During his lifetime, H. M. Tomlinson was popularly known as a writer of the sea in the Joseph Conrad tradition and as the author of travel books. It is possible, however, that his literary reputation will rest on his essays, which cover a wide variety of subjects and are distinguished by a natural elegance of style and a mastery of form. Addressing the Harvard Union in 1927 (in a lecture published as Between the Lines, 1930), Tomlinson humorously dismissed the idea that he was a "second Conrad" and claimed that his true teachers were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It is to this American tradition, and to the reflective English school of Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia: Urne Buriall (1658) and Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia (1823), that Tomlinson, the essayist, belongs.

Henry Major Tomlinson was born in Wanstead, Essex, on 21 June 1873; the eldest son of Henry and Emily Tomlinson, he grew...