Several days after the exhilarating interview with the Poet-Laureate of England, I was honored by a dinner given to me by the Honorable Company of Lady Copy-Mongers at their guildhall in Piccadilly Circus, S.W. It was a delightful affair, and I met many ladies of prominence in literary fields. Miss Braddon and John Oliver Hobbes were there, and one rather stout old lady, of regal manner, who was introduced as Clara Guelph, but whom I strongly suspected to be none other than the authoress of that famous and justly popular work, Leaves from My Diary in the Highlands, or Sixty Years a Potentate. She was very gracious to me, and promised to send me an autograph copy of her publisher's circular.

Most interesting of all the persons encountered at the banquet, however, was Miss Philippa Phipps-Phipps, forewoman of the Andrew Lang Manuscript-Manufacturing Company, from whom I gained much startling information which I am certain will interest the public.

In the course of our conversation I observed to Miss Phipps-Phipps, of whom I had never heard before, that nothing in modern letters so amazed me as the output of Andrew Lang, for both its quality and its quantity. The lady flushed pleasurably, and said, modestly:

"We try to keep up to the standard, Miss Witherup. As a worker in literary fields, you perhaps realize how hard it is to do this, but of one thing I assure you—we have never in the last ten years allowed a bit of scamp work of any description to go out of our factory. Of course we have grades of work, but the lower grades do not go out with the Lang mark upon them."

I looked at Miss Phipps-Phipps in a puzzled way, for the full import of her words did not dawn upon me instantly.

"I don't quite understand," said I. "We? Who are we?"

"The Lang Manuscript-Manufacturing Company," explained the young woman. "You are aware, of course, that Andrew Lang is not an individual, but a corporation?"

"I certainly never dreamed it," said I, with a half-smile.

"How could it be otherwise?" asked Miss Phipps-Phipps. "No human being could alone turn out an average of 647,000,000 words a year, Miss Witherup, not even if he could run two type-writers at once, and write with his feet while dictating to a stenographer. It would be a physical impossibility."

"Dear me!" I cried in amazement. "I know that there were thousands of articles from Lang every year, but 647,000,000 words! Why, it is incredible!"

"That is only the average, you know,"[Pg 61]
[Pg 62] said Miss Phipps-Phipps, proudly. "In good years we have run as high as 716,000,346 words; and this year, if all goes well and our operatives do not strike, we expect to turn out over 800,000,000. We have signed contracts to deliver 111,383,000 words in the month of June alone—mostly Christmas stuff, you know, to be published next November. Last month we turned out 39,000 lines of poetry a day for twenty-five working-days, and our essay-mill has been running over-time for sixteen weeks."

"Well, I am surprised!" said I. "Yet, when I come to think of it, there is no reason why I should be. This is an age of corporations."

"Precisely," said Miss Phipps-Phipps. "Furthermore, ours had a philanthropic motive at the bottom of it all. Here was Mr. Lang simply killing himself with work, and some 700 young men and women of an aspiring turn of mind absolutely out of employment. The burdens of the one, we believed, could be made to relieve the necessities of the other, and we made the proposition to Mr. Lang to make himself over to us, promising to fill his contracts and relieve him of the necessity of doing any further literary work for the rest of his life. We incorporated him on a basis of £2,000,000, giving him £1,000,000 in shares. The rest was advertised as for sale, and was oversubscribed ten to one. Workshops were built at Woking, and as a starter 600 operatives were employed. Working night and day, at the end of the first year we were just three months behind our orders. We immediately doubled our force to 1200, and so it has gone until to-day, and the business is constantly increasing. Our stock is at a premium of 117%, and we keep 3750 people, with a capacity of 10,000 words a day each, constantly employed."

"I am astonished!" I cried. "The magnitude of the work is appalling. Are your shops open to visitors?"

"Certainly. I shall be pleased if you will come out to Woking to-morrow, and I will show you over the establishment," replied Miss Phipps-Phipps, courteously. And then for the moment the conversation stopped.

The next day I was at Woking, where Miss Phipps-Phipps met me at the station. A ten-minutes' drive brought us to the factory, a detailed description of which would be impossible in the limits at my disposal. Suffice it to say that after an hour's walk through the various departments I was still not half acquainted with the marvels of the establishment. In the Essay and Letters to Dead Authors Department sixty-eight girls were driving their pens at a rate that made my head whirl. A whole floor was given over to the Fairy-Tale Department, and I saw fairy-books of all the colors in the rainbow being turned out at a rapid rate.

