Cricket Witness No 6 - His Captain's Hand on His Shoulder Smote

66 The Flood (1) Greyfriars For Ever..And Ever Serialisation, as in Magnet or Gem, resulted in a common reading at much the same time, so that boys, as well as adults, would learn together of the exploits of the pupils of Greyfriars and other fictional schools. Their adventures would thereby be the stuff of day-by-day chatter, all part of a more shared national consciousness. The roots of the first periodical approach with a cricketing aspect haveamodernring. Just aspresent-day commentators worry about the effect on children of access to damaging material on television or the internet, Victorian worthies noted with distaste that the outburst of publishing had its downside in the exploitative appeal to children of unworthy matter. Youthful thieves hauled before the magistrates had their felonies ascribed to reading pernicious ‘penny dreadfuls’. The stream of ‘penny dreadfuls’ stemmed from the Hanoverian practice of celebrating raucous public hangings with woodcuts, doggerel verse and the like, with such material transfigured by technical improvement into heavy sales of weekly papers to young working class men, whom now would be thought of as boys. From the 1830s these penny weeklies thrived. The cost of serialised Victorian novels was normally a shilling, twelve times that of the extremely cheap ‘dreadful’ but, even so, working class youngsters often clubbed together in farthings for their weekly dose of blood and thunder, almost all of it in cliff- hanging episodic form. A sample of titles is indicative of the criminal and supernatural staples of the genre. The String of Pearls introduced Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, while Varney the Vampire, or the Feast of Blood obviously alluded to another gruesome legend. Black Bess,or the Knight of the Road (the Victorians of all literary styles enjoyed the ‘or’ type sub-title) heralded Dick Turpin and ran for 254 episodes. The 19 th century reader, even at this low level, never lacked for stamina. Then there were the counterfeit texts, among them Oliver Twiss, Nickelas Nicklebery and Martin Guzzlewit . Then there were the eight page products