Manliness and the Boys' Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855-1940.(Book Review)

Manliness and the Boys' Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855-1940. Kelly Boyd. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

This well-argued cultural history of the British boys' story paper, the precursor to the comic book, departs from previous studies of British juvenile reading from the Crimean War onward. They tend to focus on G. A. Henty, R. M. Ballantyne, and W. H. G. Kingston, or the middle-class stories in the Boy's Own Paper, and to explore the fiction factories that supplied working- and lower-middle-class boys with their mass weekly entertainment. Based on a 1991 Rutgers University PhD dissertation, Manliness and the Boys' Story Paper has been compared with E. S. Turner's Boys Will Be Boys (1948), an engaging overview of generations of British boys' periodicals. The comparison is unfair because Turner wrote with infectious levity for a nonacademic audience, whereas 86 pages of this more solemn work are devoted to notes and bibliography. Boyd has taken full advantage of decades of historical research on childhood, and youth and more recent gender and masculinity studies, to emphasise the centrality of manliness to the boys' story paper. This book examines the commercial texts published by entrepreneurs such as Edwin J. Brett, Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe), and D. C. Thomson, as well as Frank Richards, the prolific author of the Greyfriars and St. Jim's stories, primarily as "windows into the ideologies of masculinity which informed readers' lives" (3).

The author first surveys adolescent education, work, and leisure over the book's time period, then looks at changes in publishing strategies from Victorian family firms (Brett) to the advent of mass marketing (Harmsworth) in the 1890s. The ...