The Project

Fergusson "Fergus" Wright Hume (8 July 1859 – 12 July 1932) was a British novelist, playwright, and song writer who grew up in New Zealand and authored more than 140 novels during his lifetime. His most famous work was The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), a novel which did a lot to popularize the mystery genre. Despite his initial popularity and prolificity, Hume has been largely forgotten by the public and overlooked by scholars. This website and Github repository is an attempt to gather bibliographic information about Hume's various works in one place and begin compiling a corpus of his public domain works. I hope that it will be collaborative.

This Website

In the navigation menu on the lefthand side of the page, you'll find links to a sortable bibliography, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century reviews of Hume's work, and twenty-first century reference works about Hume and his writing.

The Github Repository

In the python-scripts folder, you'll find scripts to automatically download plain text files of the novels, collections, and short stories of Hume's which have been made freely available online via Project Gutenberg, Hathitrust, and/or the Internet Archive. NB: I am new to Python, so this may not be the most elegant way to accomplish the task––feel free to suggest changes or refine as necessary.

In the text-files folder, you'll find all of the plain text f iles downloaded using that python script. (These have not been cleaned up at all at this point).

You'll also find a running bibliography in .csv format which lists what I believe to be the first editions of Hume's book-form works (based on several initial searches of WorldCat, the Internet Archive, and Hathitrusts). Eventually, I hope to build this out for U.S. / North American editions and World editions (largely, for earlier works, India). I'm also hoping to pinpoint songs, periodical publications, plays, and extant papers (correspondence, etc.).

Get Involved

If you are interested in contributing information or collaborating, please feel free to drop me a line or contact me on Twitter @cannfloyd.