Monday, December 26, 2011

Archives of British Publishers/Keith Fleming



Publishers' archives are valuable but underutilised sources of information about writers and their books, particularly writers who are little-known, or who worked under pseudonyms.

As far as I know, the largest archive of British publishers records is housed at the University of Reading, in the archive of publishers and printers.

An important set of archives that is more accessible than most is the Archives of British Publishers, which comprises the records of nine publishers copied to microfilm and microfiche, including George Rutledge, Elkin Mathews, Grant Richards, and Richard Bentley. It can be found in many major libraries.

A good example of how publishers' archives can be used is the case of the nineteenth century supernatural fiction writer, Keith Fleming. Fleming wrote three works of supernatural fiction published by George Routledge between 1889 and 1891, Can Such Things Be?, By the Night Express, and At the Eleventh Hour. The specialty publisher, Sarob, reprinted the first two in 2001 in a nice limited edition volume.

The George Rutledge papers in the Archives of British Publishers includes the contracts for the three Keith Fleming books. The signature on all three contracts is K.E. Fitzpatrick, indicating that ‘Keith Fleming’ was in fact a pseudonym. Two of the books also appear in Rutledge's book production ledgers. Can such things Be? was printed in a run of 4000 and 25 pounds was paid to “Miss Fitzpatrick”. At the Eleventh Hour was also printed in a run of 4000 and 25 pounds was paid for the copyright.

It turns out that "Keith Fleming" was in fact Kathleen Fitzpatrick, born in Ireland in 1858 or 1859, and who lived for much of her life with her widowed mother in Wales, not to be confused with the Kathleen Fitzpatrick who wrote The Weans of Rowallan.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

New Issues of LE VISAGE VERT

The year 2011 has brought us not one but two new issues of the excellent French magazine on the fantastic, Le Visage Vert.  Issue 18 came out this summer, and issue 19 has just recently appeared.

one of the supplementary cards

Issue 18 (June 2011) begins with a translation by Anne-Sylvie Homassel of Howard Pyle's "The Salem Wolf", with the original illustrations from the December 1909 appearance in Harper's Monthly Magazine. This is followed by Michel Meurger's essay on the Salem witches in American literature. Other work translated from English into French include Robert Barr's "The Vengeance of the Dead" (with illustrations from its English Illustrated Magazine appearance in May 1894) and Amelia B. Edwards's "A Railway Panic" (1856). Two stories reprinted in their original French are "Une heure d'express" and "Le Roi du Léthol", both by Georges Price (1853-1922), from his volume La Rançon du sommeil (1910). The first story seems a direct descendant of the Amelia Edwards story.  And two stories by Alexander Moritz Frey (1881-1957), along with an essay on him by Robert N. Bloch, are translated from the German. A full contents-listing for this issue can be found here.  

A supplementary envelope that comes with this issue includes three cards, printed in color on both sides, showing some of the dynamic illustrations in full color, including three pages with illustrations by Howard Pyle for his own story.  


Issue 19 (November 2011) is another bountiful volume.  It includes stories by René Thévenin (French, 1867-1967), Harry de Windt (British, 1856-1933), Rhoda Broughton (British, 1840-1920), Ernst Raupach (German, 1784-1852), and the contemporary H.V. Chao (American, the pseudonym of translator Edward Gauvin). Criticism by Michel Meurger and François Ducos.  A full list of contents can be found here.  And there is similarly a supplementary envelope with colored cards.   

Personally, the item of greatest interest to me is the fantasy story by the forgotten German dramatist Ernst Raupach, whose famous vampire story "Wake Not the Dead" (published 1822, translated into English without attribution in 1823) has long---in English---been misattributed to Ludwig Tieck.  Raupach's story, "Die Wanderung", is a fairy tale very much like the ones that would be written afterwards by George MacDonald. 

All of the publications of Le Visage Vert are elegantly and tastefully produced.  You can see a full list (and order via Paypal) at this link.  (Scroll down for the current and back-issues of Le Visage Vert).  

The Victorian Hugos: 1885+

Over at io9.com, Jess Nevins has been publishing a fascinating series on which novels and stories might have won Hugo awards--if there had been Hugo awards back in the 1880s.  His discussions range around works of (proto-) science fiction, fantasy and horror, and are well worth reading. He intends the series (eventually) to cover the years 1885 to 1930, and he's off to a good start with five years already covered in the last couple of months.  Here are the direct links to each year: 






And another recent article by Jess will likely interest readers of Wormwoodiana (and it's nice to see the very strange novel Doctor Transit get some attention): 


All recommended! 

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Blackwood on Film!

There is a for me a special interest in seeing video or hearing a voice recording of a long-dead favorite author. I have heard some recordings of Arthur Machen, an author typically associated with the 1890s, and it almost felt like having a time machine when I heard his lilting voice. I have never heard any recording of Lord Dunsany, but suspect some may survive, owing to his broadcasts on the BBC. There are various recordings and even some video footage of Tolkien, but I doubt I'll ever hear the voice of David Lindsay (alas!). Or Kenneth Morris. Or E. R. Eddison.

I knew from Mike Ashley's excellent Algernon Blackwood: A Bio-Bibliography (1987) that late in life Blackwood did radio and television broadcasts. And some years ago some surviving clips of one of these 1951 television programs showed up in a BBC4 show "The Story of the Ghost Story", broadcast on December 23, 2005. I hoped (in vain) that this show might appear somewhere on US television, but it never did. No DVD came out either, but at last I've found it on YouTube. The program is just under thirty minutes, and on YouTube it appears in two parts, part one and part two.  The snippet of Blackwood (less than twenty seconds) appears in part two, from the 6 minutes and 51 seconds mark, through 7 minutes and 9 seconds. Not much, but it is a privileged glimpse at the man, and it whets your appetite for more.

If more footage of Blackwood and other such classic authors survives, and could be complied on a DVD, I'd be first in line to buy it.

Saturday, December 3, 2011

W.F. Morris - "Bretherton"

Major W.F. Morris wrote a masterpiece of First World War fiction that won strong acclaim at the time from critics and fellow authors. Not only was it an authentic account of conditions at the Front, it was also a remarkable thriller, with a highly unusual plot, which won him comparisons to John Buchan and the best of the espionage writers.

One of the first to recognise him was Arnold Bennett. Writing in the Evening News in 1929, he observed that the two best war novels so far were The Secret Battle by A.P. Herbert, and The Spanish Farm Trilogy by R.H. Mottram: but now a third could join them. This was “Mr W.F. Morris’s Bretherton.” Bennett recalls that he has previously stressed the importance of mystery novels having a full human interest: this book provides that, “on a very generous scale”. He concluded: “Eight experienced readers out of ten will enjoy it, as I did. The ninth will say it is the finest English war-novel yet issued. The tenth will be rude about it. I understand that it is a first novel.”

He was right: it was the first novel by Walter Frederick Morris, a Norwich man who was born there on 31 May 1892, stayed there – apart from his war service – and died in that city in 1969. Morris had been commissioned at the age of 22 as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 13th Cycle Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment in November 1914, went to the front in 1915, and by the time he was demobilised, at the late date of June 1919, no doubt a rather old 27, was a Major. He was to write six more novels after Bretherton. And as yet, it has been hard to uncover very much more biographical information about Major Morris. There is a self-effacing, fussless, just-get-on-with-it quality to some of the most attractive characters in his books, that I suspect their creator may have shared.

Arnold Bennett was not the only perceptive commentator to notice Bretherton at the time. John Squire, the influential editor of the London Mercury, was one of those “ninth” people Bennett accurately predicted. Squire said “of the English war-books, undoubtedly the best is Bretherton.” And he was not alone. The Morning Post thought it “one of the best of the English war novels. I do not expect anything much better.” The Sunday Times pinpointed its dual attraction: it was both “a mystery as exciting as a good detective story and an extraordinarily vivid account of trench-warfare.” A critic who was no particular friend of popular fiction, A.C. Ward, also praised it: “ W.F. Morris’ Bretherton [is] an adventure-mystery war-novel with an admirably ingenious and leak-proof plot. This book combines a brilliant exercise of creative imagination with a remarkable ability to reproduce, vividly, first-hand experiences, and there is one brief battle-scene…which is memorable.”

Bretherton (1929: US title, "G.B.") is set in the confusion and futility and weariness – but also the elation - of the last days of the war, when a British raiding party stumbles upon an eerie tableau in a ruined chateau, under fire. Following the strains of a familiar tune, “Just a Song at Twilight”, and understandably perplexed by who would be playing a piano in the middle of an ambush, they discover a British officer, dead across the keys, with a beautiful but also dead woman, in a fine formal gown, lying on a couch close by. And the British officer is in German uniform, the uniform of a General. The scene gives force to the book’s sub-title: Khaki or Field-Grey?

The rest of the novel unravels the clues to the meaning of that haunting scene. But it also does so much more than that. Four qualities give the book its particular force and attraction. The first of these is its handling of humour, a gentle, pervading quality that is integral to the book, not a forced contrivance. Morris seems to faithfully recall the banter and badinage in the trenches, the absurdity of incident, the incongruities of civilised men in distinctly uncivilised conditions, as well as the gallows humour and a seasoning of satire at the fatuities from the high gods of HQ. However tense his plot, however squalid the scenes, there is never far away this under-stated, lightly ironic counterpoint.

The second is Morris’s handling of the mystery element. This is built up subtly by well-placed minor incidents, by half-glimpsed perspectives from characters who enter the narrative at a tangent, by shadings and hints. The mystery is the focus of the book, yet the work is not subservient to it.

The third quality, and the one that struck contemporaries most, is its realism. One said that “men who went through the war will have respect for and interest in Bretherton”. There are unflinching, but brief, scenes of horror, such as we know also from the memoirs and literature of his more celebrated contemporaries. There is – unemphasised but clear – evidence of the futility of hard-won advances swiftly abandoned. The boredom and the banal brass-hattery of the war comes across well too, though lightly done. Morris evokes well the camaraderie of the trenches, but he is also not afraid to acknowledge the rivalries, dislikes, vexations and minor feuding.

Lastly, there are the things that Bretherton is not. It is not preachy: it has no overt agenda. There is no “King and Country” stuff, no sentiment, no prejudice against the enemy: and, indeed, perhaps uniquely, it is written from both sides of the war. All of these elements make Bretherton an astonishingly finely balanced, quiet masterpiece.

