WHH’S FAMILY TREE

One of the projects that I’ve been working on is Hodgson’s genealogy.  I believe that it is important in helping understand WHH as well as his time period.  To that end, I have developed this family tree of Hodgson’s immediate family:

From this, we can see several interesting facts.

1) WHH’s oldest brother, “Chad”, died two years before WHH.

2) WHH’s next oldest brother, Lawrence, as well as the two brothers who immediately came after him (Herbert and Thomas) all died between 1-2 years of life.

3) The majority of the rest of his siblings lived relatively long lives.  “Chris” lived to be 87 years old while “Bertha” was 84.

If we remember that “Chad” had been ostracized from the family for marrying a divorced woman (probably around 1900), then that would have made WHH the male head of the family.  This may explain, in part, his remaining close to his mother and perhaps delaying marriage so long.

More research has shown that virtually all of the rest of Hodgson’s siblings left England for either Canada or America.  “Chris” eventually settled in California where he worked for a San Fransisco newspaper for many years.  Only “Lissie” stayed in England where she cared for their mother until the latter’s death in 1933.

I have some further information regarding the families of WHH’s siblings but, in deference to their privacy, will not be posting those details.

 

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200!!!

This is the 200th post of the William Hope Hodgson blog!

(Truthfully, we should have hit this milestone a while ago but I’ve been a bit busy.)

For 199 posts, I’ve extolled the virtues of Hodgson’s work and explored many facets of his life as well as other Hodgson connected items.  Hopefully, we’ll be around for another 200 more!

Actually, 2014 is shaping up to be a big year for Hodgson.  There are at least two important collections due to be released, a major donation of Hodgson papers to be unveiled, and possibly even a media project of some kind.  Things are afoot in the Hodgson world!

Coming out in May is a collection of Hodgson’s fiction from Centipede Press: THE CENTIPEDE PRESS LIBRARY OF WEIRD FICTION: WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON.  Here is the description from Amazon:

“This collection of William Hope Hodgson contains the novels The House on the Borderland and The Ghost Pirates along with twenty one short stories, including “The Voice in the Night” and the Carnacki stories. There is an excellent introduction by S.T. Joshi and rare photographs of Hodgson.”

This is a hardcover book weighing in at a MASSIVE 900 pages!  Despite the page count, it is suprisingly affordable at only $40.  I am greatly anticipating this collection (which originally was supposed to come out last December) and will review it here as soon as I can get my hot little hands on a copy!  You can pre-order it from Amazon here:

http://www.amazon.com/William-Hope-Hodgson/dp/1613470495/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1396031358&sr=1-5&keywords=william+hope+hodgson

Also coming out this year (at a date undetermined) is:

WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON: VOICES FROM THE BORDERLAND

Seven Decades of Criticism on the Master of Cosmic Horror

This collection contains articles by A. Langley Searles, Emily Alder, S.T. Joshi, Mark Valentine, Benjamin Szumskyj, Andy Sawyer, Phillip A. Ellis, Marcos Legaria, Henrik Harksen and myself.  It also includes a massive bibliography that S. T. Joshi and I have been working on (with assistance from many others) for literally decades.  I think that the biblio alone will be quite an eye-opener.

This book will be appearing from Hippocampus Press but I am unsure if it will be hardcover or only paperback.  I will pass along new details as I learn them.  Sadly, it is not currently listed on the website for Hippocampus Press.

These are in addition to the two articles on WHH that I recently had published.  “HPL & WHH” in WEIRD FICTION REVIEW #4 and “The Man Who Saved Hodgson” in NAMELESS #3.

We are very close to publishing the special definitive edition of Hodgson’s CARNACKI THE GHOST-FINDER which reprints the original 1913 edition of this classic along with the three stories added by August Derleth to the Arkham House version.  Also included is an introduction by myself detailing the importance of these stories, Carnacki’s influence through the years and the last word on the authorship of “The Hog”.  I hope to have this available for ordering by the end of April.

