The Life of Algernon Blackwood
Born in Kent, England, Algernon Blackwood grew up in a moderately-wealthy household with four siblings. His father was a financial secretary to the post office and his mother was the widow of the 6th Duke of Manchester. The Blackwoods were not part of any social circle, being revivalists with intense religious convictions.
Blackwood’s imagination and interest in the supernatural began at an early age. He believed in ghosts, communing with spirits, and charms and amulets “…long before I had read a single book”.[1] He found inspiration and joy in nature, feeling that “everything was alive”[1], a feeling and love that stayed with him his entire life.
At around the age of seventeen, Blackwood became interested in Buddhism and eastern philosophies. He spent a year at the Edinburgh University medical school and spent time with a doctor who used hypnotism in his practice. This doctor urged him to become a doctor and specialize in mental health. The doctor’s wife was a medium and Blackwood attended many seances, wavering between belief and doubt.
Following a trip to Canada with his father, they decided that Algernon should move there, and at the age of twenty-one, he moved to Toronto.
He made money by teaching the violin, French, German, and shorthand. He worked for three months at an insurance company, which he hated. When the opportunity to work for the Methodist Magazine came up, he jumped at the chance. His job was to write an article a month and captions for illustrations. He got on well with the editor until the editor learned that he was a Buddhist. After that, the relationship became strained but he kept working there. Of his time at the magazine, Blackwood says it taught him that he “… had no ambition to write, so, likewise, I possessed no talent”.[1]
Following the arrival of some money from England, Blackwood was conned into investing money in a partnership with a dairy farmer in Toronto. As well as selling milk, eggs, and butter, they furnished the upper floors of their retail building and let the rooms out to young men. They started to have trouble with the lodgers and then their milk products began to go sour when the cooling devices failed. After six months, they dissolved their partnership and Blackwood learned that he’d been conned in an expensive lesson.
He then went into partnership with another man “but this time an honest one”.[1] The idea was to buy a small tavern that had a bad name, work it up to a respectable business, then sell it and retire on the money. Despite his initial misgivings, he invested his money thinking it would redeem him after the dairy fiasco. He’d led a fairly sheltered life up to this point: he’d never smoked, drank alcohol, or been exposed to gambling or dancing. The tavern business started off well, even though Blackwood hated it, but it failed within six months and he had to face the realization that all his capital was gone.
He turned to nature and music and spent a lot of time outdoors and in his own head. Wondering if it was too late to be redeemed and trying to accept and face whatever life might bring.
Following the failure of the tavern, Blackwood spent five months camping and fishing in Northern Ontario with his friend.
Even though his money had run out, he resisted moving back to England and travelled to New York instead. He tried to get a job with a publishing house and wrote one article for Harper’s. The reception wasn’t great and he thought again that writing just wasn’t his thing.
He struggled to find work and learned from a friend how to use pawnbrokers and how get free food at hotels by buying five-cent beer to gain unlimited access to the salty snacks that were available. The one thing he never pawned was his violin.
He finally scored a job as a reporter for the Evening Sun but it only paid $15 a week which wasn’t enough to live on. He fully expected to be fired on his first day because he didn’t know what he was doing, so he winged it. A fellow reporter then filled him in on how things worked and gave him tips and tricks of the trade.
Blackwood and his friends pooled their money but could barely eat. One of his friends left on an acting tour and Blackwood became ill and bed-bound for weeks. During this time, he discovered that his remaining friend had been forging cheques and stealing from him. Blackwood said that this incident killed his trust in people. Nevertheless, he forgave his friend and gave him more chances to redeem himself. As he grew stronger after his illness, he started to earn money by posing for artists but still couldn’t return to the pace required by his reporting job.
After six weeks, his employer asked when he was coming back because he couldn’t hold his job for him much longer. The doctor said he couldn’t work a ten-hour day and gave him morphine over a four-week period. After that, he was fully back at work, feeling like nothing could stop him.
He finally reached his limit with his friend’s theft and deception, kicked him out (his friend stole everything pawnable on his way out), and reported him to the police. The police refused to look for his friend and said if Blackwood found him himself, they’d arrest the guy. He did eventually find him, and his friend went to prison for around eighteen months.
Blackwood worked for the Evening Sun for about two years and then he headed to the gold fields, overjoyed at being back in nature. He and his friends didn’t find any gold and they moved back to New York even though he’d come to detest the city.
He tried freelance reporting and used his pawning and free lunch skills to get by. He also got some acting work with a touring company but found he had no talent for it. He then got a reporting job for the New York Times, earning a decent salary for the first time. After living in poverty for so long, he found himself scared to spend any money, so he determined to save it.
He eventually found a job he enjoyed as a private secretary to a multi-millionaire philanthropist, which also paid well.
In his mid-thirties, Blackwood considered taking out American citizenship, but a meeting with his sister made him nostalgic. His father was dead by this time, but he was keen to see his mother, so he returned to England.
In New York, Blackwood was known for telling stories to his friends, particularly ghost stories, and even wrote some of them down but he never thought about offering them for publication. After returning to England, he began to enjoy spending evenings writing his supernatural stories. He was particularly interested in “speculative and imaginative treatment of possibilities outside our normal range of consciousness”.[2]
Blackwood was surprised when he received an offer to publish a handful of his stories. A friend of his had taken some and given them to a young London publisher. Blackwell had just gone into business with a man who’d developed a process for producing dried milk. The enterprise was making good money, although Blackwood said he never made any money from it.
On the thought of being published for the first time, he said, “I never forget my shrinking fear at the idea of appearing in print, my desire to use another name, my feeling that it was all a mistake somewhere, the idea that I should have a book of my own published being too absurd to accept as true.”[1]
After his third book, he gave up the dried milk business and headed off to the Jura Mountains on the French-Swiss border to live a solitary life and write. He said that after twenty books, he still wasn’t receiving much cash.
