Introduction

Fergus Hume (1859-1932) was a best-selling mystery author in the late-Victorian and modern periods. Though he is most famous for The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), he wrote over 140 novels in his lifetime.

Born in New Zealand, Hume was living in Australia when he published The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, and on the strength of its sales decided to emigrate to England to become a full-time writer. Little is known about his life there, and it is unclear where (if anywhere) his papers are housed.

Initially serialized between 31 July and 16 October 1897 in newspapers including The Woolwich Gazette, The Liverpool Weekly Mercury, and, most notably, The Illustrated Edinburgh News, Hagar of the Pawn-Shop was released in single volume format by London publisher, Skeffington & Son, in 1898. The novel was billed as a “new idea in fiction” by The Liverpool Weekly Mercury because it presented an episodic narrative in which each chapter was a standalone short story connected by an overarching plot about the eponymous heroine: a young Romany woman named Hagar Stanley.

Although the novel has been largely forgotten, it has important ties to such literary classics as George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), Romany culture, fin-de-siecle anthropology and folklore in the form of the Gyspy Lore Society (est. 1888), and, because it takes place largely in London's East End, late-century discourse about the relationship between place and identity (ala Henry Mayhew's 1851 London Labour and the London Poor and Margaret Harkness's 1889 In Darkest London). It is also an important example of a whole subgenre of fiction, set in or about pawnshops, and therefore interesting to scholars of nineteenth-century working-class life.