Warwick Deeping


George Warwick Deeping was an English novelist and short story writer, whose best-known novel was Sorrell and Son.

Life

Born in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, into a family of physicians, Warwick Deeping was educated at Merchant Taylors' School. He proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study medicine and science, then went to Middlesex Hospital to finish his medical training. During the First World War, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Deeping later gave up his job as a physician to become a full-time writer. He married Phyllis Maude Merrill and lived for the rest of his life in "Eastlands" on Brooklands Road, Weybridge, Surrey.
He was one of the best-selling authors of the 1920s and 1930s, with seven of his novels making the best-seller list.
Deeping was a prolific writer of short stories, which appeared in such British magazines as Cassell's, The Story-Teller, and The Strand. He also published fiction in several US magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post and Adventure. All of the short stories and serialised novels in US magazines were reprints of works previously published in Britain. Well over 200 of his original short stories and essays that appeared in various British fiction magazines were never seen in book form during his lifetime.

Themes

Deeping's early work is dominated by historical romances. His later novels more usually dealt with modern life, and were critical of many tendencies of twentieth-century civilisation. His standpoint was generally that of a passionate individualism, distrustful both of ruling elites and of the lower classes, who were often presented as a threat to his embattled middle-class protagonists. His most celebrated hero is Captain Sorrell M.C., the ex-officer who after the First World War is reduced to a menial occupation in which he is bullied by those of a lower social class and less education.
Deeping's novels often deal with controversial issues. In her 2009 study The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping, Mary Grover lists these:
Despite his use of controversial themes, Deeping received little recognition as a serious writer. In her influential 1932 book Fiction and the Reading Public, Q. D. Leavis described Warwick Deeping as a "middlebrow" writer. Leavis criticised Deeping and Gilbert Frankau as pretentious writers who worked to "debase the emotional currency by touching grossly on fine issues." Leavis also accused Deeping of anti-intellectualism. Noting several disparaging references to "highbrows" that appeared in Deeping's novels, Leavis wrote that Deeping's writings " exhibit a persistent hostility to the world of letters which is quite unprecedented." Graham Greene also criticized Deeping's work; in his 1936 book Journey Without Maps Greene includes Deeping's novels on a list of books "written without truth, without compulsion, one dull word following another." George Orwell, whose political beliefs were very different from Deeping's, dismissed Deeping in his 1940 essay "Inside the Whale" as being among the 'huge tribe' of writers who 'simply don't notice what is happening'. By contrast, Kingsley Amis gave some guarded praise for Deeping's work. Amis read Deeping's Sorrell and Son and initially disliked the book. However, in a later interview Amis praised Sorrell and Son, saying "Its sensibility was very crude but it delivered". Martin Seymour-Smith argued that the majority of Deeping's novels "have little literary merit." However, Seymour-Smith added "Sorrell and Son, however, does have some force behind its complacency - and is better written than the other sixty-odd books."

Books

;Published posthumously
  • Time to Heal
  • Man in Chains
  • The Old World Dies
  • Caroline Terrace
  • The Serpent's Tooth
  • The Sword and the Cross
  • The Lost Stories of Warwick Deeping – Volumes I – IX – A total of over 5000 pages, containing over 250 short stories, novellas, essays and 4 unpublished novels. These works were never published in book form and only appeared in British and American fiction magazines in the 1910s-1930s, such as The Story-Teller, The New Magazine, Cassell's Magazine of Fiction, and The Strand.

    Films

Movies based on Deeping's novels belong, with two exceptions, to the silent era. Unrest was filmed in 1920, Fox Farm in 1922, and Doomsday in 1928. Kitty, directed by Victor Saville, was one of the first British talkies.
Sorrell and Son was filmed three times: It first appeared in 1927 as a silent movie, was remade in 1934 as a sound film, and turned into a TV mini-series in 1984.

Digital editions

Category:1877 births
Category:1950 deaths
Category:20th-century English male writers
Category:20th-century English novelists
Category:Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
Category:British Army personnel of World War I
Category:English historical novelists
Category:English male novelists
Category:Military personnel from Southend-on-Sea
Category:People educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood
Category:People from Southend-on-Sea
Category:Royal Army Medical Corps officers
Category:Writers of historical fiction set in the early modern period
Category:Writers of historical fiction set in the Middle Ages