Window-Shopping for Penny Dreadfuls

[1] Black Bess; or, The Knight of the Road, No. 200

     

by Marie Léger-St-Jean

THIS IS the story of three boys. The first two were growing up in the 1870s, the last one two decades earlier. It’s the story of motherless brothers Charley and Bill from London’s East End on the one hand, and on the other hand, that of a Scottish boy christened Robert Lewis Balfour, who grew up to write Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  

[According to Ernest Mehew in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Robert Louis Stevenson was given the names Robert Lewis Balfour but changed the spelling – although not the pronunciation – of his second name to Louis when he was about eighteen, and dropped the third in 1873; to his family and close friends he was always known as Louis.]

Bill is illiterate. In charge of his younger siblings, he has not had his brother’s luck: Charley attends the Ragged School on Hatton-Garden. A ten-minute walk away from the school, on Rosamund Street, now the Spa Fields Park, stands a newsvendor. Sounds pretty boring when you can’t read, but that’s because you’ve forgotten the power of illustration. Have you ever ‘read’ a graphic novel as a kid, when you hadn’t yet learnt how to read? The only tricky thing is flashbacks, otherwise, you’re fine. So that’s why Billy was interested in the newsvendor: he would display on his shop windows the first page of the week’s number for a variety of penny dreadfuls. Each one contained an elaborate woodcut.

Nowadays, if you consult a penny dreadful, most likely in the Rare Books Room of a research library, unless you’re acquainted with a collector, it will seem like just a normal book, its seriality masked by the binding except for the predictable presence, every eight page, of a woodcut. It took me three weeks to realize that the penny bloods I was consulting at the Cambridge University Library were not later reprints, even though numbers would finish and start in the middle of a sentence, or even of a word.

That’s why Bill’s story is important: it brings to life the context in which penny dreadfuls were encountered when they were first published.

But how do we know Billy’s story if he’s illiterate? Presumably, if he cannot read, he cannot write (the reverse could not be assumed true). We know it second-hand. Actually, third-hand. If it’s true at all. Apparently Billy’s brother told it in a Thieves Anonymous meeting at which was present James Greenwood. Greenwood is respectable enough to have his own entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. John Adcock put together his bibliography.

GREENWOOD occupies an interesting position: recounting Billy and his brother’s story, he is an investigative journalist, warning against the evils of penny dreadfuls. But as many writers at the time, he is trying to string together a living as a hard-working low-earning man of letters, otherwise known as a literary hack. Thus, besides journalism, Greenwood also engaged in penny-dreadful writing…

But let’s return to Bill and Charley’s story, if we are ever to get to Robert Lewis’s.

[2] Black Bess, No. 190

Billy could read most of the story of highwaymen, but illustrations are sometimes ambiguous, generating suspense. That’s when Billy would call upon his younger brother to use his newly acquired reading skills to decipher the text beneath the illustration. Perhaps it could tell if the doorkeeper was shutting or opening the door to let the highwayman through or bar his way. But the text on the first page would not always settle the matter. Presumably the answer lay in the seven hidden pages, but the two boys’ pockets were empty.

Though social critics denounced or celebrated penny fiction as horrendously or triumphantly cheap, Billy had to steal and pawn a hammer to acquire the prized jewel. The week after, it was his younger brother’s turn. Theft was the only recourse to obtain the boys’ weekly mental sustenance. And as the brother tells in the Thieves Anonymous meeting, how could it be wrong to steal tools when week after week, Jonathan Wild was appropriating luxurious jewelry!

QED, penny dreadfuls cause petty criminality, both by creating an addiction and giving a bad example. By displaying the first page and its illustration in the shop window, newsvendors were using insidious advertising, how else could boys react to the enticing snippet but to want to know what happened next?

NOT ALL BOYS resorted to theft, and not just because some had better morals or showed more self-restraint than Billy and his brother. Robert Lewis needed nothing more than the illustration and its caption to set his imagination going and reconstruct the narrative. In ‘Popular Authors,’ he even says that there’s a whole paper to be written on the relative merits of reading a story and just looking at the illustrations. I guess that’s partly what I’m writing.

[3] Robert Lewis Balfour as a youth

Robert Lewis, let’s call him Bob for short, was introduced to penny fiction as his nurse read from Cassell’s Family Paper. However, when that was no longer acceptable reading, he started doing the weekly rounds of the shop windows. He could not afford to buy any complete numbers and had to contend himself of the first page, like Billy and his brother. However, in contrast, he did not seem to mind: he took what he wanted and constructed his own stories, as any child does to play.

