Decline and Fall.

The author's first novel, with his own illustrations, the dust jacket also designed by him. After the book was rejected for indecency by Duckworth (the publisher of his earlier biography of Rossetti), Waugh offered the manuscript to Chapman & Hall, but he did so while his father, who was the managing director of the firm, was away on holiday. The acting-director agreed to publish the novel and Arthur Waugh returned to London to discover that his son was his firm's newest author. When Arthur Waugh's biography was published three years later, however, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, the two novels published under his directorship of Chapman & Hall, were not mentioned.