ABSTRACT
Walter Besant’s father, William Tinsley , was a merchant in Portsmouth, where Walter was born. Tinsley published three novels by Richard Jefferies in the 1870s. ‘From his name’, wrote Mrs G. A. Sala, ‘he should certainly be descended from some Byzantine family, self-exiled from Constantinople at the time of its conquest by Mahomet II, for a besant or bezant is a gold coin of Byzantium, which was current in England from the tenth century to the time of Edward III.’ In 1871 James Rice asked if Walter Besant would collaborate with him in the writing of a novel, the plot of which he had already drafted. ‘Amiable sentimentalists is a fair term to apply to Besant and Rice as novelists’, observed Lewis Melville soon after the turn of the century. At the beginning of 1881 James Rice was taken unexpectedly and seriously ill.
