Silas Kitto Hocking (24 March 1850 – 15 September 1935) was a Cornish[1][2] novelist and Methodist preacher. He is known for his novel for youth called Her Benny (1879), which was a best-seller.[3][4]
Biography
[edit]Carricature of Hocking from Vanity Fair, issue dated 14 November 1906
Hocking was born at St Stephen-in-Brannel, Cornwall, to James Hocking, part owner of a tin mine, and his wife Elizabeth, née Kitto.[3][4] His brother was Joseph Hocking (1860–1937), also a novelist and Methodist minister, and his sister, Salome Hocking (1859–1927), who was also a novelist.[3][4] As a youngster he read Sir Walter Scott. Although intended to follow his father into the tin business, he felt called to the Methodist ministry.[3] He attended Owens College and the Crescent Range Theological College of Manchester.[3] In 1870 he was ordained as a minister.[4] He worked in different parts of England over the next few years, showing himself to be a brilliant preacher, and he married in 1876.[3] He resigned in 1896 to devote his time to writing, Liberal politics and journalism.[3]
Hocking wrote many novels aimed at children with a didactic bent.[3] He wrote his first novel, Alec Green, while living in Burnley[5] in 1878. It was, however, with his second novel that he won great fame; Her Benny (1879), a story of the street children of Liverpool.[4] It sold over a million copies and with it Hocking become one of the most popular authors in England.[3][4] The novel was adapted to silent film in 1920 as Her Benny.
In 1894 Hocking became editor of Family Circle and two years later helped establish Temple Magazine, a Sunday magazine in the style of Good Words.[3] His novel The Strange Adventures of Israel Pendry (1899) is autobiographical of his Cornish youth.[3] Other works include God's Outcast (1898) which reflects on the nature of guilt; and, To Pay the Price (1900), a morality story of theft and redemption.[3] His autobiography My Book of Memory was published in 1923.[3] In all he wrote fifty books.
Hocking was also politically active, for the Liberal party and unsuccessfully contested the January 1906 General Election at Aylesbury and January 1910 General Election at Coventry.[4] He died in Highgate, Middlesex, and was survived by his wife, Esther Mary, to whom he had been married since 1876.[4] They had two sons and two daughters.[6] Silas Hocking is buried in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, along with his son, who died of Spanish flu in 1919, and his wife.[4]
^Hocking, Silas K., My Book of Memory (London: Cassell, 1923), pp. 67–70.
^Although both the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Who Was Who state that Hocking had one son and two daughters, in his My Book of Memory he at one point refers to having 'a wife and four children dependent on me' (p. 164), names the sons as Ernest and Vivian (who predeceased him) (p.280–81), and mentions 'My two daughters' (p. 282).
Kent, Alan M. (2002). Pulp Methodism: The Lives and Literature of Silas, Joseph and Salome Hocking. St Austell: Cornish Hillside Publications. ISBN978-1-900147-24-8
