I’ve stumbled into the lost world of Victorian boyhood

I didn’t keep any of the comics I read as a child. Now I wish I had. One day, my grandchildren – or my grandchildren’s grandchildren – would have loved them. They might not have enjoyed them, or found them funny, or even understood them. But they would have been mesmerised all the same. Because those comics would have been a doorway to the past. A magical portal to a long-lost world. I know, because I’ve just stepped through such a portal myself.

Recently, my parents were sorting through my late grandfather’s possessions when they came across a collection of extremely old comics. They were copies of The Boy’s Own Paper, and they long predated my grandfather – he was born in 1921, whereas the comics were from the early 1880s. So they may originally have belonged to his own grandfather. My parents bundled them up and posted them to me. And ever since they arrived, I’ve been gingerly turning their aged, yellowing pages, utterly transfixed.

No longer are these comics what they were intended to be: cheap, ephemeral amusements (“Price 6d”). Instead, they’re now an extraordinary record of a culture, a country, that has gone for good. Every article they contain is a verbal time capsule, preserving for eternity its age’s views and values. About some of these views and values we probably know quite enough already, so I won’t dwell on the deeply racist adventure stories: for example, the yarn headed A Tale of the Dark Continent, in which a white explorer encounters “a tall, powerful, and nearly naked negro” named, perhaps inevitably, “Sambo”, who addresses our hero as “Massa” and speaks in “broken but pathetic English” (“Dey use me so bery bad, sah…”).

Anyway, there’s so much more to these comics than that. I love the language of the adverts, and the peculiar claims made on their wares’ behalf. Pears Soap (“The plainest features become attractive”), Goodall’s Custard Powder (“Unequalled for the purposes intended”), Allen & Hanbury’s Cod Liver Oil (“As nearly tasteless as cod liver oil can be”). My personal favourite is the ad for Cadbury’s Refreshing Genuine Economical Cocoa – which boasts of containing “four times the amount of nitrogenous or flesh-forming constituents” than rival brands. You don’t hear many slogans like that these days. (“The Burger King Whopper. Bursting with flesh-forming constituents.”)

Then there’s the articles. I keep marvelling at the sheer length of them, the density of the text, the tininess of the type. Victorian boys must have had remarkable stamina. A typical issue might contain a 3,000-word review of the Boat Race (“Both crews acquitted themselves more creditably than they did last year”), or the cricket season (“Spofforth’s alarming delivery to the leg, if it does not take the wicket, is almost sure to take the batsman”).

There’s so much practical advice, too. The young Victorian reader is constantly being enjoined to improve himself. To memorise every species of British moth and every rank of the British Navy – or to learn some new skill that, to my mollycoddled modern eyes, seems intimidatingly advanced. How to build a desk, keep chickens, paint pottery or make a weasel trap. There’s even an advert for “a boys’ lathe” (£2 15s). I could never have handled a lathe when I was a boy. I doubt I could handle one as a man.

What interests me most, though, is the voice in which all these articles are written. To those of us who grew up an entire century later, it’s fascinating. It tells us so much about the way childhood has changed.

Watch any modern children’s TV show. The presenters are, of course, adults – but they don’t talk, dress and act like adults. They talk, dress and act like children. Like the audience. Or at least, like the audience’s cool older sibling.

The Victorian comic treats its audience in a completely different way. The relationship between the Victorian comic and the Victorian comic’s reader is the relationship between a school master and his pupil. Every article reads like a lesson, delivered in a voice that is impeccably formal, brisk, strict, precise.

From time to time, the master indulges in a little light drollery – but he will brook no mischief. The pupil had better sit up and pay attention, or he’ll be writing out 100 lines after class. Then again, perhaps there’s more to it than that. The voice has an authority, a conviction, far greater than that of a mere school master.

I think I know what it is. Somehow, it feels like the voice of Victorian England itself. The voice of a land that commanded the world, and regarded its supremacy as both natural and benign. It’s the voice of unchallenged self-assurance. No giggling self-deprecation, no arch self-mockery, no shamed self-abasement. Just straight-backed certainty and square-jawed aplomb.

Which is why, for these strange but entrancing documents, comic feels a wholly inadequate word. These aren’t comics; they’re training manuals. They taught Victorian boys how to become Victorian men: the men at the head of life’s table. When I was growing up, there was nothing like The Boy’s Own Paper. If there had been, we’d have laughed at it. No boring old charts of British moths for us. No woodwork diagrams or pottery tips. All we wanted were cartoon strips. Which probably says a lot about our own culture, too.

Source Article

Next Post

The Latest: Poll: 50% of Americans Ready for Vaccine Shot | Business News

Wed Dec 9 , 2020
WASHINGTON — A new poll find only about half of Americans are ready to roll up their sleeves for COVID-19 vaccines even as states prepare to begin months of vaccinations. The survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows about a quarter of U.S. adults aren’t sure […]

You May Like