The force of words, as opposed to simply that of illustrations, was uncovered to him by his mother reading Macbeth, the sounds of the storm raging outdoors uplifting the power of words.

[4] Black Bess, No. 187

Bob first encountered complete numbers in the romantic setting of Neidweith Castle, about which Sir Walter Scott wrote a poem, ‘The Maid of Neidweith’. The abandoned tales sparked the interest of Bob and then only did he become addicted to penny dreadfuls in their full form, complete with images and text. (Stevenson’s article does not tell how he procured himself the means of sustaining his addiction.) Only after discovering the power of words through Shakespeare, the article’s unfolding suggests, was Bob prepared for the genius of Viles, Rymer, & cie. Only then did it seem that authors might actually tell a better story than he could from the illustrations.

STEVENSON tells another story of the boy Robert window-shopping and image-reading in his friend Henley’s Magazine of Art. The gallery is no longer one of penny dreadfuls, but of juvenile drama by Skelt.

When did Bobby enjoy the juvenile drama so? Even as he imagined the stories of penny dreadfuls, or later, when he had started reading them instead?

The stories of Billy, his brother, and Robert Lewis highlight a reading practice common throughout the United Kingdom and throughout the second half of the nineteenth century at the least. As for more Victorian examples, a journalist surveyed the shop windows of London, Edinburgh, and Newcastle for penny dreadfuls in 1888. [1] At the beginning of the twentieth century, a working-class woman warns against the dangers of daily news being displayed in a similar fashion, ironically preferring boys read penny dreadfuls instead. [2]

But their diverging stories also bring attention to the fact that one cannot abstract a reader’s attitude from the retail and distribution strategies. It is important to bring to light the different ways in which fiction was encountered by Victorian audiences and break the uniform mould of the three-decker novel. This is true for any historical period, all geographic locations. But it is not enough to understand actual reading experiences: they are varied, pluralistic, sometimes counterintuitive, and should not be generalized.

[5] James Greenwood

notes
[1] ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ by T. Mackay, Time, Aug 1888, pp.218-225 (p.218).
[2] ‘The Morals of the Coming Generation’ by Priscilla E. Moulder, Westminster Review, Sep 1913, pp.299-301 (p.300).

♦

¶ “Penny Awfuls” by James Greenwood, St. Paul’s Magazine, XII, 1873 HERE.

¶ “Popular Authors” by Robert Louis Stephenson, Scribner’s Magazine, July 4, 1888 HERE.

¶ “Black Bess; or, The Knight of the Road. A Tale of the Good Old Times” by Anonymous (attributed to Edward Viles). Illustrated by Robert Prowse and others. No. 1 published August 8, 1863. E. Harrison, Salisbury Court, Fleet Street. “Ran to 254 penny weekly numbers and 2028 pages, each number of eight pages (…)” — Frank Jay N&Q April 29, 1922 HERE.

¶ “Price One Penny: A Database of Cheap Literature, 1837-1860 (POP)”, by Marie Léger-St-Jean, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, England [last updated 20 June 2015] HERE.

¶ Updated with two footnotes on 15 november 2015.

Works of the Amateur Casual (1832-1929)

James Greenwood was born in 1832 and died in 1929. 
Greenwood worked as a compositor in a printing works then began a career in journalism. He wrote novels, children’s books, short stories and collections of journalism. The most celebrated author of social reform was Henry Mayhew who wrote articles for the Morning Post and published a 4 volume survey of London Life and Labor (1861-1862) Greenwood’s brother Frederick was first editor of The Pall Mall Gazette in 1865 and suggested James spend a night in the casual ward of a workhouse. The ensuing articles entitled “A Night in the Workhouse” were published in 1866 and caused a sensation with the reading public. Booth, of The Salvation Army, called it “The beginnings of the reform of our poor law.”

Greenwood took up the cause of railway-men and was instrumental in gaining them a union. In 1895 he arranged with The Ragged School Union to send poor children to the country for summer holidays. An appeal by the editor of The Telegraph provided 80,000 pounds for Christmas hampers for crippled children. In 1866 he wrote The True History of a Little Ragamuffin, a documentary account of a street Arab. He wrote children’s books and one, King Lion, was an inspiration for The Jungle Book. The story King Lion appears in The Boy’s Own Volume of Fact, Fiction, History, and Adventure. It started in the Midsummer, 1864 annual and is continued and concluded in the Christmas, 1864 annual. These were the third and fourth annuals in the series of bound volumes of the boy’s paper, published by S. O. Beeton, 248, Strand, W. C. London.

