George W. Gough

George W. Gough is known almost entirely by one book. The Yeoman Adventurer, published in New York by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1917, is a first-person historical romance of the 1745 Jacobite rising, narrated by a Staffordshire yeoman named Oliver Wheatman who is drawn out of a quiet farming life into the march of Prince Charles's army and the pursuit of the Duke of Cumberland. It was dedicated "To A. D. Steel-Maitland, M.P.", the Conservative politician and economist, "in gratitude and admiration". A second novel, The Terror by Night, followed from William Blackwood & Sons in 1922.

Almost everything else about him is uncertain, and the honest account is a list of things that cannot be pinned down. Library catalogues give the fuller name George Woolley Gough for the 1922 novel, and a George Woolley Gough — a historian and economist, sometime Exhibitioner of Balliol College, Oxford, born in 1869 — matches on name and period; but the identification of the novelist with that man is probable rather than proven, and even his death is recorded variously as 1943 and 1948. No portrait of him is known to survive.

What does survive is the book. Long out of print, The Yeoman Adventurer was digitised for Project Gutenberg and has been read far more widely in the century since than it ever was in the author's lifetime — a Jacobite adventure that has comfortably outlasted almost every trace of the man who wrote it.