Blood and Thunder

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 500, 21 January 1949, Page 11

Blood and Thunder

BOYS WILL BE BOYS. By

E: S:

Turner.

Michael joseph, London,

HATEVER their faults, "penny dreadfuls" were . works of vivid imagination: both J. M. Barrie and H. G. Wells have claimed that for them. Although they have been the butt of critics from’ the Victorian Quarterly .Review to George Orwell, their defendants, equally vocal, have ranged from Samuel Johnson (in principle anyway) to G, K. Chesterton, Now here at last is a sympathetic, thoroughly documented, brightly written story of their development, from Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (whose victims of 1840 were made into delicious meat pies) to Dick Barton, the BBC’s radio detective who, never swears, never breaks the law, and defends himself-only with a swift uppercut to the jaw. Boys Will be Boys is the story of a nation’s boyhood reading. Spring-Heeled-Jack, Varney the Vampire, The Blue Dwarf, Dick Turpin, Jack Harkaway, Sexton Blake, Nick Carter, Nelson Lee, Falcon Swift, Buffalo Bill, Deadwood Dick, Billy Bynter-what amazing reading our youth held! Here are chronicled the stories of iron men on the prairies, of weekly invasions of Britain by Germans, French, or Russians, of visits to lost civilisations in the Antarctic or the Sahara, and of journeys by space-ship to Mars. And here is an account of the sporting yarns that have ranged ‘through Champion, Rover, B.O.P. and other boys’ papers of a past era, in which with unflagging ‘regularity the lemons weré poisoned at half-time, masked forwards appeared to score a last-minute try, and bogus referees blew poisoned at the star players. ' This is not just a tale of fictional characters, however, but of the men who wrote and published them-Charles Hamilton, who wrote Billy Bunter stories for 30 years at the rate of a million and a-half words a year, or Lord Northcliffe, who founded his journalistic empire on the halfpenny papers with which he attacked and eventually destroyed the "penny dreadful." The author recall§ the fantastic competitions used to boost sales — one which drew 700,000 entries invited readers to estimate the amount of bullion in the Bank of England, the prize being "£1 a week for life’-and the fascinating advertisements for daisy air rifles, singing scarf pins, shocking electric coils, solaphones, tubogliders, and stink bombs, which lined the pages of these publications. The book is written with tremendous gusto. There are plenty of chances to be sententious in the investigation of this literary half-world,' but the author’ is too deeply engaged in his subject to

moralise,

P.J.

W.