Shelley and I just returned from a few days away in Kangaroo Valley. There, we discovered a wonderful second hand book and antique store that sucked the time from our day and the money from our pockets as we sorted through ephemera from past decades. I walked away with a pile of fascinating old comics and 'story papers' dating all the way back to 1901 and representing a wide shift on childhood reading.
Childhood reading and literacy is a topic that never seems to go away. Why do kids today read less than we did? Why can't we get them interested in the classic books that enthralled us? Is there any one of us who isn't horrified every time a child chooses to watch the Narnia movies while refusing to go near the wonderful novels?
Regular readers will know I adore comics and always have done. Far from being the lowbrow and worthless wastes of time our teachers insisted they were, comics were a way into reading and storytelling that shaped me and my imagination. A previous post - A lament for children's comics - discusses my personal experiences and the value they had to me as a young boy growing up in Stockport.
Today, the comic industry is near dead, except for the superhero juggernauts published in New York, serving an audience almost entirely made up of older fans that never put away childish things. Any comic shop will tell you that it is rare for a child under ten to venture within and that the average customer is more likely mid twenties or older.
Looking through these old, browned and chipped relics of early twentieth century childhood, a story is told that illustrates that downward path for the humble comic while revealing the changing reading habits of our kids.
(If you want a closer look at any of the images in this article, click to enlarge.)
Schoolboy japes and ladylike behaviour
One of the earlier examples I picked up wasThe Girl's Own Paper from 1901, with it's prim but charming cover (with a light colour touchup on the girl's cheeks. How cute.) This weekly paper ran for many years (this is Volume XXIII, number 1146!) Inside, an eager young girl would find articles on Chinese sayings and American poison oak interspersed with poetry and serialised stories like Barty's Star. Fifteen pages of dense prose (plus cover).
The Girl's Own Paper ran from 1880 to 1950 (history), before being incorporated into Heiress. I particularly love the Answers to Correspondents page on the back cover, where the writers respond to the letters received, but without ever printing the letters or questions they respond to. Hence, one response simply goes:
FRANCES.- February 10th, 1865, fell on a Friday. I think your handwriting is fairly good. It is very legible, which is a great point.
Devoid of all context, such comments form a fractured and random assortment of unconnected facts, leavened with opinions and comments with no relevance to anyone, save the original letterwriter.
I nearly picked up a 1919 edition of The Magnet - featuring Billy Bunter on the cover - but it was in such poor condition, merely opening it would have probably turned it to dust. Instead, I brought home this 1921 edition of The Gem, a similar title that also focussed entirely on schoolboy adventure and boarding school larks.
Every Wednesday, boys up and down the UK would part with one penneth ha'penny for the latest instalments of life at St. Jim's School for Boys. With one complete story, backed up by a couple of one page serials and the obligatory letters page, The Gem represents hours of weekly reading for young boys every week. The type is small and cramped, which makes me wonder about the eyesight strain readers would have suffered, reading by lamplight.
The Gem lasted 1711 issues from 1907 to 1939 (history), when the ink and paper shortages that reduced production on many UK comics and magazines during the Second World War most likely made continued publication difficult. It presents a wonderful look back into the idealised boyhoods of the '20s, with adverts proclaiming fretwork as a boy's ideal hobby, and offering an accordian for sale on easy payments of 8 shillings a month for six months. Model steam engines, Meccano, pea pistols and Vikwik Liniment ("Instantly kills pain of gout and lumbago") shill themselves to eager readers. Meanwhile, the stories themselves betray a literacy level most children of today would baulk at.
With that monosyllabic rejoinder, Arthur Augustus D'Arcy disappeared down the staircase.
I've yet to see the phrase "monosyllabic rejoinder" ever pop up Batman or Mighty Morphin Power Whatsits. The Flesch-Kincaid readability test suggests that sentence, and many others in those pages, requires a level of literacy comparable with a university education! Yet these story paperswere written and intended for young lads, no older than their early teens.
Fewer words for your pennies
Over the years, the American comics had begun to appear in Britain, and these had an influence on the future of these titles. By the Second World War, British comics such as The Dandy and The Beano were being published weekly.
Knockout was one of these new titles and I was able to pick up a 1945 issue. Knockout ran from 1939 to 1963 and a total of 1251 issues (history). Interestingly, The Magnet - that story paper competitor to The Gem - 'merged' with Knockout in 1940, again falling victim to the paper shortages of the war (history). Billy Bunter moved from book length text stories to a hybrid form of text and comic, popular during this period. Combining the comic illustrations with paragraphs of text in order to tell a story, the action was stilted and was no more than an overly illustrated short story.
Knockout (and Magnet) billed itself as "The Victory Comic", even though the war was rarely mentioned in its pages. The pride of a nation stretched everywhere, even to children's comics, as the final months of the war promised an end to the rationing, horrors and fears that Britain had contended with for so long.
The internal pages mix full comic strips with text stories, demonstrating a middle gound between the old story papers and what was to come. Television was still a few years away and children were accustomed to spending long hours indoors or in shelters as the blitz made playing in the street increasingly unsafe. Comics filled that time, but it interesting to note that the time needed to read one had now shrunk as text gave way to pictures.
I suspect this is partly due to the importation of American comics, creating a demand for locally produced versions, as well as the economies that would come with a far smaller word count. Although more illustration was needed, they filled up pages quicker. Stories became one or two page vignettes, rather than long serials - bite sized chunks with a punchline instead of complete short stories. Cheerful, quick and easy to read and, most of all, comparitavely cheap to produce.
Some of the other story papers transformed into comics during this period. Wizard, Hotspur and others swapped long text for quick laughs and comic strip adventure until, by the 1960s, all-text pages were increasingly rare. (Have a look at the incredibly racist stuff that passed for front page funnies on this 1949 Wizard cover!) This coincides with the rise of television and the beginning of a trend that saw more and more distractions and alternative forms of entertainment made available to children.
The last big UK comics boom was in the 1970s. Over the last thirty years, comic sales have declined sharply. No longer does every kid have a subscription and an allegiance to their favourite title. No longer are there schoolyard arguments over whether Desperate Dan is better than Dennis the Menace. No longer do kids trade comics like currency, extending the reach of each issue and intriducing even more to the joys of simple reading.
Looking back at those old issues of a century ago, it strikes me as sad that something as basic as childhood reading has been eroded. These children's weeklies demonstrate very clearly the changes in reading habits over the last one hundred years. They make me wonder whether we're not missing something by ignoring the simple joys of spending your hard-earned pocket money on twenty pages of exciting adventure to read by the fire with a jam sandwich and a glass of milk.
