When it was rejected by the important Australian publisher George Robertson on the grounds that "no Colonial could write anything worth reading," Hume published it at his own expense, selling the entire first edition of 5,000 copies in three weeks, at one shilling each. The novel was dedicated to the novelist James Payn (1830-1898), whose latest work,
The Luck of the Darrells (1885), Hume had read and admired. Copies of the first edition are among the rarest of the detective genre, with only two known copies extant.
Hume subsequently sold the copyright for fifty pounds to a group of London speculators, who, calling themselves the Hansom Cab Publishing Company, reaped enormous profits from the sales of the novel. Sales of various British and American editions passed the half-million mark, and its unrivaled success was marked by a contemporary full-length parody. Hume had always wanted to write for the stage, and The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was deliberately planned to catch the eye of theater managers; a dramatic version, by Hume and Arthur Law, was eventually produced on the London stage in 1888.
In the preface to the 1896 edition Hume described his first novel's origins: "I enquired of a leading Melbourne bookseller what style of book he sold most of.
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