P. J. Keating said his fiction was “a mixture of the domestic sentimentality of Dickens and the more brutal and bizarre elements of “the Newgate novel.”’ If we take Greenwood’s word for it, the author of Wilds of London spent three years in penal servitude for a theft from his employer. He was scathing in denouncing the penny dreadfuls, calling them "pen'orths of poison" and yet he wrote serials for penny dreadful publisher Edwin Brett. Lofts mentioned his work appearing in Young Men of Great Britain, Young Gentlemen of Great Britain, Boys World, Our Boys Paper, New Boys Paper and Boys Pocket Library. One dreadful was written under Greenwood’s real name, Joe Sterling, or, a Ragged Fortune.

Greenwood did not object to penny dreadfuls because of the violence, his objection was against the glamorizing of criminals. In The Adventures of Reuben Davidger he writes some horrible scenes that outdo anything I have ever read in a blood:

“Topmost of the buried pile was the head of our lady passenger, and so it was well placed, as its beautiful long brown curls (which many a time, as I waited at the captain’s table, had caused my heart to flutter with admiration) hung down and over the other ghastly heads, partially concealing the features. Attached to the brown ringlets by a long copper hairpin was a tag of red cloth, placed there, as I suppose, by the ruffian whose spoil the lady's head was, that he might know his own.”

Article on "Penny Awfuls," with portrait, is reproduced HERE.

Works of James Greenwood including melodrama:

Under a Cloud, by Frederick and James Greenwood, “The Welcome Guest” 1858. Published as a three volume novel in 1860.

Under a Cloud, drama in two acts by C. H. Hazlewood, 15 April 1859, Britannia

Wild Sports of the World. London : S.O. Beeton, 1861. Published in eight monthly parts, beginning in May, 1861. The title-page. reads: Wild sports of the world : a boy's book of natural history and adventure. By James Greenwood. With woodcuts from designs by Harden Melville and William Harvey, coloured illustrations from water-colour drawings by J.B. Zwecker, Harrison Weir and Harden Melville, portraits of celebrated hunters from original photographs, and maps showing the habitats of animals and plants all over the world.

“Under a Cloud,” by Frederick and James Greenwood, serial in The London Herald, New Series, (old Series H. Vickers) J. Berger, 13 Catherine Street, Strand. 1863.

“Reuben Davidger; or, Seventeen Years and Four Months Among the Dyaks of Borneo,” by James Greenwood, Boys’ Own Magazine, S. O. Beeton, 1863

King Lion, by James Greenwood, Illustrated by CHB, The Boy’s Own Volume of Fact, Fiction, History, and Adventure. Starts in the Midsummer, 1864 annual and is continued and concluded in the Christmas, 1864 annual. These were the third and fourth annuals in the series of bound volumes of the boy’s paper, published by S. O. Beeton, 248, Strand, W. C. London.

Curiosities of Savage Life by James Greenwood, London: S. O. Beeton, 1864.

Savage Habits and Customs. With woodcuts and designs by Harden S. Melville; engraved by H. Newsom Woods. London, S.O. Beeton 1864

Curiosities of London Life 3d edition London : S.O. Beeton, 1865

The Adventures of Reuben Davidger : seventeen years and four months captive among the Dyaks of Borneo, London : S.O. Beeton, 1865.

The Adventures of Seven Four-Footed Foresters : narrated by themselves, by James Greenwood with illustrations by H.S. Melville ; engraved by Vizetelly. London : Ward and Lock, (London : W.H. Cox) 1865

Silas the Conjurer : his travels and perils by James Greenwood. First published serially in the 1865 Midsummer and Christmas volumes of the Boys Own Volume of fact, fiction, history, and adventure. London : S.O. Beeton, 1866

A Night in a Workhouse by the “Amateur Casual” (James Greenwood) Pall Mall Gazette, January 12, 1866, first (of 3) installments. Others January 13, and January 15, 1866.

A Night in a Workhouse reprinted from the “Pall Mall Gazette,” 1866. 1 shilling edition.

A Night in a London Workhouse, Digby, St. Giles. One-penny broadside. 1866.

A Night in a Workhouse from the Pall Mall Gazette, London : Bowering, 211, Blackfriars Road, Sell & Son, King Street, Borough, and all Newsagents. 1866, penny edition. How the Poor are Treated in Lambeth ! The Casual Pauper! “Old Daddy,” the Nurse ! The Bath! The Conversation of the Casuals! The Striped Shirt! “Skilley” and “Toke” by Act of Parliament! The Swearing Club! The Adventures of a Young Thief! &c., &c, &c.

Brittania Theatre. THE CASUAL WARD; or, a Night in the Workhouse. Written by Colin Hazelwood. 18/2/66.

