Conclusion

In a letter to his cousin from 9 July 1884, Sala revealed his dreams about making enough money while in Australia to retire. ¹ When writing to his close friend and confidant, Mrs Skirrow, from 14 February 1885, while actually travelling through Australia, Sala brought up the subject of money once again. Pleased that he had earned $700 for two ‘speechifyings’ or lectures, he casually quipped that he might ‘give a lecture at Honolulu and earn three hundred dollars while I wait for the steamer.’ ² He appealed to Mrs Skirrow to not think of him as being mercenary because ‘you know why and for whose dear sake I am working the mine of my capacity to the last vein of the ore.’ ³ He was of course talking about his wife who accompanied him on his tour of Australia. In fact Sala probably came away from his last overseas engagement with £3,000, a decent sum but nowhere near enough to enable him to retire with the kind of lifestyle he was accustomed to, and only a quarter of the amount which his friend and fellow journalist Archibald Forbes had made five years earlier while on his Australian tour. ⁴ In any case, his wife was suddenly stricken with peritonitis in Melbourne and died 24 hours later on 31 December 1885, just as the pair were due to return to England. Writing to Mrs Skirrow a week later, and clearly distressed, Sala said ‘All … my hopes in the future lie in that grave. The money I have made for her dear sake – of what good is it to me now?’ ⁵ Sala would spend the remaining 10 years of his life working harder than he had ever done.