He spoke fluent German and he served as a spy in Switzerland during World War 1.
Blackwood was a founding member of the Toronto Theosophical Society and a member of The Ghost Club – a paranormal investigation and research organization, founded in London in 1862.
Blackwood never married. He loved nature and the outdoors, and his friends have described him as a loner but good company, much like many of his lonely, optimistic protagonists in his stories. In a letter to a young writer, Blackwood said that all his books were “more or less autobiographical”.[3]
Algernon Blackwood died on 10 December 1951 after several strokes. A few weeks after his death, his nephew scattered Blackwood’s ashes in the Swiss Alps, in the mountains he’d loved.
Want to Know More?
If you’re interested to know more about Algernon Blackwood, see:
- Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood by Mike Ashley
- Episodes Before Thirty by Algernon Blackwood (pdf,1.1Mb)
Algernon Blackwood Works
Blackwood published 14 novels, including 2 children’s books, some plays, and a lot of short stories. He often wrote stories for newspapers at short notice and, as a result, he was never sure of exactly how many short stories he did actually write.
- The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories (1906) – original short story collection
- The Listener and Other Stories (1907) – original short story collection
- John Silence (1908) – short story collection
- Jimbo: A Fantasy (1909) – novel
- The Education of Uncle Paul (1909) – novel
- The Lost Valley and Other Stories (1910) – original short story collection
- The Human Chord (1910) – novel
- The Centaur (1911) – novel
- Pan’s Garden: a Volume of Nature Stories (1912) – original short story collection
- A Prisoner in Fairyland (1913) – novel sequel to The Education of Uncle Paul
- Ten Minute Stories (1914) – original short story collection
- Incredible Adventures (1914) – original short story collection
- The Extra Day (1915) – novel
- The Starlight Express (1915) – play co-authored with Violet Pearn, based on A Prisoner in Fairyland
- Julius LeVallon (1916) – novel
- The Wave (1916) – novel
- Day and Night Stories (1917) – original short story collection
- The Promise of Air (1918) – novel
- The Garden of Survival (1918) – novel
- Karma a reincarnation play in prologue epilogue and three acts (1918) – play co-authored with Violet Pearn
- The Crossing (1920) – play co-authored with Bertram Forsyth, based on short story Transition
- Through the Crack (1920) – play co-authored with Violet Pearn, based on The Education of Uncle Paul and The Extra Day
- Wolves of God, and Other Fey Stories (1921) – original short story collection
- White Magic (1921) – play co-authored with Bertram Forsyth
- The Halfway House (1921) – play co-authored with Elaine Ainley
- The Bright Messenger (1921) – novel sequel to Julius LeVallon
- Episodes Before Thirty (1923) – autobiography of his early years
- Tongues of Fire and Other Sketches (1924) – original short story collection
- Sambo and Snitch (1927) – children’s novel
- Ancient Sorceries and Other Tales (1927) – selected short stories from previous collections
- The Dance of Death and Other Tales (1927) – selected short stories from previous collections
- Dudley & Gilderoy: A Nonsense (1929) – novel
- Strange Stories (1929) – selected short stories from previous collections
- Max Hensig (1929) – play c-oauthored with Frederick Kinsey Peile, based on short story Max Hensig – Bacteriologist and Murderer
- Short Stories of To-Day & Yesterday (1930) – selected short stories from previous collections
- The Willows and Other Queer Tales (1932) – selected short stories from previous collections
- The Fruit Stoners: Being the Adventures of Maria Among the Fruit Stoners (1934) – children’s novel
- Shocks (1935) – original short story collection
- The Tales of Algernon Blackwood (1938) – selected short stories from previous collections
- John Silence (1942) – reprint of 1908 short story collection with added preface
- Selected Tales of Algernon Blackwood (1942) – selected short stories from previous collections
- Selected Short Stories of Algernon Blackwood (1945) – selected short stories from previous collections
- The Doll and One Other (1946) – original short story collection
- Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural (1949) – selected short stories from previous collections
Collections Published After Algernon Blackwood’s Death
- In the Realm of Terror (1957) – selected short stories from previous collections
- The Dance of Death and Other Stories (1963) – short story collection reprint of the 1927 The Dance of Death and Other Tales
- Selected Tales of Algernon Blackwood (1964) – selected short stories from previous collections
- Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre (1967) – selected short stories from previous collections
- Ancient Sorceries and Other Stories (1968) – selected short stories from previous collections
- Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood (1973) – selected short stories from previous collections
- The Best Supernatural Tales of Algernon Blackwood (1973) – selected short stories from the 1929 Strange Stories collection
- Tales of Terror and Darkness (1977) – omnibus edition of Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre (1967) and Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural (1949)
- Tales of the Supernatural (1983) – selected short stories from previous collections
- The Magic Mirror (1989) – original short story collection, selected, introduced, and with notes by Mike Ashley
- The Complete John Silence Stories (1997) – reprint of the 1908 John Silence collection plus the one remaining John Silence story, A Victim of Higher Space
- Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories (2002) – selected short stories from previous collections
- Algernon Blackwood’s Canadian Tales of Terror (2004) – eight stories of Canadian interest plus information on the author’s years in Canada
- The Lure of the Unknown: Essays on the Strange (2022) – edited and introduced by Mike Ashley
Footnotes
[1] Episodes Before Thirty by Algernon Blackwood (pdf,1.1Mb)
[2] Correspondence between Blackwood and Peter Penzoldt
[3] Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood by Mike Ashley
