On receiving the gift of a "fine violin" from his un-musical uncle, Ernest is astonished to discover it was bought in a back-street junk shop for three shillings and sixpence. But it's soon apparent that the violin has a special quality all of its own... The story starts at 00:01:20
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00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:20 The Violin
00:43:49 Credits, thanks and further listening
About the author: Richard Marsh was the pen name of Richard Bernard Heldmann (1857-1915). He was a highly prolific author in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Although somewhat overlooked today, he is probably best remembered for his 1897 supernatural thriller, 'The Beetle', published in the same year as Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' and initially far more popular, outselling it six times over.
Richard Bernard Heldmann was born in North London into a family of lace merchants. He began his writing career in the early 1880s as a regular contributor to boys' adventure magazines, such as 'The Boy's Own Paper' and 'The Union Jack', a short-lived periodical of the 1880s edited by the author G. A. Henty. Heldmann rapidly rose to become co-editor with Henty in 1882, but he abruptly left the periodical the following year, apparently under a cloud: recently unearthed records indicate that in 1884 he was sentenced to 18 months hard labour for forging cheques. He certainly disappeared from the literary scene for several years, before re-emerging in 1888; it was at this point he began using the pen name Richard Marsh.
During his subsequent career, Marsh produced over 70 books of fiction and many short stories in a range of genres, many of them with comic and/or horror elements. His short stories featured regularly in Cassell’s Magazine, The Strand Magazine, Cornhill Magazine, Household Words and many other magazines. He died in Haywards Heath, Sussex, in August 1915 from heart disease, at the age of 57. So prolific was he that he left several novels and stories unpublished at the time of his death, and they were published posthumously.
Richard Marsh is also known to afficionados of supernatural and horror fiction as the grandfather of the celebrated 20th century author of supernatural "strange stories", Robert Aickman: Marsh's daughter, Mabel Violet Marsh, was Aickman's mother. (Robert Aickman is an author whose work is sometimes requested for me to read on the channel, but unfortunately his stories are all under copyright so can't be uploaded here.)
'The Violin' first appeared in book form in Marsh's 1900 collection 'The Seen and the Unseen'. It's likely, given Marsh's prodigious contributions to contemporary periodicals, that it previously appeared in magazine form in the late 1890s, but this can't be stated with certainty.
Recording © Bitesized Audio 2024