Edwin Lester Arnold

Edwin Lester Linden Arnold (14 May 1857 – 1 March 1935) was an English writer. He was the son of journalist and poet Edwin Arnold, and spent his childhood between England and India. His best-known work is Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation which is one of the earliest examples of the planetary romance sub-genre.

Life and literary career

Arnold was born in Swanscombe, Kent, as son of Sir Edwin Arnold. Most of his childhood was spent in India, but he returned to England to study agriculture and ornithology. He became a journalist in 1883, and published his first books A Holiday in Scandinavia (1877) and Bird Life in England (1887) before writing his first novel The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician, the adventures of a warrior who goes in and out of an unexplained state of suspended animation in order to be a witness to invasions or attempted invasions of England. Phra was first published in 24 parts in the prestigious Illustrated London News, and later published in book form in the United States and the United Kingdom.

He wrote several pieces of shorter fiction, including the novelettes "The Story of Ulla", which was published in Short Stories magazine in March 1892, and "Rutherford the Twice-Born", which was published in the Idler magazine in May of the same year. These and eight other stories were collected in The Story of Ulla and Other Tales in 1895.

Arnold later wrote two other novels. The first was Lepidus the Centurion: A Roman of Today (1901), which flopped commercially. In 1905 Arnold published his best known novel, Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation, also known as Gulliver of Mars, (1905). Its initial reception was lukewarm, and he published only a few short stories in later years. However, it was later seen as an important precursor of the planetary romance sub-genre.