Reginald Turner (writer)

Reginald "Reggie" Turner (2 June 1869 – 7 December 1938) was an English author, an aesthete and a member of the circle of Oscar Wilde. He worked as a journalist, wrote twelve novels, and his correspondence has been published, but he is best known as one of the few friends who remained loyal to Wilde when he was imprisoned, and who supported him after his release.

Turner never knew who his parents were, but was an illegitimate member of, and raised by, the Levy-Lawson family, owners of the newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. He was educated at Hurstpierpoint College and Merton College, Oxford. On leaving Oxford he trained briefly as a barrister under Travers Humphreys, but was too lazy for the Law; having a leaning towards writing he joined The Daily Telegraph, where he inaugurated the paper's gossip column. Between 1901 and 1911 he published a dozen novels. None of them made a great impression; Turner observed that it was not his first editions that were scarce, but his second ones, although at least three of his novels were reprinted. His biographer, Stanley Weintraub, comments that the circumstances of Turner's birth, reminiscent of H.M.S. Pinafore and The Importance of Being Earnest, are reflected in his fiction, sometimes humorously and sometimes seriously.

Turner numbered among his friends Max Beerbohm, Lord Alfred Douglas, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, D. H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, Osbert Sitwell and others of the London literary scene during the late 19th and early 20th century.S. N. Behrman said of him, "He was one of those men who talk like angels and write like pedestrians".Harold Acton agreed, writing of Turner's conversation, "One forgot to eat while he spun his fantasies." Beerbohm said, "He would be eloquent even were he dumb," and Maugham wrote, "Reggie Turner was, on the whole, the most amusing man I have known."

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