“It’s a question of intellectual honesty … Oh, a small one maybe. But you say yourself you don’t know where it may lead, what accretions of untruth – if it is untruth – may gather round it. This is a matter of historical truth, of course you must speak up.”
Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956)
WHEN HE SETTLED IN at Frank Wise’s old desk on the morning of Wednesday, September 14, 1925, Hugh Eayrs had no reason to think the day would be different from any other. Macmillan of Canada was doing very well in spite of the turnover of staff in the early post-war years. Few of the current employees knew of the turmoil caused by the president who had resigned so suddenly in 1921.
But Eayrs, with his sandy hair swept back and to the side and his rather wistful, basset hound countenance, remembered. He had wasted no time in establishing himself in Wise’s office once George Brett and Sir Frederick Macmillan had offered him the presidency. Within days, he had written to Hodder Williams, of Hodder and Stoughton, asking to have an announcement of his appointment placed in The Bookman, the book trade magazine Williams controlled. Eayrs noted that he was the proud son of Dr. George Eayrs, LL.D., F.R.H.S., of Leeds, that he had emigrated to Canada from England in 1912 (at the age of eighteen), and that he had entered the publishing industry immediately after his arrival in Toronto. He had collaborated with Thomas B. Costain in a novel, The Amateur Diplomat, published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1916, and had written a brief biography of Sir Isaac Brock for Macmillan of Canada’s “Canadian Men of Action Series” late in the war. Eayrs concluded his autobiographical sketch with the request that in particular he did not want the announcement to emphasize his youth or mention his age.1
Not yet twenty-six at the time he became president of Macmillan of Canada, Eayrs was understandably sensitive about his relative lack of experience. Nevertheless, he had assumed firm control of the firm. He knew that Brett and Macmillan held high opinions of him, but he was also aware that they thought themselves able to control the actions of a young and untested president in a way they had failed to do with Wise. If so, they had underestimated him. In his first months as president, he had managed to convince his own sales manager as well as George Brett, against their better judgment, that Macmillan of Canada should publish W.H. Blake’s translation into English of Louis Hémon’s lyrical novel, Maria Chapdelaine, a work of mythic proportions about the spirit of a rustic and devout Quebec people. Beautifully illustrated with woodcuts by the Toronto graphic artist Thoreau Macdonald, it instantly became an international success.2 Thereafter, the New York and London offices of Macmillan had given Eayrs considerable latitude in deciding what the Canadian firm might publish.
Hugh Eayrs was a young man who possessed great force of personality and an infectious sense of humour. He had a clear sense of direction, but he was impulsive and took offence easily, whether with business associates or reviewers of Macmillan of Canada titles. One junior employee was immediately impressed on joining the firm by “the drive and charm” of the man. But John Morgan Gray soon witnessed another side to his boss. At times he would bang the desk with his fist to make a point. “Hugh Eayrs had a low boiling point,” Gray recalled, “and was not famous for reasonable argument. He fired and hired on impulse, or would cut off a bookseller’s discount for criticism of our service or prices.” A worried Winnipeg bookseller inquired in 1924 whether it was true that Eayrs might still “harbour some ill feelings” against his company over certain business dealings. Eayrs explained that he was going through “a bit of a nervous breakdown” and was about to “get right away from business for a month or six weeks.”3
Eayrs played as hard as he worked. “I have several stories to tell you which I shall treasure until I next meet you,” he wrote to a friend in England in 1924, “in view of the fact that my temporary secretary is a very tender young thing who might resign if I dictated these stories to her.”4 On at least one occasion, his adventures got him into trouble. “I wish to do in writing what I did to-day personally,” he wrote to an acquaintance during his first year as president, “offer you a sincere apology for my part in the unfortunate incident which took place to-day at the 60 Club. I do this first, because I want to, and second because the Commission of the Club asks me to do so.” Then he left the name of his attorney, with whom the offended man’s own counsel should communicate.5
On this September day, Eayrs accepted a telephone call. On the other end of the line was a reporter from the Toronto Star. What could Eayrs tell him about a writ just taken out at Osgoode Hall against one of Macmillan’s authors, H.G. Wells, over his Outline of History? Who was this woman, Florence A. Deeks, whose lawyers had secured it? What did Eayrs think about the $500,000 in damages the woman sought for the illegal use of her unpublished manuscript in the writing of The Outline?
What indeed? Eayrs was stunned and managed only to mutter that he had no comment to make. All he knew about these extraordinary claims was what the reporter had told him. What was this all about? Where to begin? Perhaps when the writ was served he would learn more. Meanwhile, all he could do was wait.
The next day, the Toronto Star and the Toronto Telegram made the charges public. The Star’s account was brief but prominent. “Toronto Writer Asks Wells for Big Sum,” ran its front-page headline, just below one that announced formal German approval of the Rhineland Pact at Locarno. The Telegram’s headline, like its article, was longer:
AUTHORESS HERE SUES H.G. WELLS FOR $500,000 Claims Outline of History Contains Part of Unpublished Work by Miss Florence A. Deeks
In the absence of any contact from the woman’s lawyers, all Eayrs had to go on was the newspaper accounts. They were not particularly helpful. She was seeking an injunction restraining Wells’s publishers from selling, advertising, or distributing The Outline of History without the plaintiff’s consent, because it contained “a reproduction in whole or in part … of the unpublished literary composition or work known as ‘The Web.’ ”6
“The Web”? Eayrs had never heard of it. The Deeks woman had also asked for “a mandatory injunction directing the defendants,” Wells and the publishers of The Outline, “to deliver to the plaintiff for destruction all books, manuscripts and other documents containing such reproduction; for an account of all sales by the defendants; and for an account of all profits.” Finally, she sought the half-million dollars in damages for “the illegal use, appropriation and reproduction of the plaintiff’s said unpublished literary composition or work and for infringement of her proprietary rights therein.”
