Arthur Llewelyn Jones-Machen, born in 1863 in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, married Amelia Hogg, a music teacher, in 1887. Amy was thirteen years older than him. They lived in London and through her he made the acquaintance of various eccentrics and bohemians, including A. E. Waite and M. P. Shiel. He met Oscar Wilde – who, by 1895, had become “a great mass of rosy fat”, and who confessed that he thought absinthe “a detestable drink”. In 1899, after a protracted illness, Amy died, projecting the desolate Arthur into the arms of the Hermetical Order of the Golden Dawn. By this time, he had written some of his oddest fiction, including “The Inmost Light”, “The Shining Pyramid” and “The Novel of the White Powder”. Few of these facts are available via Machen’s memoir, Things Near and Far (1923), though you may find some of them in Horatio Clare’s excellent introduction to it, or in the exhaustive notes provided by his editors from Three Imposters Press. From the memoirist himself, we learn that he likes France, wine and conversation, and once owned a bulldog called Juggernaut. These may be facts but they are of another order.

We are left with carefully calculated anecdotes and impressions. A restless young man, barely more than a boy, abandons the childhood rectory and its mysterious surrounding hills – where the sun “hangs over the huge round of Mynydd Maen in the west” – and travels to London to become a writer. In some sense he is heartbroken to leave. In some sense he is full of glee. He supports himself by writing “The Anatomy of Tobacco”, and by cataloguing secondhand books. He walks from Clare Market to Great Queen Street along “the most evil-smelling by-ways I have have ever experienced”. He stays at Wandsworth, in an “old Georgian house” with a “grave old garden”; he stays at Turnham Green, again among “ample lawns and gardens”. He criss-crosses Dyott Street, “the last remnant of the old rookery of St Giles”, subsisting on tea and bread and butter, then finds two rooms on Soho Street – “undoubtedly seventeenth century, panelled, with beautifully deep wooden cornices”.

His furniture, such as it is, moves with him; he subsists on tea and bread and butter; in three months, using only commercial fly-papers, he captures “over three thousand fleas”. Eventually, freed by a series of small legacies, the expectations of youth shading…