page_title: Talbot Baines Reed
section_title: Death and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Talbot Baines Reed / Death and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Memorial to Andrew Holmes Reed at Abney Park Cemetery, signed O'Shea, Kilkenny, Ireland, mason. This is a photo of listed building number 1257298.
context_page_description: Talbot Baines Reed was an English writer of boys' fiction who established a genre of school stories that endured into the mid-20th century. Among his best-known work is The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's. He was a regular and prolific contributor to The Boy's Own Paper, in which most of his fiction first appeared. Through his family's business, Reed became a prominent typefounder, and wrote a standard work on the subject: History of the Old English Letter Foundries.
  Reed's father, Charles Reed, was a successful London printer who later became a Member of Parliament. Talbot attended the City of London School before leaving at 17 to join the family business in Fann Street. His literary career began in 1879, when the B.O.P. was launched. The family were staunchly Christian, pillars of the Congregational Church, and were heavily involved in charitable works. However, Reed did not use his writing as a vehicle for moralising, and was dismissive of those early school story writers who did, such as Dean Farrar.
context_section_description: Reed generally enjoyed vigorous good health. However, early in 1893 there were signs that his workload was taking its toll. In January of that year he left London for an extended stay in Ireland, hoping to recover his energies. He returned to his various duties in May, but later in the summer became seriously ill with what was identified at the time as "consumption", and was probably pulmonary tuberculosis. He relinquished the secretaryship of the Bibliographical Society and returned to Ireland where, though largely confined indoors, he continued writing his regular weekly column for the Leeds Mercury and finished his final novel, Kilgorman. Letters to friends at home indicated that he remained in good spirits and was hopeful of recovery. However, his condition worsened, and he was advised to return home for urgent medical treatment. Back in London he wrote his last piece for the Mercury, a review of Seventy Years of Irish Life by W.R. Le Fanu. He died at his home in Highgate on 28 November 1893, aged 41, and was buried in Abney Park Cemetery, by the side of his father and grandfather.
  Among the many tributes paid to Reed, Joseph Sime spoke for "the boys of the English-speaking world" who had "lost one of their best friends". Sime wrote of Reed's particular empathy with the young: "He possessed in himself the healthy freshness of heart of boyhood ... and could place himself sympathetically at the boy's standpoint in life." Reed's grave was visited by boys and their families for many years. He died a wealthy man, although long before his death he had transferred the copyright of his books to the Religious Tract Society for a nominal sum.
  Reed's regular readers included the young P.G. Wodehouse, who particularly loved the school stories. Wodehouse's literary biographer Benny Green, while excoriating Reed as a "hereditary prig" and a "religious huckster", accepts that he influenced Wodehouse, and cites in particular The Willoughby Captains. Green also echoes Quigly in asserting that none of Reed's successors could match his abilities as a storyteller. Quigly summarises Reed's legacy to future school story writers: he established a genre by "alter[ing] the shapeless, long-winded, garrulous and moralistic school story" into something popular and readable, a convention followed by all his successors. Reed himself expressed the guiding principles of his life in a letter addressed to a new Boys' Club in Manchester: "The strong fellows should look after the weak, the active must look after the lazy, the merry must cheer up the dull, the sharp must lend a helping hand to the duffer. Pull together in all your learning, playing and praying."
  The grave in Abney Park was eventually surmounted by a memorial stone for Reed's family in the style of a Celtic cross, reflecting their connections to Ireland. It was cut by the O'Shea brothers' firm. Reed's biographer, the printing executive and historian Stanley Morison, suggests that Reed's legacy is his History of the Old English Letter Foundries, while Jack Cox, historian of the B.O.P, asserts that the school stories first serialised in the magazine are the writer's true memorial.
  After Reed's death, Elizabeth Reed agreed that his considerable personal library should be given to the St Bride Foundation Institute, whose collection of typographic literature included the library of Reed's early mentor, William Blades.  This collection now forms part of the St Bride Library,  The books and collection of Reed's company, the Fann Street Foundry, went to first its later purchaser Stephenson Blake and then to the Type Museum collection.
caption: Reed's memorial stone in Abney Park cemetery
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