From the Penny Dreadful to the Ha'penny Dreadfuller

From the Penny Dreadful to the Ha'penny Dreadfuller

Author: Robert J. Kirkpatrick

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780712309547

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This book tells, for the first time, the full history of the British boys' periodical, from its origins in the second half of the 18th century to its decline after the Second World War. Beginning with educational and religious magazines, it follows the trail through the violent and sensational 'penny blood' which thrived between around 1830 and 1870, to early attempts to entertain as well as educate boys through monthly magazines, and the ground - breaking weekly story papers and 'penny dreadfuls' of Edwin J. Brett, beginning with Boys of England in 1866, and his rivalry with the Emmett brothers and other publishers. It also looks at cheap periodical publishing for boys in America, before exploring the introduction of more 'respectable' periodicals such as the Boy's Own Paper and Chums, and the attempts of a young Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe and founder of the Amalgamated Press, to usurp the 'penny dreadful' by producing the 'ha'penny dreadfuller'. Finally, it charts the progress of the story paper through the first half of the 20th century, before it gave way to comics, imported American magazines, and television. It concludes with a comprehensive checklist, giving publication details of over 600 periodicals.


The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats

The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats

Author: Michael Connerty

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-08-30

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 3030768937

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This monograph seeks to recover and assess the critically neglected comic strip work produced by the Irish painter Jack B. Yeats for various British publications, including Comic Cuts, The Funny Wonder, and Puck, between 1893 and 1917. It situates the work in relation to late-Victorian and Edwardian media, entertainment and popular culture, as well as to the evolution of the British comic during this crucial period in its development. Yeats’ recurring characters, including circus horse Signor McCoy, detective pastiche Chubblock Homes, and proto-superhero Dicky the Birdman, were once very well-known, part of a boom in cheap and widely distributed comics that Alfred Harmsworth and others published in London from 1890 onwards. The repositioning of Yeats in the context of the comics, and the acknowledgement of the very substantial corpus of graphic humour that he produced, has profound implications for our understanding of his artistic career and of his significant contribution to UK comics history. This book, which also contains many examples of the work, should therefore be of value to those interested in Comics Studies, Irish Studies, and Art History.


James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family

James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family

Author: Rebecca Nesvet

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-30

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 104009371X

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James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family is the first monograph focusing on Sweeney Todd and Varney the Vampyre’s creator James Malcolm Rymer (1814–1884). It argues that Rymer wrote his so-called ‘penny bloods’ and ‘dreadfuls’ for and about British urban working families. In the 1840s, the notion of the family acquired unprecedented prominence and radical potential. Raised in an artisanal artistic-literary family, Rymer wrote for and edited family magazines early in that genre’s history, deployed Chartist domesticity to liberal ends, and collaborated with cheap publisher Edward Lloyd to define and popularise the domestic romance genre. In 1850s–1860s penny serials published by George W.M. Reynolds, John Dicks, and Lloyd, Rymer showed how families might sustain Empire and advocated for patriarchal family dynamics in response to literary and political change. During the fin-de-siècle, Rymer’s penny fiction was demonised as hyper-masculine ‘bloods’ and ‘dreadfuls’, a reputation it retains today. Reading Victorian penny fiction’s most indicative author’s works as a corpus and with attention to their original textual, cultural, and political contexts reveals it as the family-oriented phenomenon it in fact was.


Key Concepts in Victorian Literature

Key Concepts in Victorian Literature

Author: Sean Purchase

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2006-03-27

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0230204198

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Key Concepts in Victorian Literature is a lively, clear and accessible resource for anyone interested in Victorian literature. It contains major facts, ideas and contemporary literary theories, is packed with close and detailed readings and offers an overview of the historical and cultural context in which this literature was produced.


