The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

Mr. Barnes of New York (1887)

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

Mr. Barnes of New York and its sequel Mr. Barnes, American (1906) were written by Archibald Clavering Gunter. Gunter (1847-1907) is one of the literary success stories of the nineteenth century. He was a failure as an engineer, chemist, and stockbroker, but had modest success as a playwright and was extremely successful as an author. He was responsible for the popularity of Ernest Thayer's “Casey at the Bat” (1888) but is most remembered for Mr. Barnes of New York. The novel was rejected by every major publisher, so Gunter decided to publish it himself. It became the best-selling book in American history to that point, selling more than a million copies in America alone and being pirated in Europe by six different publishers at once.

Mr. Barnes of New York concerns the European adventures of Mr. Burton Barnes. He is a wealthy American layabout, traveling and hunting to dispel the boredom in his life. By accident he becomes a witness to a fatal duel in Corsica. A tense political situation in Egypt provokes a duel between two English officers and a French officer. One of the Englishmen kills the French officer. Unfortunately, the French officer is Corsican, and his sister Marina swears vendetta against the man who killed her brother. Barnes meets and falls in love with a beautiful English woman, Edna Anstruther. Edna’s brother Edwin was one of the two Englishmen in the duel. While searching for the man who killed her brother Marina cares for a wounded Englishman in a hospital in Egypt, falling in love with him (and he with her). This Englishman is, of course, Edwin. After a long series of metaphorical and literal pursuits Barnes wins Edna’s heart, Marina forswears her vendetta (and then discovers that it was not Edwin who killed her brother), and Marina and Edwin agree to marry.

It is not hard to see why Mr. Barnes of New York was rejected by so many publishers or why it eventually sold so well. Gunter strains toward slick badinage in his dialogue and a been-there-done-that cosmopolitan atmosphere, but he lacks the light touch of a Grant Allen, and the effort shows. Much of the plot is contrived, with several hard-to-credit coincidences, and the middle-class proprieties of Barnes and Anstruther are at times suffocating. Gunter’s attitude toward women, that they will only fall in love with a man who dominates them, likely will not be popular with modern readers.

And yet the reader is almost forced to keep reading. Mr. Barnes of New York is in some ways a lesser version of Ouida’s Under Two Flags. Like Under Two Flags, Mr. Barnes of New York is a flawed novel which somehow compels the reader to ignore those faults and continue on to the next page to find out what will happen. Gunter does not make the reader care about his characters as much as Ouida did, nor does Mr. Barnes of New York have the so-bad-they’re-good passages of Under Two Flags, but the reader will want to know how the different plots resolve themselves and what happens to the characters.

Mr. Barnes of New York is notable as a prototype for the Lost Race novel. There is no fictional country in Mr. Barnes of New York, no Ruritania (see: The Prisoner of Zenda) or Graustark (see: Graustark). But Gunter’s Corsica is a colorful, exotic land which functions structurally and thematically in much the same way as Ruritania or Graustark, and the plot dynamic of the stalwart American hero becoming involved in foreign intrigues–on a low level in Mr. Barnes, in a much more elevated way in later Lost Race novels–anticipates that of the Lost Race novel. Mr. Barnes of New York was sufficiently popular that its influence on Anthony Hope Hawkins and George Barr McCutcheon can be reasonably speculated upon.

Recommended Edition

Print: Archibald Clavering Gunter, Mr. Barnes of New York. Los Angeles, CA: Hardpress Publishing, 2012.

Online: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006501914