Royal Pavilion Theatre. THE CASUAL WARD; or, a Night in the Workhouse. 18/2/66. Joseph Cave, manager, Hazlewood, author.

Effingham Theatre. NOBODY’S SON; or, A Night in a Workhouse. 18/2/66.

The True History of a Little Ragamuffin by the author of "A night in a workhouse". London: S. O. Beeton, 248, Strand, W.C. (ten doors from Temple Bar) 1866, New York: Harper, 1866.

The Hatchet Throwers by James Greenwood with thirty-six illustrations, drawn on wood, by Ernest Griset, from his original designs. London : John Camden Hotten, Piccadilly., 1866.

The True History of a Little Ragamuffin by James Greenwood, author of "A night in a workhouse,” with illustrations by Phiz and J. Gordon Thomson. London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler, Warwick House, Paternoster Row c.1867.

“Jack Stedfast,” by James Greenwood, Boys of England, No. 97, 1867

Unsentimental Journeys; or Byways of the Modern Babylon, by James Greenwood, 1867

Legends of Savage Life by James Greenwood with thirty-six illustrations, drawn on wood, by Ernest Griset, from his original designs. London : James Camden Hotten, 1867.

The Purgatory of Peter the Cruel by James Greenwood with thirty-six illustrations, drawn on wood, by Ernest Griset. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1868.

The Bear King: a narrative confided to the marines by James Greenwood ; with illustrations by Ernest Griset. London: Griffith and Farran, successors to Newbery and Harris, 1868. Griset, Ernest Henry, 1844-1907. 98 pgs.

The Seven Curses of London, by James Greenwood, London : S. Rivers & Co. 1869

“Jack Stedfast ; or, Wreck and Rescue.” melodrama, 1869.- Brittania. Mr. C. Pitt’s adaptation of James Greenwood’s JACK STEDFAST 5/9/69.

Joe Sterling; or, A Ragged Fortune by James Greenwood, London : E.J. Brett, c. 1869

“Satan Free: a Story of Old Calaban,” by James Greenwood, The Young Men of Great Britain, no. 49, 1868, companion to Boys of England.

“Penny Awfuls” by James Greenwood, St. Paul’s Magazine, XII. 1873.

The Wilds of London by James Greenwood with twelve illustrations by Alfred Concanen, London: Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly, 1874.

In Strange Company Being the Experiences of a Roving Correspondent by James Greenwood, “The Amateur Casual” Second Edition, Henry S. King & Co. 1874

Low-Life Deeps an Account of the Strange Fish to be Found There by James Greenwood, a New Edition, London: Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly, 1876 (and 1881).

“Prince Dick of Dahomey,” by James Greenwood, The Boys’ World (John Allingham, pseudonym: Ralph Rollington) c. 1879

“Life in a Workhouse,” by James Greenwood (The Amateur Casual), illustrated by J. Barnard. The title was afterwards altered to “The Model Guardian.” Began serialization in The Million, No. 1,Vol. 1, February 12, 1870. From all accounts this was a fictional reworking of the original non-fiction articles.

“Bless Her Heart,” by James Greenwood, Wedding Bells, January 1, 1871.

Mysteries of Modern London by One of the Crowd, London: Diprose and Bateman, 1883.

Toilers in London by One of the Crowd The Toiler, as Herein Depicted, has no Claim, and puts Forth None, to rank in the Same Category with what are Vaguely Termed the Working Classes. London: Diprose and Bateman, 1883.

Odd People in Odd Places; or, The Great Residuum by James Greenwood author of “Tag, Rag, and Co. &c. London Frederick Warne & Co. 1883.

The Prisoner in the Dock: my four years' daily experiences in the London Police Courts, by James Greenwood, London : Chatto & Windus, 1902.

Penny Awfuls

‘PENNY AWFULS’

By James Greenwood

St. Paul's Magazine XII 1873.

