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When Marcus Clarke died suddenly at age thirty-five, he left behind him crippling debts, controversial writings, and opinion divided, as it has remained, about his true stature as an author. His compositions were disparate and, considering his short career, voluminous. Remembered today chiefly as the creator of an epic account of penal banishment, His Natural Life (1874), he also produced three other novels; a substantial body of shorter fiction; hundreds of columns, reviews, leaders, and miscellaneous pieces for the press; and adaptations and original works for the fledgling local theater. But his output was uneven, leading one contemporary to accuse him of having "a fatal fluency of pen . . . a memory that supplies the place of profound research . . . [as well as] a real talent for seizing on the ludicrous side of everyone and everything." Pulled between his gentlemanly upbringing and a love of the demimonde, he cultivated cynicism, irony, and a blasé unconcern that led Henry Kendall to remark that "there was stuff in the man-good stuff too, only he himself did not appear to value it." Clarke has remained, as his schoolfriend Gerard Manley Hopkins described him, "a kaleidoscopic, particoloured, harlequinesque, thaumatropic being." Ultimately, Kendall decided that Clarke "was not a genius, but he was something more than a brilliant mime," whereas another friend claimed that, at the time of his death, Clarke "was recognised as facile princeps amongst the litterateurs of Australia." Mark Twain confirmed this verdict in 1895 after reading a selection of Clarke's writings.
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