One can imagine Hugh Eayrs, later that day, stepping up to 14 Elm Street, the old St. George’s Hall, after a brisk walk from the Macmillan offices. This was where the Arts and Letters Club had established its quarters in 1920, and the club was where he often relaxed over more than one drink after a hard day’s work. Many of the city’s most prominent artists, writers, academics, and patrons of the arts belonged to it. The journalist Hector Charlesworth held court there. Vincent Massey, heir to the Massey farm machinery fortune, frequently brought guests of international stature, like G.K. Chesterton, to its premises. Artists of the Group of Seven, such as J.E.H. MacDonald, could be found at the table they regarded as their own, arguing amongst themselves. The composer Healey Willan presided this year as the club’s president.7 It was a place where minds could meet and, when it suited their fancy, men could be boys.
Much of the club gossip that day was no doubt about the charges levelled by Florence Deeks and the $500,000 she sought from H.G. Wells and his fellow defendants. This was not the kind of attention Hugh Eayrs sought. But as he fortified himself with his usual dose of liquid courage, he appears to have learned a little from his friends about Miss Deeks. Later that day he penned a short letter to George Brett in New York, informing him of the situation and enclosing clippings from the Telegram and Star. As publisher of the North American edition of The Outline of History, Macmillan in New York had been named as a defendant. “None of us have heard of this person, Miss Deeks, and I am trying to find out what I can of her but the prevalent impression amongst writers here is that she is lightminded.” Meanwhile, he said, he would consult Macmillan’s Toronto lawyers.8
Hot in pursuit of sensation, the next day the Star gave the story a headline: “Miss Deeks’ Suit Over Wells Book Causes a Big Stir.” The story’s lead paragraph reflected the mood at the Arts and Letters Club the day before: the charges had “set literary Toronto agog.” Friends of Miss Deeks had told the Star that she meant business, that this was no “freak action,” and that she had the full support of her brother, who had “a large construction business.” The woman’s lawyer had refused to say anything about the case other than that “if it was by a coincidence that the material in Wells’ ‘Outline of History’ was so similar to the material prepared by Miss Deeks for her manuscript ‘The Web,’ then it was a most remarkable coincidence.”9
Contacted by the newspaper, Macmillan in London denied any knowledge of the matter and noted that it had not even published The Outline of History. One Toronto publisher wondered why Miss Deeks had waited five years to bring her action and pointed to the use Mr. Wells had made of famous collaborators such as Sir Ray Lankester and Sir Harry Johnston. Another defended the facts of history as matters of common possession easily used by different authors for their own purposes. Nevertheless, sources close to Miss Deeks had indicated that Macmillan of Canada had possessed “The Web” for a considerable length of time, during which, she claimed, it had somehow reached Mr. Wells. “Striking similarities” existed between the two works, it was said.
Eayrs received a letter from the firm of Tilley, Johnston, Thomson & Parmenter the same day. He was now more than a little worried. The woman’s charges might be outrageous, but she had retained the services of the city’s best lawyers, for W. Norman Tilley was renowned in the province as the Law Society’s leading litigator.10 Of all the members of the Law Society of Upper Canada, Tilley was probably the last one who would allow himself to become involved in a frivolous action. And the letter from his firm pulled no punches. “You of course are fully conversant with the use that was made of our client’s manuscript while the same was in your hands and it is, therefore, unnecessary for us to go into further details at the present time for the purpose of substantiating the facts and circumstances relied on in support of the claim now made.” The letter then suggested that if Macmillan of Canada was willing to entertain a settlement, negotiations should proceed.11
Eayrs was dumbfounded. Wells had written and published his book half a decade ago, when Eayrs was still secretary of the company, during the days of Saul and Wise.
Saul and Wise. What went through the mind of Wise’s successor when he first made the connection between the events in question and the final years of the disgraced president? He must have dwelt, if only for a fleeting moment, on the unsavoury circumstances surrounding the dismissal of Frank Wise from the firm. Like George Brett and Sir Frederick Macmillan, he knew that Wise had engaged in more than a few dubious activities before his days as a publisher had ended. What fugitive thoughts began to gnaw at Eayrs’s presumption of his firm’s innocence in the matter of these outlandish claims? Did he recall the signed statement he had obtained four years earlier from Miss E. Millership, a secretary during Wise’s final days? In it, she had stated that Wise had telephoned her, asking her to find copies of certain letters he had written and to mail them to him. Fortunately, she had had the good sense to speak to Eayrs about the request, and he had written to the ex-president refusing to allow him access to any of the company records. Wise “then asked me,” Miss Millership had written in her statement, “if we had found certain papers which were supposed to be unfindable in the files. I said no.”12 At the time, Eayrs had suspected that the papers in question were about Sales Unlimited. But were they? Wise’s inquiry could have been about any number of highly irregular schemes.
