George R. Sims Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on George R. Sims

No one would have been more surprised than George Sims himself that posterity should recognize him not as the immensely popular crusading journalist, not as the writer of several highly successful melodramas, not as a writer of melodramatic novels and short stories, nor as the bon vivant and man-about-town--the celebrity lending his name to the promotion of dog food and hair restorer--but as the writer of verse. "In the Workhouse: Christmas Day" is remembered yet, and in its time was rivaled only by Thomas Babington Macaulay's "Horatius" as a recitation piece. Sims with his ballads hit upon a successful formula and used it to draw attention to the appalling conditions of the London slums. But verse played a small role in his busy existence, and he wrote little after his dramatic successes in the 1880s.

Sims was born into a prosperous London family with Chartist sympathies on his mother's side. His life reflects such a background. Educated at Hanwell Military College and the university at Bonn, he was sent down from the latter for his exuberant behavior. He entered the family business, an early assignment being to give Henry Mayhew, now remembered for his survey of London Labor and the London Poor (1864), a tour of it, but he aspired to write. For several years he enjoyed a bohemian existence by night while dutifully working in London by day. In 1874, however, he joined the staff of Fun, and three years later joined the Referee and contributed a weekly column, "Mustard and Cress," which appeared, under the pseudonym Dagonet, without fail until his death. In 1881 Gilbert Dalziel commissioned him and Frederick Barnard to prepare a series of illustrated articles entitled "How the Poor Live" for a new journal, the Pictorial World . Sims reached and caught an audience that more serious researchers did not. His work, as he put it in his autobiography, My Life: Sixty Years' Recollections of Bohemian London (1917), caused "something of a sensation." Questions were asked in Parliament, innumerable sermons preached, and eventually a Royal Commission on the Housing of the Poor was instituted; the process of amelioration had begun.

Sims's journalism had its light side, principally a celebration of English middle-class amusements. He wrote of horse racing, of showing dogs, of boxing, of the resorts catering to Londoners' need for recreation (Brighton being his favorite), and of good living generally. A very hardworking man, he produced novels and short stories, also melodramas and burlesques, many of which enjoyed lucrative runs in London, the provinces, and abroad. At one time in the 1880s four of his plays were running concurrently in the West End, an achievement equaled once, apparently, but not surpassed in his lifetime.

Popular when first appearing in the daily press, Sims's ballads were praised by critics of note when published in book form. Robert Buchanan's enthusiastic review of an edition of The Dagonet Ballads for the February 1881 Contemporary Review led to friendship with Sims, with whom he collaborated on several melodramas; Bret Harte, on arriving in England, first wished to meet not Tennyson, Browning, or Gladstone but Dagonet. His ballads reached and reach yet a wide audience, for Sims has been accorded an honor enjoyed by few minor Victorian poets: a modern edition, published in 1968. The title, however, Prepare to Shed Them Now, anticipates, even courts, the ballads' potential risibility. Overly sentimental they are, but better writers than Sims succumbed to the maudlin, the staple of much Victorian art, in an age when human suffering on a large scale was close at hand for the middle classes to observe. Arthur Calder-Marshall stresses the sociological importance of Sims's ballads, whose literary characteristics are "colloquial language and heavily accented verse," with a first-person narrator telling "a melodramatic story, expressing often opinions which appeared almost blasphemous but which in fact robustly restated simple faith." Sims, himself in many ways the quintessential good-hearted, highly sociable Englishman, cleverly manipulated his readers into identifying with people whose experience was vastly different from their own. Profoundly aware of the best elements in the English character, he appealed across the chasms of class to the English passion for fair play. No revolutionary--he loved the good life too much to risk its overthrow--George Sims gently but firmly educated his readers. He was immensely gratified to discover that Charles Booth, credited with the implementation of state old-age pensions, began his career as a social reformer because of Sims's most famous ballad. Sims wrote not for posterity but for social improvement; in his day he was remarkably successful.