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E.S. Turner's first book, published in 1948, is a wholly original, richly researched and uncommonly insightful study of a somewhat disreputable genre: the 'Boys' Weekly' papers commonly known as 'penny dreadfuls.' 'A classic of its kind... [Turner] ploughed through back numbers of the old blood-and-thunder adventure magazines specialising in cliffhanger serials; the young hero would be left hanging over a cliff in a totally impossible situation, which would be easily resolved in the next issue: 'With one bound Jack was free.' Social history had never been as much fun or, with three extra printings in its first week - such was the demand - as profitable.' Jonathan Sale, Guardian 'Some people felt that E.S. Turner may have invented a new kind of book - the popular social history, very British, very funny, but written with a glistening elegance.' Andrew O'Hagan, London Review of Books… (more)
Boys Will Be Boys was first published in 1948, when the juvenile idol of the day was the BBC's Dick Barton.
Note to the third edition.
In this book the reader is invited to take a backward plunge into the new mythology - the mythology of Sexton Blake and Deadwood Dick, of Jack Sheppard, Jack Harkaway and Billy Bunter; of all the idols of boyhood from Dick Turpin down to Dan Dare.
Preface.
Charles Addams, the macabre-minded artist of The New Yorker, has a sketch of a sinister-looking building which bears a notice: 'Beware of the Thing.'
Chapter I. Gothic hangover.
Quotations
Last words
Let G. K. Chesterton have the last word
The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. . . . [Their literature] will always be a blood and thunder literature, as simple as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.
E.S. Turner's first book, published in 1948, is a wholly original, richly researched and uncommonly insightful study of a somewhat disreputable genre: the 'Boys' Weekly' papers commonly known as 'penny dreadfuls.' 'A classic of its kind... [Turner] ploughed through back numbers of the old blood-and-thunder adventure magazines specialising in cliffhanger serials; the young hero would be left hanging over a cliff in a totally impossible situation, which would be easily resolved in the next issue: 'With one bound Jack was free.' Social history had never been as much fun or, with three extra printings in its first week - such was the demand - as profitable.' Jonathan Sale, Guardian 'Some people felt that E.S. Turner may have invented a new kind of book - the popular social history, very British, very funny, but written with a glistening elegance.' Andrew O'Hagan, London Review of Books
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Book description
1st ed., Oct. 1948; 6th imp., April 1949; new rev. ed., 1957; new rev. ed., 1975.
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