ABSTRACT

For both of them the impetus to turn, or return,2 to fiction was provided by their employment on Temple Bar. It took some time to move Yates, but Sala had serial novels running in the magazine from the very beginning, and right through the period of his editorship (December 1860-January 1863). His appointment as 'ostensible editor' probably stipulated, like John Maxwell's subsequent offer of the position to Trollope, that in addition to receiving a substantial salary and having an editorial assistant (Yates) to do most of the actual editing, he would contribute at least one novel. Maxwell, who was not a particularly good judge in such matters, must have built his hopes of getting value for his money on such admired shorter pieces of fiction as 'Colonel Quagg's Conversion' and 'How I Tamed Mrs. Cruiser', rather than on

Sala's only previous full-length novel, The Baddington Peerage, which had been almost universally d"erided. On the face of it, Sala's performance both as writer and as editor justified Maxwell's optimism. His first serial for Temple Bar, The Seven Sons of Mammon, was highly praised, and with the help of his series 'Travels in the County of Middlesex' and his other articles, the magazine maintained a solid circulation of 30,000 copies.3 It cannot have been his fault, or Yates's, that Maxwell got into financial difficulties before it was a year old, and that Sala had to endure a sharp reduction in the rate of payment he received for his own contributions: from a fixed sum of £20/16/8 a month (£250 a year), with an extra £1 for each page above sixteen, to a flat rate, still munificent, of 30/- a page.4 But his salary as editor apparently remained undiminished, and if what he said in his Life can be believed, he salvaged further consolation from Maxwell's financial problems by buying back the book-rights to Mammon for £100 and selling them for a much higher sum to another publisher, Tinsley Brothers.5 Despite this windfall he too was again having trouble with his creditors a few months later. Maxwell, however, had found a permanent cushion against adversity in the person of a new author who soon became far more valuable to Temple Bar than Sala could ever have been.