If he wanted to get to the bottom of this scandal in the making, Eayrs had a lot of legwork to do, and quickly. First he met with John Saul; then he spoke to Professor George Sidney Brett at the University of Toronto. Rumour had it that the Deeks woman had consulted the noted historian of psychology a few years earlier about her work. By the time Eayrs sat down to report his findings to George Brett in New York and Sir Frederick in London, he was alarmed at what he had learned. The suit, he wrote to Brett, was “beginning to appear much more serious than I had supposed.” Both Professor Brett and John Saul had told him essentially the same story. Miss Deeks had indeed consulted them, and apparently others, after New York published The Outline of History, complaining that Macmillan in Toronto had held her unpublished manuscript for a very long time, and that after it was returned to her it was “thumb-marked and pencil-marked.” She had then claimed that some of her material “had been copied word for word” and had found its way into The Outline.13
This was not the worst of it. Saul had told Eayrs that after consulting with Frank Wise about the manuscript, he had not only told Miss Deeks that her manuscript was good but also had proposed to her, “with Wise’s approval,” that he (Saul) “forward” it to Macmillan in New York for possible publication. More alarming still, both Professor Brett and John Saul had assured Eayrs that there existed “a resemblance between the material in Miss Deeks’s manuscript and Mr. Wells’s OUTLINE OF HISTORY so extraordinarily marked as to be a matter for amazement.”
The Toronto scholar who shared the New York publisher’s name had said “that coincidences of this kind were not likely … on the whole to be regarded as anything but coincidence.” But Eayrs was scarcely put at ease when the professor added that there was a possibility, nevertheless, “that the court would look at it differently.” Eayrs concluded his letter to Brett in New York by insisting that no one currently at the Toronto house had had any intimation of Miss Deeks’s activities or had even heard of her. But he added that its lawyer Robert L. Johnston, a Macmillan of Canada director and partner in McLaughlin, Johnston, Moorhead & Macaulay, insisted on a meeting very soon between himself, Eayrs, and the president of the American branch.
Eayrs quickly followed his letter to Brett with one to Sir Frederick Macmillan, assuring him, too, that no one in the Toronto office had ever heard of Miss Deeks. “Upon the appearance of the first notification in the press,” he wrote, “I thought the woman light-minded but I have now gone deeper in to the matter and find it is likely to assume a more serious complexion.” After complaining that her lawyers had seen fit to release details of her charges through the press, he suggested that Sir Frederick trace whether her manuscript had ever been sent to Macmillan in London. Her lawyer had insisted categorically that the manuscript had been sent to the London branch of Macmillan through “Mr. Brett’s house.” In addition, Eayrs felt obliged to mention one complicating factor: he had been told “on good authority” that Frank Wise had been “in touch with this Miss Deeks for some time past and is in close touch with her now.”14 He concluded by saying that he and the company lawyer, Mr. Johnston, were watching the matter “most carefully.”
While Eayrs publicly assumed the stance that the claim that Wells had used “The Web” was unfounded and laughable, in fact, with each day that passed he grew more worried. John Saul lived in the affluent Rosedale district of Toronto, in a pleasant home with warm, multicoloured brown brick, its two gables facing the street. At 30 St. Andrews Gardens, he was separated by only three houses from Eayrs’s own home, larger but more austere than Saul’s and in plain red brick, at number 55. Every time the two neighbours chatted, Saul seemed to tell a different story. Later in the month Eayrs told Robert Johnston, in worried confidence, that Saul now thought “The Web” had indeed been “forwarded to England.”15
In a flurry of letters whose bravado scoffed at the idea, the three branches of Macmillan now began an extensive quest amongst themselves to determine just which of them had possessed “The Web,” and when. Eayrs spoke of “this ridiculous case” to Sir Frederick Macmillan, but insisted politely, using the words of his lawyer, that it was of utmost importance “to find out if the manuscript by this Miss Deeks was ever sent to your house and when returned,” and whether the British publisher possessed “any correspondence with our house either with Mr. Wise or Mr. Saul confirming it.”16
Macmillan’s Brett initially thought that “The Web” might indeed have been sent to his firm. “We have not yet been able to find out what happened to this MS after it was received by us,” he wrote. But before mailing the letter, Brett had second thoughts about the words he had chosen; so he pencilled out the word “after” and replaced it with “if.”17 The next day he sent a delicately worded letter to Wells, outlining Miss Deeks’s suit, proclaiming that it was “so ridiculous that no reasonable person would give a moment’s attention to it,” but urging him to give it “every possible attention.” A week later, now convinced that the case was serious indeed, in a letter written in the stiff syntax of legal formality, he asked Wells directly whether he possessed proof that the outline of his book was his own, and whether, either directly or indirectly, he had ever heard of “Miss Florence Deeks or of her manuscript, or seen it, either prior to or subsequent to your decision to undertake the book, ‘The Outline of History.’ ”18
Wells did little to illuminate matters. The Toronto Star interviewed him in London. “I can say nothing about it, because I knew nothing about it,” he said. By the time the Toronto Telegram reached his flat in Whitehall Court, its correspondent found only his secretary there. Wells, he was told, had left for “the country,” but he had left the message that “it was only a newspaper story.” When the reporter asked why someone would launch a frivolous action if the consequence would be to incur the costs of the suit, the secretary replied that Mr. Wells was of the view that “the lady must have taken proceedings on account of an unpublished work of her own. In that case she herself must have given that work to Mr. Wells if he used it for the ‘Outline of History,’ and he says he knows nothing about it.”19
It was a curious thing to say. On one hand, the author of The Outline of History appeared to offer a categorical denial of any knowledge of the Toronto woman’s work; on the other, he declared that if he had used her work, she must have given it to him of her own accord. Each statement by itself made sense, but taken together they seemed to swing on a hinge of negation.
