1 Introduction: Fiction for the Working Lad
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Notes 1 Introduction: Fiction for the working lad 1. George Orwell, ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: Vol. I: An Age Like This (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970 [1968]), 505–31, quotation from 530. 2. Orwell, ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, 516. 3. Ibid. 4. Orwell, ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ originally appeared in Cyril Connolly’s literary maga- zine Horizon, no.3 (March 1940), 346–55. One month later a reply appeared from popular story paper author Frank Richards (the pen name of Charles Hamilton). The controversy about Orwell’s article still raged on forty years later in issues of Story Paper Collector’s Digest, a monthly magazine for collectors and enthusiasts; see letters from Ernest Holman, Simon Garrett and Brian Sayer in nos. 477–9 (1986). Richards’ ‘Reply to George Orwell’, is included in Orwell and Angus, eds, Collected Essays, 531–40. 5. Orwell, ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, 529. 6. This is a burgeoning field, but see Peter Stearns, Be a Man! Males in Modern Society (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979; revised 1990); J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds, Manliness and Morality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); Michael Roper and John Tosh, eds, Manful Assertions: Masculinities in England since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1991); Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imaginings of Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1994); Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion, 1996); Angus Maclaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Polic- ing Sexual Boundaries, 1870–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). For a fuller discussion of the literature on the history of masculinity see Kelly Boyd, ‘“Wait Till I’m a Man!”: Manliness in the English Boys’ Story Paper, 1855–1940’ (PhD thesis, Rutgers Uni- versity, 1991), chap.1. 7. See, for example, James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); David Alderson, Mansex Fine: Religion, Manliness and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Diana Barsham, Arthur Conan Doyle and the Meanings of Masculinity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); and Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan, eds, Masculinity and Spiritu- ality in Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave [Macmillan] 2000). 8. James Greenwood, ‘The Penny Awfuls’, St Paul’s Magazine 12 (1873), 161–8; Alexander Strahan, ‘Bad Literature for the Young’, Contemporary Review 26 (1875), 981–91; Francis Hitchman, ‘The Penny Press’, MacMillan’s Magazine 43 (1881), 385–98; Edward Salmon, ‘What Boys Read’, Fortnightly Review n.s.39 (1886), 248–59; Bennett G. Johns, ‘Literature of the Streets’, Edinburgh Review 165 (1887), 40–65; and Edward Lyttleton, ‘Penny Fiction’, Quarterly Review 171 (1890), 150–71. 181 182 Notes to Chapter 1 9. John R. Gillis, ‘The Evolution of Juvenile Delinquency in England, 1890–1914’, Past and Present no.67 (May 1975), 96–126. 10. Hamilton’s work will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. Biographical information is from W. O. G. Lofts and Derek Adley, The Men Behind Boys’ Fiction (London: Howard Baker, 1970), 168–71; Charles Hamilton, The Autobiography of Frank Richards (London: Charles Skilton, 1952); and Mary Cadogan, Frank Richards: The Chap Behind the Chums (London: Viking, 1988). 11. Richards, ‘Reply to George Orwell’, 538; the emphasis is Richards’. 12. Ibid., 535 13. This paragraph is largely derived from John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), see esp. chs 1 and 2. 14. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, Romance, 38. 15. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (London: Verso, 1987 [1984]); Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance (London: Methuen, 1984); and jay Dixon, The Romance Fiction of Mills and Boon, 1909–1990s (London: UCL Press, 1999). 16. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1987). 17. Thomas Frost, Forty Years’ Recollections: Literary and Political (London: Sampson Low, 1880), 90. 