ABSTRACT
G. A. Henty was born twenty years later than W. H. Russell. They both studied classics, Henty at Westminster School, and then at Gonville and Caius College. He left Cambridge on the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1855, without taking a degree, as Russell had done before him. Henty’s aspirations as a novelist came to fruition some ten years later than those of his elder war-correspondent colleague – for such he was to become in due course, when, for instance, they were both covering, though not in each other’s company, the Franco-Prussian War. Henty wrote letters home describing all he saw, and his father, impressed by the writing, showed them to a friend, the elder James Grant, who was Editor of the Morning Advertiser. Edmund Downey wrote that ‘Henty was for a time one of the most regular of the callers at Catherine Street.
