Hugh Conway, the pen name of Frederick John Fargus (26 December 1847 - 15 May 1885), was an English novelist born in Bristol

Bristol

Bristol is a city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, with an estimated population of 433,100 for the unitary authority in 2009, and a surrounding Larger Urban Zone with an estimated 1,070,000 residents in 2007...

, the son of an auctioneer

Auction

An auction is a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bid, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder...

.

Early life

Fargus was intended for his father's business, but at the age of 13 joined the school ship Conway

HMS Conway (school ship)

HMS Conway was a naval training school or "school ship", founded in 1859 and housed for most of its life aboard a 19th-century wooden battleship. The ship was originally stationed on the Mersey near Liverpool, then moved to the Menai Strait during World War II. While being towed back to Birkenhead...

in the Mersey

Mersey

Mersey may refer to:* River Mersey, in northwest England* Mersea Island, off the coast of Essex in England * Mersey River in the Australian state* Electoral division of Mersey in the state of Tasmania, Australian...

, lent by the Admiralty

Admiralty

The Admiralty was formerly the authority in the Kingdom of England, and later in the United Kingdom, responsible for the command of the Royal Navy...

 for training future merchant navy officers. In deference to his father's wishes, however, he gave up the idea of becoming a seaman. He returned to Bristol, where he was articled to a firm of accountants until his father's death in 1868, when he took over the family business.

Works

While a clerk Fargus had written the words for various songs, adopting the pen name Hugh Conway in memory of his training-ship days. James Williams Arrowsmith, the Bristol printer and publisher, took an interest in his work, and Fargus's first short story appeared in Arrowsmith's Miscellany. In 1883 Fargus published through J. W. Arrowsmith his first long story, Called Back, of which over 350,000 copies were sold within four years. One admirer was the American poet Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...

. A stage version of the book was produced in London in 1884, and in that year Fargus published another story, Dark Days.

Ordered to the Riviera for his health, Fargus caught typhoid fever

Typhoid fever

Typhoid fever, also known as Typhoid, is a common worldwide bacterial disease, transmitted by the ingestion of food or water contaminated with the feces of an infected person, which contain the bacterium Salmonella enterica, serovar Typhi...

 and died in Monte Carlo

Monte Carlo

Monte Carlo is an administrative area of the Principality of Monaco....

. Several other books by him appeared posthumously, notably A Family Affair, which was serialized in the English Illustrated Magazine in 1884-5 and first published in volume form in 1885.

His son, Archibald

Archibald Fargus

Rev. Archibald Hugh Conway Fargus M.A. was an English cricketer who was a right-handed batsman who bowled right-arm fast...

, was a first-class

First-class cricket

First-class cricket is a class of cricket that consists of matches of three or more days' scheduled duration, that are between two sides of eleven players and are officially adjudged first-class by virtue of the standard of the competing teams...

 cricket

Cricket

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...

er, scholar and clergyman.