Florence thought it best to defer to Mr. Tilley as to when the writs should be served on the defendants. Meanwhile, she had much to do before her action could be brought to court. Furious that “The Highway of History” had been rejected by the New York publishers because it so much resembled The Outline of History, she had vented her frustration at George. Now she needed another kind of support, that of expert witnesses to testify on her behalf.
But who? For his defence, Wells would no doubt call upon some or all of the authorities listed on his title page. She needed scholars of a similar calibre. Professor Brett at the university had encouraged her to think that the action might succeed, but it was evident that he would rather not be involved in a legal action. Who among historians in Canada possessed the most impeccable authority? What was the name of their professional body? Armed with such questions, she soon found the address of the Canadian Historical Association. Thus began her contact with Lawrence J. Burpee in Ottawa, its founding president.
Like many other members of the historical association he had helped to bring into existence, Lawrence Burpee was not a professional historian attached to a university department. Instead, he was a former federal civil servant who, having worked for three successive ministers of justice in the 1890s, had resigned in 1905 to become librarian of Ottawa’s public library, leaving this post seven years later to accept appointment as the first Canadian secretary of the International Joint Commission. It was a position in which he would remain until his death in 1946, at the age of seventy-three.
His first loves, however, were history, literature, and geography. A man of seemingly limitless energy, he had published several books on the adventure of exploration as it related to Canada, including The Search for the Western Sea in 1908, Scouts of Empire in 1912, Pathfinders of the Great Plains in 1914, and Sandford Fleming, Empire Builder the year after. At the time he received Florence’s request to examine “The Web” and The Outline, his activity and output had scarcely slackened: he had just assumed the presidency of the Canadian Authors’ Association and was preparing the first historical atlas of Canada for publication. In 1925, many of his most distinguished historical contributions were still to come.20
Burpee was intrigued by the tale told by the Toronto woman. She had sent him a copy of her comparison and had explained the circumstances by which her manuscript seemed to have been removed from the Macmillan vault during the very months in which H.G. Wells had apparently begun to write The Outline. His curiosity got the better of him. He agreed to examine the two works and soon began the laborious task of his own comparison.
He sent his report to Florence on January 11, 1926. “What I have been asked to do,” he said, “is to make a careful examination of ‘The Web’ and of the ‘Outline of History,’ and to say whether or not a comparison of the two books reveals, in my opinion, any evidence of the plan, scope, spirit or language of one having been appropriated and incorporated in the other. If the facts are as stated, the appropriation obviously could be only from ‘The Web.’ ”21
Burpee declared that, having just seen both works for the first time, he had brought to his assessment “no preconceived ideas as to the character, scope or language of either.” He had compared “The Web” and The Outline, and then proceeded to examine critically Miss Deeks’s typewritten analyses of their frameworks and substance. At the outset, he said, he had doubted that coincidence alone could constitute “evidence of deliberate plagiarism.” But only “up to a point.” By the time he had finished his own assessment, he had compiled his own lengthy list of parallel passages and had reached his own conclusions. Florence lingered over Burpee’s concluding paragraphs:
The impression left upon my mind by this detailed study of all the material, is that to a considerable extent the plan, scope, spirit and language of “The Web” have been incorporated in “The Outline.” I have already said that coincidences, as such, are not necessarily evidence of plagiarism; occasional similarities may be coincidences and nothing more. But here the thing to my mind, gets beyond the reasonable bounds of such an explanation. One finds the same general plan – a distinctly original treatment of an unusually broad and intricate subject; striking similarities in the framework; similarities in treatment; and also perhaps equally significant dissimilarities, as the stressing of woman’s place in the history of the world in “The Web” and its avoidance in “The Outline”; and coincidences of language until it becomes impossible to regard them any longer as merely coincidences. Equally significant is the appearance, at least to some extent, of the same underlying thought in both works, the striking idea of the history of the world considered as a web or fabric into which is woven the story of man and his deeds, good and evil. One might take each item in these lines of comparison separately, or even each line of comparison, and perhaps remain unconvinced, but the cumulative effect of the whole is overwhelming.
Without attempting an analysis, I think it must be patent to anyone who reads and compares the “Web” and the “Outline” that they are not only curiously alike in plan and structure, but equally unlike any previous attempt at a world history …
In regard to similarities in the actual language employed by the authors of “The Web” and “The Outline” – that is, the presentation of similar ideas in the same sequence, and clothing them in substantially the same form of words, – the instances are far too numerous to even begin to present them here. In this respect perhaps more than in any other, – the significance of the comparison lies not so much in the individual example, which in itself may be often insignificant as evidence, as in the piling up of innumerable such instances. And as I have already said, it is the cumulative effect of very many similarities, in this as in other directions, that compels one to the conclusion that some of those who were engaged in preparing material, at some stage, for ‘The Outline,’ must have had access to the manuscript called ‘The Web.’ ”22
This was support beyond Florence’s wildest expectations. One of Canada’s most distinguished men of letters now agreed with her. Burpee had even appended his own five-page list of similar words, phrases, ideas, and mistakes. She felt vindicated, almost triumphant.
One expert on her side, however, was not enough. So, wearing her new-found confidence like a bright spring coat, she went to the university to talk to some of her academic acquaintances. Later she walked east across Queen’s Park Crescent to St. Michael’s College to speak with Sir Bertram Windle.
