Mary Tourtel was created in 1920, at a time when the "Express" was in competition with "The Daily Mail" and its then popular comic strip "Teddy Tail", as well as the strip "Pip, Squeak and Wilfred" in "The Daily Mirror". The then news editor of the "Express", Herbert Tourtel, was approached with the task of producing a new comic strip to rival those of the "Mail" and "Mirror" and immediately thought of his wife Mary, already an established author and artist. Rupert Bear was the result and was first published as a nameless character in a strip titled "Little Lost Bear" on
Two Years Before the Mast us of Melville” and “other passages seem to anticipate him”. (Melville, born in 1819, was exactly four years Dana's junior, and returned from his first tour as a seaman when "Two Years Before the Mast" was first published in 1840): The following description of the English sailor, Bill Jackson, has literary similarities to Melville's "Billy Budd": Writes Morris, "Dana is something more of a poet than either he or his contemporaries were aware; and that his ignorance of this gift was a loss to him as well as to us." With the onset of the 1849 California Gold Rush, Dana's