1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Henty, George Alfred

HENTY, GEORGE ALFRED (1832–1902), English war-correspondent and author, was born at Trumpington, near Cambridge, in December 1832, and educated at Westminster School and Caius College, Cambridge. He served in the Crimea in the Purveyor’s department, and after the peace filled various posts in the department in England and Ireland, but he found the routine little to his taste, and drifted into journalism for the London Standard. He volunteered as Special Correspondent for the Austro-Italian War of 1866, accompanied Garibaldi in his Tirolese Campaign, followed Lord Napier through the mountain gorges to Magdala, and Lord Wolseley across bush and swamp to Kumassi. Next he reported the Franco-German War, starved in Paris through the siege of the Commune, and then turned south to rough it in the Pyrenees during the Carlist insurrection. He was in Asiatic Russia at the time of the Khiva expedition, and later saw the desperate hand-to-hand fighting of the Turks in the Servian War. He found his real vocation in middle life. Invited to edit a magazine for boys called the Union Jack, he became the mainstay of the new periodical, to which he contributed several serials in succession. The stories pleased their public, and had ever increasing circulation in book form, until Henty became a name to conjure with in juvenile circles. Altogether he wrote about eighty of these books. Henty was an enthusiastic yachtsman, having spent at least six months afloat each year, and he died on board his yacht in Weymouth Harbour on the 16th of November 1902.