20
Popular Literature: Comics, Dime Novels, Pulps
and Penny Dreadfuls
Denis Gifford
British Children’s Comics: 150 Years of Fun and ThrillsThe familiar British weekly comic magazine of today, usually comprising some thirty-two
pages of strip cartoons, most in colour, some in black-and-white, can trace its ancestry
back to an experiment produced for Christmas 1874, and forty years further back to a
four-page annual edition dated 1831. And the regular comic characters can trace
themselves back to a one-off experimental strip designed with no more ambition than to
fill a page in a weekly humour magazine published in the summer of 1867. Both these
casual (at the time) events took place long enough ago to secure Britain’s claim as founder
of the feast of fun that fills the world with laughter.
To take these two events in chronological order, first came the vehicle. Bell’s Life in
London and Sporting Chronicle, a weekly which began on 3 March 1822, introduced a
regular pictorial feature called The Gallery of Comicalities in 1827. This series of
caricatures, illustrated jokes and humorous engravings was contributed by such
favourite contemporary cartoonists as George Cruikshank, Robert Seymour and Kenny
Meadows. The pictures were so popular that thirty-four of these cartoons were gathered
together and reprinted as a full page of pictures on Sunday, 2 January 1831: the first
cartoon page in British newspaper history. This was so successful—and economical!—
that a further fifty-four cartoons were reprinted in the edition dated 12 March 1831,
with the interesting editorial note that the engravings ‘cost the proprietors two hundred
and seventy guineas’. If true, this would imply that the average fee paid per picture was
five guineas, a good deal higher than the fee a comic artist would receive half a century
later, when two shillings would be considered a good price per panel!
An enterprising publisher named George Goodyer now enlarged on Bell’s idea and,
assembling four broadsheet pages from back numbers of Bell’s weekly, published them
as a one-shot entitled The Gallery of 140 Comicalities on 24 June 1831. Goodyer charged
the steep price of threepence for this bumper budget of cartoons, editorially reckoning
that the total cost to him was £735. His profits can be estimated by the mathematically
minded, as we know his total sales to have been 178,000 copies. Another publisher,
William Clement Jr, saw even more potential in this pictorial format, and turned The
Gallery of Comicalities into an annual series, running it from Part II (1832) to Part VII
(1841). This regular cartoon paper becomes a good contender for the title of the first
comic, for among the myriad cartoons can be found primitive strips, tiny two-picture