Mixed Messages: Authoring and Authority in British Boys' Magazines

Abstract

Mixed Messages: Authoring and Authority in British Boys’ Magazines Claudia Nelson (bio) A number of editors of British boys’ magazines at the end of the last century were also well known as authors of fiction for boys and/or adults, among them Max Pemberton of Chums, W. H. G. Kingston and G. A. Henty of the short-lived Union Jack, R. S. Warren Bell of the Captain, and “Guy Rayner” (S. Dacre Clarke) of at least nineteen periodicals. 1 In their editorial capacity, however, they typically constructed themselves as a separate species, purveyors of story but not storytellers themselves. They thus qualify as “forgotten authors” in a dual sense, since not only have many of them fallen into obscurity today, but most of them also kept their names off the mastheads in their own day, acknowledging only their work as contributors. 2 Nevertheless, it is appropriate to consider here even editors who did not write fiction as full-fledged authors for boys, not only because of the regular columns that they produced but also because of the control that they exerted over the appearance, contents, and philosophies of their magazines. As Paul Ferris comments of Alfred Harmsworth in his role as publisher of the Halfpenny Marvel (founded 1893), “The voice of Alfred . . . coloured every issue” (61). What we might see as the double meaning inherent in editorship (is editing merely coordinating and blue-penciling, or is it a creative activity akin to, say, conducting an orchestra?) is mirrored by the polysemic appeal of the collaborative texts these editors produced. Although there were any number of topics on which the boys’ magazines of this period are deliberately ambiguous, in this essay I will focus on attitudes toward authority to be found in some representative periodicals. Examining the evolution of correspondence columns and editorials in boys’ magazines between 1824 and 1914, Diana Dixon detects a gradual movement away from authoritarianism and toward a sometimes overstated desire to be the “friend” of one’s young subscribers. Examining the narrower timespan from 1892 to 1910, I propose that in this liminal period, during which [End Page 1] editors and publishers were forced into an ascending spiral of competition for readers, we can see magazines endorse both authoritarianism and friendliness, both respect and contempt for authority figures. Given the state of the periodical-publishing industry of the day, this editorial inconsistency was an important survival strategy. In 1824 there were only five magazines for young people in England; in 1900 there were 160 (Dixon, “Instruction” 63). Kirsten Drotner counts no fewer than 307 commercial British boys’ magazines in existence between 1880 and 1918 (123). And if many of these titles quickly foundered, others as quickly arose to replace them. Hence it was difficult for any one magazine to distinguish itself from its competitors; for one thing, few could claim to have the exclusive services of a given writer. It was not merely that proprietors of multiple story papers would use the same writers for several magazines at once, although that was certainly the case; there was also significant cross-pollination. The public-school magazine the Captain (founded in 1899 by George Newnes), for instance, shared its contributors with rivals that included Chums, the Boy’s Own Paper, Young England, and the Boy’s Journal. Upon finishing a series of stories for one venue, an author might reuse distinctive settings and casts of characters in another series for another periodical, as in the case of Bell’s popular tales of Greyhouse School, which appeared over a decade or more in both the Captain (which Bell edited) and the Boy’s Journal. As Dixon comments, while Harmsworth, influential publisher of numerous boys’ papers, would denounce competitors’ writers in one breath as “drunken, sodden, creatures, whose lives have been one unbroken story of failure,” he would commission contributions from them in the next (qtd. in “Children” 136). In an apparent effort to suggest their difference from other strikingly similar weeklies, some Harmsworth products were even printed on pink or green paper instead of the conventional white (Drotner 127). Niche marketing, in other words, was not the strategy of the more important boys’ titles at this time, although certain...