SOURCE: "Robert Hichens," in The Glory That Was Grub Street: Impressions of Contemporary Authors, The Musson Book Company Limited, n.d., pp. 105-14.

An English author whose works often concern the city of London, Adcock served as editor of the London Bookman from 1923 until his death in 1930. In the following essay, he focuses on Hichens's literary beginnings and his novel The Garden of Allah.

There is a tradition that every novelist began as a writer of verse, and if Robert Hichens did not exactly conform to it, he did not altogether break with it, for in his youth he wrote both verse and prose, but without regarding either as the business of his life. His first absorbing ambition was to become a musician; he sacrificed a career at Oxford to this end, and, leaving Clifton College, studied music for some years at Bristol and at the Royal College...