Turner, G. I G. Turner, followed by what is apparently address: Mr. Grey, Edgeley, Stockport; Turner (overwritten), Adswood I. Directories afford no help in identifying the contributor. He seems most likely to be the journalist Godfrey Wordsworth Turner, 1825–1891. (Allibone, Boase), usually mentioned by his contemporaries as "Godfrey Turner." Godfrey Wordsworth Turner studied art, then turned to journalism. As contributor and staff member was connected with numerous periodicals, e.g., Spectator, Morning Chronicle, Leader, John Bull, Comic Times, Train, Daily News; longest connection was with the Daily Telegraph. Mentioned by Hatton, Journalistic London (p. 138), as writer of "graceful verse and literary sketches." Author of Jest and Earnest, 1861, a medley of prose and verse; two works on paintings, a guide to International Fisheries Exhibition, a handbook titled Picturesque Wales. Was friend of the young H.W. writers Sala, Yates, Hollingshead, the Broughs. Recorded that he met Dickens "at various times in my very young days, when in fact I was but a schoolboy and he a young and successful author"; later saw Dickens in a performance of Not So Bad As We Seem (Kitton, Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil, pp. 182–83). Wrote "'Boz' and the Play," Theatre, April 1885.
Another G. Turner – George Gladstone Turner – published, between 1881 and 1887, three volumes of narrative and lyric poems.
Author: Anne Lohrli; © University of Toronto Press, 1971
