continued to enjoy adventure stories written for adults such as Westward Ho!, an
Elizabethan romance by Charles Kingsley (1819–1875).
Kingston was succeeded as editor of the significantly named periodical The Union Jack:
Tales for British Boys, a penny weekly devoted to adventure stories, by G.A.Henty (1832–
1902), who became the most prolific writer of boys’ adventure stories in the last decades
of the nineteenth century. A war correspondent who had travelled widely, and covered
most of the major conflicts in Europe from the Crimean to the Franco-Russian War as
well as various colonial expeditions, Henty began writing full-time for children when his
poor health made strenuous travelling impossible. He was soon producing four books a
year, ranging from historical works, such as With Clive in India: or the Beginnings of
Empire (1884) to stories based upon recent or even contemporary events, such as The
Dash for Khartoum: A Tale of the Nile Expedition (1892).
Henty was enormously popular, with sales of his books reaching 150,000 annually,
according to his publisher Blackie. In view of this kind of success, it is not surprising
that by the end of the century almost every publishing house in Britain was eagerly
providing adventure stories for a young reading public which was growing in size not
only because of the expansion of the public (that is, private) schools but also of the
national state schools, after education had been made compulsory for all children by a
Parliamentary Act of 1870.
Even the Religious Tract Society, originally founded to disseminate religious works,
launched a weekly periodical, the Boy’s Own Paper, in 1879 to cater for a new
generation of readers by serialising adventure stories by such writers as Ballantyne and
Kingston. So popular was the magazine that within five years its circulation had reached
a quarter of a million, and over half a million within ten years.
Other periodical publishers followed suit. In the years between 1855–1901 over a
hundred secular magazines for boys were published in Britain, the majority after the
1870 Education Act—Young Folks in 1871, Young England in 1880, Chums in 1892 and
The Captain in 1899, to name some of the most famous examples. Most of them
attracted the major writers of adventure stories at this time, including Ballantyne,
Kingston and Stevenson. They were well produced on good quality paper, and copiously
illustrated.
Alongside these periodicals produced by the respectable, middle-class publishers,
however, there also existed penny magazines of a more sensationalist character. Edwin
J. Brett (1828–1895) dominated this field with his Boys of England launched in 1867,
featuring the boisterous adventures of Jack Harkaway, but Brett had notable rivals in
the brothers George and William Emmett with melodramatic serials in their periodical
Sons of Britannia, launched in 1876.
In the 1890s Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe (1865–1922), started a series of
weekly periodicals selling at only one halfpenny each, such as The Halfpenny Marvel in
1893, The Union Jack (reviving Henty’s old title) in 1894, and Pluck, also 1894. The
Halfpenny Marvel specialised in stories about buried treasure and adventures at sea,
while the Union Jack concentrated more on stories about how Britain obtained her
colonies. Pluck also contained tales of daring deeds in imperial settings, and serials
based upon such topics as General Gordon and the Siege of Khartoum. The weekly
fiction found in Pluck and the Union Jack, with their stories about youthful heroes in
326 SHAPING BOYHOOD: EMPIRE BUILDERS AND ADVENTURERS