It would be an excellent and profitable arrangement if the London School Board were empowered not only to insist that all boys and girls of tender years shall be instructed in the art of reading, but also to root up and for ever banish from the paths of its pupils those dangerous weeds of literature that crop up in such rank luxuriance on every side to tempt them. Until this is done, it must always be heavy and uphill work with those whose laudable aim it is to promote education and popular enlightenment. To teach a girl or boy how to read is not a very difficult task; the trouble is to guide them to a wholesome and profitable exercise of the acquirement. This, doubtless, would be hard enough, were our population of juveniles left to follow the dictates of their docile or rebellious natures; but this they are not suffered to do. At the very outset, as soon indeed as they have mastered words of two and three syllables, and by skipping the hard words are able somehow to stumble through a page in reading fashion, the enemy is at hand to enlist them in his service. And never was poor recruit so dazzled and bewildered by the wily sergeant whose business it is to angle for and hook men to serve as soldiers as is the foolish lad who is beset by the host of candidates of the Penny Awful tribe for his patronage. There is Dick Turpin bestriding his fleet steed, and with a brace of magnificently mounted pistols stuck in his belt, beckoning him to an expedition of midnight marauding on the Queen’s highway; there is gentlemanly Claude Duval, with his gold-laced coat and elegantly curled periwig, who raises his three-cornered hat politely to the highly-flattered schoolboy and begs the pleasure of his company through six months or so - at the ridiculously small cost of a penny a week, that, he, the gallant captain, may initiate our young friend in the ways of bloodshed and villainy; there is sleek-cropped, bullet-headed Jack Sheppard, who steps boldly forth with his crowbar, offering to instruct the amazed youth in the ways of crime as illustrated by his own brilliant career, and to supply him with a few useful hints as to the best way of escaping from Newgate. Besides these worthies there are the Robbers of the Heath, and the Knights of the Road, and the Skeleton Crew, and Wildfire Dick and Hell-fire Jack, and Dare-devil Tom, and Blueskin, and Cut-throat Ned, and twenty other choice spirits of an equally respectable type, one and all appealing to him, and wheedling and coaxing him to make himself acquainted with their delectable lives and adventures at the insignificant expense of one penny weekly.

It is not difficult to trace back the evil in question to its origin. At least a quarter of a century ago it occurred to some enterprising individual to reprint and issue in “penny weekly numbers” the matter contained in the “Newgate Calendar,” and the publication was financially a great success. This excited the cupidity of other speculators, in whose eyes money loses none of its value though ever so begrimed with nastiness, and they set their wits to work to produce printed weekly “pen’orths” that should be as savoury to the morbid tastes of the young and the ignorant as was the renowned Old Bailey Chronicle itself. The task was by no means a difficult one when once was found the spirit to set about it. The Newgate Calendar was after all but a dry and legal record of the trials of rogues and murderers, for this or that particular offence, with at most, in addition, a brief sketch of the convicted one’s previous career, and a few observations on his most remarkable exploits. After all, there was really no romance in the thing ; and what persons of limited education and intellect love in a book is romance. Here then was a grand field ! What could be easier than to take the common-place Newgate raw material, and re-dip it in the most vivid scarlet, and weave into it the rainbow hues of fiction? What was there that “came out” at the trials of Jack Sheppard and Claude Duval and Mr. Richard Turpin and which the calendar readers so greedily devoured, compared with what might be made to “come out” concerning these same heroes when the professional romance-monger, with the victim’s skull for an inkstand, gore for ink, and the assassin's dagger for a pen, sat down to write their histories? The great thing was to show what the Newgate Calendar had failed to show. It was all very well to demonstrate that at times there existed honour among thieves; the thing to do was to make it clear that stealing was an honourable business, and that all thieves were persons to be respected on account at least of the risks they ran and the perils they so daringly faced in the pursuit of their ordinary calling. Again, in recording the achievements of robbers of a superior grade, the Calendar gave but the merest glimpse of the glories of a highway villain’s existence, whereas, as was well known to the romancist of the Penny Awful school, the life of a person like Mr. Turpin or any other Knight of the Road is just one endless round of daring, dashing adventure, and of rollicking and roystering, or tender, blissful enjoyments of the fruits thereof. Likewise, according to the same authority, it was a well-known fact, and one that could not be too generally known, that rogues and robbers are the only “brave” that deserve the “fair,” and that no sweethearts are so true to each other, and enjoy such unalloyed felicity, as gentlemen of the stamp of Captain Firebrand (who wears lace truffles and affects a horror for the low operation of cutting a throat, but regards it as quite the gentlemanly and “professional” thing to send a bullet whizzing into a human skull ) and buxom, fascinating Molly Cutpurse.

But after all, if the unscrupulous hatchers of Penny Awfuls (this term is no invention of mine, but one conferred on the class of literature in question by the owners thereof ) had been content to stick to Newgate heroes and Knights of the Road, perhaps no very great harm would have been done. At all events, the nuisance must soon have died out. Popular interest in the British Highwayman has for many years been on the wane. There are no longer any mail coaches to rob, and the descendants of the rare old heroes of Bagshot and Hounslow have brought the profession into disgust and contempt by taking to the cowardly game of garroting. Every boy may read of the pitiful behaviour of these modern Knights of the Road when they are triced up, bare-backed, in the press-room at Newgate, and a stout prison warden makes a cat-o’-nine-tails whistle across their shoulders. How they squeal and wriggle and supplicate! “Oh! sir, kind sir! O-o-o-oh-h, pray spare me; I’ll never do it again!” There is not the least spark of dash or bravado about this kind of thing, and the cleverest penman of the Penny Awful tribe would fail to excite feelings of emulation in the minds of his most devoted readers.