That Bretherton was no accidental achievement is evident from two at least of Morris’s subsequent novels, both with settings involving the Great War. Just as in Bretherton, they are concerned with questions of identity, allegiance, chance, concealment and self-discovery. His second book, Behind the Lines (1930), is almost a match for Bretherton, and a commentator noted that “in spite of the flood of war books”, Morris was able to achieve “a quite different viewpoint from all the others”, and his book was “an outstanding success”. A subaltern is forced to flee when he accidentally kills an overbearing, taunting fellow officer: appearances are all against him and he does not trust to trench justice. He becomes a fugitive and has to make alliance with other deserters, lost soldiers and outlaws in a hand to mouth existence in the no man’s land that the opposing forces aren’t occupying. A clever, and just plausible, plot twist sets matter right.

His third novel, Pagan (1931), though set in peace time, unravels a macabre mystery that derives from the war, and again is founded upon the themes of lost identity, the outsider and tested loyalties. It is almost as powerful as the first two. Again, it has a sound mystery element, engaging characters, and well-described settings in the French countryside, still torn from the war. It is somewhat harder to find than the first two. All three books have at their heart a Jekyll & Hyde type theme, where both Jekyll and Hyde are understandable and may win our sympathy: a very difficult feat to pull off.

After these, Morris wrote four more novels that are more conventional adventure thrillers, but with his trademark flair for keen action, lively characters and unusual plotting. They followed at a pace of one every two years, until the last in 1939.

In the first of these, The Hold-Up (1933), the setting is the Auvergne in France, whose mountains, gorges and forests Morris evokes with a fine warmth. An Englishman, a war veteran, is a passenger on a country bus careering along the steep cliffside roads, when it is held up by a masked bandit and hostages taken. Yet there was an odd familiarity about the voice and the manner of the disguised villain – something which takes him back to the war. And the deportment and bearing of the young peasant woman who was one of his captives was not quite in character. As in his earlier books, Morris sustains a compelling mystery using concealed identities and characters who are more than they seem, though the plot is perhaps rather more in the run of the thrillers of the day. The book was still well-received, though. The Evening News thought it was “A first rate tale of adventure, romance and danger.”

The title of his next book, Something to His Advantage (1935), is from the wording of adverts placed by solicitors to trace missing legatees named in wills, asking them to make contact to learn about their good fortune. A young solicitor and his detective-novelist friend journey to a remote Norfolk village to give just such news to a reclusive beneficiary – who does not survive to hear it. The pair launch their own investigation. It’s a breezily-written, engaging enough yarn, but missing the strangeness and originality of his earlier work.

In No Turning Back (1937), two ex-soldiers with a flippant wit and devil-may-care attitude are drawn into a treasure hunt for Spanish gold. Unfortunately, they are not the only ones after it and find themselves chased – or chasing – halfway around the world. Both characters are enjoyably drawn and are a cut above the Sapper type of heroes, not least because they don’t take themselves too seriously.

They return in Morris’ last book, The Channel Mystery (1939), in a plot which takes its lead from Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands. Only here, the enemy is lurking in the minor rocks and islets of the Channel Isles. It was perhaps fitting that the author who wrote so compellingly of the First World War should end with a warning of what was to come in the Second. After that, it is not clear whether Morris stopped writing or could no longer find a publisher.

Yet there was one more ringing tribute. When in 1952 a master of the spy thriller form, Eric Ambler, identified his top five spy stories, four of them were very well known: The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers; The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad; The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan; and Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham. The fifth must even by then have seemed more obscure to Ambler’s readers. It was Bretherton by W. F. Morris.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Book Collecting

Ray Russell of Tartarus Press has made a short film in which I talk about my book collection and especially some authors I think are unfairly neglected, such as Ronald Fraser and J.C. Snaith. It can be viewed here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYsL7BUO6c4

Monday, November 21, 2011

Vivian Meik's DEVILS' DRUMS

Front cover of dust-wrapper

I'm very pleased to say that the expanded edition of Vivian Meik's Devils' Drums (originally published in 1933), which I finished eight years ago (for a different publisher), has now come out in a very attractive edition from Medusa Press.  Not only is the dust-wrapper attractive, but the design on the binding is as well, so I will show scans of both here. Meik's stories of central African voodoo are refreshingly different from most British horror fiction of the 1930s. One story from Devils’ Drums has been filmed. "The Doll of Death" was adapted for the television program, Rod Serling's Night Gallery. Directed by John Badham, it was the second to last episode of the series, broadcast on 20 May 1973. 

This new edition is limited to 300 copies.  Order via the Medusa Press website.

Here is the table of contents:


INTRODUCTION – Douglas A. Anderson
AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

I           DEVILS’ DRUMS
II         WHITE ZOMBIE
III        AN ACRE IN HELL
IV        THE DOLL OF DEATH
V         WHITE MAN’S LAW
VI        .  . .  L’AMITIÉ RESTE
VII      THE MAN WHO SOLD HIS SHADOW
VIII     RA
IX        A HONEYMOON IN HATE
X         DOMIRA’S DRUM

ADDITIONAL STORIES:

XI        THE TWO OLD WOMEN
XII      CHIROMO
XIII     I LEAVE IT TO YOU


Spine and upper cover of binding

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

WORMWOOD 17

Wormwood # 17 is due to be published shortly and contains Joel Lane's new insights on the work of H.P. Lovecraft, as well as essays on Gabriele d’Annunzio's poetry, Reginald Hodder, Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados, Donald Armour’s Swept & Garnished, Robert Aickman's plays and an Overview of American Decadence, and our usual columns 'Under Review' by Reggie Oliver, ' Late Reviews' by Doug Anderson and 'Camera Obscura'.

Wormwood 17 also includes a fascinating article by Doug Anderson about Robert Aickman's plays. These are a completely unknown part of Aickman's literary work for almost all readers, and Doug helpfully summarises the plays and comments on their themes. As Doug concludes, drama probably wasn't the right form for Aickman's imagination, but even so it is intriguing to learn more about his work here.

By a frustrating oversight, Doug's essay was not included on the cover or contents page of this issue. However, readers should certainly not miss this opportunity to find out about such rare Aickmaniana.

Monday, September 5, 2011

Auction of John Loder book collection




Back in May John Loder's book collection was put up for sale by Australian Book Auctions. John is well known for his bibliography of Australian crime fiction and his collection of Australian crime, assembled over many years, was second to none.

A highlight of the sale was a copy of A Study in Scarlet in the 1887 issue of Beeton's Christmas Annual. Randall Stock's bibliography identified 32 extant copies, of which 11 are in private hands - this was an unrecorded 12th copy. The copy was rebound without wrappers and had some minor repairs. It was estimated at $40-80,000 and failed to sell.

A Colonial Edition of Dracula, with a library lending label on the cover, sold for $1,864.

A signed first edition of Frank Walford's Twisted Clay (T. Werner Laurie, 1933) without dust jacket and hinges starting, with six other Walford books, sold for $559.

Australian pulp detective magazines from the 1940s and '50s sold very well indeed, particularly Action Comics magazines - three lots, including a set of Leisure Detective Magazine and Action Detective Magazine, sold for $1,107, $1,748, and $1,282 respectively.

A lot of Fergus Hume titles were up for sale including various early editions of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, though a rare copy of the Melbourne Kemp & Boyce edition (1886) failed to sell.

I picked up a set of The Australian Journal for $303 - volumes I (1866), XI (1876), and about 20 loose issues up to the 1930s. Lots of supernatural and crime fiction within.

(Note that all prices include the buyer's premium.)

