ABSTRACT
The late-Victorian juvenile fictions dubbed the “penny dreadfuls”—which, like the penny bloods, 1 featured gothic horrors and criminal heroes—generated a good deal of critical outrage that spurred a major transformation in the children's publishing industry. Middle-class concerns regarding the effects of cheap fiction on working-class young people persisted into the Edwardian era. Among the most salient features of children's literature publishing in the last three decades of the nineteenth century is the proliferation of “improving” penny magazines that sought to displace the penny dreadful. This transformation within the juvenile penny literature industry is epitomized by the career of Edwin J. Brett. As John Springhall says, “the dubious mantle of Edward Lloyd's Salisbury Square publishing house” was “inherited” by Brett, 2 whose penny dreadfuls issued by the Newsagents' Publishing Company in Fleet Street—the most infamous of which is The Wild Boys of London; or, The Children of Night (1864–1866)—attracted, like Lloyd's penny bloods, many readers among working-class youths and much hostile criticism from middle-class adults. In response to the hostile criticism, Brett—a genius of opportunistic entrepreneurship—launched Boys of England: A Young Gentleman's Journal of Sport, Travel, Fun, and Instruction (1866–1899), a weekly publication designed as an antidote to the very dreadfuls that made Brett wealthy in the first place. Boys of England, advertising its improved status in its subtitle, was designed to assure uneasy adults that the suspense-filled serials that were the magazine's primary attraction are the equivalent of healthy “sport” and uplifting “instruction,” just an unusually exciting form of “travel” literature, or merely good clean “fun”—qualities to make all “boys of England” into “young gentlemen.” The first issue informs juvenile readers, “Our aim is to enthral you by wild and wonderful but healthy fiction.” Likewise, parents are comforted with the knowledge that “a moral and healthy tone may be maintained in conjunction with the boldest fiction.” 3 This editorial proclamation is cut to the measure of middle-class notions, throughout the last third of the nineteenth century, regarding the best way to encourage more salubrious reading among working-class young people. As B. G. Johns insists in “The Literature of the Streets” (1887), if such improved fictions “are to reach the classes in direst need … though the whole atmosphere of the fiction must be clean and healthy,” publishers must offer fictions “of downright amusement, or they will not be read.” Thus, “the wildest adventure may be freely used.” 4
