Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday : The Geography of Class in Late-Victorian Britain

Abstract

A regular feature of Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday, an illustrated comic newspaper published from 1884 until 1923?though sporadically after 1916, is Ally Sloper's travels in and around London and to the seaside.1 Ally's journeys and their chronicling by his daughter Tootsie serve as kind of travel literature for the working-class and lower-middle-class readership of the paper. On one hand, Tootsie's accounts of Poor Papa running afoul of Victorian ideas about social decorum, whether at the seaside, back stage at a music hall, at Ascot, at the Lord Mayor's Ball, in the pit at Drury Lane, at the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, or countless other places, are mere back drop for the paper's jokes and satires. On the other hand, the vast range of locales and events visited by Ally and his motley band of companions serves to give us a sense of the types of places the varied readership of Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday (ASHH) may have visited in search of leisure. These travelogues tell us what the Victorian readership of the paper may have actually done (or hoped to do) while there. I emphasis the Victorian readership of the paper because even though ASHH continued publishing well into the twentieth century, I am largely concerned with the Victorian versions of the paper and have confined my discussion and examples to the 1880s and 1890s. Beyond telling us where the paper's Victorian readers may have gone on their holidays and showing us what they may have done once there, ASHH engages in a sustained critique of class. In short, ASHH operates as a satirical geography of leisure and class of the late-Victorian era in which physical and class boundaries are overcome with a degree of ease and even shown to be unimportant. In its critique of late-Victorian class, we can see the ways in which popular culture has the potential to