Lastly, I have been contacted by a source who indicates that there may be a special media project involving Hodgson coming along soon.  I cannot give more details than this but the second that arrangements are finalized, I’ll report it here!  It could potentially be a very exciting project!

So it looks that as we move towards the 100th anniversary of Hodgson’s death in 2018, Hodgson is beginning to get the attention he deserves.  But we have to keep on fighting the good fight.  I encourage everyone to buy the Centipede and Hippocampus Press volumes.  Only by showing publishers that there is a demand can we keep Hodgson’s work available and alive.  Perhaps, in 2018, we may even be able to convince Penguin to produce a volume of Hodgson’s fiction as they’ve done for Lovecraft and now Clark Ashton Smith!

HELLBOY AND HODGSON?

You just never know where Hodgson will show up!

I was reading HELLBOY: STRANGE PLACES as part of my 365 Day Graphic Novel Challenge (where I read a graphic novel a day for a year and write about it here: http://365graphicnovelchallenge.wordpress.com/ which you all know about because you follow that blog regularly, right?) when I came upon an unexpected dedication:

“For Hans Christian Anderson,

King of Mermaids,

and William Hope Hodgson,

Master of the Sargasso Sea.”

 

Now it is obvious to any fan of Hellboy and his creator, Mike Mignola, that there is a very strong Lovecraftian influence throughout Mignola’s work.  This was the first that I had seen of an indication that Mignola was also a fan of Hodgson though.

The book is a collection of two stories (“The Third Wish” and “The Island”).  Both of these had appeared as separate comic book mini-series.  “The Third Wish” is where the Hans Christian Anderson comes into play and it is “The Island” that was inspired by Hodgson.

Mignola says the following in his introduction to “The Island”:

“This was a rough one.

“My original idea was a story inspired by the Sargasso Sea stories of William Hope Hodgson (1877-1917) and his novel, The Boats of the Glen Carrig–a graveyard of ships and a strange island overrun with weird fungus and monsters.”

Unfortunately, the story proved to be more trouble than Mignola had anticipated.  Despite two separate attempts, he still couldn’t get the story he wanted so it morphed into “The Island” which begins rather Hodgson like with Hellboy coming ashore in a cove of wrecked ships but actually delves more into the original of Hellboy’s world and the terrifying Ogdru Jahad.

Some of Mignola’s pencilled pages are included in the back of the book and they are enough to make us hope that one day Mignola, and Hellboy, will return to the Sargasso Sea and finally tell us that ‘impossible’ tale.

Major Hodgson Donation Announced!

Jane Frank has just confirmed that she and her husband are making a major donation of William Hope Hodgson material!  The donation consists of the Franks’ WHH archive of original typescripts, offprints, correspondence, photographs and ephemera (formerly known as the Sam Moskowitz collection).

It is being donated to the University of California, Riverside, where it will become part of the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy in the UC Riverside Libraries’  Special Collections & University Archives.  A formal announcement will be forthcoming from UC Riverside.

A special reception and panel discussion about Hodgson is planned to commemorate this event and will be held on April 16, 2014, at the Library.

In her email to me regarding the donation, Jane stated that it had always been their intention to donate the material to a college or university and that one of their primary goals when buying the collection at the Moskowitz auction was to keep it whole and complete.  This will mark the first collection of Hodgson material available to the general public for research and edification.

On a personal note, I am beyond thrilled that the Franks have made this amazingly generous donation.  For so long, it has been difficult to do scholarly work on Hodgson due to the lack of primary sources.  It is my fervent hope that this will become the leading repository for Hodgson material and that other scholars and collectors will follow suit by donating even more material.

Sadly, I cannot attend the panel on April 16th but I strongly encourage any readers who can to make the trip!  It will be the event of a lifetime!

see http://eaton.ucr.edu/ for more about the Eaton Collection