Melbourne's Century Old Mystery - Who was Fergus Hume?

Abstract

One hundred years ago this year, there arrived on the Melbourne scene from overseas a young man who was to use his new, if temporary, home city and his own remarkable cluster of talents to produce one of the best-selling popular novels of all time, - 'The Mystery of a Hansom Cab'. It's publication has been estimated to exceed two thirds of a million copies. Quite certainly he put a mark on the then colonial city which gave it, at its age of fifty a distinctive if brash, Victorian image, which has gone around the world since that time. The writer was, of course. 'Fergus Hume' (1859-1932), of Scottish stock, born Fergusson Wright Hume on 8 July 1859 at the Royal Malvern Hospital, Worcester where his father was the steward to the mentally disturbed. With his parents, brother and sisters, 'Fergus' as he was always known, landed in January 1863, at Port Chalmers, New Zealand, the family drawn thither not by the magnet of the recent gold strikes in the interior so much as the fact that Otago was, still, in foundation and temper, a Presbyterian colony - to which faith his father James adhered till his dying day. In Dunedin James soon became the manager of the city's lunatic asylum, a figure of substance, who was concerned to give his younger son, Fergus, an excellent traditional education, first at the High School, a Scottish foundation, and then at the University of Otago, where he fell under the dynamic influence of Professor George Sale, a former classics tutor of Trinity College, Cambridge. Actually, however, Fergus's formal studies were 1n law, and he was articled to Robert Stout, then a famed criminal lawyer and attorney-general, but soon to become premier of New Zealand.