TO THE AMERICAN EDITION OF 1905 This novel was written in the year 1880, only a few years after I had exported myself from Dublin to London in a condition of extreme rawness and inexperience concerning the specifically English side of the life with which the book pretends to deal.

Everybody wrote novels then.

It was my second attempt; and it shared the fate of my first.

That is to say, nobody would publish it, though I tried all the London publishers and some American ones.

And I should not greatly blame them if I could feel sure that it was the book's faults and not its qualities that repelled them.
I have narrated elsewhere how in the course of time the rejected MS.
became Mrs.Annie Besant's excuse for lending me her ever helping hand by publishing it as a serial in a little propagandist magazine of hers.
That was how it got loose beyond all possibility of recapture.