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William Pett Ridge (22 April 1859 – 2 October 1930) was an English fiction writer, born at Chartham, near Canterbury, Kent, and educated at Marden, Kent, and at the Birkbeck Institute, London. He was for some time a clerk in the Railway Clearing House, and began about 1891 to write humorous sketches for the St James's Gazette and other papers.
Writings and character
His published first novel was A Clever Wife (1895), but he secured his first striking success with his fifth, Mord Em'ly (1898), which showed his ability to draw humorous portraits of lower-class life.
In 1924, fellow novelist Edwin Pugh recalled his early memories of Pett Ridge in the 1890s: I see him most clearly, as he was in those days, through a blue haze of tobacco smoke. We used sometimes to travel together from Waterloo to Worcester Park on our way to spend a Saturday afternoon and evening with H. G. Wells. Pett Ridge does not know it, but it was through watching him fill his pipe, as he sat opposite me in a stuffy little railway compartment, that I completed my own education as a smoker... Pett Ridge had a small, dark, rather spiky moustache in those days, and thick, dark, sleek hair which is perhaps not quite so thick or dark, though hardly less sleek nowadays than it was then.
Pett Ridge was a compassionate man, giving generously of both his time and money to charity. He founded the Babies Home at Hoxton in 1907 and was an ardent supporter of many organisations that had the welfare of children as their object. This charitable zeal, and the fact that he established himself as the leading novelist of London life and character, led to him being marked as a natural successor of Dickens. On 7 January 1914, in King's Hall, Covent Garden, he was a member of the jury in the mock trial of John Jasper for the murder of Edwin Drood. At this all-star event, arranged by The Dickens Fellowship, G. K. Chesterton was Judge and George Bernard Shaw appeared as foreman of the jury.