The Penny Awful trade, however, has not been brought to a standstill on this account. Cleverer men than those who paraded Dick Turpin and Claude Duval as model heroes have of late years come into the garbage market. Quick-witted, neat-handed fellows, who have studied the matter and made themselves acquainted with it at all points. It has been discovered by these sharp ones that the business has been unnecessarily restricted ; that even supposing that there are still a goodly number of simpletons who take delight in the romance that hangs on those magic words, “Your money or your life,” there are still a much larger number who take no interest at all in gallows heroes, but who might easily be tempted to take to another kind of bait, provided it were judiciously adjusted on the hook. As for instance, there were doubtless to be found in London and the large manufacturing towns of England, hundreds of boys out of whom constant drudgery and bad living had ground all that spirit of dare-devilism so essential to the enjoyment of the exploits of the heroes of the Turpin type, but who still possessed an appetite for vices of a sort that were milder and more easy of digestion. It was a task of no great difficulty when once the happy idea was conceived. All that was necessary was to show that the faculty for successfully defying law and order and the ordinations of virtue might be cultivated by boys as well as men, and that as rogues and rascals the same brilliant rewards attended the former as the latter. The result may be seen in the shop window of every cheap newsvendor in London - The Boy Thieves of London, The Life of a Fast Boy, The Boy Bandits, The Wild Boys of London, The Boy Detective, Charley Wag, The Lively Adventures of a Young Rascal, and I can’t say how many more. This much is true of each and everyone, however - that it is not nor does it pretend to be anything else than a vicious hotch-potch of the vilest slang, a mockery of all that is decent and virtuous, an incentive to all that is mean, base, and immoral, and a certain guide to a prison or a reformatory if sedulously followed. If these precious weekly pen’orths do not openly advocate crime and robbery, they at least go so far as to make it appear that although to obtain the means requisite to set up as a Fast Boy, or a Young Rascal, it is found necessary to make free with a master’s goods, or to force his till or run off with his cash-box, still the immense amount of frolic and awful jollity to be obtained at music halls, at dancing rooms, - where “young rascals” of the opposite sex may be met, - at theatres, and low gambling and drinking dens, if one has “only got the money,” fully compensates for any penalty a boy of the “fast” school may be called on to pay in the event of his petty larcenies being discovered. “What’s the good o’ being honest ?” is the moral sentiment that the Penny Awful author puts into the mouth of his hero, Joe the Ferret, in his delectable story “The Boy Thieves of the Slums.” “What’s the good of being honest ?” says Joe, who is presiding at a banquet consisting of the “richest meats,” and hot brandy and water; “where’s the pull? It is all canting and humbug. The honest cove is the one who slaves from morning till night for half a bellyfull of grub, and a ragged jacket and a pair of trotter cases (shoes), that don’t keep his toes out of the mud, and all that he may be called a good boy and have a “clear conscience” ’ (loud laughter and cries of “Hear, hear,” by the Weasel’s “pals”). “I ain’t got no conscience, and I don’t want one. If I felt one a-growing in me I’d pisen the blessed thing” (more laughter). “Ours is the game, my lads. Light come, light go. Plenty of tin, plenty of pleasure, plenty of sweethearts and that kind of fun, and all got by making a dip in a pocket, or sneaking a till. I’ll tell you what it is, my hearties,” continued the Weasel, raising his glass in his hand (on a finger of which there sparkled a valuable ring, part of the produce of the night’s work), “I’ll tell you what it is, it’s quite as well that them curs and milksops, the ‘honest boys’ of London, do not know what a jolly, easy, devil-may-care life we lead compared with theirs, or we should have so many of ‘em takin’ to our line that it would be bad for the trade.”

It is not invariably, however, that the Penny Awful author indulges in such a barefaced enunciation of his principles. The old-fashioned method was to clap the representatives of all manner of vices before the reader, and boldly swear by them as jolly roystering blades whose manner of enjoying life was after all the best, despite the grim end. The modern way is to paint the picture not coarsely, but with skill and anatomical minuteness; to continue it page after page, and point out and linger over the most flagrant indecencies and immoral teachings of the pretty story, and then, in the brief interval of putting that picture aside and producing another, to “patter” ( if I may be excused using an expression so shockingly vulgar ) a few sentences concerning the unprofitableness of vice, and of honesty being the best policy. And having cut this irksome, though for obvious reasons necessary, part of the business as short as possible, the “author” again plunges the pen of nastiness into his inkpot, and proceeds with renewed vigour to execute the real work in hand.

