Henry Major Tomlinson (21 June 1873 – 5 February 1958) was a British writer and journalist. He was known for anti-war and travel writing, novels and short stories, especially of life at sea. He was born and died in London.[1]
Tomlinson was brought up in Poplar, London. He worked as a shipping clerk, and then as a reporter for the Morning Leader newspaper; he travelled up the Amazon River for it.
In World War I he was an official correspondent for the British Army, in France. In 1917 he returned to work with H. W. Massingham on The Nation, which opposed the war. He left the paper in 1923, when Massingham resigned because of a change of owner and political line. His 1931 book Norman Douglas was one of the first biographies of that scandalous but then much admired writer.
On 26 December 1899, at Stephen's, Poplar, he married Florence Margaret, dau. of Thomas Hammond, a sailmaker, of Pekin Street, Poplar, by whom he had a son and two daughters.
Tomlinson was much admired in the 1920s.[2] In 1921, Christopher Morley praised what he saw as the "exquisite, considered prose" to be found in Tomlinson's 1918 book of essays, Old Junk:
How direct and satisfying a passage to the mind Mr. Tomlinson's paragraphs have. How they build and cumulate, how the sentences shift, turn and move in delicate loops and ridges under the blowing wind of thought, like the sand of the dunes that he describes in one essay.[3]
Frederic P. Mayer, however, writing in the Virginia Quarterly Review, expressed a less admiring view:[4]
Because his book is labeled fiction, H. M. Tomlinson, with the publication of his first novel, "Gallions Reach," is gaining fame. Before, Tomlinson, essayist and traveler, enjoyed but a limited distinction. Recently, however, and mainly through "Gallions Reach," there has grown a Tomlinson vogue. He has been praised as "a second Conrad." The truth is, Tomlinson does not derive from nor resemble Conrad.[4]