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Penny Pickwick

A recent bargain book purchase was a copy of The Post-Humourous Notes of the Pickwickian Club, an early Dickens plagiarism by Thomas Peckett Prest and published by Edward Lloyd. Two volumes bound in one in the complete 112 parts that were published in weekly penny issues in 1837-39, for a mere 12 pounds from an online seller. Presumably they thought it was an early edition of the Pickwick Papers and not worth much. Here is part of an early article on penny part fiction that mentions the Penny Pickwick and some of Lloyd's other publications. NOVELS IN PENNY NUMBERS (The Saturday Review, 13 September 1862) Jacob Tonson is said to have had the attics of a house in Little Britain in habited by a colony of authors whose services he could call into requisition when he chose. Three of these “famous pens” slept under one rug, while one suit served their purposes when stirring abroad; and from these attics, as from an arsenal, Tonson drew forth the arms which disturbed the Ministry, or set the hearts of the nation a flutter. Since those days, the position of the recognised author has amazingly improved, but we doubt whether the race of hack authors is not greatly degenerated. Originally recruited almost solely from the ranks of wandering scholars who had spent some years at one of the Universities, who had been ushers or classical masters at schools, and who possessed, therefore, a very considerable amount of learning, our cheap authors have by degrees dwindled down to those who never saw the inside of an Eton grammar, and whose ignorance of foreign literature is only equalled by their ignorance of their own. Hence perpetual carelessness and blundering in the most ordinary sentences – hence bombast and obscurities, and a general want of style and poverty of English, pitiable enough to contemplate. Doctor Johnson, indeed, said that “every newspaper was now written in a good style,” but it was after a long training in the school of Addison, Swift, Dryden, Pope, and of the Doctor himself. All these masters are now felt to be out of place, and the spasmodic, the turgid, the quaint, or the silly style, each taken from its most popular exponent, serves the purpose. But, although the scholarship survives, the race survives. “Time was that when the brains were out the men would die,” but that time has long passed away, and a man without brains is as lively as ever. Bad, too, as Jacob Tonson undoubtedly was, we have in these days fallen upon a worse set of publishers. There was an assumption of learning at least in the books that came from “Curll’s lewd press or Tonson’s rubric post,” but are clean abandoned now by the “classic muse” in the presses from which we are about to quote. Certainly we do not desire that quotations should lie all about an article like the top dressing on a field, or, to quote Mr Sneer in the Critic, “like lumps of marl in a barren ground, encumbering what it is not in their power to fertilize;” but we do wish to feel the presence of scholarship, and to meet, at least occasionally, with a thought. Fifty or even seventy years ago, the issue of works of fiction, as well as of religion and history, in periodical parts, was very well known. The sale was no doubt circumscribed because of the weight of material; but the country bookseller, by the aid of the slow wagon, helped the London publisher to dispose of his wares, just as now, when both are aided by the railways. But these effusions, to which a temporary vitality had been given by the success of the novels of Mrs. Radcliff and the Minerva Press school, soon died out. Of what kind they were, it is hardly worth while to inquire. Mrs Aphra Behn had set her mark upon their predecessors, the crop of which was rank, filthy and lascivious. Mrs Behn’s plays were not of the cleanest. The stage, how loosely does Astoa tread, Who fairly puts all characters to bed – Says Pope, and their titles may sometimes tell us what we may expect from their contents. But, as Lady Wortley Montagu, Sir Walter Scott’s grandmother, and other ladies will witness, bad as they were, they used to be read aloud in a circle of young ladies, and apparently relished and remembered. Hence, no doubt, the lingering prejudice and hatred against works of fiction – feelings which are slowly dying out, but are yet in some families in full force. Their badness and ingrained viciousness soon called for their banishment, and in a short time young people were ashamed to be seen reading them. “Here, my dear Lucy,” cries Lydia Languish, “hide these books. Quick, quick; fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilet, throw Roderick Random into the closet, put the Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man, thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa, and there, put The Man of Feeling into your pocket.” Containing such fruit, it was no wonder that a circulating library was stigmatized as an “evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge,” or that novels and their authors were both hated and despised. The blood and thunder romances, and the haunted castle school which Horace Walpole introduced, drove away these; and the advent of Sir Walter Scott brought the historical novel into fashion, and redeemed the whole series of fiction, but also seems entirely to have stamped out the novels in numbers, which the followers of the Della Cruscan school still indulged in. Consequently, when Mr Dickens first began to publish the Pickwick Papers in monthly parts, it was regarded as a novelty – an experiment, indeed; and the fact that novels had been issued in that form years ago, seemed to have been quite forgotten. If the upper classes of society had become tired of the Minerva Press school, it is evident that there were lower strata into which ghosts, murders, and vampires could yet penetrate. About twenty years ago, Mr Edward Lloyd, of Salisbury Square, the proprietor of a paper afterwards edited by Douglas Jerrold, marking the success of Dickens’ shilling numbers, flooded the town with a succession of penny-number novels, especially adapted for the working classes. There was Ela, the Outcast; Ada the Betrayed, or the Murder at the Old Smithy; Varney the Vampire, or the Feast of Blood; The Old Ferry House; and The String of Pearls, a blood-thirsty novel, the principal character of which, a barber of Fleet Street, contrives to cut the throats of his customers and turn them down a trap-door, whence they issue in the shape of mutton pies of great savouriness and celebrity. Of course, with these horrors – some of them described with a rough power by a more celebrated author, who tried his ‘prentice hand on them – there was a regular flood of Jack Shephards, Blueskins, Jonathon Wilds, Claude Duvals, and pirates and robbers without number. The game, indeed, seems begun with a Penny Pickwick, of course a rank copy of Boz’s celebrated work, and issued at the same time. This, the publishers of Mr. Dickens, we believe, tried to stop by an injunction; but as the grossness of the copy was perfectly apparent, as no one could doubt that the issue was at least colourably different, since one came out monthly, price one shilling, and the other weekly at one penny, the sages of the law held that the piracy did not interfere with the original work, and it was not suppressed. At any rate, it ran on till its attractions ceased, or its readers got tired of the issue, when the tale was wound up in a moderately thick volume.

Friday, August 19, 2011

The Holocaust by R. Murry Gilchrist


Robert Murray Gilchrist’s great collection of decadent tales, The Stone Dragon and Other Tragical Romances (Methuen, 1894), owes much to W.E. Henley, ironically well known for his anti-decadent stance. Henley published many pieces in his National Observer that have become classics of the 1890s English decadent movement, including short stories by H.B. Marriott Watson, whose collection, Diogenes of London and other Fantasies and Sketches, dedicated to Henley, was also published by Methuen in 1893, stories and poems by W.B. Yeats, and verse by Graham R. Tomson.

Below is a list of Gilchrist stories that appeared in the National Observer, followed by the text of ‘The Holocaust,’ a tale in the same style as those that appeared in The Stone Dragon.

‘The Return,’ 2 July 1892
‘The Basilisk,’ 23 July 1892
‘The Writings of Althea Swarthmoor,’ 17 September 1892
‘Dame Inowslad,’ 7 January 1893
‘Witch-in-Grain,’ 6 May 1893
‘The Pageant of Ghosts,’ 19 August 1893
‘Bubble Magic,’ 18 November 1893
‘The Holocaust,’ 3 February 1894.

'The Holocaust' (The National Observer, 3 February 1894)
By R. Murray Gilchrist

My husband and master the bishop being called to Court, I journeyed yesterday to Broadlow. This morning my cousin’s second lady vehemently desired me to tell all I know of her who once held the place she adorns so brightly. We were in the still room, and the bantlings played on the floor, pulling the buckles of their mother’s shoes and croodling like culvers. The request was over-sudden; to gain time, I opened the green lattice, and looking out to the herb garden, said that little Bab herself had mounted by Neptune in the empty tank, and that in the sun-haze her countenance bore a plain likeness to one dead. And the row of clarifying waters in the window span round and round, and I swooned in madam’s arms. But she consoled me, and now to her will, I write the following history, in trust that my lord may never be permitted to read. The fustian preface I will omit; ‘tis but a record, unprofitable to the would-be adventurer, of life among the Barbary Rovers, of voyagers to Feginny, of the saving of a ship’s crew. Its six volumes are in the library, bound in pigskin, and revered by all. Of my cousin’s three years in Bologna – years devoted to the joys of Italian gallantry – little is known, for on that score he hath ever been silent.

Thirteen years ago he returned for good – even then scarce more than a youth – with the Princess Bice. As you know report tells that ere he travelled to Italy he and I had had love passages. The grandams teased me, and (for I am assured, madam, that you have heard) once I stole away from Broadlow for a month, and came back lightened. We were close akin, and Bible patriarchs enjoyed their handmaids…When news came of his marriage I prayed for a renewal of his ardour; but at the first sight of the Princes Bice, as she sat at his side in the big chariot, I knew that all hope was unavailing. Yet she was not more beautiful than you, dear lady; indeed her face lacked the mysterious and tender charm that shines from a woman whom nature has intended for motherhood. Where you are snowy, she was olive, her black her was dull and lifeless, not all quick and gold. If at any time Bab be taken into a darkened room, and the curtain lifted aback of her head some faint resemblance may be seen. Once, peeping unawares to the princess Bice’s dressing-closet, I saw her naked afront of the mirror – her wondrous hair unbound and tumbling to the floor. At my appearance her body flushed and methought I watched a rashlight burning in a grove of firs.

Her manner was haughty; at first it seemed as she mistrusted me, looking from her spouse to me and back again with some suspicion. He leaned on her shoulder, and it was as though I head, ‘This is she – was not I foolish? nay, sweetheart, trust me!’ The roses I had greeted her with were out carelessly aside.

My lord took my hand with ancient friendliness, ‘Diana is your gentlewoman,’ he said. ‘She will conduct you to the chamber.’

She smiled wryly, and laid her fingers on my palm, with a look bidding me kiss, so I raised their daintiness lothfully to my lips.

Then I led her through the lines of servants, past stately old Mother Humble – God rest her – and along the upper gallery to the bed-chamber; and there, when the door was shut, she put her hands on my shoulders and drew me to the hearth.

‘You were…’ she said. ‘He hath told me all, and I forewarn you that if – again – I can be an enemy worse than Satan himself. Yet, since you are his kinswoman, I had liefer you were my friend.’

At her girdle was a pouch made of silk, inwrought with a curious device of seed pearls; this she untied, and emptying to her table the comfits held therein, begged me to accept it as a token of her desire to act in all things well. From that even I became attached after a fashion; she held me as the flame holds the jenny-spinner. I strove to abhor her, yet was never happy save in her presence. ‘Tis to her I owe the accomplishments that commended me to the fancy of my husband the Bishop. True, in my girlhood I could strum on the harpsichord, but my music was never more than picking the tune with my forefinger and making base haphazard; and the Princess Bice taught me the rich fugues and solemn adagios of the Italian masters. The golden tissues that hang in the withdrawing-room we worked together on her toy-loom of ivory; and amongst my cousin’s books are many vellum scripts of our illumination.

Months passed, and the gossips began to grow impatient, for the couple had already spent nigh upon a year in Paris, and yet there was no sign of my lord’s happiness being consummated by the birth of one to inherit. The land, as you know, madam, goes with the title, and Sir Cadwallader, our Welsh kinsman, vowed, if ‘twere ever his, to divide the park into farms and to chop down every tree. My lord did not hate him (Sir Cadwallader being a fool), but it tore his heart to think of such beauty being destroyed. Day by day – hour by hour – the desire for a lawful child grew upon him, and she herself became impatient beyond measure, questioning minutely all the matrons and perusing all that has been writ. Several false alarms were given, and these themselves depressed the husband, for the continual deferring of hope fretted his soul. The chaplain spent long afternoons in prayer; and she harped on the idol-creed in which she had been bred, and sent to foreign shrines offerings of jewels and gold.

My lord’s demeanour changes, and, although he was never harsh, her caresses grew distasteful to him, and I have often seen him take away her hands from his brow, and crave leave to meditate. Then she would sigh like one demented, and for awhile in her voice as she sang I could find notes of anger and of braised tenderness, that wetted my eyes with tears, and made the fascination wherewith she held me deepen into love.

Three years after the return, my cousin was despatched to the Hague with secret messages for the Princess Mary of Orange, now – Heaven be praised – our queen, and in his absence, I saw her linger fondly over all that brought him to mind. She would sit in his chair, study his favourite books, and even kiss the breast of his coats, as if, perchance, she might detect some lingering aroma.

Once she strove with the women in the harvest field, hoping thus to cast away the curse of barrenness. At sunset – she had gleaned from noon – a wench passed by with her by blow, and she turned pale and sick, and came back to the house.

‘Diana,’ quoth she. ‘God’s mercy is unduly dispensed. Yon begger with her babe is starving. Go privately and bring the woman here, and feed her in my room!’

So I went and filled the strumpet with good things. Whilst she ate the Princess Bice stole the babe away, and when the half bemused mother noted its disappearance and cried out, I ran to the cabinet, and found madam, with the child patting her naked breasts and chuckling most jocundly.

Sometimes days passed without her making a comment on her grief, but anon she would lament. ‘’Tis not that I love children, Diana, but that I love my spouse. Love him – said I – marry, I adore him! Such is my devotion that were I to die in travail I should be tenfold more happy than to live unchilded.’