Writing on this subject it is impossible for me to forget a vivid instance of the pernicious influence of literature of the Penny Awful kind as revealed by the victim himself. It was at a meeting of a society the laudable aim of which is the rescue of juvenile criminals from the paths of vice, and there were present a considerable number of the lads themselves. In the course of the evening, as a test I suppose of the amount of confidence reposed by the lads in their well-wishers and teachers, it was suggested that any one among them who had courage enough might rise in his place and give a brief account of his first theft, and what tempted him to it. It was some time before their was any response, although from the many wistful faces changing rapidly from red to white, and the general uneasiness manifested by the youths appealed to, and who were seated on forms in the middle of the hall, it was evident that many were of a great good mind to accept the invitation. At last a lad of thirteen or so, whose good-conduct stripes told of how bravely he was raising himself out of the slough in which the Society had discovered him, rose, and burning red to his very ears, and speaking rapidly and with much stumbling and stammering - evidences one and all, in my opinion, of his speaking the truth - delivered himself as follows :-

“It’s a goodish many years ago now, more’n six I dessay, and I used to go to the ragged-school down by Hatton-garden. It was Tyburn Dick that did it, leastways the story what they call Tyburn Dick. Well, my brother Bill was a bit older than me, and he used to have to stay at home and mind my young brother and sister, while father was out jobbing about at the docks and them places. We didn’t have no mother. Well, father he used to leave us as much grub as he could, and Bill used to have the sharin’ of it out. Bill couldn’t read a bit, but he knowed boys that could, and he used to hear ‘em reading about Knights of the Road, and Claude Duval, and Skeleton Crews, till I suppose his head got regler stuffed with it. He never had no money to buy a pen’orth when it came out, so he used to lay wait for me, carrying my young sister over his shoulder, when I came out of school at dinner time, and gammon me over to come along with him to a shop at the corner of Rosamond Street in Clerkenwell, where there used to be a whole lot of the penny numbers in the window. They was all of a row, Wildfire Jack, the Boy Highwayman, Dick Turpin, and ever so many others - just the first page, don’t you know, and the picture. Well, I liked it too, and I used to go along o’ Bill and read to him all the reading on the front pages, and look at the pictures until - ‘specially on Mondays when there was altogether a new lot - Bill would get so worked up with the aggravatin’ little bits, which always left off where you wanted to turn over and see what was on the next leaf, that he was very nigh off his head about it. He used to bribe me with his grub to go with him to Rosamond Street. He used to go there regler every mornin’ carryin’ my young sister, and if he found only one that was fresh, he’d be at the school coaxin’ and wigglin’ (qy. inveigling or wheedling), and sometimes bringin’ me half his bread and butter, or the lump of cold pudden what was his share of the dinner. He got the little bits of the tales and the pictures so jumbled up together that it used to prey on him awful. I was bad enough but Bill was forty times worse. He used to lay awake of nights talkin’ and wonderin’ and wonderin’ what was over leaf, and then he’d drop off and talk about it in his sleep. Well, one day he come to the school, and says he, “Charley, there’s somethin’ real stunnin’ at the corner shop this mornin’. It’s Tyburn Dick, and they’ve got him in a cart under the gallows, and there’s Jack Ketch smoking his pipe, and a whole lot of the mob a rushing to rescue him wot’s going to be hung, and the soldiers are there beatin’ of ‘em back, and I’m blowed,’ says Bill, ‘if I can tell how it will end. I should like to know,’ says he. ‘Perhaps it tells you in the little bit of print at bottom ; come along, Charley.’ Well, I wanted to know too, so we went, and there was the picture just as Bill said, but the print underneath didn’t throw no light on it - it was only just on the point of throwin’ a light on it, and of course we couldn’t turn over. I never saw Bill in such a way. He wasn’t a swearin’ boy, take him altogether, but this time he did let out, he was so savage at not being able to turn over. He was like a mad cove, and without any reason punched me about till I run away from him and went to school again. Well, although I didn’t expect it when I come out at half-past four, there was Bill again. His face looked so queer that I thought I was going to get some more punching, but it wasn’t that. He come up speakin’ quite kind, though there seemed something the matter with his voice, it was so shaky. ‘Come on, Charley,’ he said, ‘come on home quick. I’ve got it,’ and opening his jacket, he showed it me - the penny number where the picture of the gallows was, tucked in atwixt the buttonings of his shirt. ‘But how did you come by the penny?’ I asked him. ‘Come on home and read about Jack Ketch and that, and then I’ll tell you all about it,’ Bill replied. So we went home ; and I read out the penny number to him all through, and then he up and told me that he had nicked (stolen) a hammer off a second-hand tool stall in Leather Lane, and sold it for a penny at a rag-shop. That’s how the ice was broke. It seemed a mere nothing to nail a paltry pen’orth or so after reading of the wholesale robbery of jewels, and diamond necklaces, and that, that Tyburn Dick did every night of his life a’most. It was getting that whole pen’orth about him that showed us what a tremenjus chap he was. Next week it was my turn to get a penny to buy the number - we felt that we couldn’t do without it nohow ; and finding the chance, I stole one of the metal inkstands at the school. That was the commencement of it ; and so it went on and growed bigger; but it’s out and true, that for a good many weeks we only stole to buy the number just out of Tyburn Dick.”

