I’ve been spending a lot of time recently with a book I’m really fond of — E. S. Turner’s Boys Will Be Boys: The story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, Billy Bunter, Dick Barton, et al. It’s a retrospective of the “boys’ papers” and “story papers” of the 19th century — the bridge between the adult prose periodicals of the 1800’s and what we now would recognize as comics.
For the storyteller working in children’s literature, this book is full of information that it may not actually be important to have, but can nonetheless be a whole lot of fun to get into. The book investigates everything from the economics of the “penny dreadfuls”…
Each penny part weighed a mere quarter-ounce against the two ounces afforded by such meritorious publications as Leisure Hour and the Family Herald. [James Greenwood, author of The Wilds of London] declared: “It is the infinitesimal quantity of trash that may be palmed off for a penny that serves as the carrion bait to attract toward it the flies of the book trade.”
…to the rivalries, large and small, that went on between/among the publishers…
In 1866 the Reverend J. Erskine Clark published his Chatterbox at a halfpenny, in a bold effort to undercut the “penny dreadfuls”. Sir James Barrie, who was an eager consumer of sensational literature in his young days, admits that he was side-tracked onto the Chatterbox, which broke him of the “penny dreadful” habit, though not before he had tried to write one or two himself.
…to the public attitude to the people working on them (not incredibly high, from the looks of things).
Despite the advance of education, complained the Edinburgh Quarterly, such works as Joscin the Body Snatcher and Three-Fingered Jack, the Terror of the Antilles,
were still there “to dispute the favor of the poorer class of readers with translations of the improving romances of M M. Zola and Paul de Kock… In a lane not far from Fleet Street is a complete factory of the literature of rascaldom — a literature which has done much to people our prisons, our reformatories and our Colonies with scapegraces and ne’er-do-wells.”
The Quarterly’s critic claimed to have private knowledge of the authors of many of these penny publications — ” — not as a rule very distinguished members of the Republic of Letters, though in some few instances their antecedents are better than might be expected.” …The critic knew of a maidservant whose father wrote novels from ten to four for a cheap publisher: also of a cook who, taxed with dilatoriness in the preparation of meals, explained that she was busy in the kitchen writing novels.
Hey, I didn’t know I had a previous life in London. 🙂 But no, wait, this description’s even better:
…the miserable beer-swilling wretches who write them…if such a word as write could be applied to their work!
As a rule they are drunken, sodden creatures whose lives have been one long unbroken story of failure. Sometimes they are University men who in the flower of their youth gave promise of being noble men but giving way to the temptations of drink they have gradually sunk lower and lower in the scale of life until at last they reach the depths of degradation and their natures have become so debased that they are fit only to write evil stories which fill the pocket of the man who prints and sells the “penny dreadful”. …Where do they write? Communal kitchens of cheap lodging-houses, the bar parlours of dirty back-alley “pubs”…
Hooboy. But Turner himself is dryly funny all through:
Who will withhold sympathy from a hack presented with, say, six pictures showing a redskin dancing round a captive, two Frenchmen fencing, a highwayman holding up a coach, a smuggler’s boat landing in a cove, a detective looking at a footprint through a magnifying glass, and a bound and gagged woman, with instructions to “keep it down to 20,000 words” and call it “Guy Gaspereau, the Brigand Chief”?
I’ll be coming back to this subject in some blog entries next week, because there are some things in this book that are just too good not to share. But here’s something very cool in the meantime:
Stanford University has an online “window” into their Dime Novel and Penny Dreadful Collection. There is a “guided tour” of the dreadfuls, and a timeline. Additionally, titles of papers and thousands of (usually, cover) images can be browsed, though something weird seems to be going on with the text-search facility — it keeps demanding some kind of Stanford-based login procedure. But the clunky interface doesn’t interfere all that much with the sheer wonderfulness of the basic material, once you start getting into it.
I really wish that the British Library would do something like this with its own famous “penny parts” holding, the Barry Ono Collection, which is apparently really something to see. (It’s been microfilmed, which is all very well, but I really wish someone would CD-ROM or DVD that output…)