Each morning she writ an account of how the preceeding day had been spent; once by chance I tumbled on the unlocked book and read: ‘I am indeed weary, for what I know of his past assures me that I alone am to blame. Nay, I would yield up everything – cast away my riches – turn to the humblest wife in the land could I but once again wear him the flower of our passion. Yesterday I pondered, ‘twas as if between heaven and me hung a curtain of rusty steel God might not hear through. I have prayed and prayed and naught answers! I am tempted to turn to the Powers of Darkness. Are there no necromancers – no half-devils in human form who may help me? For now I am desperate and would travel over red hot plough-shares to compass my desire.’

A thousand preparations were made for my cousin’s home-coming. Every friend and kinsman of note was ordered, for the earldom had been given to reward his successful embassy. The Princess Bice grew paler and paler as the day approached, and mention of him brought the poppies to her cheeks. She had devised quaint entertainments, and the thought of his return made her heart beat so loudly that I might hear.

On an October evening she and I, hearing the beacon fired on Comber Knab, where had been stationed a watcher, set out to drive across the park, where the abysses writhed white vapours, like the steam from ever-shifting pots. She leaned from one window of the chariot; I from the other. The air was soft, but permeated with some subtle dullness; in the far landscape the basin-shaped depression of the Black Rake, surrounded by its tree-fringed cliffs, resembled an immense, solitary mere, with blackly glazed surface. The oaks of Hollym Chase wagged their heads above the underwood; the drowsy rooks wheeled to and fro. Twice the scritch-owl cried, and hills and valleys caught the horrid sound and echoed it with many reverberations; once a pike in the sullen stream sprang up and fell with heavy splashings. This was the good-night of all wild things; for after it the gloom deepened into inkiness, and across the sky was drawn a web denser than that of all former nights.

At the Cammer-Gate, where the wooden bridge crosses the gulf, the chariot drew up sharply, for an old man barred the way. He spake no word to the drivers, but moved slowly to the door from which my mistress leaned, and in the glimmering light of the lamp I marked his strangeness. His countenance was that of a physician, his attire of velvet edged with sable. He spoke in a foreign tongue, and she answered, her voice full of sharp gladness. ‘Twas not Italian – that I knew full well – but rather a barbarous lingo. Soon he threw into her lap a small packet, and pointing with a yellow hand to a copse of beeches, allowed the vehicle to pass. In a few minutes my lord had met us, and taken his seat by his wife’s side.

That night he was mightily loving. After supper, when the dance was opened, he was even handsomer than in the days when he had been lord of my own heart; and the Princess Bice seemed transfigured with delight. All the folk noted it; and many lamented that so fit a couple should be so unprofitable. Then, the morrow being Sunday, Dean Bastler, my mother’s uncle, who was deaf and decrepit, read his sermon on the relationship of Elkanah and his wife, taking for his text ‘Penninah had children, but Hannah had no children.’ He had never been a respecter of persons, and the discourse was little qualified to please, though, forsooth, the gaffer was eloquent enough. He told naught of Hannah’s joy, but recounted from history many instances of unprofitable wedlock, and declared that SIN alone was the cause. At the end he offered a lengthy prayer that the Almighty would see fit to bestow children on his host and hostess; and my lord, covering his face with his hands, which thing he was not wont to do, cried out Amen! As we left the chapel his lady fell on his bosom and whispered, ‘Am I not better to thee than ten sons?’ But he put her from him in silence.

An hour later I was sent for to her chamber, where I found her worn out with the frenzy of weeping. “All is over,’ she said. ‘For love’s sake be it done.’

My lord had cause to set out for London soon afterwards, and she bade him farewell with much tenderness. That night she drew me to a private place and undid before me the packet the old man had flung into her lap. ‘All it holds I know,’ she said, ‘but ‘twill be strange to you.’ And she showed me a handful of pastilicos. ‘Light one,’ she said.

I did as she bade me, and instantly a silence fell upon the place, so that even the crackling of the sea-coal was no longer heard. The air became redolent with marvellous perfumes, and I heard one tap-tapping at a door I wot not of, and felt unseen hands touching mine. She laughed, ‘To-night I will lie in the state bed,’ she said. ‘A whimzie has taken me; see that the purest linen is laid, and every window tightly fastened.’

Midnight was near when she withdrew from the company that was still in the house. At the foot of the staircase she trembled violently, and would have me clasp her waist; and when I had helped her undress she delayed me with a thousand pretexts, sitting uneasily in her chair by the fire and talking feverishly. On a table I saw in a copper chafing dish a charm of pastilicos; I made as though I would disturb its symmetry, but she called me to her side. ‘Nay, Diana, do not destroy my plan! She gasped. ‘Give me the taper.’

I placed it in her hands; she lighted it, and moved to the chafing dish and touched the pastilicos one by one. Then I flew to the door, but she followed me open mouthed and caught me in her arms. Her lips said, though no sound came, ‘Stay with me! stay with me!’

My limbs lost all power and I fell to the floor. The Princess Bice crawled into the bed. From the pastilicos arose an angry melody; then all was silent. Soon the air of the chamber trembled and gathered together over the smoulderings; and hovering there I beheld the figure of a man so fearfully and miraculously beautiful that my eyes were dazzled. The curtains parted and fell to, and I saw no more.

At daybreak I felt her breath upon my cheek, and heard her command of silence. Some time before noon all the servants were called together in the Council Room, where my mistress, very haggard but full of triumph, sat in the great seat from which Mall of Broadlow had dispensed judgment. ‘Friends,’ she said sogtly, ‘for I may call you friends, I have news of import. Your master’s trouble will soon be removed, for I have cause – and ‘tis not hope now, but truth certainly – to believe that in due time I shall bring him a child.’ So unexpected was her announcement that even those who had regarded her with disfavour, fell to their knees, and, as she passed through their midst, caught the edges of her skirt to kiss. Dean Bastler had stood at the door and one had repeated her words loudly, and he raised his hands in benediction; but she passed without any sign, and, although she spoke not of it to her guests, all matrons divined the cause of her vapourish spirits. And when my lord returned ‘twas to find the house mad with delight. The months passed quickly; all preparations were made for the lying-in; but the Princess Bice herself took interest in naught save her husband’s devotion.

The night of her lightening came at last, and by her request I sat with her before her labour. She had instructed me to light at a certain time the pastilico that still remained. As the clock struck I obeyed, and saw her rise from her bed and leave the chamber, ever increasing the space between us; I followed – sank upon the stairs – strove vainly to cry for succour.

Afterwards I crawled on hands and knees through many long deserted passages, and into the open park. Her bare feet passed hurriedly over the grass in the distance, then turned across to the road, and to the wooden bridge where we had met the old man. She reached the beech copse, and ere she entered a flame leapt forward to embrace her; I heard a long and terrible sigh. From the house came a crowd of searchers, headed by my lord; amidst the heart-burnt wood they found Bab lying on a bed of charred leaves.

Saturday, August 13, 2011

'Penny Fiction' by Francis Hitchman




The following article, by Francis Hitchman, appeared in the Quarterly Review in July 1890, and is one of the most detailed and interesting contemporary accounts of penny dreadfuls and penny part publications.

‘We must educate our masters,' said Lord Sherbrooke (then Mr. Lowe), in the course of the debates on the Reform Bill of 1867. The remark fell upon fertile soil, and Mr. Forster's Education Bill of 1870 sprang directly out, of it. The very class, who but a few years before had detected in the demand for education nothing but the greedy clamour of the clergy of the hated ‘Establishment' for more influence than was rightly theirs, and who under the influence of the happily extinct Manchester School of politicians, had been most vehement in their protest against State interference between parents and children, now demanded ‘free, compulsory, and secular education,' always at the cost of the State, and always to be directed by the bitterest enemies of that ‘State Church,' to which the working classes were indebted for all the education they had received for half a century. It is useless to resuscitate the miserable controversy. The Birmingham Education League is dead, and the quarrels which it stirred up are, we may hope, dead with it. We have been ‘educating our masters' in the three R.'s for nearly twenty years, and some of us are beginning to ask, to what use they have put that painful training in the rudiments which has cost the country so much solid money. The natural inquiry is, what do they read? Not indeed that they read much. The modern system of education, with the pressure of impending examinations forever weighing upon teachers and children, is admirably adapted to prevent the youth of the period from troubling itself greatly about literature in any form. The son of the working man, who leaves school as soon after he has passed the age of thirteen as possible, has no love for books, and, having ‘passed his standard,' not unnaturally thinks he, has practically done with the whole apparatus of learning for the rest of his life. By and by he will perhaps take some small interest in public affairs, or the concerns of his trades' union may become important to him, and in that case he will spend his Sunday morning over a newspaper. With the Sunday newspaper, however, we have in this place nothing to do. Except for one trumpery addition, their number and character remain pretty much what they were when the subject was dealt with in these pages more than ten years ago. Before the time for the Sunday paper arrives, however, the working lad that the enterprising publishers of Shoe Lane and the purlieus thereof have provided him with a certain store of amusement. A walk during the dinner hour - say from twelve to one - through the courts and alleys in the irregular space which is, roughly speaking, bounded on the north by Holborn, on the south by the Thames, on the west by St. Martin's Lane, and on the east by St. Paul's and its precincts, will afford the observant passenger sufficient food for reflection. He will find that while a certain proportion of the lads from the various offices and factories in that region are beguiling their leisure with various minor games, or indulging in the rough horse-play in which the London ‘larrikin' delights, many of the remainder are occupied in reading. In the same way the lads employed in City offices and warehouses, who in many cases have a great deal of leisure, naturally spend it in the same way.

It will, of course, be said that this is a laudable occupation. There are not a few good people in whose eyes a book is a species of fetish, and who look upon printed paper with as much reverence as do the Mahometans. To all such the boy, who, in their own phrase, ‘never has a book out of his hands,’ is worthy of respect and even of admiration. Unfortunately, however, the lad of this type revels in a literature which is not precisely of the kind for which Cobbett and Franklin hoarded their pence. No small proportion of it comes under the category of 'Penny Dreadfuls.' It had been hoped that books of this class had become extinct. A somewhat sanguine writer on the subject a few years ago expressed a lively satisfaction at the fact that he had inquired in vain for the catchpenny romances that were popular in the days of his youth. ‘The Mysteries of the Court,' ‘The Mysteries of London,' ‘The Haunted House, or Love and Crime,’ ‘Maria Martin, or the Murder in the Red Barn,' ‘The Haunted Cellar, a tale of Fleet Ditch,' and 'Joskin the Body Snatcher,' were, he found, ‘out of print.' It would seem, however, that they are 'out of print' only in the serial form. A walk through Holywell Street will show that they are still to be bought in sixpenny volumes - price four pence halfpenny at the discount booksellers and that they dispute the favour of the poorer class of readers with translations of the improving, romances of MM. Zola and Paul de Kock.

