Reading the Mortlocks: The Novels of Martindale Hall

The novels in particular provide an insight into the interests, hobbies and daydreams of the Mortlock family members in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although we can’t know who read what, the family appear to have been avid readers across a wide range of genres, owning novels by many of the most popular authors of the time, both Australian and international.

There are at least two sets of records for the Martindale library collection, in two different hands, and using slightly different systems. The first is composed of two volumes, dated January 1921, and includes a ‘Library Catalogue’ and a ‘Guide to the Library Catalogue’ that specifies the location of each subject area on the library’s shelves. The List A and List B fiction titles, for example, were located on the top shelves (List A) and on the second, third and fourth shelves (List B). There is no obvious logic to the separation of these lists, since both contain companion titles from the same authors with similar themes. The author of this set of records is currently unknown, since the handwriting indicates it was neither Rosye nor Jack.

The library had clearly expanded over the two decades represented by these lists, since many authors have far more works listed in the second compared with the first. There are three works by Edgar Rice Burroughs in the 1921 list, for example, but twenty-one by the 1940s, including two of the three listed in 1921. Similarly, works by Henry Rider Haggard had quadrupled over the two decades and all fourteen earlier works were still in the collection. Most books in the second list were published in the 1910s and 1920s (200 and 267, respectively), and it’s likely that they were bought immediately or soon after publication, given the Mortlock family’s wealth. The most popular year for acquired titles was 1924, when forty-one different books were published. By the 1940s the acquisition of new titles had dwindled considerably, tailing off into four or five a year. This is perhaps not surprising given that Jack was ageing, Rosye and Ranson had both died (Ranson in 1936 and Rosye in 1939) and there were no children to inherit the library.

A strong thread of escapism winds throughout the Martindale collection, typified by the fiction of India and Africa, war, foreign legion and espionage tales, mystery, crime and detective stories, and science fiction, fantasy and historical fiction. Some of the Australian content falls into what Ken Gelder describes as the ‘colonial Australian popular fiction archive’, incorporating ‘romance, adventure fiction, Gothic fiction, crime fiction, Lemurian fantasy and … related subgenres’, such as ‘South Sea’ adventure and lost-race tales.¹

‘Lost race’ tales typically posit the survival of an ancient or mythical population of people in hitherto unknown or unexplored places, either on or inside the Earth. They often highlight utopian ideals while emphasising various colonial tropes that helped to reinforce the superiority of British culture and empire.² There were several books of this genre in the Martindale library, such as Henry Rider Haggard’s seminal She (1886), along with its sequels, Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), She and Allan (1921) and Wisdom’s Daughter: The Life and Love Story of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (1923). Companion examples are Daughter of the Dawn: A Realistic Story of Maori Magic (1903), by William Hodder, which has a group of ancient Lemurians surviving in New Zealand; The Arms of Phaedra: A Tale of Wonder and Adventure (1924), by Nigel Worth (aka Noel Wright), which has ancient Minoans surviving in Crete; and the various novels that were part of the Sir John Meredith, occult detective series by Francis Gerard.

In many ways, much of the Mortlock reading material was mass popular fiction, which doesn’t match the outward ideal of the Hall, its interiors and contents, or the lifestyle of the Mortlocks. Instead, the novels they favoured were typically the kind enjoyed by the middle and working classes, who usually consumed the versions serialised in magazines rather than in book form. Some of the Mortlocks’ favourite authors (if the numbers they purchased are any indication) include Henry Rider Haggard (53 titles), Guy Thorne (43 titles), George Chetwynd Griffith (30 titles) and Bertram Mitford (26 titles). Haggard was one of the most popular authors of adventure yarns in the 1920s, Thorne was an English journalist who authored several tales with science-fiction elements and often moralistic Christian overtones, and Griffith was a prolific writer in all genres, authoring science fiction, fantasy, adventure, detective and historical novels. Mitford produced over forty novels during his career, many set in colonial Africa.

Assuming that the books were purchased when published, or soon after, then over 200 of the romance, science-fiction and historical-fiction titles must have been bought and read by Rosye and/or William, since they predate 1902. Many others must have been avidly devoured by the Mortlock sons, although they were no longer still boys when some of the titles were acquired. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, Barsoom/Mars and Venus series, for example, were published between 1911 and 1932, making Jack between seventeen and thirty-eight, and Ranson eleven and thirty-two when these books came into the Martindale library.

Although detective fiction transcended class barriers³—especially that of Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy Sayers, both of whom were represented in the Martindale collection—other authors were ridiculed by the literary elite. One such was Marie Corelli, who outsold the likes of Doyle and whose melodramatic romances were among the highest-selling titles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴ It is tempting to assume that Rosye and Joan were the main readers of such romances, especially since those novels span from the late 1890s right through until 1939, the year of Rosye’s death (e.g. Edith Maud Hull’s The Forest of Terrible Things). Most of the books purchased in the second half of the 1930s and the 1940s, however, are espionage, war, or adventure tales, typified by P. C. Wren’s Beau Geste and other novels, Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu series, Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond series, and Francis Gerard’s Sir John Meredith series. While Rosye may well have read them, the different tone of these volumes suggests that Ranson and Jack were the major consumers.

What happened to these books once Martindale became the property of the University of Adelaide is another question, and certainly many (as yet uncounted) found their way into the University of Adelaide library. Photographs of the Martindale library shelves in 1984 show them largely denuded of books, and a 1986 inventory contains only 148 works of the more than 1,000 that were present in 1946, representing a mere 15 per cent of the original collection. Collectible or rare editions were most likely sold, as was the case with some of the antique furnishings and objects, but many more could easily have been souvenired by Adelaide University students, staff and guests of the Hall when it functioned as a Bed and Breakfast. Only one of the science-fiction and fantasy works that existed in 1946 is present in the current collection, suggesting that these were particularly souvenirable items.