If degrees and honours after a name imply academic respectability, Bertram Coghill Alan Windle, K.S.G., M.D., LL.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.R.S., F.S.A., was its very hallmark. After a distinguished academic career in England and Ireland, Sir Bertram had retired in 1919 at the age of sixty-one from the presidency of University College, Cork, to Toronto to remove himself from the turmoil of Irish politics and to be near members of his family. When authorities at the University of Toronto discovered his presence, they leaped at the chance to secure his affiliation with the institution.23
Son of an English vicar, Windle had been educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied medicine. After graduation, he took up practice as a surgeon and pathologist in Birmingham and became a member of the original staff of the University of Birmingham. But interests in medicine and education alone were insufficient to quench the relentless curiosity of this Victorian polymath, for his intellectual interests ranged from natural history and anthropology to the histories of science and religion. Indeed, it was for his work in these subjects, not his authoritative Manual of Surface Anatomy, that the British reading public had come to know him. Among his popular books on archaeology, science, and religion were The Prehistoric Age (1904), A Century of Scientific Thought (1915), and Science and Morals (1919).
For eight years after his retirement to Toronto, Sir Bertram (he had been knighted in 1912) gave an annual series of public lectures at the University of Toronto, regularly attracting such large audiences to the theatre of the Physics Building that Convocation Hall often had to be used to accommodate the overflow. His book The Romans in Britain had appeared in 1923, incorporating some of his lecture material. It reached a second, then a third printing within a year. A resident of Toronto for only seven years by the time Florence went to speak with him, he was nevertheless one of the city’s best-known scholars.24
Windle chose to associate himself with St. Michael’s College in Toronto because, influenced by the Oxford Movement when studying in Dublin, he had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1883. Founded by the Basilian order in 1852, St. Michael’s was the only Roman Catholic institution affiliated with the University of Toronto. For his services to the faith, Windle had been appointed Knight of St. Gregory the Great in 1909 and had received honorary degrees from Rome (Ph.D.) and from Marquette University (D.Sc.). His book Miracles and Other Matters had appeared in 1924, and when he listened to Florence’s story and considered her request that he examine and compare “The Web” and The Outline of History, he was busy at work on a “who’s who” of the Oxford Movement and The Catholic Church and Its Reactions with Science, due to appear in 1927.
Quite independent of the merits of the case of Miss Deeks, Sir Bertram Windle was scarcely predisposed to be enamoured of the anti-clerical H.G. Wells, whose well-known view of the Roman Catholic church was that it was a colossal failure as an institution and a nefarious and stultifying influence in cultural and intellectual life, especially in Ireland.25
Now sixty-eight, Sir Bertram was eager to live a life free of controversy, and he told Florence this. Nevertheless, the genial man listened to her fears and agreed to examine her work and The Outline. It took him several months, but in the spring or summer of 1926 he sent her lawyers a lengthy report. His duty, as he recorded it, was not to make a case against the author of The Outline of History but simply to express his “honest opinion on the matter.” His method was to examine the “skeleton” or “framework” of each work, to read them section by section and side by side, making “copious notes” as he went along, and to scrutinize the “Analysis so carefully prepared” by Miss Deeks. He added, however, that by the time he had completed his own evaluation, he had found that the notes he made in his travels through the two books corresponded “to a large extent” with her comparison.26
Sir Bertram’s report read like a paraphrase and elaboration of Burpee’s. Similarities between the two books, it began, could only be accounted for in one of three ways: (1) that both authors worked from the same model; (2) that the framework was an inevitable one and could not therefore be avoided; or (3) that “one author copied from the other.” The first possibility he discounted on the grounds that no earlier model existed for such unique accounts of the history of civilizations, and neither Deeks nor Wells had indicated that they had found or used one. As to the second, Sir Bertram noted that even he could think of other ways in which the authors might have constructed their works – so nothing was “inevitable” about their themes or structures. That left the third explanation, and it was the one he thought most likely: that one author had copied from the other – “and in this case,” he wrote, “it is perfectly obvious that the copying could only have been of the ‘Web’ by the ‘Outline.’ ”27
He did not find “any absolutely crushing and final piece of evidence” but concluded that there was nevertheless “a good literary prima facie case” for plagiarism. The general frameworks were identical, and great similarities existed in the choice of theme, incident, and detail. His report discounted some of the details in Florence’s comparison as likely coincidences in wording; too much reliance on them in court, he advised, would weaken her case. Yet having stated these reservations, he added that there remained “a number of passages the similarity of which is quite startling.”28
Sir Bertram provided several examples of parallel passages. One from the Deeks manuscript, for example, said:
But notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of the Greeks they still preserved their national unity by means of the institutions of the past – their language, religion, games, Amphyctionic councils and oracles. At the Amphyctionic councils the deputies of a dozen peoples met together and discussed common interests; and in order to consult the chief oracle, which was at Delphi, people flocked from all parts of the Greek world. The importance of their games may be judged from the fact that their first existing historical record is connected with the Olympic games. In B.C. 778 the name Coroebus was inscribed on the public register of the Elians as having won the prize of the Stadium, and it became customary to take this date as the starting point of history.
The corresponding passage from The Outline read:
Yet there was always a certain tradition of unity between all the Greeks, based on a common language and script, on the common possession of heroic epics, and on the continuous intercourse that the maritime position of the states made possible. And, in addition, there were certain religious bonds of a unifying kind. Certain shrines, the shrines of the god Apollo in the isle of Delos and at Delphi, for example, were sustained not by single states, but by leagues of states or Amphictionies … A still more important link of Hellenic union was the Olympian games that were held every four years at Olympia.
