Shortly after the publication of his first two novels, Russell sparked a brief debate on contemporary fiction in the pages of the London Review. In a letter to the editor on the subject of ‘Poetry and Novels’ published on 8 February 1868, he attributed the ‘present vapid, idle, valueless tone of our fictional literature’ to a poetic influence deriving from Tennyson:

The critical sentiments expressed here support the statements Russell later recorded in his 1894 essay in My First Book which is discussed in the Introduction to the present volume. In that essay, writing from the vantage point of more than fifteen years' success as a nautical novelist, he recalled how at the outset of his literary career he was driven to adopt a particular style and content in his fiction by the assumption that the ‘great mass of readers – those who support the circulating libraries – are ladies’.