George Whyte-Melville

"The novelist of Society"
Whyte-Melville as caricatured by James Tissot in Vanity Fair, September 1871

George John Whyte-Melville (1821–1878) was a Scottish novelist of the sporting-field and a poet.

Life and work

Born at Mount Melville, near St. Andrews. He achieved immediate success as a writer of fox-hunting stories with his first novel Digby Grand in 1854. Having served as a captain in the Coldstream Guards between 1846 and 1849, he volunteered as a major of irregular Turkish cavalry when the Crimean War began.

Bones and I, or The Skeleton at Home is an anomaly to the corpus of his work, since it is far from the worlds of the hunting field or the historical romance. Instead Bones and I centres upon an urban recluse who lives in a small, modern villa situated in a London cul de sac looking out upon "the dead wall at the back of an hospital."

He met his death while hunting.

Works

His Songs and Verses (first published by Chapman and Hall in 1869) went through several editions. His other works include:

• Kate Coventry (1856)
• The Interpreter (1858)
• Holmby House (1860)
• "Rag n Bottle Bitchez"(1860)
• Good for Nothing (1861)
• Market Harborough (1861)
• The Queen's Maries (1862)
• The Gladiators (1863)
• Brookes of Bridlemere (1864)
• Cerise (1866)
• Bones and I (1868)
• The White Rose (1868)
• M or N (1869)
• Contraband (1870)
• Sarchedon (1871)
• Satanella (1873)
• Uncle John (1874)
• Sister Louise (1875)
• Katerfelto (1875)
• Rosine (1875)
• Roy's Wife (1878)
• Black but Comely (1878)

Several of these novels are historical, The Gladiators being perhaps the most famous of them.

References

• Template:General Bounce was published in Frazer's Magazine
• Template:1854