Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory

He wrote all his life - but was he an author? Herbert Allingham was one of 'the men who wrote for the Million'. His melodramatic serial stories ran week after week in the ha'penny papers a hundred years ago. From his first published work in 1886 to his death in 1936 he entertained hundreds of thousands of working-class readers, bringing colour and entertainment into hard, precarious lives. But was he an author? He didn't think so. Nothing he wrote was ever published in book form and while the