Henry Frith

Henry Frith (2 May 1840 – 12 October 1917) was an Irish engineer who translated the works of Jules Verne and others, as well as writing his own works. His prolific output amounted to nearly 200 works between translations, novels, and instructional titles.^[1]

Frith was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 2 May 1840, at 2, Upper Leeson Street.^[2] He was the second son of Henry Frith and Frances (née Winter). Of his four siblings^[3][4][5][6] only two, his eldest and youngest brothers survived to adulthood. His father worked in the Ordnance Office in Dublin.^[7] Frith was educated at Cheltenham College and entered Trinity College Dublin on 1 July 1857 to train as a Civil Engineer.^[1] Applying for a Civil Service post, he was appointed to the War Office in London, where he remained until 1875 when he retired with a pension and began his literary efforts.^[7]

Frith married Mary Lowndes (April 1844 – 7 June 1928) on 25 May 1869 in Hove, Sussex, England. Mary was the third daughter of William Lowndes (1807–1864) and Marth Sutton (1807–1890). The Lowndes were wealthy, being the ground landlords for Knightsbridge in London.^[8] When Mary's step-brother William Lowndes (1834–1905) died, his estate was valued at £452,310. He not only left £7,000 to each of his three half sisters, but also left his real estate (the Knightsbridge ground rents, and the Bury house) together with the residue of his personal estate to her eldest son William Frederick.^[9]

The couple had six children:

• Ida Mary Frith (1870–1963)
• William Frederick Lowndes Frith (1871–1956), changed his surname from Frith to Frith Lowndes in 1906.^[10] This was at the request of his step-uncle William Lowndes's will, which made William his heir.^[11]
• Ernest Henry Frith (1874–1926)
• Lilian Adela Frith (1880–1962)
• Roland Girdlestone Frith (1884–1947), moved to the US
• Percival Lowndes Frith (1886–1954)

Frith originally trained as an engineer,^[12] and worked for the War Office until 1875 when he qualified for a pension. The way in which he described himself changed over time:

• 1870 Baptismal record: Gentleman
• 1871 Census: Civil Servant – War Office
• 1871 Baptismal record: Gentleman
• 1874 Baptismal record: Manager to a Public Company
• 1881 Census: Author, Editor, Publisher's Reader
• 1884 Baptismal record: Author
• 1886 Baptismal record: Authorship
• 1891 Census: Literature
• 1896 Marriage Record for Frederick: Author
• 1901 Census: Retired Author
• 1908 Marriage record for Ida: Gentleman
• 1911 Census: Retired Civil Servant – War Office

Frith's work, with nearly 200 books to his credit, consists of:

• Translations, from French, of novels and instructional works.
• Novels, mostly juvenile fiction
• Entertaining non-fiction, usually for younger readers
• Instructional non-fiction

He also produced some albums and books that don't fit easily into these four categories. Frith freely makes the work of others in his non-fiction works, and some of them were encyclopedic in tone, briefly covering a wide range of issues in a topic. In his preface to Ascents and Adventures: A Record of Hardy Mountaineering in Every Quarter of the Globe, he says: "The following pages do not profess to be a record of our own personal adventures. They include many experiences of a varied character in Europe, Asia, and America; but while making use of the narratives and notes of more experienced climbers, without copying their work; we have in some cases embodied the spirit of it, and fixed it in our pages for the amusement, and it may be for the instruction, of young people."^[13]

The first of Frith's works that is catalogued at the British Library is an 1875 translation of Les Braves Gens by Jules Girardin. This was translated as The Adventures of Johnny Ironsides in English. Frith followed this in 1976 with a translation of two of Jules Verne's stories in the following year: Une Ville flottante and Les Forceurs de blocus as A Floating City and the Blockade Runners.^[1]

Frith translated another five workes by Verne:^[14]

• 1876: Vingt mille lieues sur les mers as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.
• 1877: Aventures de trois Russes et de trois Anglais as Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in Southern Africa
• 1878: Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours as Round the World in Eighty Days
• 1879: Le Pays des fourrures as The Fur Country
• 1884: Kéraban-le-têtu as Kéraban the Inflexible

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction suggests that Frith may have translated Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon, but neither Wolcott^[1] nor Evans^[14] include it on their lists.

Wolcott rated Frith's translation of Vingt mille lieues sur les mers as a translation of particular merit and said of him: "With his scientific background he understood much of what Verne had written, and this translation has remained one of the best of the time with only minor deletions from the original text."^[1]

Frith also translated other works by:

• Lucien Biart [fr]
• Joséphine-Blanche Colomb
• Alphonse Daudet
• Alexandre Dumas
• Léon Gautier
• Jules Girardin
• Adrien Paul
• Philippe Daryl 
• Gaston Tissandier
• Victor Tissot [fr]
• P. Villars

Most of Frith's novels fall into the boys' adventure category. As with the lists in the following sections, the list of titles is not meant to be comprehensive, but to give the reader a flavour of the range of Frith's output:

• Aboard the Atlanta: The Story of a Truant
• The Captain of Cadets
• A cruise in Cloudland
• In the Yellow Sea: a tale of the Japanese war
• The Lost Trader: or, the mystery of the “Lombardy,” etc.
• The Hunting of the “Hydra,” or the Phantom Prahu

The entertaining non-fiction was mostly aimed at a juvenile audience. The titles included:

• The Biography of a Locomotive Engineer
• The Romance of Engineering
• The Romance of Navigation
• Coil and Current
• Half Hours of Scientific Amusement (translated from a book by Gaston Tissandier
• Ascents and Adventures
• Haunted Ancestral Homes: True Ghost Stories
• Chivalry (translated from a book by Léon Gautier
• King Arthur and His Knights

Frith's instructional non-fiction has been quite long-lived, with new editions, sometimes revised, long after his death. The titles include:

• Speeches and Toasts: how to make and propose them
• The Chairman's Guide and Secretary's Companion
• The Complete Letter-Writer for Ladies and Gentlemen
• Chiromancy: or the science of palmistry
• How to read Character in Handwriting

Frith died, aged 78, on 12 October 1917. He was still living at Shenstone House, Amersham Common.^[15] He was survived by his wife Mary, who administered his estate of £2,335 4s 10d. The Buckinghamshire Examiner expressed sympathy with his son, William Frederick.^[15] Mary survived Frith by another 11 years, dying on 7 June 1928.

• Works by Henry Frith at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Henry Frith on the Internet Archive
• Full View texts by Henry Frith at Hathi Trust