Did Charles Hamilton, the most prolific writer in the English language, use twenty-eight pseudonyms (Frank Richards, et al) because of multiple personality?

Pseudonyms have been a recurrent topic here (search pseudonym), because the alternate personalities of a person with multiple personality often have their own names, which, for the person, are pseudonyms.

Of course, not everyone who uses pseudonyms does so because of multiple personality, but persons who use pseudonyms that have not been imposed on them by obvious circumstances should be suspected of having multiple personality until proven otherwise.

Indeed, some “obvious circumstances” for pseudonyms—like an author’s writing novels in more than one genre—may be only a rationalization for alternate personalities who want to publish under their own names.

I wonder if Charles Hamilton had multiple personality, but all I can say from reading a biography is that his personality had puzzling contradictions (which may be a clue to multiple personality) and his writing process was similar to that of other writers previously discussed.

Frank Richards, et al.

“Charles Harold St John Hamilton [1876-1961] used more than twenty pen-names, created almost a hundred fictional schools and published well over 72 million words of fiction, or the equivalent of a thousand novels. He is better known as Frank Richards, the pseudonym he used when writing about Greyfriars School and its imperishable inmates. He created St Jim’s as Martin Clifford and Rookwood School as Owen Conquest, but Frank Richards became more to him than just another pen-name — it was an alter ego…” (1, p. 1).

“Even when Hamilton had become the grand old man of boys’ writers, he retained a curiously Peter Pan-like quality” (1, p. 18). (Due to child-aged alternate personalities?)

“ ‘It was a curious thing that when I wrote I seemed to see it all happening before my eyes, as if I were looking at a picture. I had a sense of writing down actual happenings’ “ (1, p. 24).

“As Frank Richards he would write quite differently from Martin Clifford (and he seemed to feel that the pen-names themselves somehow governed this)” (1, p. 50).

“In some ways Frank Richards has always been an enigma. Apart from the phenomenon of the vastness of his literary output, there are the strange opposites in his nature, each of which seemed to find expression without involving him in the kind of conflict that someone of his sensitivity might be expected to feel. He was a long-term compulsive gambler, yet the code of behaviour he advocated for his readers with, apparently, total sincerity and conviction, was one that would have eschewed and, indeed, condemned gambling. Until he reached his early forties, he was addicted to traveling in Europe, but a decade later was extremely reclusive. With his interest in language and a passion for the classics, he was the antithesis of his most famous character, Bunter, yet breathed life into him in a way that has made him almost as archetypal as Cinderella. His published writings are more prolific than any other author’s in the English language, yet…according to his niece…he ‘always hoped to be able to break away from writing’ ” (1, p. 169).

“I have lived for fifty years by writing stories: but I still have not the remotest idea of how a story comes into existence…somehow or other — I have not the least idea how — the story took shape and form. I never knew what any character was going to say, till he said it: and seldom what he was going to do, till he did it. I suppose this must have been because the characters, to me, seemed to live: and being, for the moment, living people they had wills of their own and did what they liked. It is difficult for me to imagine an author writing in any other way then this: but no doubt different writers have different methods…

“[I] never did dictate…[since I didn’t think] that I could have talked as fast as I could type: fifty words a minute would be rather a strain on the vocal organs. And an author must work fast if his work is going to be any good: slow writing makes heavy reading. James Joyce told a man once that he had made ‘good progress’ one afternoon: he had written one sentence! After that, it hardly needs a glance at his work to see that it is worthless…

“A whole story was always floating in my mind when I began to write. It really is an odd process, which I do not quite understand myself: once you get going the characters seem to walk and talk of their own accord, as if the breath of life had been breathed into their nostrils: the author has little more to do than to record their sayings and doings. Sometimes it almost seems like writing to dictation” (1, pp. 206-207).

Charles Hamilton’s Twenty-Eight Pen-Names: “Michael Blake, Winston Cardew, Martin Clifford, Harry Clifton, Clifford Clive, Sir Alan Cobham, Owen Conquest, Gordon Conway, Frank Drake, Freeman Fox, Hamilton Greening, Cecil Herbert, Robert Jennings, Gillingham Jones, T. Harcourt Llewelyn, Clifford Owen, Ralph Redway, Frank Richards, Hilda Richards, Raleigh Robbins, Robert Rogers, Eric Stanhope, Robert Stanley, Peter Todd, Nigel Wallace, Talbot Wynyard” (1, Appendix Three).

1. Mary Cadogan. Frank Richards: The Chap Behind the Chums. London, Viking Penguin, 1988.