Barry Eric Odell Pain (28 September 1864 – 5 May 1928) was an English journalist, poet, humorist and writer.

[1] Later, the socio-economic circumstance of his birth helped fit him comfortably into the group of "new humor" writers that emerged in the 1890s, none of the other members of which was university educated.

In 1889, Cornhill Magazine's editor, James Payn, published his story "The Hundred Gates", and in 1890 Pain moved to London where he became a contributor to Punch and The Speaker, and joined the staffs of the Daily Chronicle and Black and White.

[4] Pain supposedly "owes his discovery to Robert Louis Stevenson, who compares him to De Maupassant".

The year Pain moved to London his first book—In a Canadian Canoe, the Nine Muses Minus One, and Other Stories[6]—was published in "The Whitefriar's Library of Wit and Humour."

However, in a Longman's Magazine article titled “The New Humour” Andrew Lang claimed, among other things, that Pain's sort of humor could appeal only to “deeply corrupted sensibilities.”[7] Nevertheless, the term "new humour" gradually joined other "new" concepts of the time, such as the new journalism, new woman, and new drama, and became a positive description of the humorous writings of working class writers such as Jerome K. Jerome, Israel Zangwill, W.W. Jacobs, and William Pett Ridge.

Gradually, through the original flaws in character, the society ends disastrously in conflict with the native population.