"Here," said the forelady, as we reached a large, capacious, and well-lighted writing-room, "is our latest venture. There are 700 employees in here, and they work from 9 a.m. to 12, have a half hour for luncheon, and resume. At five they go home. They have in hand the Lang Meredith. We have purchased from Mr. Meredith all right and title to his complete works, which we are having rewritten. These will appear at the proper time as 'The Lucid Meredith, by Andrew Lang.' The old gentleman at the desk over there," she added, pointing to a keen-eyed, sharp-visaged fellow, with a long nose and nervous manner, "is Mr. Fergus Holmes, who began life as a detective, and became a critic. He is here on a large salary, and has nothing to do but use his critical insight and detective instinct to find the thought in some of Mr. Meredith's most complicated periods. After all, Miss Witherup, our operators are only human, and some of them cannot understand Meredith as well as they might."

"I am glad to know," said I, with a laugh, "that you pay Mr. Fergus Holmes a large salary. A man employed to detect the thought of some of Mr. Meredith's paragraphs—"

"Oh, we understand all about that," Miss Phipps-Phipps smiled, in return. "We know his value, which is very great in this particular matter."

"And does he never fail?" I asked.

"I presume he does, but he never gives up. Once he asked to be allowed to consult with Mr. Meredith before giving an opinion, and we consented. He wrote to the author, and it turned out that Mr. Meredith had forgotten the paragraph entirely, and couldn't tell himself what he meant. But he was very nice about it. He gave us carte blanche to make it mean anything that would fit into the rest of the story."

We passed on into another room.

"This room," said Miss Phipps-Phipps, "is at present devoted to the British poets. There have been a great many bad poets in Britain who have become immortal, and we are trying to make them good. That young man over there with red hair is rewriting Burns—the introduction we are doing in our essay-room. The young lady in blue glasses is doing Gay over again; and we have intrusted our Lang edition of Herrick to the retired clergyman whom you see sitting on that settee by the window with a slate on his lap. To show you how completely we do our work, let me tell you that in this case of Herrick all his poems were first copied off on slates by our ordinary copyists, so that the clergyman who is doing them over again has only to wet his finger to rub out what might strike some people as an immortal line."

"It's a splendid idea!" I cried. "But wouldn't a blackboard prove less expensive?"

"We never consider expense," said Miss Phipps-Phipps. "We really do not have to. You see, with a capacity of 800,000,000 words a year at the rates for Lang, for which we pay at rates for the unknown, we are left with a margin of profit which pleases our stockholders and does not arouse the cupidity of other authors."

"What a wonderful system!" said I.

"We think it so," said Miss Phipps-Phipps, placidly.

"And do you never have any troubles?" I asked.

"Oh yes," replied my hostess. "Only last week the Grass of Parnassus and Blue Ballade employees rose up and struck for sixpence more per quatrain. We locked them out, and to-day have filled their places with equally competent employees. You can always find plenty of unemployed and unpublished poets ready to step in. Our prose hands do not give us much trouble, and our revisers never say a word."

"Have you any novelties in hand?" I asked.

"Oh yes," said Miss Phipps-Phipps. "We are going to supersede Boswell with Lang's Johnson. We are preparing a Lang Shakespeare; and when the copyrights on Thackeray and Dickens have expired, we'll do them all over again. Then we are experimenting in colors for a new fairy-book; and our chromatic Bibles will be a great thing. We are also contemplating an offer to the French Academy to permit all the works of its members to be issued as ours. I really think that Daudet by Andrew Lang would pay. Hugo by Lang might prove too much for the British public, but we shall do it, because we have confidence in ourselves. We shall issue the Philosophy of Schopenhauer by Andrew Lang next week."

"How about our American authors?" I queried. "Are you going to rewrite any of them?"

"Who are they?" asked Miss Phipps-Phipps, with an admirable expression of ingenuousness.

"Well," said I, "myself, and—ah—Edgar Poe."

"Any poets?" said Miss Phipps-Phipps.

"Some," I answered. "Myself and—ah—Longfellow."

[Pg 69]
[Pg 70]

"I don't know," said Miss Phipps-Phipps, becoming somewhat reserved. "Send me your manuscripts. I have heard of you, of course—but—ah—who is Miss Longfellow?"

I contented myself with a reference to the scenery, and then I said: "Miss Double Phipps, I wish you would conduct me into the presence of Mr. Lang. I like him as a manly man, and I love him for the books he has put forth, which not only show his manliness, but his appreciation of everything in letters that is good."

"Well, really, Miss Witherup," said Miss Phipps-Phipps, "we don't know where he is, but we think—it is not my thought, but that of the corporation—we think you will find him playing golf at St. Andrews."

"Thank you," said I. "But, after all," I added, "it is not what the corporation thinks so much as what you as an individual think. Where do you believe I may find Mr. Lang?"

"Among the Immortals," was the answer, spoken with enthusiasm.

And believing that the lady was right, I ceased to look for Mr. Lang, for in the presence of immortals I always feel myself to be foolish.

Nevertheless, I am very glad to have seen the Lang Company at Woking, and I now understand many things that I never understood before.