The Wicked Boy

The Wicked Boy

Author: Kate Summerscale

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2017-07-04

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0143110462

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Winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Book! From the internationally bestselling author, a deeply researched and atmospheric murder mystery of late Victorian-era London In the summer of 1895, Robert Coombes (age 13) and his brother Nattie (age 12) were seen spending lavishly around the docklands of East London -- for ten days in July, they ate out at coffee houses and took trips to the seaside and the theater. The boys told neighbors they had been left home alone while their mother visited family in Liverpool, but their aunt was suspicious. When she eventually forced the brothers to open the house to her, she found the badly decomposed body of their mother in a bedroom upstairs. Robert and Nattie were arrested for matricide and sent for trial at the Old Bailey. Robert confessed to having stabbed his mother, but his lawyers argued that he was insane. Nattie struck a plea and gave evidence against his brother. The court heard testimony about Robert's severe headaches, his fascination with violent criminals and his passion for 'penny dreadfuls', the pulp fiction of the day. He seemed to feel no remorse for what he had done, and neither the prosecution nor the defense could find a motive for the murder. The judge sentenced the thirteen-year-old to detention in Broadmoor, the most infamous criminal lunatic asylum in the land. Yet Broadmoor turned out to be the beginning of a new life for Robert--one that would have profoundly shocked anyone who thought they understood the Wicked Boy. At a time of great tumult and uncertainty, Robert Coombes's case crystallized contemporary anxieties about the education of the working classes, the dangers of pulp fiction, and evolving theories of criminality, childhood, and insanity. With riveting detail and rich atmosphere, Kate Summerscale recreates this terrible crime and its aftermath, uncovering an extraordinary story of man's capacity to overcome the past.


Before Tom Brown

Before Tom Brown

Author: Robert J. Kirkpatrick

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2024-01-01

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0718897366

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The use of school life as a closed narrative environment is well documented, and modern examples such as Malory Towers and Harry Potter show the genre’s continued appeal. While there have been several histories of the school story, especially in children’s literature, almost all of them take as their starting point Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Although occasionally acknowledged in passing, there has never been a complete study of earlier school stories, or of other fictional portrayals of school life before the middle of the eighteenth century. In Before Tom Brown, Robert Kirkpatrick traces the roots of the school story back to 2500BC, when school life was a feature of Sumerian, Egyptian and Graeco-Roman texts written as teaching aids for children. From Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Shakesperean comedies, he explores for the first time the use of school dialogues in the classroom, in print and on stage, and presents new evidence that the first school novel appeared in 1607. Finally, he examines the role of the school story in the broader development of the novel as the genre became established through the eighteenth century. Readers will be rewarded with a whole new perspective on the history of children’s literature.


The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature

The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature

Author: Lucy Andrew

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-10-19

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 3319620908

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This book maps the development of the boy detective in British children’s literature from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. It explores how this liminal figure – a boy operating within a man’s world – addresses adult anxieties about boyhood and the boy’s transition to manhood. It investigates the literary, social and ideological significance of a vast array of popular detective narratives appearing in ‘penny dreadfuls’ and story papers which were aimed primarily at working-class boys. This study charts the relationship between developments in the representation of the fictional boy detective and changing expectations of and attitudes towards real-life British boys during a period where the boy’s role in the future of the Empire was a key concern. It emphasises the value of the early fictional boy detective as an ideological tool to condition boy readers to fulfil adult desires and expectations of what boyhood and, in the future, proper manhood should entail. It will be of particular importance to scholars working in the fields of children’s literature, crime fiction and popular culture.


Juvenile" Literature and British Society

Juvenile

Author: Charles Ferrall

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-05-10

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1135235082

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In this study, Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson argue that the Victorians created a concept of adolescence that lasted into the twentieth century and yet is strikingly at odds with post-Second World War notions of adolescence as a period of "storm and stress." In the enormously popular "juvenile" literature of the period, primarily boys’ and girls’ own adventure and school stories, adolescence is acknowledged as a time of sexual awareness and yet also of a romantic idealism that is lost with marriage, a time when boys and girls acquire adult duties and responsibilities and yet have not had to assume the roles of breadwinner or household manager. The book reveals a concept of adolescence as significant as the Romantic cult of childhood that preceded it, which will be of interest to scholars of both children’s literature and Victorian culture.