Considered as strings of words, the two passages appeared quite different. Yet as with many other such passages in “The Web” and The Outline, the obvious stylistic differences masked the underlying structural identity, for evidence of plagiarism rested here, as Sir Bertram pointed out, less in identical wording or facts in common than in the strong parallel in the sequence of presented detail.
| THE WEB | THE OUTLINE |
| national unity | certain tradition of unity |
| language | common language and script |
| religion | continuous intercourse |
| Amphyctionic councils | certain religious bonds |
| common interests | of a unifying kind |
| Delphi | Delphi |
| Olympic games | Olympic games29 |
Such sequences would not at once be evident to the casual reader of both works, for he would be struck by the considerable differences in expression; but they stood out to those, like Sir Bertram, who became serious students of the two texts.
What most struck Sir Bertram, however, was the place of women in both works. In “The Web,” he observed, women were central; in The Outline they were almost completely absent. This was a mystery where meaning, as with Sherlock Holmes and the hound that did not bark, arose at times from silence, and he placed great emphasis on it:
The curious thing is that the female side of world history is so completely ignored as to cause one to wonder why even such a historian as Mr. Wells should have written two large volumes on the world’s history and eliminated from them almost every important woman whom history has known … In fact the exclusion of women from the book is so marked a feature that one is obliged to wonder why it exists. This at least may be said that, if one were anxious to cover up one’s tracks after copying from a book, the natural method which would suggest itself to the mind would be to make a very great difference in some way or another between the two books. Miss Deeks of set purpose, and perhaps at times even a little out of season, insists on women all through her book. Mr. Wells also, it would seem, of set purpose, ignores them all through his. I wonder why? …
I confess as I went through the “Outline” it did occur to me time after time that there was some reason – unexpressed – for the studious omission of almost any mention of women. They may not have been so important in the history of the world as Miss Deeks would have us believe, but yet there were quite a lot of them who counted for so much in the tale of the human race … Time after time I have found myself asking “What is your reason for completely ignoring women? Is it because you want to make a difference between your book and another?” … This is clear to me: – if I had cribbed from another book and wanted to cover up my tracks I would select one or two points and in those points I would make my book differ just as widely as possible from the other … I stress this point because it is quite obvious even to the legal layman that the defence would run on the lines to some extent of “Look at The Differences.”30
In his report, Sir Bertram concluded that he was not in a position to venture an opinion as to whether such a literary comparison would carry weight in a court of law. Miss Deeks had a case, but a difficult one to sustain in spite of the evidence at hand. “The whole thing,” he concluded, “depends on how the evidence on the two sides would strike a body of common-sense men coupled with the amount of probability which could be shown for the access to the MS which is claimed to have taken place.”31
Florence received Sir Bertram Windle’s report with more than a little satisfaction. His conclusions were almost identical to those of Burpee, and both reports exactly paralleled her own analysis. She hoped that, like Burpee, Sir Bertram would agree to appear in court on her behalf. Later in the year, she sent him an enlarged version of her analysis to consider. Towards the end of November, a second report arrived from him, to which were appended several more pages of notes and passages from the two books. “I consider the analysis a marvel of labour,” he said, “knowing intimately, as I do, both Outline and Web.” Sir Bertram was now more convinced than ever that Wells had committed an egregious act of plagiarism. “I confess it is difficult to avoid coming to the conclusion that the writer of the second book had had access to the MS of the first,” he wrote. “I hesitate to use the word ‘impossible’ for my scientific training has at least made me cautious in choice of words, but it would greatly surprise me if the contrary could be proved.”32
Even after he had submitted his second report, Sir Bertram continued to study the two works and the additional materials Florence occasionally sent him. In April 1927 he expressed his willingness to serve as an expert witness on her behalf. There were “few things on earth” that he “more detested than going into Court as a witness,” he said. But he was willing to do anything he could “to obtain justice.”
I have all along thought that one at least of the most important lines of argument is this: – Wells notoriously made no early study of history. Science was his line and his early tales show that. Then his time was filled by writing social novels. That takes time. Suddenly he comes out with an elaborate if inaccurate outline of history. Now this I am prepared to swear to anywhere – no man who had not made a prolonged study of the subject could by any kind of possibility have drafted the scheme of the book. It is utterly impossible to conceive anything of the kind and I could bring powerful examples to show it. Then he got that scheme somewhere. From a book? Let him produce it – I don’t know of one … From a friend? Let him produce the friend. From your book? It certainly could have been found there.33
After making her rounds of New York publishers with “The Highway of History,” Florence had sought expert American advice from members of the New York literary community. An acquaintance she described only as “a gentleman of high attainments in the world of literature and business” provided her with a letter of introduction to H.G. Leach, editor of the Forum, a magazine founded in 1886 for the discussion of controversial public issues. With it tucked securely in her handbag, Florence and Mabel made their second trip to New York in as many years.
In the Forum office, her sister at her side, Florence explained the situation and prevailed upon Leach for the name of a prominent expert to look over “The Web” and The Outline.34 He did as he was asked, referring her to one of his friends, Henry S. Canby, a Yale University professor and the editor of the recently founded Saturday Review of Literature, and to C.K. Ogden, a prominent British writer, linguist, and member of the editorial board of the Forum. In this way, knowledge of her accusations began to percolate beyond the precincts of Manhattan publishing houses and into the larger world of New York intellectuals.
