Eden Phillpotts (4 November 1862 – 29 December 1960) was an English author, poet and dramatist. He was born in Mount Abu, India, was educated in Plymouth, Devon, and worked as an insurance officer for ten years before studying for the stage and eventually becoming a writer.[1]
Eden Phillpotts was a great-nephew of Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter. His father Henry Phillpotts was a son of the bishop's younger brother Thomas Phillpotts. James Surtees Phillpotts the reforming headmaster of Bedford School was his second cousin.[2]
Eden Phillpotts was born on 4 November 1862 at Mount AbuinRajasthan. His father Henry was an officer in the Indian Army, while his mother Adelaide was the daughter of an Indian Civil Service officer posted in Madras, George Jenkins Waters.[3]
Henry Phillpotts died in 1865, leaving Adelaide a widow at the age of 21. With her three small sons, of whom Eden was the eldest, she returned to England and settled in Plymouth.[4]
Phillpotts was educated at Mannamead School in Plymouth. At school he showed no signs of a literary bent. In 1879, aged 17, he left home and went to London to earn his living. He found a job as a clerk with the Sun Fire Office.[3][4]
Phillpotts' ambition was to be an actor and he attended evening classes at a drama school for two years. He came to the conclusion that he would never make a name as an actor but might have success as a writer. In his spare time out of office hours he proceeded to create a stream of small works which he was able to sell. In due course he left the insurance company to concentrate on his writing, while also working part-time as assistant editor for the weekly Black and White magazine.[3][4]
Eden Phillpotts maintained a steady output of three or four books a year for the next half century. He produced poetry, short stories, novels, plays and mystery tales. Many of his novels were about rural Devon life and some of his plays were distinguished by their effective use of regional dialect.
Eden Phillpotts died at his home in Broadclyst near Exeter, Devon, on 29 December 1960.
Phillpotts was a friend of Agatha Christie, who was an admirer of his work and a regular visitor to his home. She dedicated her 1932 novel Peril at End House to Phillpotts, and in her autobiography, she expressed gratitude for his early advice on fiction writing and quoted some of it. Jorge Luis Borges was another Phillpotts admirer.[6] Borges mentioned him numerous times, wrote at least two reviews of his novels, and included him in his "Personal Library", a collection of works selected to reflect his personal literary preferences.[7]
He co-wrote several plays with his daughter Adelaide Phillpotts,[9]The Farmer's Wife and Yellow Sands (1926);[10] she later claimed their relationship was incestuous.[11][12] Eden is best known as the author of many novels, plays and poems about Dartmoor. His Dartmoor cycle of 18 novels and two volumes of short stories still has many avid readers despite the fact that many titles are out of print.
Philpotts also wrote a series of novels, each set against the background of a different trade or industry. Titles include: Brunel's Tower (a pottery) and Storm in a Teacup (hand-papermaking). Among his other works is The Grey Room, the plot of which is centred on a haunted room in an English manor house. He also wrote a number of other mystery novels, both under his own name and the pseudonym Harrington Hext. These include: The Thing at Their Heels, The Red Redmaynes, The Monster, The Clue from the Stars, and The Captain's Curio. The Human Boy[13] was a collection of schoolboy stories in the same genre as Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co., though different in mood and style. Late in his long writing career he wrote a few books of interest to science fiction and fantasy readers, the most noteworthy being Saurus, which involves an alien reptilian observing human life.
Eric Partridge praised the immediacy and impact of his dialect writing.[14]
The Complete Human Boy. Comprising "The Human Boy," "The Human Boy Again," "The Human Boy and the War," "The Human Boy's Diary," "From the Angle of Seventeen," Etc. (1930)
West Country Plays (1933) [Buy a Broom and A Cup of Happiness.]
The Book of Avis: A Trilogy Comprising Bred in the Bone, Witch's Cauldron, A Shadow Passes [1936]
^"...among the honorary associates of the [Rationalist Press] Association, past and present, are distinguished names such as...Eden Phillpotts." Quoted in Lord Snell, Men, Movements And Myself (p. 156), J.M. Dent and Sons, 1936.
^Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations. University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Page 218.
^James Y. Dayananda, 'Phillpotts , (Mary) Adelaide Eden (1896–1993)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Sept 2012 accessed 9 May 2017
^Philpotts, Eden; The Human Boy; Pub: Harper & Brothers, 1899.
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