The Jubilee of the " Boy's Own Paper "
Ma. BALDWIN responded to an unerring instinct when he thought it well worth his • while to accept the invitation of the Boy's Own Paper to speak at its jubilee celebration this week. For, as he no doubt told himself, if there is anything
more important than the training of youth he has not yet heard of it. -It would be strange if, being a Latin scholar, he did not say to himself Maxima debetur puero reverentia.
When the Boy's Own Paper burst upon an unexpectant world fifty years ago an urgent need was met by a few thinking seniors. They produced what they knew boys ought to have and what they thought, or at least earnestly hoped, the boys would accept. Naturally no demand for a great change in the literature of youth came from the boys themselves. Their parents, teachers, and guardians might have made the demand, but they did not. All that the parents were doing at that time was to counteract at home the influences of the " penny dreadful " type of story, which, oddly enough, they seemed to regard as one of the indispensable evils of the world. Possibly they consoled themselves with the reflection that if crime was not made romantic by somebody there would not be a sufficient supply of temptations for their boys to resist. However that may be, certain thinking men in touch with the Religious Tract Society decided on a policy. Hence the Boy's Own Paper. The problem was to produce a jolly paper which would surround a boy with a wholesome and a definitely Christian atmosphere while the boy should be scarcely aware of it.
The solution of this nice problem was due to the genius of Mr. G. A. Hutchison, who was editor from 1879 to 1912.
Hutchison never doubted that such a paper would succeed if, as he said, " it is written for boys and not for their grand- mothers."
It was related of Dr. Vaughan when he was Head Master of Harrow, that he was contemplating the expulsion of a boy for some serious escapade when the boy's father appeared to protest against what he regarded as an excessive punishment. " Boys will be boys," he suggested. " Yes," said Vaughan, " quite so. But with my consent they shan't be young men."
The present writer read the Boy's Own Paper from the first number and he can guarantee that there was plenty of fun without prudishness or priggishness. No boy ever found in it an excuse for being a young man before his time ; but he did find every sort of artistically concealed encouragement to be a man—for in the moral sense the single word covers the whole of life.
The present writer began to read the paper when he was on the threshold of a public school and he can gratefully say that there and then the alleged terrors of public school life were rolled away like a scroll. Such information—false, as it turned out—which he had been- able to gain about public schools was roughly to the effect that any boy who tried to behave as he had been brought up to behave at home would be regarded as a " milksop " (a terribly popular word in those days) and would be bullied till he mended his ways. He had thus come to regard his future at school as being mainly an occasion for deciding whether he would say his prayers in the presence of others or whether he would not ; and whether, if he did, he would dare to fight some new Slogger Williams. It has been said that every mediaeval war was a religious war, but the fact was hardly a justification for a mediaeval view of public schools forty or fifty years ago. Experience showed, when the time came, that the House Master allotted three minutes of silence for prayers and saw that the silence was observed, or deputed a prefect (who was generally stricter) to see that it was observed. And no boy, however much of a bully, would have dared to break down the custom any more than he would have dared to stay away from a lesson on the ground that attention to rules was the mark of a milksop.
There were great writers for boys in those days, when Plancus was consul, nearly fifty years ago—or at least they seemed to
be. Fenimore Cooper had died nearly thirty, years before the B.O.P. began, but the man who romanced on Red Indian life, and who had enough art to impress both Balzac and Victor Hugo, was still the model for every writer who wanted to combine in an alluring, form a modicum of history with a great deal of adventure. R. M. Ballantyne—R. L, Stevenson's Ballantyne the Brave—derived from Fenimore Cooper. The present writer might have a different opinion now if he re-read their books, but at that time he certainly ranked i'he Coral Island and The Young Fur Traders, with Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. W. H. G. Kingston was a sea writer, and most boys still read From Powder Monkey to Admiral. Then there was Henty who was not the less beloved or believed in because he wrote all his stories—several of them appeared in the B.O.P.—in accordance with a formula which never varied. • In an amusing interview, published in the Observer last Sunday, the two gifted writers who collaborate under the nom de guerre of " Herbert Strang," mentioned that Henty's stories always had the same number of chapters and that each chapter had its own set of incidents. In chapter twenty—or it may have been in chapter nineteen—there was always a prisoner's escape. Henty was quite sound in attaching great importance to' the escape. As Herbert Strang" says, the literature of boys is still the literature of escape.
This literature has changed not at all in essence, though it has changed entirely in its setting. For the modern boy the world is much more mechanized than it used to le. A writer who wants to make sure of gaining the attention of boys must always be a little in advance of discovery. Hence the overwhelming popularity of Jules Verne. Red Indians are out of fashion, and well they may be, as standardized motor-cars are now produced in hundreds of thousands on spots where Red- Indians pitched their wigwams seventy years ago. It is interesting to remember that when Sir Robert Baden-Powell was starting the Boy Scouts he wrote a book containing outlandish rhymes which were to be the staple of entertainment round camp fires. One wonders whether those aboriginal songs and recitations " caught on," or whether they died with the Red Indian spirit, or whether the boys were too self-conscious in any case to declaim them. For all we know, however, they may have been a success. After all, Red Indianism survives strongly enough in the whole of the wonderful Scout movement.
Then the B.O.P. always provided a story of school or home life. Some of us will never forget Talbot Baines Reed, one of the founders of the Bibliographical Society. The present writer was given a present of a year's subscription to the B.O.P. when a story by Reed called My Friend Smith was appearing. At that time the paper used to appear in weekly parts, but every month the four weekly parts appeared bound together with a presentation picture. It was too much for the present writer to wait for a month to discover what happened at the recurring crises in the career of Smith. Accordingly, he several times independently spent his pocket money on a weekly part. How one counted the days between each appearance of the rusty red cover of the monthly part, with the slender surrounding design recalling the goblin tracery of Dicky Doyle on the cover of Punch!
It is a mechanized world, we have said. One need only turn over the pages of the B.O.P. to-day to notice that boys have taken up with electricity, wireless, motor-bicycles, and aeroplanes—the last properly appropriate to the " soaring human boy." The modern boy is older than a boy of the same age fifty years ago, so " Herbert Strang " says ; but, then, he begins reading earlier, so the B.O.P. by no means suffers. He thinks more of his career. The boy of nine to-day wants to be an airman, whereas fifty years ago his ambition was to be a porter. So the B.O.P. goes on, and long may it do so, piesenting the old doctrine in a different dress but never failing month by month to make it extraordinarily attractive.
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