H. M. Tomlinson

Tomlinson was born and raised in Poplar, London, to Henry Tomlinson, a foreman at the West India Docks, and Emily Major.^[3] Educated at a local school, Henry began working as a shipping clerk at the docks at the age of twelve. In 1886, his father died, and Henry became responsible for providing for the family. In the evenings Tomlinson continued his education by studying geology, botany, mineralogy and zoology. After a quarrel with his employer at the docks led him to walk out of his job, Tomlinson "presented himself on the spur of the moment to the editor of the Morning Leader, a Radical paper that later became the Daily News, and was given a job", becoming a full-time employed reporter in 1904.^[4] In their employ he was sent on several international trips, including an expedition (beginning in Cardiff, Wales) in 1909–10, some 2,000 miles up the Amazon River in South America, and his journey became the basis for one of his most celebrated books, The Sea and the Jungle (1912).^[2][5]

In World War I, he was an official correspondent for the British Army, in France. He became disillusioned with the conduct of the war, and in 1917 he returned to work with H. W. Massingham as the Literary Editor of The Nation magazine, which opposed the war.^[6] Christopher Morley wrote in 1957 that Tomlinson "never really recovered from the first World War, which he witnessed as a war correspondent. The death and destruction which he saw at first hand corroded his spirit, though he never lost his faith in the "nobodies," the common men who had won that war."^[5] He left the paper in April 1923 with Massingham when Joseph Rowntree decided to sell the journal to a group headed by John Maynard Keynes. In 1930 he published an autobiographical account of his war experiences in his book All Our Yesterdays.

Tomlinson continued to write novels and travel stories until the end of his life. His final novel, The Trumpet Shall Sound (1957), is set during the Second World War, in particular during The Blitz, and follows the stories of the Gale family in London.^[7] In a review of the book, The New York Times concluded that "[as] a marksman, Mr. Tomlinson is master of many kinds of arrows."^[8] The New Yorker's reviewer wrote: "It is fascinating, human, and beautifully told in full but not sad consciousness of all that goes on in human hearts—the fear and pain and love and confusion and joy—whether the hours are spent with books and roses or out in the dark within sound of gunfire."^[9] Tomlinson died on 5 February 1958 at the age of 84.

On 26 December 1899, at St. Stephen's Church, Poplar, he married Florence Margaret Hammond, daughter of Thomas Hammond, a sailmaker, of Pekin Street, Poplar, by whom he had a son and two daughters.

A large collection of Tomlinson’s manuscripts, correspondence, and other papers is held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Further manuscripts and correspondence, including drafts of All Our Yesterdays and Gallion’s Reach, are preserved in the H. M. Tomlinson collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Tomlinson was widely admired during the interwar period for the quality of his prose and for his reflective travel and maritime writing.^[10] In 1921, the American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet Christopher Morley praised what he saw as the "exquisite, considered prose" to be found in Tomlinson's 1918 book of essays, Old Junk:

How direct and satisfying a passage to the mind Mr. Tomlinson's paragraphs have. How they build and cumulate, how the sentences shift, turn and move in delicate loops and ridges under the blowing wind of thought, like the sand of the dunes that he describes in one essay.^[11]

Frederic P. Mayer, however, writing in the Virginia Quarterly Review, expressed a less admiring view:^[12]

Because his book is labeled fiction, H. M. Tomlinson, with the publication of his first novel, "Gallions Reach," is gaining fame. Before, Tomlinson, essayist and traveler, enjoyed but a limited distinction. Recently, however, and mainly through "Gallions Reach," there has grown a Tomlinson vogue. He has been praised as "a second Conrad." The truth is, Tomlinson does not derive from nor resemble Conrad.^[12]

In the preface to his critically-acclaimed short story collection Miguel Street (1959), the novelist V. S. Naipaul cited Tomlinson as an inspiration, and one from whom he learned how to be a writer.^[13]

Tomlinson's 1912 travel narrative The Sea and the Jungle, based on his voyage up the Amazon River, came to be regarded as a classic of English travel literature.^[14] His writing was also shaped by his experiences as a war correspondent during the First World War, which left him deeply disillusioned by modern industrial warfare.

The literary critic Derek Severn wrote that Tomlinson "was a writer of singular integrity and individuality who published nothing that was not distinguished, whether in essays and criticism, or works of travel, or novels—though these were, in strict terms, the least satisfactory of his books, the whole being usually less than the sum of the parts."^[4]