Silas Hocking - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Silas Kitto Hocking was an Cornish

Cornish people

The Cornish are a people associated with Cornwall, a county and Duchy in the south-west of the United Kingdom that is seen in some respects as distinct from England, having more in common with the other Celtic parts of the United Kingdom such as Wales, as well as with other Celtic nations in Europe...

novelist and Methodist

Methodism

Methodism is a movement of Protestant Christianity represented by a number of denominations and organizations, claiming a total of approximately seventy million adherents worldwide. The movement traces its roots to John Wesley's evangelistic revival movement within Anglicanism. His younger brother...

preacher. He was born at St Stephen-in-Brannel

St Stephen-in-Brannel

St Stephen-in-Brannel is a civil parish and village in central Cornwall, United Kingdom. St Stephen village is four miles west of St Austell on the southern edge of Cornwall's china clay district.In medieval times the parish lay within the royal manor of Brannel...

, Cornwall

Cornwall

Cornwall is a unitary authority and ceremonial county of England, within the United Kingdom. It is bordered to the north and west by the Celtic Sea, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by the county of Devon, over the River Tamar. Cornwall has a population of , and covers an area of...

, to James Hocking, part owner of a tin mine, and his wife Elizabeth. In 1870 he was ordained as a minister. Working in different parts of England over the next few years, he wrote his first novel, Alec Green, while living in Liverpool

Liverpool

Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...

in 1878. It was, however, with his second novel that he won great fame; Her Benny, a story of the street children of Liverpool. This sold over a million copies. All in all he wrote fifty books.

Kitto was also politically active, for the Liberal party

Liberal Party (UK)

The Liberal Party was one of the two major political parties of the United Kingdom during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a third party of negligible importance throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, before merging with the Social Democratic Party in 1988 to form the present day...

. He died in Highgate

Highgate

Highgate is an area of North London on the north-eastern corner of Hampstead Heath.Highgate is one of the most expensive London suburbs in which to live. It has an active conservation body, the Highgate Society, to protect its character....

, Middlesex

Middlesex

Middlesex is one of the historic counties of England and the second smallest by area. The low-lying county contained the wealthy and politically independent City of London on its southern boundary and was dominated by it from a very early time...

, and was survived by his wife, Esther Mary, to whom he had been married since 1876. Together they had one son and two daughters. Through his mother he was related both to the biblical scholar John Kitto

John Kitto

John Kitto was an English biblical scholar of Cornish descent.-Biography:Born in Plymouth, John Kitto was a sickly child, son of a Cornish stonemason. The drunkenness of his father and the poverty of his family meant that much of his childhood was spent in the workhouse. He had no more than three...

, and to HDF Kitto

H. D. F. Kitto

Humphrey Davey Findley Kitto was a British classical scholar of Cornish ancestry. He was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire....

, the eminent professor of Greek. His brother was Joseph Hocking

Joseph Hocking

Joseph Hocking was a Cornish novelist and Methodist minister. He was born at St Stephen-in-Brannel, Cornwall, to James Hocking, part owner of a tin mine, and his wife Elizabeth.In 1884, he was ordained as a minister...

(1860–1937), also a novelist and Methodist minister, and his sister, Salome (1859-1927), was also a novelist.

Silas Hocking is buried in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, along with his son, who died of Spanish flu in 1919, and his wife.

Selected works

Alec Green (1878)
Her Bennyhttp://www.archive.org/details/herbenny00hockgoog(1879)
Ivy (1881)
Real Grit (1887)
For Light and Liberty (1890)
Where Duty Lies (1891)
A Son of Reuben (1894)
For such is Life (1896)http://www.archive.org/details/forsuchislife00hock
In Spite of Fate (1897)
Gripped (1902)
A Modern Pharisee (1907)http://www.archive.org/details/amodernpharisee00hockgoog
My Book of Memory (memoirs, 1923)

Source

R. G. Burnett, "Hocking, Silas Kitto (1850–1935)", rev. Sayoni Basu, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Selected works

Source

Further reading