ABSTRACT
One of the main generic categories used to classify juvenile adventure and school stories was “romance.” The word was used in the subtitles of novels such as G. Manville Fenn’s Dick o’ the Fens: A Romance of the Great East Swamp and J. H. Yoxall’s Nutbrown Roger and I: A Romance of the Highway and even the penny dreadful Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was improbably described as “24 Pages of Sensational Romance” (Kevin Carpenter 33). The subjects of many nonfi ction works were also frequently called romances. T. C. & E. C. Jack published a series called “Romance of Empire” (MacKenzie 215), Seeley Service had on its list a complete Library of Romance on subjects such as exploration, missionary heroism, mining, war inventions, and “savage life” and the Religious Tract Society published books such as Romance of Real Life: True Incidents in the Lives of the Great and Good. Novels and stories set in a distant and exotic period of history were invariably described as romances but as the editor of Chums asks,
is there no romance in the [contemporary] world, and I answer myself, why, of course there is. But it’s the new romance, Chums, the romance of ships and seas, of distant lands and unknown countries, even the romance of this great London of ours, with its teeming millions and its terrible stories of danger and peril and want and starvation. There’s the new romance for you. And if it has not the cloaked horsemen and the “beshrew me’s” and the “gadzooks” of the old time, believe me that more happens in London in one day than happened in the mediaeval towns in a twelvemonth. (1900: 428)1
And such romance had a particular appeal for boys, the author of A Brief History of Boys’ Journals (1913) pointing out that “the boy of to-day, even as the boy of yesterday, wants one thing and one thing only, and that is romance”
(cited in Dunae 1989: 31). For as Stables put it in the opening sentence of the preface to For Life and Liberty “There is a thread of romance in the warp or weft of nearly every boy’s life” (9).
