A reputation made by a conversation
Born in Kent in 1864, Hichens was the son of a clergyman. He studied music in London and wrote criticism for the press. The Green Carnation, published anonymously in 1894, put recognisable versions of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas into conversation. Its success made the author of a book about celebrity into a public figure himself.
Travel in Egypt and North Africa furnished subjects for later fiction. The Garden of Allah, published in 1904, reached audiences in print, on stage and through film. Alongside these romances Hichens developed a quieter line of supernatural fiction in which a change in someone’s manner can be harder to explain than an apparition.
A clergyman under observation
The Dweller on the Threshold begins with the outward signs of the Reverend Marcus Harding’s success. His church draws money, music and fashionable weddings. A visitor nevertheless notices how uncertain Harding becomes in the presence of his curate, Henry Chichester. What seemed an obvious distribution of authority between the two men begins to reverse. The work first appeared in 1911; the Methuen volume here identifies itself as the second, cheaper edition of March 1914.
