ST. JIM'S AND GREYFRIARS

By R. R. CECIL

IT was Samuel Johnson's belief that what we read with inclination makes the strongest impression. " If we read without inclina- tion," he said, " half the mind is employed in fixing the attention, so there is but one half to be employed on what we read." This, I think, explains (without excusing) the fact that The Pilgrim's Progress, which so many better people have enjoyed, has never been more to me than a bulky volume with heavily-tooled covers and shiny paper, which wouldn't stay open on the table ; whereas after thirty years I can still name every character at Greyfriars and St. Jim's.

A reasonably well-read and discriminating parent, no doubt, can open magic casements for his offspring, stealthily besetting their path with the " right " books, urging nothing, censoring nothing. ,It's undoubtedly the quickest way to literary maturity and the self- sought enjoyment of poetry, the crowning reward of readership. My own father, who sternly discountenanced the Magnet, the Gem, the Union Jack, Pluck and the Nelson Lee Library, was a vigorous advocate (at, I suspect, one or even two removes) of Sir John Lubbock's "Hundred Best Books." I recently found I had read nine of these, including Zadig, Pickwick. and the one which Sir John compendiously called Shakespeare. But I remember that in his less guarded moments my father often spoke with affection of The Adventures of lack Harkaway, genuinely regretting that those wonderful stories, serialised throughout his own boyhood, were not available for my brothers and me to read. I never heard anyone else speak of them.

Now there comes, as the product of a dogged industry that it

is humbling to contemplate, this remarkable book of Mr. Turner's* —" The Story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, Billy Bunter, Dick Barton, et a/." And in it Jack Harkaway has an entire chapter to himself. His creator was Bracebridge Hemyng, barrister of the Middle Temple, "who found that turning out fiction was vastly more profitable than sitting around waiting for briefs." Jack's escapades ran in Boys of England from 1871 until the end of the century ; and, to judge from the excerpts Mr. Turner treats us to, they maintained a steady rhythm of torture, decapitation, all-in wrestling, graphic cannibalism and the competing stenches of blood and burning flesh. Kraft-Ebbing and the Comte de Sade had not then made their niches in our native vernacular ; but the fate of Nuratella, the native girl who had betrayed Jack into captivity, would be classified as sadism in any newspaper report today. Even at school Jack was on terms with the head- master's wife which pre-dated Young Woodley by sixty years. So this was the healthy literature of those who were young in the 'eighties and 'nineties! This was what Mr. George Sampson, of the Concise Cambridge History of Literature, devoured in his youth along with Sweeney Todd and Spring-Heeled Jack, to record in later years that he " found no harm in any of them."

Maybe there was no more " harm" in them than in the atrocities

of Hans Andersen. On the question of harm, G. K. Chesterton once a voiced a noble impatience with the thesis that boy who couldn't read stole an apple because he liked the taste, while a boy who could read stole one because his mind was aflame with Dick Turpin. But how gentle, by comparison, were the Magnet and Gem, the furtive reading of every boy I knew, and of nearly every girl ; furtive because parents condemned them unheard as trash and nonsense, and because their small bulk fitted them for bed-time contraband.

They were morally impeccable, these stories of Harry Wharton and Co. of the Remove, of Tom Merry and Co. of the Shell. For hundreds of thousands of lower middle-class products of the Educa- tion Act they portrayed (we thought) the romance of a public-school life that had been going on for centuries, and brought it within the ambit of our dawning literacy. Such an opinion can never be put to any test, but I would be ready to swear that, because they were about boys of our own age whose lives fulfilled our dreams of well-to-do elegance and savoir-faire, the Magnet and Gem had more influence, lasting influence, on people of my generation than all the * Boys Will Be Boys. By E. S. Turner. (Michael Joseph. 10s. 6d.) other boys' weeklies together. The very appearance of these young gentlemen, as indicated in pen drawings which I now see to be pretty poor work, set standards for us that intensified the difficulties of our parents in the boys' outfitters' shops. No trousers could ever be too tight and straight, no turn-ups deep enough or angular enough, no Eton collar was ever just right. Nor could any barber produce that wayward shock of front hair, so carefully drawn, so carelessly English.

