ompetitions. My painfully laboured novel
only got honourable mention, and my comedietta was lost in the post.

[Illustration: Arthur Goddard.]

But I was now at the height of literary fame, and success stimulated me
to fresh work. I still marvel when I think of the amount of rubbish I
turned out in my seventeenth and eighteenth years, in the scanty leisure
of a harassed pupil-teacher at an elementary school, working hard in the
evenings for a degree at the London University to boot. There was a
fellow pupil-teacher (let us call him Y.) who believed in me, and who
had a little money with which to back his belief. I was for starting a
comic paper. The name was to be _Grimaldi_, and I was to write it all
every week.

"But don't you think your invention would give way ultimately?" asked Y.
It was the only time he ever doubted me.

"By that time I shall be able to afford a staff," I replied
triumphantly.

Y. was convinced. But before the comic paper was born, Y. had another
happy thought. He suggested that if I wrote a Jewish story, we might
make enough to finance the comic paper. I was quite willing. If he had
suggested an epic, I should have written it.

So I wrote the story in four evenings (I always write in spurts), and
within ten days from the inception of the idea the booklet was on sale
in a coverless pamphlet form. The printing cost ten pounds. I paid five
(the five I had won), Y. paid five, and we divided the profits. He has
since not become a publisher.

[Illustration: "IT WAS HAWKED ABOUT THE STREETS."]

My first book (price one penny nett) went well. It was loudly denounced
by Jews, and widely bought by them; it was hawked about the streets. One
little shop in Whitechapel sold four hundred copies. It was even on
Smith's book-stalls. There was great curiosity among Jews to know the
name of the writer. Owing to my anonymity, I was enabled to see those
enjoying its perusal, who were afterwards to explain to me their horror
and disgust at its illiteracy and vulgarity. By vulgarity vulgar Jews
mean the reproduction of the Hebrew words with which the poor and the
old-fashioned interlard their conversation. It is as if English-speaking
Scotchmen and Irishmen should object to "dialect" novels reproducing the
idiom of their "uncultured" countrymen. I do not possess a copy of my
first book, but somehow or other I discovered the MS. when writing
_Children of the Ghetto_. The description of market-day in Jewry was