H. M. Tomlinson

Henry Major Tomlinson (21 June 1873 – 5 February 1958) was a British writer, novelist, journalist, and essayist. He was known for his travel literature, maritime essays, novels and anti-war works, and was widely admired during the interwar period for the quality of his prose style. His 1912 work The Sea and the Jungle became regarded as a classic of English travel literature, and his debut novel Gallions Reach won the Femina Vie Heureuze Prize in 1929.

Tomlinson moved within the literary circles associated with Edward Garnett and The English Review, alongside figures such as Joseph Conrad, John Galsworthy, W. H. Hudson and Ford Madox Ford. The American journalist, novelist and poet Christopher Morley once described him as the "Lord God of English prose", and his prose style has been favourably compared with Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Life and work Tomlinson was born and raised in Poplar, London to Henry Tomlinson, a foreman at the West India Docks, and Emily Major. Educated at a local school, Henry began working as a shipping clerk at the docks at the age of twelve. In 1886, his father died, and Henry became responsible for providing for the family. In the evenings Tomlinson continued his education by studying geology, botany, mineralogy and zoology. After a quarrel with his employer at the docks led him to walk out of his job, Tomlinson "presented himself on the spur of the moment to the editor of the Morning Leader, a Radical paper which later became the Daily News, and was given a job", becoming a full-time employed reporter in 1904. In their employ he was sent on several international trips, including an expedition (beginning in Cardiff, Wales) in 1909–10 some 2,000 miles up the Amazon River in South America, and his journey became the basis for one of his most celebrated books, The Sea and the Jungle (1912).

In World War I he was an official correspondent for the British Army, in France. He became disillusioned with the conduct of the war, and in 1917 he returned to work with H. W. Massingham as the Literary Editor of The Nation magazine, which opposed the war. Christopher Morley wrote in 1957 that Tomlinson "never really recovered from the first World War, which he witnessed as a war correspondent. The death and destruction which he saw at first hand corroded his spirit, though he never lost his faith in the "nobodies," the common men who had won that war." In a review of the book, The New York Times concluded that "[as] a marksman, Mr. Tomlinson is master of many kinds of arrows." The New Yorker's review wrote that "It is fascinating, human, and beautifully told in full but not sad consciousness of all that goes on in human hearts—the fear and pain and love and confusion and joy—whether the hours are spent with books and roses or out in the dark within sound of gunfire." Tomlinson died on 5 February 1958 at the age of 84.

Personal life On 26 December 1899, at St. Stephen's Church, Poplar, he married Florence Margaret Hammond, daughter of Thomas Hammond, a sailmaker, of Pekin Street, Poplar, by whom he had a son and two daughters.