ABSTRACT
Edmund Downey remembered meeting William Tinsley in 1900, when his memoirs were published. Eventually William Tinsley got mixed up, hopelessly and bewilderingly, with a group of publishing firms which was bolstering itself largely on bill-stamps. Louisa Tinsley, William’s faithful wife and companion, had been unwell for some time and she was not able to offer him much comfort in days when no doubt both of them were trying hard to conceal their distraught feelings. The novel, by Lily Tinsley, was published in 1886 as a three-decker, and three of the short stories were earlier published as single volumes by her father, for some reason under the name of Laura Tinsley. In his book, Twenty Years Ago, describing the years spent working for William Tinsley, his young friend Edmund Downey wrote that from 1879 he had been ‘busily employed at No. 8 Catherine Street until the autumn of 1884’.