Florence knew only that these men were distinguished literary and linguistic experts, and she sat with Mabel in their hotel room, waiting for the telephone to ring and the mail to be delivered to the front desk, little knowing their networks of intellectual association or those whom they admired. In doing so, she was unaware that one thread in the web of interest common to Canby and Ogden alike was H.G. Wells.
Canby had a working relationship with Wells going back to the war. A champion of the League of Free Nations idea, Canby had been invited to England by the British Ministry of Information early in 1918 to help promote “mutual understanding among the associated nations.” He had been one of those present that summer at the Reform Club dinner party at which Wells had charmed the guests with his ideas on a League of Free Nations and on history in general. When the Saturday Review of Literature was about to be launched in 1924, with Canby as its founding editor, Wells wrote to congratulate him.35 For his part, Ogden, founder in 1912 of an intellectual weekly, the Cambridge Magazine, had solicited contributions from Wells. H.G. was quite interested in Ogden’s idea of developing a form of English as a universal language.
Canby and Ogden responded to Miss Deeks’s request for help. Ogden admitted to being a personal friend of Wells’s illustrator and “many of his authorities and advisers.”36 Each was understandably guarded in offering advice. Canby warned her that a “conclusive argument” for plagiarism by Wells would require “evidence supplied from a thorough study of both books by a historian thoroughly versed in world literature” in order to examine them in the context of earlier work. “I do not believe that a charge of plagiarism can rest upon the verbal resemblances alone … I find, in short, the verbal resemblance[s] striking but not in themselves convincing.”37 But then, he admitted, his duties at the Saturday Review prevented him from devoting enough time and attention to detail required of the task.
Ogden spent several evenings comparing Florence’s marked passages from “The Web” and The Outline, and concluded that no reputable historian would provide an opinion without at least a month of study. He suggested to her that she should settle the matter out of court. Perhaps an indication that the New York friends of Wells were worried, Ogden also told her that he and Canby had conferred. The two had agreed to sign a letter (along with Leach) advising Wells to look carefully into the matter “in view of the fact that he may have had many collaborators and assistants, any one of whom might have failed to state the source of material supplied.”38
There was another indication that Ogden and Canby viewed the accusations of Miss Deeks as extremely serious ones. The British theorist of literary criticism I.A. Richards happened to be in New York visiting Ogden and other friends. He and Ogden had collaborated three years earlier in a pioneering and influential study of the resolution of philosophical problems through linguistic analysis, The Meaning of Meaning, and the two scholars continued to pool their ideas. Like Wells, Richards was very interested in Ogden’s development of the idea of Basic English, his international language consisting of only 850 common English words. Ogden decided to seek Richards’s views on the Deeks accusations.
Richards’s visit seemed perfectly timed for Ogden’s purposes, as well as for those of Miss Deeks. So, nominally on her behalf, Ogden asked his friend to compare “The Web” and The Outline in conjunction with her comparison. Richards was no historian, but the Cambridge scholar could make a fair claim to being the world’s leading expert on literary criticism. His Principles of Literary Criticism had appeared in 1924 to great acclaim, and by mid-1926 work was well advanced on its companion volume, Practical Criticism, which would be published three years later.
Richards extended his New York stay by ten days in order to study the two texts in question. Towards the end of May, Ogden’s letter arrived at the hotel in which the women from Toronto were staying. He had now seen a rough draft of Richards’s report and hoped to be able to forward a copy to her before she left New York. “It … expresses the conclusion that there is a prima facie case for an indebtedness both in general structure and in detail from which, whatever its explanation, a formidable legal action could be developed.”39
The assessment by the Cambridge critic, when at last it arrived, was called “A Report Upon Certain Resemblances Between The Outline of History and The Web.” It began with the bald statement, “The prima facie resemblances between THE WEB and THE OUTLINE are plentiful.” Richards’s initial research strategy had been to look for “possible common sources” that might explain any resemblances between “the more interesting correspondences.” He did not discover any. What he did identify was a number of curiously similar passages. Like Sir Bertram Windle, Richards drew attention to the one on the unity of the Greeks and the rise of the Olympic Games. Such correspondences, he said, were frequent.40
As another example, Richards reproduced passages from treatments of Pericles. “The details chosen to give this picture of Pericles human interest” in The Outline, he said, “are those which are to be found in the WEB.” Richards added that the special prominence afforded to Pericles in The Outline did not arise out of a consensus of scholarly opinion.41 Instead, it mimicked the idiosyncratic treatment of Pericles in “The Web.”
Other “curious similarities,” he said, “were also frequent in the chapters on Roman history,” and he proceeded to provide an example. “Such a resemblance is of course by itself without significance. But the repetition of such parallelisms becomes suggestive, and many passages could be cited which have quite as much the air of being paraphrases worked up in later revisions.”42
Richards was profoundly interested professionally in the use and meaning of words. He paid particular attention, therefore, to “similarities of diction where the word or phrase concerned is hardly an obvious choice.” Once again, no individual example was impressive in itself; “but cumulatively,” he added, “their effect is considerable, occurring as they do in works whose intellectual temper and style are so different. They give the impression that an earlier draft which may have been more like the WEB has been revised and expanded into the published form of the OUTLINE.”43
As Florence read Richards’s report, she revisited many of the acts of literary commission or omission common to both works that had already been identified in her comparison or pointed out in the reports of Sir Bertram Windle and Lawrence Burpee. The misattribution of the founding of the Holy Roman Empire to Charlemagne instead of Otto the Great; the neglect of monasticism and feudalism; the absence of any discussion of chivalry or the guild system; the remarkable similarities in accounts of Columbus and the navigators. Richards also noted a curious footnote in The Outline that said: “This is not the same Simon de Montfort as the leader of the crusade against the Albigenses, but his son.” Curious because, as Richards pointed out, “The Outline had not mentioned this Simon de Montfort in its account of the Albigensian Crusade. The Web mentioned him twice.”44
Florence paid careful attention to the Cambridge scholar’s conclusions.
