, continued in the Daily Chronicle until 8 May 1894.
In A Communication to My Friends (Chapter 9), George Moore recalled his meeting with William Faux about Esther Waters.
In “Pity the Poor Library Manager” (Newsbasket, February 1938), F.C. Faux recalled that he read Esther Waters for his father William and recommended that W.H. Smith sell it. William declined, citing unspecified improper parts.
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