But this is not all. In a lane not far from Fleet Street there 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. At the present time no fewer than fifteen of these mischievous publications are in course of issue from this one place. They are not, it is true, very new, but they have a steady and considerable sale in the back streets, and are constantly advertised as in course of re-issue. First on the list comes 'Spring Heeled Jack, or the Terror of London,' No. 2 given away with No. 1, with ‘a splendid coloured plate gratis.’ The 'plate,' a coarse woodcut printed on tinted paper, represents a stage-coach crowded with affrighted passengers, over whose heads springs the devil with horns, hoofs, tail, and bat-like wings complete. The story is what might be expected a tale of highwaymen, murderers, burglars, wicked noblemen, and lovely and persecuted damsels, whose physical charms and voluptuous embraces are dilated upon with exceeding unction. It is almost needless to say that the highwaymen of the romance are not the sorry and sordid rogues we know them to have been in real life, but always 'dashing,' 'high spirited,' and ‘bold.' As a matter of course, they all carry pistols, which they use with unerring skill, which never miss fire, and apparently never require re-loading. It is equally a matter of course that the enemies of these gallant fellows - the constables, who at the time of the story, which is left in uncertainty but is presumably about the middle of the eighteenth century, are under the orders of a ‘Commissioner' - are ugly, stupid, ill conditioned, and cowardly; that it is a ‘paternal government' under which 'things have reached such a pitch that a man may be fined, perhaps imprisoned, for carrying a pistol to protect himself;' and that, in one word, all the officers of the law are ‘tyrants’ and 'oppressors,' whom it is the duty of ‘spirited lads' to resist to the uttermost. No. 2 on our list bears the promising title of ‘Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street,' and is a delectable story of a barber under whose shop is a cellar into which his customers are precipitated through a trap door, to be robbed and murdered at leisure. By way of adding to the ludicrous ghastliness of the story, the corpses of the victims, who appear to average about one per diem, are made into meat pies by a fascinating woman who keeps a shop in Bell Yard. There is the usual apparatus of a gang of desperate criminals of superhuman strength, sagacity, and courage; and of stupid and blundering watchmen and honest folk. Everybody always goes armed, and is ready to produce his weapons on the smallest provocation, or none at all; and the use of a pistol is invariably represented as a proof of courage and presence of mind. ‘Cheeky Charlie, or what a Boy can do' - the third of these romances - is an impossible tale of an outcast boy, who is rescued by a personage very appropriately called ‘the Vagabond,' from the cruelties, of the workhouse and the Guardians of the Poor. The story is almost abject in its silliness - many children of twelve years old could write as coherently and as well - but it enforces with great energy the theory that the constituted authorities are both rogues and fools, the fool predominating. ‘Green as Grass,' No. 4 of the series, might also have been written by a sharp errand boy. The tale is of a swindling attorney, who with his son victimizes a wealthy but intensely vulgar family, whose foolish son gives the title to the book. It is stupid beyond expression in conception and execution alike, the fun is intensely depressing, and the illustrations so wretched as to suggest the idea that the artist (?) must be caricaturing himself. ‘Turnpike Dick' is described as the true history of all the celebrated highwaymen, and appears to be a hash up of the moral and improving biography of Dick Turpin and his ‘gallant companions.' The hero is always in company with a magnificent horse; is always armed with sword and pistols, sumptuously dressed; he has ‘a rich, mellow voice,' in spite of his 'nocturnal rambles' and frequently repeated ‘draughts of brandy;' he is of matchless physical beauty, and is naturally beloved by the most adorable of women; and he beguiles his leisure with wine and song amidst a select crew of 'knights of the road,' whom he treats in a ‘haughty yet affable manner.' The moon is always 'shining merrily' on his gallant exploits, and fortune is ever on the side of the handsome hero, and as constantly unfavourable to the stupid, cowardly, and ill-looking constables and their assistants. ‘Jack Sheppard,' burglar and prison breaker, is the hero of the sixth romance on the list. The story is constructed on precisely the same lines as the last mentioned, and may be compendiously described as a glorification of vice and crime. The ‘large coloured picture, presented gratis' with the first number, emphasizes this point, representing, as the epigraph informs, the reader, ‘Jack Sheppard commencing his career of undying fame (!) in the carpenter's shop.' The ‘Poor Boys of London, a Life Story for the People,' is a tale of slightly loftier pretensions, in the course of which the author displays his acquaintance with casual wards, thieves’ kitchens, and criminal resorts generally, and uses such descriptive and dramatic powers as he possesses to extenuate the offences of the 'poor boys' who, in his own phrase, are ‘driven to crime.' ‘The School on the Sea' is a tale relating the rebellion of a number of boys against an impossible sea-captain, who is the head of an equally impossible school on a ship provided by the Admiralty. The whole thing is a farrago of disgusting rubbish, but it appears to be popular. The title of ‘He would be a Clown, or the Pet of the Pantomime,' sufficiently explains the substance of the next serial on our list, the author of which, if he proves nothing else, demonstrates very clearly that he knows nothing whatever of the stage. ‘Tales of Pirates, Smugglers, and Buccaneers;’ ‘Three Fingered Jack, the Terror of the Antilles,' and ‘Lions and Tigers, or the Pirates of the South Pacific,' are romances, the substance of which may be guessed from their titles. The moral tone is simply deplorable. Lawlessness and violence are the subjects of the writers' fondest admiration, and the severer matter is pleasingly seasoned with love scenes of the 'luscious' kind, which are almost as offensive in their way as the performances of certain young lady novelists of a higher rank. Of the remaining works on this publisher's list no special mention need be made. 'Broad Arrow Jack,’ ‘Captain Macheath, the Prince of the Highway,' and ‘Famous Fights in the Prize Ring,' all point the same moral - that no life is so delightful as a life of roguery tempered with violence; that highwaymen and thieves are heroes; and their mistresses queens of beauty and romance, whose venal caresses are the rightful guerdon of skill, daring, and dash.

When it is remembered that this foul and filthy trash circulates by thousands and tens of thousands week by week amongst lads who are at the most impressionable period of their lives, and whom the modern system of purely secular education has left without ballast or guidance, it is not surprising that the authorities have to lament the prevalence of juvenile crime, and that the Lord Mayor, and Aldermen should constantly have to adjudicate in cases for which these books are directly responsible. The story is always the same. An errand boy or an office lad is caught in the act of robbing his master - 'frisking the till,' embezzlement, or forgery. In his desk are found sundry numbers of these romances of the road, a cheap revolver, a small stock of cartridges and a black mask. A little pressure brings out the confession that those ‘properties' have been bought by the youthful culprit with the intention of emulating the ‘knights of the road,' the tale of whose exploits has fascinated him. It is necessary, for the sake of other lads in the same employment, to press for a conviction and the boy is taken off to prison, to come out a passed recruit of the great army of crime.

Even where the literature offered for the consumption of this class of boys is not directly criminal, it is often dangerously foolish, and even vicious. One publication boldly announces itself as 'The Bad Boys' Paper;' and, though the editor, who adopts the pseudonym of Guy Rayner, ostentatiously announces that his ‘one aim and object is to provide a healthy and entertaining journal,' it is impossible to say that he has attained it. The hero of one is a boy who runs away from school after getting drunk with his comrades on smuggled punch in the dormitory; another relates the adventures of an English boy of fifteen in India, whose favourite companion is a tame tiger, and who does wonderful things with a bow and arrow; another is a story of low life, with all the vulgarity retained, and the humour carefully left out. The remainder of the paper fully comes up to the level thus indicated. An even worse specimen of this class of paper is a shabby and ill printed rag which has for title ‘The Boys London and Boys of New York.' This sheet is printed in London from stereotyped plates, which are very obviously manufactured in America, and appears to have been issued for many years past, the number for the week ending 29th September 1889, being 647. The staple is of course fiction, the character of which may be judged from the titles of the stories, instalments of which appear in this number: The Haunted Glen, a Story of Mystery (with an illustration of appalling hideousness); the Steam Catamaran, a Legend of the North West; the Shorty's Trip around the World; Johnnie Burgoo, or the Mystery of a Boy's Life; the Maniac Engineer; Mad Anthony Wayne; Cale Loring and his Demon Dog, and the Wreck of the ‘Columbus.' ‘The London Story Paper’, which is almost as old an undertaking as that just mentioned, is of much the same type, printed like it from American stereotypes, with illustrations a shade better.

English papers for boys are almost as foolish, but there is improvement in the external appearance of most of them. The oldest is the ‘Boys of England,' now in the fourteenth year of its existence. The editor and proprietor, announces somewhat conspicuously that this ‘journal of travel, sport, fun, and instruction' is ‘subscribed to by H.R.H. Prince Arthur and Count William Bernstorff.' Why those distinguished persons should honour the paper it is not easy to see. There is certainly nothing in its contents to induce tutors and governors to recommend it, though it may be admitted that there is nothing flagrantly offensive. The chief failings of the paper are its weakness, and curiously ‘second-hand' air. The American reprinted matter is especially thin and poor. Much the same thing may be said of two other publications of the same class which are issued by the same publisher - 'Boys of the Empire' and ‘The Boy's Comic Journal.' Other papers of a similar but slightly lower type are: 'Ching Ching’s Own,' ‘The Boy's Champion Journal,' ‘The Boys' Leisure Hour,' and ‘The Young Folks’ Paper.' They present no feature of special interest, and call for little remark. The best that can be said of them is that they are comparatively harmless; the worst, that no boy is likely to be the better for reading them. He will derive neither information nor instruction from them, and it may be doubted whether the time spent over them would not be infinitely more usefully employed in cricket and football or some lighter games. Boys cannot, of course, be invariably engaged in athletic exercise, but they would certainly be far wiser if they devoted themselves to chess or draughts, or even dominoes, than if they indulged in the intellectual debauchery which a constant study of books of this class implies.