If we were less apt in adopting the moral code, this is because it was so consistently high and its observance so difficult at busy, rough-and-tumble day-schools ; though Mr. Charles Hamilton (bless him!), who wrote these stories weekly for thirty years as Frank Richards and Martin Clifford (1,500,000 words a year), knew about our needs and difficulties ; and, as our unofficial mentor, he was never " pi " or flat-footed. I think it is a matter of common consent

that the character of Billy Bunter, the " owl" of the Remove at Greyfriars, was his most vital creation. I thought at one time that he owed something to the fat boy in Pickwick, but I see now that this was only because he was fat and rather unpleasant. Mr. Turner paints him thus: " The owner of the tightest trousers in Greyfriars (for some reason they were striped horizontally and vertically, instead of just vertically) was the perfect butt. He had few praiseworthy qualities, other than the power to incite mirth. He would borrow money with no inten- tion of paying it back, he would pirate another man's tuck without a qualm. . . . He was never really unpopular—a fat boy never can be. His machinations were so barefaced and his bonhomie so suspect that it was a fellow's own fault if he was taken in by them."

This omits, of course, the astounding and incongruous fact that he was a clever ventriloquist, but perhaps Mr. Hamilton never really made adequate use of this priceless adjunct to the ideal school story. Of all the Greyfriars characters, Bunter was perhaps the one most eligible for survival ; and it is good to know that he still appears from time to time in unrelated (and much more expensive) publica- tions—and that his adventures are available in Braille.

How old is popular literacy ? Many of the " bloods " and " dread- fuls " examined by Mr. Turner were well established before the Education Act of 1870, and must, therefore, have been designed for the adult near-gentry. This is a sobering thought ; for these publica- tions, on the whole, were a pestilential lot, ill written and generally prurient. Some of the more modern are written in the language of newspaper " reportage " (still following the Northcliffe prescrip- tion of a two-line maximum for paragraphs), which is at least

grammatical and is terse enough not to waste the time of the modern boy beset by so many counter-attractions. Before and during World War I they were better written, on the whole, than the works of,

say, George Manville Fenn ; to open one of his hundred-odd books today is to be shocked at the extreme poverty of the writing. Some of the most competent, I thought (and still think), were the Jack, Sam, and Pete stories of S. Clarke Hook, which get a very cursory mention in Mr. Turner's book. He notes that Pete was a ventrilo-

quist (which he failed to notice about Billy Bunter), but makes no mention of the glorious fact that this gigantic negro, perpetually showing a complete set of gold teeth as he roared with laughter ("Yah, yah, yah !") was a multi-millionaire. It was the essence of these stories that if Pete wanted to go somewhere at a time when there was no train to take him, he bought the railway and had one put on. He was magnificent, lovable, invincible in the ring— and admitted by many fathers as unexceptionable in order that they' might read his preposterous adventures themselves.

Those who attribute juvenile crime to the effect of the " weeklies " may be partially right ; it is my belief that behaviour of many kinds, good and bad, and at all ages, is a delayed consequence of early reading, so that the worst books are the ones that most merit the sociologists' attention. But there can be nothing to be said for the complaint that the current increase of juvenile crime is due to the

weeklies. They are morality tracts by comparison with their for- bears, and even the much-maligned Dick Barton is a pillar of

respectability beside any comparable figure in the penny dreadfuls of the past.

Mr. Turner's researches must have been prodigious. From the innumerable references and comparisons in his book, a work of

scholarship, humour, granite-like common sense and a great deal of tenderness, one concludes that he must now have read more bloods than any man living. I believe he enjoyed doing it at first, but I should doubt if he will ever look at another. I do not understand why he got Captain C. B. Fry to write an introduction. Captain Fry knows absolutely nothing about bloods. He cheerfully says so. During his six years as a boy at Repton and two more as a master at Charterhouse he " never saw or heard of such publications." There must, therefore, be something bad about them ; but he does not know what it is. All things considered, it is a relief to know that Repton and Charterhouse did not see Magnets and Gems. They were not written for Repton and Charterhouse ; they were written for the back-street boys, who bought them with the pennies they got by taking bundles of newspapers to the butcher's.