Arthur Machen

Arthur Machen was a Welsh author and journalist best known for his occult, mystical, and supernatural fiction, and greatly admired in his own day by Oscar Wilde and H.P. Lovecraft.

Machen was born Arthur Llewellyn Jones on March 3, 1863 (‘Machen’ was his mother’s maiden name), in Caerleon on Usk in South Wales, the only child of an Anglican priest. Machen attended Hereford Cathedral School although his parents could not afford to send him to Oxford. He moved to London in 1881, living in poverty in Notting Hill and working, variously, as a journalist, a private tutor, and a publisher’s clerk, indexing, cataloguing, and undertaking literary translations, most notably the Memoirs of Casanova.

His first book, The Anatomy of Tobacco, was published by George Redway in 1884. In 1887, a modest family legacy allowed Machen to marry his fiancée Amy Hogg and to write full-time. In this period, he produced many of his major works, including The Great God Pan and ‘The Inmost Light’ (1894); The Three Impostors (1895); The Hill of Dreams (completed in 1897 but not published until 1907); Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature (1902); and The White People (1904). The death of Amy to cancer in 1899 precipitated a spiritual crisis leading Machen to dally with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and to retrain as an actor with Frank Benson’s touring Shakespeare company. In 1903, he married the bohemian Dorothie Purefoy Hudleston, with whom he had two children.

Money worries finally compelled Machen to return to journalism in 1910. His short story ‘The Bowmen’ appeared in the Evening News in 1914, giving rise to the Great War myth of the ‘Angel of Mons’. Machen’s fiction experienced a resurgence of interest in America and the UK the 1920s, but he soon fell back into genteel poverty, only partially ameliorated by a small Civil List pension granted in 1932. A literary appeal was launched for him on his eightieth birthday, allowing him to live out the remainder of his life in reasonable comfort.

He died at his home in Amersham on December 15, 1947, a few months after Dorothie.