18. See Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post- Structuralism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman, eds, The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); and Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), for extensive discussions of the theory. For a good treatment of reader-response criticism in the context of modern literary criticism, see Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 74–88. A precise definition of different types of readers is found in Robert Crosman, ‘Four Types of Reader’, Reader: A Newsletter of Reader-Oriented Criticism and Teaching no.5 (October 1978), 3–9. For an early exploration of the uses of reader/response criticism, see Susan Suleiman, ‘What is Reader-Oriented Criti- cism?’ Reader: A Newsletter no.4 (1978), 3–6. 19. Janice A. Radway, ‘Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context’, Feminist Studies 9 (1983), 53–78; Radway, Reading the Romance; and Leslie W. Rabine, ‘Romance in the Age of Electronics: Harlequin Enterprises’, Feminist Studies 9 (1985), 39–60. 20. The use of the soubriquet was not uncommon in working-class culture; see Edward Royle, Chartism (London: Longman, 1986), 46, for the use of names like ‘Queen Victoria’ and the ‘Duke of Wellington’ on Chartist petitions; and Rohan McWilliam, ‘Radicalism and Popular Culture: The Tichborne Case and the Politics of Fair Play, 1867–1886’ in Alastair Reid and Eugenio Biagini, eds, Currents of Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 55–6. 21. Richards, ‘Reply to George Orwell’, 537. 22. Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How America Learned to Stop Living and Love the Cinema (New York: Pantheon, 1983). 23. Denning, Mechanic Accents, 4. 24. Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973 [1971]), 160. Notes to Chapters 1–2 183 25. Jack Cox, Take a Cold Tub, Sir! The Story of the Boy’s Own Paper (Guildford, Surrey: Lutterworth Press, 1982), 70–2. 26. On his death Brett left a personal estate valued at £76,538; ‘Wills and Bequests: Brett’, Illustrated London News (8 February 1896), 186. For the general (un)prof- itability of Victorian boys’ magazines, see John Springhall, ‘“Disseminating Unpure Literature”: The “Penny Dreadful” Publishing Business since 1860’, Economic History Review 47 (1994), 567–84. 27. Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’,’ in Raphael Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 227–39. 28. E. S. Turner, Boys Will Be Boys: The Story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, Billy Bunter, Dick Barton, et al (London: Penguin, 1976 [1948]). 29. Louis James, ‘Tom Brown’s Imperialist Sons’, Victorian Studies 17 (1973), 89–99; Patrick Dunae, ‘Boy’s Own Paper: Origins and Editorial Policies’, The Private Library 9 (1976), 123–58; ‘Boys’ Literature and the Idea of Race, 1870–1900’, Wascana Review (1977), 84–107; ‘Making Good: the Canadian West in Boys’ Lit- erature’, Prairie Forum 4 (1979), 165–81; ‘Penny Dreadfuls: Late Nineteenth- Century Boys’ Literature and Crime’, Victorian Studies 22 (1979), 133–50; ‘Boys’ Literature’, Victorian Studies 24 (1980), 105–21; and ‘A New Grub Street for Boys’, in Jeffrey Richards, ed., Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 12–33; John O. Springhall, ‘Healthy Papers for Manly Boys: Imperialism and Race in Harmsworth’s Halfpenny Boys’ Papers of the 1880s and 1890s’, in Richards, Juvenile Literature and Imperialism, 107–25; ‘“A Life Story for the People”? Edwin J. Brett and the London Low-Life Penny Dreadfuls of the 1860s’, Victorian Studies 33 (1990), 223–46; and Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap, 1830–1996 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press [now Palgrave Macmillan], 1999). 30. Kathryn Castle, Britannia’s Children: Reading Colonialism Through Children’s Books and Magazines (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Robert H. MacDonald, ‘Reproducing the Middle-Class Boys: From Purity to Patriotism in the Boys’ Magazines, 1892–1914’, Journal of Contemporary History 24 (1989), 519– 39; and The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880–1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Claudia Nelson, Boys Will Be Girls: the Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857–1917 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991); ‘Mixed Messages: Authoring and Authority in British Boys’ Magazines’, The Lion and the Unicorn 21 (1997), 1–19; and ‘David and Jonathan – and Saul – Revisted: Homodomestic Patterns in British Boys’ Magazine Fiction, 1880–1915’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 15 (1990), 17–21. 31. This genre is too large to enumerate here, but for a good roundup see Robert J. Kirkpatrick with Michael Rupert Taylor, Victorian School Stories in Books and Periodicals (Oxford: privately published, 2001) and Robert J. Kirkpatrick, The Encyclopaedia of Boys’ School Stories (Aldershot: