After his father's death in 1886 Tomlinson was employed as a shipping clerk and in 1904 began his distinguished career as a journalist with the radical
Morning Leader. His first three articles involved the sea, being about North Sea trawlers, naval maneuvers, and a voyage by tramp steamer up the Amazon to San Antonio Falls, a trip that became the basis for his first and best-known book,
The Sea and the Jungle (1912).
Old Junk, the first evidence of Tomlinson's transition from journalism to essay writing, appeared in 1918. S. K. Ratcliffe, in his foreword to the American edition (1920), says that, compared with The Sea and the Jungle, "Old Junk is not, in the same organic sense, a book. The sketches and essays of which it is composed are of different years and ... of a wide variety of theme." There is, however, a unifying fascination with the revelation of unexpected beauty, value, or even horror, in the apparently banal or everyday. In "Transfiguration" a coastal landscape is seen "as though joyous in the first dawn." In "The Pit Mouth" sacrificial heroism is shown by "a common miner." In "The Call" a supposedly simple village youth constructs a wireless set out of old junk.
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