A question likely to occur to the reader of these pages is - what sort of persons are these who are so ignoble and utterly lost to all feelings of shame that they can consent to make money by a means that is more detestable than that resorted to by the common gutter-raker or the common pickpocket? How do such individuals comport themselves in society? Are they men well dressed and decently behaved, and have they any pretensions to respectability ? The bookselling and publishing trade is a worthy trade : do the members of it generally recognise these base corruptors of the morals of little boys and girls? or do they shun them and give them a wide berth when they are compelled to tread the same pavement with them? My dear reader, I assure you that whether they are shunned or recognised by those who know them is not of the least moment to the blackguardly crew who pull the strings that keep the delusive puppets going. Well dressed they are - they can well afford to be so, for they make a deal of money, and in many cases keep fine houses and servants and send their children to boarding-school. They dine well in the city, and bluster, and swagger, and swear, and wear diamonds on their unsullied hands, and chains of gold adorn their manly bosoms. As for any idea of moral responsibility as regards those whose young souls and bodies they grind to make their bread, they have no more than had Simon Legree on his Red River slave plantation. They are labouring under no delusion as to the quality of the stuff they circulate. In their own choice language, it is “rot,” “rubbish,” “hog-wash,” but “what odds so long as it sells?” They would laugh in your face were you so rash as to attempt to argue the matter with them. They would tell you that they “go in” for this kind of thing, not out of any respect or even liking they have for it, but simply because it is a good “dodge” for making money, and their only regret is that the law forbids them “spicing” their poison pages and serving them as hot and strong as they would like to. I speak from my own knowledge of these men, and am glad to make their real character known, in order to show how little injustice would be done if their nefarious trade were put a stop to with the utmost rigour of any law that might be brought to bear against them.

Again, it may be asked, who are the “authors,” the talented gentlemen who find it a labour of love to discourse week after week to a juvenile audience of the doings of lewd women and “fast” men, and of the delights of debauchery, and the exercise of low cunning, and the victimising of the innocent and unsuspecting? Ay, who are they? Few things would afford me greater satisfaction than to gather together a hundred thousand or so of those who waste their time and money in the purchase and perusal of Penny Awfuls, and exhibit to them the sort of man it is to whose hands is entrusted the preparation of the precious hashes. Before such an exhibition could take place however, for decency’s sake, I should be compelled to induce him to wash his face and shave his neglected muzzle; likewise I should probably have to find him a coat to wear, and very possibly a pair of shoes. His master, the Penny Awful proprietor, does not treat him at all liberally. To be sure he is not worty of a great amount of consideration, being, as a rule, a dissipated, gin-soddened, poor wretch, who has been brought to his present degraded state by his own misdoings. As for talent, he has none at all; never had; nothing more than a mere accidental literary twist in his wrist - just as one frequently sees a dog that is nothing but a cur, except for some unaccountable gift it has for catching rats, or doing tricks of conjuring. He works to order, does this obliging writer. Either he has lodgings in some dirty court close at hand, or he is stowed away in a dim, upstairs back room of the Penny Awful office, and there the proprietor visits him, and they have a pot of ale and pipes together - the one in his splendid attire, and the other in his tattered old coat and dirty shirt - and talk over the “next” number of Selina the Seduced ; and very often there is heard violent language in that dim little den, the proprietor insisting on their being “more flavour” in the next batch of copy than the last, and the meek author beseeching a little respect for Lord Campbell and his Act. But the noble owner of Selina generally has his way. “Do as you like about it,” says he; “only bear this in mind. I know what goes down best with ‘em and what’s most relished, and if I don’t find that you warm up a bit in the next number, I’ll knock off half-a-crown, and make the tip for the week seventeen-and-six instead of a pound.”

James Greenwood.