For children of a larger growth enterprising publishers cater with great liberality and with corresponding profit to themselves. The number of penny weekly papers, leaving newspapers, trade journals, and professedly religious organs wholly out of account, is literally enormous, and their circulation almost fabulous. There is probably no family of the classes rather absurdly described as 'working' and ‘lower middle' in which one at least of these prints is not bought as regularly as Saturday night comes round. In many such families three, four, and even more are taken by various members and lent from one to another. Including such as may be seen on the counters of public-houses and the tables of coffee taverns and cheap restaurants, we are probably well within the mark in saying that every copy sold is read by six persons. Now as one of these prints boasts a circulation of 334,000 a week (?), another modestly announces its sale as ‘a little under half a million' (?), a third claims a quarter of a million, and several are known to sell over 100,000 weekly - it is obvious that the family penny papers combined must be one of the greatest social forces in the kingdom. Whether they are worthy of their vocation is a question which it may be worth while to investigate.

The first point which strikes the inquirer is the obvious niggardliness with which most of these prints are managed. The American cheap press is drawn upon largely and unblushingly. More than one of the weekly prints, to be mentioned hereafter, is composed almost exclusively of reprints of this kind, while several of the remainder obtain from one-third to one-half of their matter from the same source. Two methods of procedure are open to the enterprising publisher. In one case he simply cuts the story out of the American journal and reprints it as it stands, trusting to the printer's reader to correct the eccentricities of American orthography. This method may be commended for its comparative honesty. The author, it is true, receives no compensation for the use that is made of his work, but he is served no worse than the hundreds of English authors of infinitely greater pretensions, whose work is similarly ‘conveyed' every day in the United States. The English reader, too, is not plundered. The story presents itself for what it is - a tale of American life by an American writer - and as such he gets it at a very cheap rate. Greater ingenuity is required for the second method, which is, however, less popular with publishers on account of the greater expense which it entails. Under this system the publisher hands over a copy of the work which he wishes to have edited for the English market to one of the hacks in his employment. Pen in hand, this latter goes over the whole book, altering, striking out, writing in, and generally transmogrifying it. The title of the book is changed, as are the headings of the chapters; over-long chapters are divided; two short chapters are run into one; the dramatis personae are re-baptized, names that are familiar to the students of English fiction being substituted for American names and titles; the ‘brown stone, mansion on Fifth Avenue' becomes a stately edifice in Belgravia or Grosvenor Square; Saratoga or Long Branch becomes Brighton or Scarborough; the 'trip to Europe' is a Continental tour or a visit to Scotland; and the millionaire's country-house on the Hudson River becomes a hunting-box in the Shires, or a fishing lodge in the West of Ireland. The people are similarly changed. The Senator is transformed into a Duke or an Earl at the least - titles are very cheap in fiction of this character - the M. C. blossoms out into an M.P.; the Pittsburg ironmaster into a Manchester cotton lord, and the Wall Street operator into a prototype of the Rothschilds or the Barings. When a little more care is thought desirable, the style is modified in accordance with English notions of the fitness of things, and the more obvious Americanisms are suppressed. The book thus becomes an English novel for all practical purposes at a cost to the enterprising proprietor of the penny Weekly of about 5l., which, if he is in an unwontedly generous mood, he may perhaps make guineas. Instances have been known of a story so manipulated having passed through a periodical of the lower class, and having afterwards blazed forth in all the glory of chromo-printed boards for sale at the railway stations (price 2s.).

There is, it must be admitted, one trifling drawback to these ingenious operations in the copyright complications which occasionally result, a very odd instance of which occurred a year or so ago. An English writer, who is not altogether unknown in the neighbourhood of Fleet Street, produced a novel in the usual way in London, which had the customary run at the circulating libraries and at the end of the season was forgotten. Some time afterwards he was not a little surprised to discover that his story, with some changes of names and places, was appearing in weekly instalments in a well-known periodical. He naturally complained, and the sequel to his complaint was that he made the unwelcome discovery that his story had been translated into American, and re-translated from the American version into English. Legal proceedings were threatened, and the pillaged author confidently expected a considerable sum from the publisher of the, periodical, but the latter was, luckily for himself, able to show that the original story owed so much to a German original that he was able to set his opponent at defiance.

The proprietors of these publications do not of course rely only upon American sources for their wares. Ancient and forgotten Annuals, Keepsakes, Books of Beauty, Friendship's Offerings, Town and Country Magazines, and similar repertories of ‘genteel fiction' are regularly sifted for available matter. One editor indeed makes no secret of his dependence on these sources, as will be evident from the annexed advertisement which appears weekly in his papers:-

‘Literary contributions to…must be short, and very curious or very amusing, original, translated or copied. Copied scraps must be from old books, magazines, periodicals, or newspapers published originally at least forty-two years ago. Literary contributions (if used) will be paid for as follows: Original or translations, three halfpence per line, and extra when specially good; copied or cuttings from print, one penny per line. Compiled articles counted original.'

The same thing is done by the proprietors of other weekly pennyworths, who enlist the great army of amateurs in their service by offers of prizes of one or two guineas for the best story of a certain length, reserving to themselves the right of publishing all the competing compositions, even though they may not adjudge the prize to them. There are besides a great number of persons to whom the pleasure of appearing in print is a sufficient reward for a great deal of labour, and from them much ‘copy' is obtained. For the rest, the verses and miscellaneous paragraphs, which fill up the odd corners of the minor prints of the day, are raked together from all conceivable sources: ancient jest books, collections of anecdotes, defunct and abortive magazines, and the boxes of odd volumes which may be seen outside secondhand bookstalls and brokers’ shops, are all put under contribution.

A different origin may be ascribed to much of the ‘original’ work which appears in the columns of some of these prints. One proprietor, for example, has a regular manufactory of periodical fiction. Thither a little band of ‘literary gentlemen' bend their steps betimes each morning, and until four or five o'clock in the afternoon they labour in the transmogrification of American novels as a above described, or, in the production of new and original romances of high life and the passions. Sometimes by way of stimulating their invention, the proprietor provides them with a set of illustrations which have done duty before, and which they may ‘write up to' as best they can. More frequently, however, they have to rely on their own unassisted genius. The principal point upon, which stress is laid, is that every instalment of these romances shall contain at least one situation susceptible of pictorial treatment. It is hardly necessary to say that the gentlemen who accept engagements of this kind are 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. One example, who was tolerably well known a few years ago, was a University man, a beneficed clergyman, who, having had a misunderstanding with his bishop, threw up his living and abandoned the clerical dress and habits. Another man of the same type bore an historic name, took honours at Oxford, and was expected to do great things. His abilities were of a high order, but he was idle, reckless, and, worst of all, constitutionally incapable of resisting the seductions of drink. He had a facile pen and great stores of information, but he never succeeded in accomplishing anything beyond the veriest hack-work. His greatest achievement was a romance written for a weekly paper now defunct. The proprietor had made a journey to Paris, and whilst there had picked up for a small sum some fifty or sixty wood blocks which had been used to illustrate a romance by Ponson du Terrail. These were handed over to the hack in question, with instructions to arrange them in any order that he pleased, and to write up to them so as to use them all. This romance, whose principal merit was that it presented not the faintest resemblance to anything that Ponson du Terrail ever wrote, achieved a considerable amount of success, but produced little in the way of either money or reputation for the unfortunate author, who died in a London hospital a year or two after the story was completed.

It must not, of course, be supposed that the Grub Street of today is populated exclusively with broken-down University men. A goodly proportion of them began life in the unambitious capacities of compositors, reporters, and hangers on of the newspaper press. One well known personage of this class began what in moments of confidence he delights to style his ‘literary career,' when acting as shopman to a second hand bookseller in a manufacturing town of the Midlands. Another distinguished person of the same type translates dubious French novels on week days, and on Sundays actually officiates as minister of some sort of Dissenting chapel. A third was a village schoolmaster in Scotland, while of a fourth a curious anecdote was told a few years ago in a monthly magazine. ‘A friend of the writer,’ said the magazinist, 'has in his service a housemaid whose father writes novels for a Fleet Street publisher from 10 to 4 daily.' A still more amusing illustration of the social status of some of our popular instructors was lately related by a lady, the wife of a well known physician. Her cook having repeatedly neglected to send up the dinner with the punctuality which is desirable in a well-ordered household, she remonstrated with some sharpness, and to her astonishment was informed that the young person in question was so much occupied with the novel she was writing that she had been unable to pay due attention to her duties in the kitchen. It would be easy to multiply instances of the same state of things, but the fullest information could probably be given by the officials of the Reading Room at the British Museum. Those who wish to see the subject, treated in the most amusing light, however, may be referred to a clever novel of the ‘Besant and Rice' series, which has for title ‘With Harp and Crown,' and in which real and well known persons are described under feigned names.

From writers of this type it is, of course, hopeless to expect work of any high pretension, nor as a matter of fact is it to be found. But if the literary level of the weekly press be low, its morals are irreproachable. Fortunately it has been found out immorality and indecency do not pay. Not merely is Lord Campbell's Act a stringent one, stringently enforced, but the feeling of the public is distinctly against nastiness of the kind which is the surest passport to the favour of the Parisian democracy. A print such as the Vie Parisienne, the Gil Blas, or the Petit Journal pour Rire, would not live for a month in London, for the sole reason that shopkeepers and newsvendors would not exhibit it, and decent people, whether of the ouvrière or of the petite bourgeoise class, would not buy it and would not place it where their families might see it. It is easy to vent cheap sneers at the pruderie anglaise which has brought about this state of things, and for tenth-rate novelists, who would never have been heard of but for their clumsy Zolaism, to say unpleasant and ungracious things about English girls. The fact remains, and it is certainly one of which no Englishman need be ashamed, that the popular literature of to-day is singularly pure in tone, and that any violation of decency would inevitably lead to such a falling of circulation as would practically amount to the ruin of the paper guilty of it. At the same time it must be admitted, that this very care for purity and decorum produces some rather anomalous results in itself; while the innocent ignorance of the writers on all points connected with those exalted personages, about whom they write so fluently, is sometimes laughable to an almost painful degree. One or two elementary truths might with great advantage be impressed upon the minds of those authors. It might, for example, be pointed out to them that peers of the realm do not as a rule look for their wives amongst the shop girls and milliners' apprentices of Regent Street and Bond Street; that baronets are not, as a rule, superhumanly wicked; that the chorus and ‘extra ladies' of the minor theatres are not necessarily superhumanly virtuous; that ladies of birth, family, and position, are not invariably much worse from the moral point of view than their own maids; and finally, that gentle- people, of whatever age or condition they may be, have occasionally some notion of the value of self-restraint, and are sometimes actuated by motives a little higher than those of a sordid self-interest.

