A short life of the author
Richard Hughes wrote one of the most shocking and most original novels of the twentieth century — A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), a book about children captured by pirates that demolished the Victorian myth of childhood innocence with a psychological precision and a moral audacity that left its readers genuinely disturbed. The novel was published as The Innocent Voyage in America, a title that captured its central irony: the children are not innocent at all, and their capacity for violence, deceit, and emotional detachment proves far more frightening than anything the bewildered pirates can manage. It is one of the great neglected novels of the century — praised by its contemporaries (it was an immediate bestseller), admired by literary critics, and acknowledged by William Golding as an influence on Lord of the Flies, yet somehow never quite achieving the canonical status it deserves.
Caterham and Oxford
Richard Arthur Warren Hughes was born in Weybridge, Surrey, in 1900 and grew up in various parts of England and Wales. He attended Charterhouse School and Oriel College, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Robert Graves, T. E. Lawrence, and the literary generation that came of age in the shadow of the First World War. At Oxford, he published his first book of poems, Gipsy Night and Other Poems (1922), and wrote The Sisters’ Tragedy (1922), a one-act play that was performed in the West End when he was still an undergraduate.
He also wrote Danger (1924), a radio play commissioned by the BBC that is generally regarded as the first play written specifically for radio — a pioneering work in a medium that was then barely a year old.
A High Wind in Jamaica
Hughes spent time in the Caribbean in the mid-1920s, and the experience provided the setting for his masterpiece. A High Wind in Jamaica (1929) tells the story of a group of English children living in Jamaica who are sent home to England after a hurricane but are captured by a small band of incompetent pirates. What follows is not the adventure story the reader expects: the children, far from being terrified victims, adapt to their situation with an amoral flexibility that reveals the savagery beneath the surface of childhood. Emily, the central figure, commits an act of lethal violence and then forgets about it; the smaller children revert to a nearly animal existence; and the pirates, who are fundamentally decent men bewildered by their young captives, are eventually hanged for crimes the children committed.
The novel was a critical and commercial success — it was a Book of the Month Club selection in America and was praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Its influence on subsequent fiction about childhood — particularly on Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) — has been widely acknowledged.
In Hazard
In Hazard (1938) was Hughes’s second novel — the story of a cargo ship caught in a Caribbean hurricane, based on a real incident involving the SS Douro in 1932. The novel was technically brilliant — Hughes’s description of the hurricane is among the finest passages of sustained descriptive prose in English fiction — but it lacked the psychological depth and moral complexity of A High Wind in Jamaica.
The Human Predicament
Hughes spent the last two decades of his life working on The Human Predicament, an ambitious trilogy of novels set against the rise and fall of Nazism. Only two volumes were completed: The Fox in the Attic (1961) and The Wooden Shepherdess (1973). The trilogy interweaved fictional characters with real historical figures (including Hitler, Göring, and Röhm) and attempted to understand how an advanced civilisation could descend into barbarism. The novels were admired for their intelligence and ambition but were commercially unsuccessful, and the third volume was left unfinished at Hughes’s death in 1976.
Collecting Hughes
A High Wind in Jamaica (Chatto & Windus, 1929) in first edition with dust jacket is the primary target — one of the great interwar novels. The American first edition (Harper, 1929, as The Innocent Voyage) is also collected. In Hazard (Chatto & Windus, 1938) is the second novel. The Fox in the Attic (Chatto & Windus, 1961) is the beginning of the unfinished trilogy. Hughes’s early poetry and plays, particularly The Sisters’ Tragedy (1922), are scarce.