WARREN, Samuel (1807-1877), author of Ten Thousand a Year, was born in Denbighshire in 1807. After a curriculum at the university of Edinburgh, of such distinction that he made the acquaintance of “Christopher North” through his undergraduate fame, he began the study of medicine, but soon abandoned it for the English bar. He entered at the Inner Temple in 1828, and was successful in his profession. He took silk in 1851, was made recorder of Hull in 1854, represented Medhurst in parliament for three years (1856-59), and was rewarded by his party leaders in 1859 with a mastership in lunacy. Meantime he had made a much more brilliant success in fiction-writing. Very early in his career, before he was called to the bar, he had begun to write for Blackwood. His Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician appeared in that magazine between August 1830 and October 1831, being collected into two volumes in 1832. A third volume was published in 1838, the contents of which appeared originally in the same magazine between September 1832 and August 1837. These short stories, most of them of a horrible character, with morbid interest shielded under a moral purpose, were extremely popular, and so realistic that as long as the writer remained anonymous it was customary for doctors to declare that some brother must be making capital of the secrets of his profession. Warren’s brief experience as a medical student thus stood him in good stead. But his great success was Ten Thousand a Year, which ran in Blackwood from October 1839 to August 1841, and was published separately immediately on its conclusion. Critics complained of the coarseness of the workmanship, of the banality of the moralizing, the crudeness of the pathos, the farcical extravagance of the humour; but meantime the ...