Lot Essay
Grant Richards writes: 'My knowledge of Robert Tressall, my dear Partridge, is v. slight. The manuscript was brought to me by a friend, Jessie Pope ... who is now dead. It had been written by the father of a maid who had been either in her own family or in a family with which she was intimate ... Its length, she thought, precluded publication, but ... I came to the conclusion that it could be cut down to the length of this volume ... it never had any real sale until the Reformers Bookshop in Glasgow took it up ... I believe the family emigrated. I never saw any one of them. P.S. Tressall himself died considerably before the book's publication ....'