Editing Arthur Machen (section)

===Final years: 1926–1947===

By 1926 the boom in republication was mostly over, and Machen's income dropped. He continued republishing earlier works in collected editions, as well as writing essays and articles for various magazines and newspapers and contributing forewords and introductions to both his own works and those of other writers—such as the Monmouthshire historian [[Fred Hando]]'s ''The Pleasant Land of Gwent'' (1944)—but produced little new fiction. In 1927, he became a manuscript reader for the publisher [[Ernest Benn]], which brought in a much-needed regular income until 1933.

In 1929, Machen and his family moved away from London to [[Amersham]] in Buckinghamshire, but they still faced financial hardship. He received some recognition for his literary work when he received a Civil List pension of £100 per annum in 1932, but the loss of work from Benn's a year later made things difficult once more. A few more collections of Machen's shorter works were published in the thirties, partially as a result of the championing of Machen by [[John Gawsworth]], who also began work on a biography of Machen that was only published in 2005 thanks to the Friends of Arthur Machen.<ref name="machensoc.demon.co.uk"/>

Machen's financial difficulties were only finally ended by the literary appeal launched in 1943 for his eightieth birthday. The initial names on the appeal show the general recognition of Machen's stature as a distinguished man of letters, as they included [[Max Beerbohm]], [[T. S. Eliot]], [[George Bernard Shaw|Bernard Shaw]], [[Walter de la Mare]], [[Algernon Blackwood]], and [[John Masefield]]. The success of the appeal allowed Machen to live the last few years of his life, until 1947, in relative comfort.