The parallels offered by the remainder of the work are, with some exceptions, of a kind which would require consideration of a statistical rather than of a literary order. Granted the possibility of the assumption that the Web had been used in the writing of the Outline, there are a very large number of correspondences – in the selection of details, in their arrangement, in the emphasis laid upon them – which would enormously strengthen this possibility. But these correspondences would not, I think, in themselves necessarily impose this assumption upon us. Yet the force of so many parallel passages cannot be neglected …
I have noticed many other such instances of a possible influence from the Web. They have, of course, by themselves, not the slightest evidential value. But they are suggestive once the assumption of a connection between the two works is admitted.
To sum up, I do not regard the internal evidence that can be gathered from a comparison of the two books and an examination of their sources as in any way conclusive, and would regard a legal action which proceeded on that basis alone as unlikely to succeed. On the other hand, I have no doubt that a case could be prepared which would create a powerful impression that an indebtedness had been by some means incurred. A skilful defence, however, would, I believe, probably succeed in breaking down that impression in the minds of a jury.
My own opinion as to whether the Web has or has not been used in the composition of the Outline would depend upon the other evidence. It seems to me possible, though improbable, that the very numerous correspondences may have arisen through the use of common or allied sources … But if this were the whole truth of the matter, I should have to admit that the long arm of coincidence had been remarkably active in the affair. If on the other hand it were shown that the manuscript of the Web had been in London during 1918, then the fact that the similarities which I have noticed are quite as close and quite as numerous as I should expect to find had the manuscript been extensively used, is plainly relevant. Failing strong external evidence of this use, however, I am of the opinion that the internal evidence is insufficient to prevail in a court of law, though sufficient to arouse a strong suspicion.45
The carefully prepared report of I.A. Richards troubled the New York friends of Wells as much as it delighted Florence and Mabel. The apparent reliance of The Outline on “The Web” was striking. In the absence of any proof that “The Web” had crossed the Atlantic and reached Wells, however, the evidence was also inconclusive. But if it had? Then the parallels and correspondences became very damning indeed and Wells would be in serious trouble. Aware of this, Ogden and Canby hurriedly conferred at New York’s Harvard Club in June with Richards and Leach. There they laboured over the delicate wording needed in a letter they were about to sent to Wells over their several signatures. It read, in part:
We understand that you have already been informed of this action, and have considered it sufficient to deny any personal knowledge of “The Web”; and that the same attitude has been taken by Macmillan’s representatives in New York & London. We feel, however, that you should not be allowed to let the legal proceeding attain the serious dimensions now contemplated, without giving the matter full consideration from every angle. If, for instance, you had been misinformed as to whether the MS of “The Web” (or a copy of it) ever left the Toronto office, or if it were possible that some assistant or collaborator failed to acknowledge to you the source of material supplied, a very undeniable situation might arise. We consider the correspondence to be such that in the hands of lawyers an impression could be created which, however little justification it might have, would be much regretted by many of your admirers. In an apologetic cover letter to Wells, this time written from the Yale Club, Ogden hinted that perhaps the best solution was to have Macmillan publish a revised version of Deeks’s book: “An advance royalties payment,” he added, “would allow for compromise.”46 If words were gestures, these constituted a friendly nudge and a knowing wink.
Wells misunderstood the intention of the letter, thinking that his friends had decided to “back up Miss Deeks,” and he sent Ogden an angry reply. In September, Ogden tried to assure Wells that he and his friends had written the letter in order to draw his attention “to the fact that a serious Lawsuit seemed likely to develop.”47 Ogden had warned his friend of this as best and as forcibly as he could.
Florence, meanwhile, pressed on in pursuit of further support from experts. Following advice from Ogden, she contacted Harry Elmer Barnes, the politically progressive and prolific advocate of the American “New History,” in Northampton, Massachusetts. Responding to receipt of her comparison of the two texts, he replied, “There certainly seems to be an astonishing similarity.” Then he asked for more information about how Wells could have come to use her manuscript. She complied, and the result was a conference between Barnes and Ogden over lunch about the matter and six weeks later a further letter from Barnes. “My fairly thorough examination of your material leads me to this general conclusion, namely, that you have the basis for a perfectly just contention that Mr. Wells or his clerical secretary have seen and made use of your MS. in the preparation of the Outline of History.”48
Barnes had placed himself in an awkward position by being so forthright, for along with his friends James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard, he was a historian heavily critical of “traditional” political and constitutional history and its Brahmin practitioners in New England and old. In this struggle, the iconoclastic Wells was a helpful ally and Barnes could not afford to alienate him. So Barnes took on the role of academic broker, suggesting that he contact an acquaintance at Andover College – “a moderate critic” of Wells – to examine the two works in greater detail. Later, after explaining his reasons, he wished her the best of luck, suggested a fee of $200 for the Andover historian, and thanked her for the $50 cheque for his own services.49
He would come to regret that his involvement with Miss Deeks was purchased at so cheap a price.