If those few and simple rules were observed, and if the caterers for that taste for high life, which obviously prevails amongst those whom Mr. Laurence Oliphant was wont to call the ‘lower middles,' would but condescend to write from a somewhat higher point of view than that of the servants' hall, something better might be afforded than is to be found in these romances. Take, for example, the batch of papers which represent what may very fairly be called the ‘J. F. Smith school of fiction.' This is perhaps the oldest of all the styles of the penny weekly press. ‘The London Journal,' in which it took its rise, made its first appearance nearly forty nine years ago. As usual it began as ‘a weekly record of literature, science, and art,' but science and art were left on one side at a very early period, and the paper became a vehicle for thrilling romances of fashionable life of the most exciting kind. The principal author was a Mr. J. F. Smith, who was, if not the founder – that title being properly due to the notorious G. W. M. Reynolds - the great exemplar of the penny periodical romance. Mr. Smith, who died at the beginning of the month of March last, was a man of more than respectable abilities, and was content to lead a queer, disreputable Bohemian life on the salary of a Parliamentary Under-Secretary. Curiously enough, he was absolutely unknown amongst journalists, and even amongst ‘literary men' of the type immortalized by the author of ‘Caste.' Yet, as the writer of the single obituary notice which appeared in the daily papers remarks, ‘he had a thousand readers where Dickens had ten, or Thackeray one. He was the people's chosen author; he won the throne of their affections, and he held it unassailed.' During the time of his greatest prosperity he lived in a second-rate Bloomsbury boarding-house, and his only public appearances were at the office of the late Mr. Johnson, the proprietor of ‘The London Journal,' where he wrote his weekly instalment of copy, and whence, having drawn his salary, he disappeared for a week. With few exceptions his works were thrilling romances of fashionable life, but he began his career as a writer of fiction as a devotee of the ‘romantic school.' His first success was achieved in 1849, when, after Rush's murders, he wrote an exciting novel with the taking title of ‘Stanfield Hall.’ It's only fair to say, however, that the tale, though sufficiently sensational, was not a mere vulgar reproduction of the story of Mr. Jermy, but a work more in the style of the late G. P.R. James, with a touch of Charles Dickens's humour. ‘Stanfield Hall' was followed by ‘Minnigrey' ‘Woman and her Master,' 'Amy Lawrence,' and an endless series of tales upon the same lines, thanks to which 'The London Journal' was at one time the best property of its class in London. In the course of time Mr. Smith seceded from 'The London Journal’ and joined the staff of a rival print of the same, kind 'The Family Paper' of Messrs. Cassell where it is said that he was not quite so successful. He had, however, founded a school of romancers which is with us to this day. Mr. Pierce Egan the Younger, whose name suggests memories of the Tom and Jerry era, was the most successful amongst them; but he was nearly, if not quite, equalled by a certain Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth whose name will not be found in Mr. Mudie's lists Miss Braddon, Mr. Charles Reade, Mrs. Henry Wood, whose romances, however, scarcely hit the popular taste. Mr. Smith had founded his school, and the class for which he catered was satisfied with his method. Its principal characteristics were summed up some time ago, and they have not changed in the interval. The romances if Mr. Smith and his imitators, it was, said, ‘contain plenty of vice and not a little crime, but the criminal always comes to grief in the end, and virtue is duly rewarded with wealth and titles and honour. The villains are generally of high birth and repulsive appearance; the lowly personages always of ravishing beauty and unsullied virtue. Innocence and loveliness in a gingham gown are perpetually pursued by vice and debauchery in varnished boots and spotless gloves. Life is surrounded by mystery; detectives are ever on the watch, and the most astonishing pitfalls and mantraps are concealed in the path of the unwary and the innocent. Nor are reflection and observation wanting. Maxims of the most tremendous morality, overwhelming aphorisms, and descriptive passages of surpassing fineness are scattered lavishly over the pages.’

So far as it goes, this description was perfectly accurate in the fifties and still remains so; but one really important point has been omitted - the stories are all identically the same. When one has been read, all have been read; the names and the localities only are changed. Lady Laura's hair is brown, and her eyes are blue in one story; Lady Constance in another has black hair and violet eyes, but each goes through the same adventures, each is made love to by an unprincipled adventurer - Captain Hawke in one story, Major Falcon in another - each rejects his guilty overtures with the same superb disdain, and if, when the trying scene is over, Lady Constance goes into hysterics, Lady Laura takes her revenge by ‘falling into a deathly swoon.’ So with the other persons of the story. For some inscrutable reason known only to the penny romancer, the baronet is always a villain, is always the possessor of colossal wealth, which he squanders remorselessly for the guiltiest purposes, while the Earl is as invariably the best and noblest of men, against whom, calumny and cruelty launch their envenomed shafts in vain. There is always a stolen child and a missing box of deeds, containing amongst other things the parchment certificate of the marriage of the hero's parents, without which of course - the Registrar-General's office being unknown in the land of Smithian romance - the hero is considered by everybody to be of illegitimate birth. When at last, through the supernatural skill of the detective and the simple mother wit of the comic servant, the missing deed box is discovered, the hero is placed in possession of his title and estates; the wicked baronet is discomfited and sent into exile; the intriguing lawyer, whose intrigues would not have puzzled a child, is led off to the bulks, which, it appears, still exist at Chatham; and the virtuous heroine is rewarded for her constancy by promotion from the servants' hall to that coronet which, as Foote taught the world a century and a half ago, is the invariable reward of ‘Piety in pattens.’

All this, it will be said, is very poor stuff, but the, popular appetite for it seems to be practically inexhaustible. ‘The London Journal' is still in existence, though but the ghost of its former self, subsisting mainly, as it would seem, on it's ancient reputation, and by the republication of those thrilling romances of Mr. Smith by which it first achieved success. Its place has been taken by a rival publication almost identical in size, shape, and general appearance, which has for title ‘The London Reader,' and is now in the twenty-seventh year of its existence, and by a ‘Family Reader' now in its twentieth year. All three have something more than a family likeness; even the illustrations might be drawn by the same hands. The men are always ten and a half feet high at the least, and the women about eight feet. Both are handsome in the same way, with straight noses and strongly accentuated mouths, and both, men and women alike, habitually stand with the head a little on one side, the body leaning forward, and one hand thrust backwards behind the hip, an attitude into which a lay-figure may be put readily enough, but which no human being would voluntarily adopt.

These illustrations were adopted in the first instance as a means of marking the difference between ‘The London Journal,' and its predecessor amongst the penny weeklies, ‘The Family Herald.’ This last-named paper, which made its first appearance in 1844, is a really favourable specimen of the class to which it belongs, and has had the honour of being praised by two such very dissimilar critics as the late Leigh Hunt and ‘The Saturday Review' in its former days. Hunt, in the last pages of his 'autobiography,' tells how in his old age he was still cheerful and could still call for and enjoy his ‘Family Herald,’ adding a few words of kindly commendation of the little paper. The ‘Saturday,' in its turn, once allowed an article in praise of it to appear in its columns, which, though perhaps a little warmer in its eulogies than the circumstances warranted, was not without a certain justification. The ‘Family Herald' is, in fact, what it has always been, a very creditable specimen of the popular literature of the day. The bulk of the matter is, of course, fiction, but space is found for other things. Of the fiction it may at once be said that it will compare favourably not merely with that which appears in magazines of its own class, but with the stories which adorn the pages of magazines of much greater pretension. Several well-known writers, indeed, first made their bow to the public in the pages of ‘The Family Herald,' notably that Miss Warden, whose ‘House on the Marsh' was the sensation of the season a few years ago. In themselves the stories are at worst inoffensive, but they have certain positive merits which can be fully appreciated only after a long course of penny fiction. In the first place, the tales are not too ‘genteel;' in the second, they are not wildly sensational. In other words, the writers do not strive to make up for their incapacity to delineate character by nicknaming their puppets out of the highest ranks of the peerage, and by putting into the mouths of high-born ladies language and ideas which would be considered vulgar even by the shop-girls and apprentices who form the majority of the readers of these papers. Nor do they endeavour, as a rule, to atone for the feebleness of their grasp of character by inventing situations of impossible horror and incongruity. The stories are, in short, very fair specimens of fiction of the second order, and may certainly claim recognition on the ground of morality and good feeling. That part of ‘The Family Herald’ which is not occupied by novels, serial and other, is filled with miscellaneous clippings on various subjects; riddles, and an essay on some social or general topic not political. These essays will seem to most readers the weakest part of the paper. They are very trite and commonplace, and consist mainly in the repetition of two or three obvious reflections in a variety of ways.

Partly by way of supplement to their weekly issues and partly as independent speculations, the proprietors of some of these periodicals publish short stories in a separate form, each complete in a single issue, to which they give the name of 'Novelettes.' Those of 'The Family Herald' are of much the same character as the stories in that journal. They are perfectly cleanly, sometimes rather dull, and sometimes mildly sensational. If their readers get little moral or ethical teaching from them, they are at least able to while away their leisure pleasantly. It is not always possible to speak at gently of some other of these publications. ‘The Bow Bells Weekly’ a rival of ‘The Family Herald,' which after sundry vicissitudes has lately made its appearance in a new form publishes one of these ‘Novelettes' every week. The idea seems to be a successful one, for the issue has continued for a period of about a dozen years, but an examination of the stories does not leave behind it a very exalted idea of the intellectual capacity of either writers or readers. The stories are all of ‘high life,’ or rather of something which the writers imagine high life to be. The puppets invariably address each other in the very finest English finest from the point of view of the servants hall, that is to say; and when the author speaks in his own person, his skilful manipulation of the pronouns 'who,' 'whom,' and ‘which,' with and without the conjunction, affords the reader a wonderful insight into syntax. The incidents are of the most romantic and blood curdling description, the mysteries enthralling, and the passions of every personage of the fiercest kind. A murder or two, a mysterious disappearance, an abduction attempted or successful, are but parts of the common form in which these romances are cast, and in the end everything always comes right; virtue, youth, and beauty inseparable allies in these stories are triumphant, and the villain, as always happens in real life, meets the fate he deserves. Of course it would be absurd to look for perfection, but it might have been hoped that the standard would be a little higher than it is. The publishers would seem, however, to understand their business, and, finding that trash will meet a ready market, content themselves with supplying it.

