The Oxford Circus: A Novel of Oxford and Youth

Entrusted with the literary remains of the late Alfred Budd, we think it fitting to provide the reading public, however briefly and inadequately, with some particulars of his life. They are, alas, only too few (Fate saw to that), but they may serve to indicate those forces of heredity and environment which worked to produce his remarkable novel, The Oxford Circus.

Alfred, as he was known to his intimates, was himself inclined to believe that, in some bygone age, a noble ancestor of his had founded the South Devon sea-side resort of Budleigh Salterton, where one summer he himself spent a happy fortnight. But our own researches[1] have disclosed no earlier trace of his family until Hosea Budd appears, in mid-Victorian days, as a general dealer in the pretty Flintshire village of Llwynphilly. He prospered, and his only son Albert, soon after taking Orders in the Church of England, took to wife Megan Meard, the daughter of a Shropshire corn-factor. The sole issue of this happy union was a boy, christened Alfred Hosea, after his two grandfathers--the future author of The Oxford Circus. The Meards, it is interesting to note, boasted a Huguenot origin, and from this strain perhaps was derived our author’s keen appreciation of the language and culture of France.

[1] We should like here to acknowledge the devoted help afforded us at the Public Records Office by Miss Agatha Anderleigh, B.Litt., than whom England has no more experienced genealogist.

Too delicate by far to be sent to boarding school, Alfred Budd was educated at home by his father, then and still the perpetual curate of Widdleswick, Salop. The boy’s mother unfortunately died while he was still but twelve summers old, but we understand that her influence lived after her, and that her son paid fitting tribute to her pious memory in his charming pen-portrait of Lady Julia Penhaligon.

The lad showed promise. Through the kindness of Sir Pontefract Gribble, the village Squire, he was enabled to browse in the well-stocked library of Widdleswick Manor. That he did not waste this splendid opportunity of reading both widely and wisely, not least in the domain of the contemporary novel, readers of his own, alas, posthumous, work of fiction will soon feel confident.

But how did Mr. Budd come to write the present volume? the reader may well be tempted to inquire. The circumstances have a melancholy interest all their own.

The Rev. Albert Budd had destined his only son to follow him into the ministry of the Church, and so, at the age of seventeen, the boy (for he was no more) was sent to Oxford to compete for an open exhibition at St. Edmund’s Hall. What happened? Perhaps his fragile health had handicapped him in the stern race; perhaps he had devoted too much attention to Sir Pontefract’s collection of modern fiction, and hardly enough to the more apposite writings of Aristotle and Euclid and Origen. Be that as it may, Alfred was unsuccessful in the examination, and, after three whole days in the University city, he left Oxford, as it turned out, for ever.

But those three days left an indelible impression upon his quick imagination.

The leaven worked, and while studying with a view to a second attempt in the next autumn, he devoted his leisure hours to the composition of The Oxford Circus. His incurable weakness in mathematics, however, asserted itself more and more during these months, and when the time came round he did not feel that his chances of success justified a second visit. The clerical career, then, was closed to him, and he had perforce to search for other employment.

His quest was soon rewarded. An advertisement inserted in The Times newspaper, under the appropriately chosen sobriquet of “Gaveston,” brought him an offer of work from a famous memory-training institute, which required the services of a representative in the Far East. Success seemed well within his grasp, and in due course he sailed from Cardiff to take up his post in Japan.

The rest is soon told.

To the quiet little vicarage at Widdleswick came a few short letters, bearing strange foreign stamps, and posted at Gibraltar, at Brindisi, at Port Said, and later handed over to us as his literary executors. They told, simply and modestly, of his hopes and fears, his ship mates and their ways, and in one he spoke of his plans for a sequel to The Oxford Circus, itself only completed a very few days before sailing. But it was not to be: dis, as he himself had said with reference to his University career, aliter visum.… For during the always trying passage of the Red Sea, poor Alfred disappeared. He supped, but did not take his place for breakfast. Neither his fellow-passengers nor the captain nor the crew could throw any light on his whereabouts, and it was presumed that he had fallen overboard in the darkness. They further presumed that his fall had been accidental.

Alfred Budd is dead. His readers will be at one with us in regarding his loss as a grave one to English letters. He despised coteries and disliked cliques. He was an honest workman of literature, using none but sound materials, none but well-established models. For its wit, its photographic realism and its daring originality, The Oxford Circus is a first novel of which any publisher might be proud. Its sparkling epigrams, and its vivid portrayal of life in many different strata of our modern society, seem almost unexpected from one who lived so quietly as Mr. Budd. Yet somehow his originality of invention leaves no room for doubt: Budd was perhaps the first novelist to introduce the London and North Western Railway station into a novel of Oxford life. Such a writer had no mean future.

Here and there, in preparing Alfred’s MSS. for the press, we have detected discrepancies which, had he lived, he might have adjusted, subtle touches which he might have amplified, luxuriances which he might have pruned. In respect to his memory, however, we have let these stand. If we have done wrong, we look for pardon from those who remember that, where an old and very deep friendship is concerned, the task of literary execution is no easy one.

H. M. R. M.