Author: Henry Hawley Smart

Henry Hawley Smart served as an army officer before becoming a prolific English novelist. His fiction drew particular strength from racing, hunting, and service life, subjects connected to his family background and military career. The Great Tontine appeared from Chapman and Hall in 1881 as a three-volume novel. It belongs to the remarkably steady sequence of books Smart issued from the late 1860s through the early 1890s. The Great Tontine also shows how he could move beyond turf-centered plots while retaining his interest in strategy, money, institutions, and social maneuvering. Smart’s practical experience gave his fiction an alert sense of competition, loyalty, and calculated risk. Readers approaching this Victorian novel encounter an author remembered especially for sporting fiction, yet capable of placing those characteristic concerns within a different narrative setting and sustaining them across the expansive form of a three-volume publication.