Unconventional Reminiscences, by William Charles Scully

Unconventional Reminiscences, by William Charles Scully. Penguin Modern Classics. The Penguin Group (South Africa). Cape Town, South Africa 2007. ISBN 9780143185468 / ISBN 978-0-14-318546-8

As his memoir Unconventional Reminiscences describes, at fourteen William Charles Scully set off for South Africa's diamond fields to find his fortune and during the 1870s lived as a digger panning for gold. For the rest of the nineteenth century he worked as a magistrate in remote areas of Namaqualand and the Transkei which he introduced to the world's literary map.

William Charles Scully (1855-1943) was the son of one John Joseph Scully and of Elizabeth Mary Creagh of Limerick, whose story is told partly here. He in turn was married (in 1890) to Honoria Emily Richardson, who became his Nora Scully, well known in her own right. They had several children between them, four of whom survived into adulthood. They were Gerald, Miriam, Ernest and Betty, to whom their father's first series of autobiography was dedicated. By the date of his first visit to London, described in the concluding sequence here, Scully was known for several published works. His most usual publisher, T. Fisher Unwin - who had been releasing the works of Scully's coeval, Olive Schreiner - had put out his Poems in 1892. This was hailed as an example of the Colonial Literature which had been initiated in the Eastern Cape by Thomas Pringle. Through his agent at A P Watt, Scully had also placed new poems, short stories and articles in several prominent journals of the day, including The Pall Mall Magazine, The Graphic, The Cornhill Magazine and Scribner's, and later The Atlantic Monthly and others. Appearances like these had led to his first collection, Kafir Stories of 1895. The further Transkei short stories to which he refers had been included in his next collection, The White Hecatomb. Subsequently Unwin took Scully's next collection, By Veldt and Kopje (1907), which included the piece he mentions here called 'The Lepers', together with the article on the music of the Transkei people written jointly with Nora Scully. The same volume included his account of A Forgotten Expedition', which accordingly was omitted from Scully's later memoirs (but which is included here). For most of the first decade of the 1900s Scully was resident in Port Elizabeth as its chief magistrate. From there he began submitting what he entitled his Unconventional Reminiscences to The State. This was the Cape Town-based journal which had been launched as a monthly miscellany in January 1909, supporting the National Convention and a Closer Union political line. Edited by Philip Kerr (based in London), and later by B K Long in Cape Town, The State had already carried pieces by Scully, but the Reminiscences which commenced in the Union number, the Volume 3, Number 6 issue of June 1910, were to prove their most sustained feature. Internal evidence shows that Scully kept no more than an instalment or two ahead of his deadlines, working late at night into the small hours when, as he remarked, the notes from which he wrote tended to become mixed. Hence an unfortunate error he made in one instalment could be corrected in an apologetic letter attached as a preface to the next. But The State could also be quite cavalier in the placing of what Scully called his 'articles', measuring off an item when it reached the bottom of a convenient page rather than allowing it to run to the natural conclusion of a particular sequence. Their typesetters also routinely toned down, or deleted entirely, some of Scully's more sarcastic remarks; in their version of his text Cecil Rhodes, for example, emerged unscathed by any criticism. Yet what Scully later labelled his 'First Series: Wanderjahre', covering the period from his birth to 1875, ran through twelve numbers until May 1911, at which time he bade a provisional au re voir to his readers. [...]

This is an excerpt from the memoir Unconventional Reminiscences, by William Charles Scully.

Title: Unconventional Reminiscences
Author: William Charles Scully
Series: Penguin Modern Classics
Genre: Memoir
Publisher: The Penguin Group (South Africa)
Cape Town, South Africa 2007
ISBN 9780143185468 / ISBN 978-0-14-318546-8
Paperback, 13 x 20 cm, 290 Seiten