At the same time it might have been hoped that some effort would be made to rise above the level of mawkish silliness with which they appear to be content. One, in the series entitled 'The Princess's Novelette,' is as fair a specimen of this quality as could be desired. The heroine is the daughter of a London banker who is hustled by a body of working men at a station on the Underground Railway. She is rescued by a gentleman who ‘offers a striking contrast to the gay youth of gilded saloons.' Arrived safely at home, she contrasts her hero with her own brother, ‘by profession a soldier,' whom she at once puts through his facings with the question:-

‘”Augustus, are you fearless and brave?”
‘”Ella, my dear," said Mrs. Laughton, “what an extraordinary question to put to your brother! Soldiers are not all intended to risk their lives. The common privates, sons of labourers and mechanics, are drilled on purpose to fight. Gentlemen officers are to keep them in their proper places."'

Satisfied apparently with this lucid explanation Ella's 'ideas respecting marriage are altered,' and she sets to work to find the hero who saved her from the wicked working man. In the most artless way in the world she gets his name and address at the station and sets a private detective on his track, instructing him to meet her at the house of a nurse formerly in the service of the family. Having thus discovered all about her hero, she intrigues for an invitation to a house where she expects to meet him. There she flirts outrageously with a baronet of great wealth concerning whom the reader learns nothing save that he speaks of a waltz as ‘the mazy.' Having refused the baronet's offer of marriage, she invites herself to the house of an aunt in the country, in the hope that her hero, who rejoices in the remarkable name of Edwy Delyun, may make his appearance there. ‘Tastily but simply dressed,' she walks along the road which Mr. Delyun must traverse on arriving, in hope of seeing him, and on the following day ‘takes a light rod ' and goes out fishing by herself. She succeeds, of course, in hooking first the bough of a tree and next the susceptible heart of the innocent Edwy. Matters are brought to a crisis by a jealous poacher, who imagines that the young lover is endeavouring to secure the affections of a maid-servant of whom he is enamoured, and who naturally, according to the writers of penny fiction, shoots him in the back. The wound is a trifling one, but the fair Ella obtains assistance and completes her triumph.

This agreeable picture of maidenly modesty and the manners of good society is paralleled by ‘The Illustrated Family Novelist,' the number of which now before us relates the loves and sorrows of a young lady who falls in love with a handsome actor whom she accidentally meets in the street, and who moves heaven and earth to win him, the moral for the benefit of the smart shop-girls and milliners' apprentices who may be seen studying the paper in omnibuses and tramcars, being of course the desirability of making acquaintance with handsome and interesting young men in the street. Much the same kind of moral is enforced in all these ‘Novelettes,' which increase in number and apparently in popularity with every succeeding month. For this latter accident their extreme cheapness may possibly account; they are certainly amongst the least costly specimens of popular literature with which the student can make acquaintance. The price is always the same, a penny; and for that sum the reader is provided with a sufficiently sensational story worked out with as much elaboration as he is likely to require, and illustrated with from one to half-a-dozen pictures in woodcut or some of the more recent processes, not greatly inferior to the illustrations which accompany more costly periodicals. In actual amount of letterpress about as much matter is given as is usually found in one of the small one-volume stories prepared by publishers of a different type for the circulating libraries. Thus each number of the ‘Bow Bells' series already mentioned consists of sixteen large quarto pages, printed in double columns with three illustrations. Allowing for what compositors call ‘fat,’ and for the space occupied by the woodcuts the story thus contains about 25,000 words, equal to about 100 pages of the ordinary three-volume novel. The other series contain some a little more matter, and some a little less. Thus, ‘The Ladies' Own Novelette,' which is not quite so utterly futile in substance as some of its competitors, announces on its cover that it gives ‘TWO COMPLETE NOVELS' for its penny, and carries out its promise by issuing 32 pages of a size somewhat smaller than those of ‘Bow Bells,' and containing about 40,000 words or 150 pages of regulation novel size. The quantity and quality are very much alike in all the series, but the shape is sometimes altered, and various inducements are held out to subscribers. The lottery for prizes of more or less value is a favourite one, and prize competitions for successful answers to charades and arithmetical puzzles are hardly less popular. One widely circulated print of this kind advertises its willingness to sell paper dress patterns, with full instructions, at half price to subscribers who like to send a ‘coupon' cut from the cover and certain stamps, while several open their columns to ‘correspondents,' answering in this way questions on every conceivable subject, from the etiquette of courtship to the manufacture of cowslip wine, and from the art of corn-cutting to the authenticity of the Canticles.

There is, from one point of view happily, no lack of effort to stem the current of mingled wickedness and folly which threatens to turn cheap literature into a curse. The twin great Societies are doing admirable work; but the Religious Tract Society is doubtless greatly hampered by its name. There are probably thousands of the class whom it is most desirable to reach who refuse to read the stories of the, 'Leisure Hour,' on the ground that they 'don't care for tracts.' Nor, considering the feebleness and ineptitude of not a few of the earlier publications of the Society, can this feeling be a source of any real surprise. If, however, the same paper appears without the imprimatur of the Society, the class for which it is intended will buy and read it so long as it is conducted on its present lines. The wisdom of this course is proved by the popularity of the Society's two papers for children 'The Boy's Own Paper' and ‘The Girl's Own Paper’ which in the last ten years have proved themselves quite the best things of their kind. It would be pleasant to speak as highly of the series of penny novelettes issued by the Society, apparently in emulation of the exceedingly secular publications with which we have hitherto dealt. Unfortunately these stories, though well printed and got up, are written to a great extent on the lines of an old-fashioned tract, with a somewhat obtrusive moral, and are consequently hardly likely to be bought in large numbers by the class whom it is most sought to reach. Of course kind-hearted people will buy them extensively to give away; but that is a very different thing from such a circulation as the ‘wholly worldly’ press enjoys.

The series of stories issued by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, under the title of the 'Penny Library of Fiction,' is certainly not open to this objection. Some people may, indeed, be inclined to say that they err occasionally in the opposite direction, and differ too little from the sensational stories which their startling covers appear to emulate. The objection is, however, overstrained. The stories are good from the literary point of view; most of them, if not all, are eminently amusing and interesting; the tone is thoroughly healthy and masculine, and though religion is never paraded its influence is felt. Like the impluvium in the hall of a Roman house, it purifies and tempers the surrounding atmosphere in silence and almost unseen. It is even more satisfactory to be able to add that the stories stand on their own merits. Whether they are profitable to the Society as a commercial speculation we have no means of knowing; but judging from the wide circulation which our independent inquiries assure us that they enjoy, it is probable that they are. In any case there is every reason to believe that they really reach the class for which they are designed, and that they have in many cases served to create a taste for reading of a higher character than semi-vicious and wholly frivolous romances. It is useless to complain, as some do, that these publications are deficient in the very quality for which the societies are supposed to exist. The days of the tract are gone by, and the classes amongst which they were once distributed - not perhaps altogether without benefit - have asserted and are asserting themselves more strongly every day. The British working man, in short, will neither buy tracts nor read them. For the first time, perhaps, a good many people saw him in his true colours during the late strikes suspicious, haughty, jealous, irritable, and resenting above all things the very appearance of patronage and condescension. If we wish to improve the literary food which he will accept, we can do so only by offering him better things than have yet been presented at a similar price. No good will be done by an attempt at censorship, whether by Act of Parliament or by Act of County Council. Abortive prosecutions are above all things to be deprecated. If books come within the lines of Lord Campbell's Act, the law should of course be enforced; but ill-advised prosecutions like that of the ‘Decameron' some months ago, and prurient gossip like the Music Hall debates in Lord Rosebery's Parliament, do a thousand times more harm than good.

If we wish, therefore, to get rid of the worse and weaker forms of penny fiction, we must begin in the school-room – not necessarily by yielding to the popular cry for technical education for boys and cookery classes for girls at the public expense but by encouraging the growth of something resembling culture. The Catechism has gone, of course; it is a ‘sectarian' formula, and; as such, hateful to the ‘sectarians' of Secularism and Dissent. The Bible has followed the Catechism, though even so critical an observer and educationist as Matthew Arnold pleaded for it as the only relic of culture left to the working classes. The result is that we are in the position of the man in the Gospels. We have cast out the unclean spirit of ignorance from the working-class mind, and have left it empty, swept and neatly garnished with ‘the three Rs.' Let us beware lest the unclean spirit returns with seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and turn the class we have made our masters into the agents for the overthrow of society.

How the void thus created is to be filled up is the problem of to day. It is impossible, as, we have said, to fall back upon religious teaching in the Board Schools; to do so would raise a storm which no Ministry cares to provoke. While the settlement of this question is pending, however, there are happily some signs of light in the distance a healthy and natural light, and not the artificial glimmer created by philanthropic societies and individual benevolence. Publishers are beginning to awaken to the fact that the spread of education and the increased facilities of communication have created a vast new public to which it is worth while to appeal. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and kindred institutions, the Messrs. Chambers, and to a certain extent Messrs. Cassell in a more recent period, had, as it were, to create their public. To day the audience is gathered; the demand exists, it awaits only supply. The extent of the sale of the trash, upon which we, have spent so much space, proves the existence of a public who may be reached by a little courage and enterprise, and from whom a large profit may be drawn. Many publishers are happily that they are beginning to meet the growing demand. Messrs Cassell have led the way with a ‘National Library,' which it is no hyperbole to say is a marvel of good editing, mechanical excellence, and cheapness. Other publishers are following with cheap ‘libraries' of the masterpieces of English literature, and more modern books, such as Lady Brassey's fascinating journals of travel, and Captain Burnaby's 'Ride to Khiva,' while a great number of really good and wholesome works of fiction have recently appeared at the nominal price of 6d. – really 4 ½ d. or 5d. per copy. The greatest triumph is Perhaps the sixpenny edition of ‘Westward Ho!' Charles Kingsley's healthy and vigorous Elizabethan story. The first impression of this reprint - 100,000 - is, it is gratifying to learn, already sold, and the demand does not appear to be completely supplied even yet. Whether the other numbers of the same series will be equally popular is perhaps open to question. 'Hypatia' and 'Hereward the Wake' demand a considerable amount of knowledge in the reader, while 'Yeast' and ‘Alton Locke' deal with social problems which have materially changed their aspect in the thirty years that have passed since the books were first published. The experiment is, however, a spirited and courageous one, and will command the good wishes of all who desire to see sound literature made popular. It only remains for some publisher of courage, enterprise, and wit, to follow where the Christian Knowledge Society has led, by giving similarly good literature to the new generation, in the time-honoured penny number form, to make the romances of the highway and the prison things of the past.