Revaluing British Boys' Story Papers, 1918-1939

H. A Fairlie

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349451067, 9781137293053
• eBook ISBN: 9781137293060
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores the phenomenon of the story paper, the meanings and values children took from their reading, and the responses of adults to their reading choices. It argues for the revaluing of the story paper in the inter-war years, giving the genre a pivotal role in the development of children's literature.

1

Setting the Scene: Critical Perspectives, Producers and Consumers

This chapter outlines an approach to the theorisation of popular culture, drawing on the work of critical and cultural theorists, which forms a background to my arguments across the book as a whole. It also explores the nature of creators and audiences. The notion of context is important here: what do we know of the producers of the story papers and their publishing methods? Who were the consumers of the story papers and what were the contexts of their reading lives? The chapter offers an introduction to some of the key themes and perspectives that will be explored in more detail in the following chapters.

Theorising popular culture

That the Library Association could speak of children’s publishing in the 1930s as ‘an ocean of terrible trash’ (Hunt, 1994: 106) says more about contemporary critical attitudes than it does about the books. The prevailing critical attitude was one of barely controlled horror at the apparent rise of the ‘low brow’, the mass-produced fictional experience, at the expense of quality literature. Retrospectively known as mass culture theory, this view was articulated most influentially by Matthew Arnold, who defined culture as ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’ (Arnold, 1960: 6). This view was enormously significant from the 1870s through to the 1950s – it became the tradition to see culture in this way, and likewise to view popular culture as ‘anarchy’.

Maintaining a controlling hold on ‘high’ culture is thus the only way to counter the perceived threat of the increasing power of the working class, the rising influence of the mass of the population. This is culture as a form of control – the ‘best’ people controlling the subordinate anarchic mass of ‘others’. Without culture there can be nothing but anarchy; for Arnold this unquestioned binary polarity allows for no shades of opinion or cultural practices in between.

By the 1920s and 1930s the Arnoldian ‘culture and civilisation’ tradition was clearly dominant as a theory which could apparently both account for the great increase in ‘terrible trash’ and offer some hope for countering its influence. Chief amongst its exponents was F. R. Leavis, who was in turn to dominate critical methods and the study of culture for the next 30 years.

F. R. Leavis’s interpretation of the Arnoldian tradition centred on the importance of education. In order to preserve the best that has been written and said, students must be taught to appreciate, to value the best according to prescribed criteria. Schools and colleges, he wrote, should try to ‘preserve and develop a continuity of consciousness and a mature directing sense of value – a sense of value informed by a traditional wisdom’ (Leavis, 1979: 15).

This need for preservation and continuity underpins much of Leavis’s work. Like Arnold he wanted to protect a ‘traditional’ value system which he saw as fundamentally threatened. For Leavis, however, the threat did not come from the masses as such, but rather from the more insidious influence of industrialisation and urbanisation. The coming of industrialisation has destroyed the old, and by implication better, ways of life, and left in their place something shabby and worthless – the standardised, homogenised and mass-produced taste. These old ways of life are characterised in Leavis’s view of a traditional organic society, as one in which labour meant the pursuit of traditional manual skills, and which was united by shared moral and aesthetic values. In such a society, it was the task of the educated minority to safeguard authority and continuity, to uphold tradition and heritage. His argument is a moral rather than political one, arguing not on class-based lines but against what he sees as threats to the very essence of life for all citizens. The mass market, mass production and standardisation, for Leavis, inevitably lead to ‘standardisation of persons’ (Mulhern, 1981: 9). The nature of modern work, tending to the repetitive and ceaseless machines, as he sees it, leads to what amounts to a kind of brainwashing: the masses are so debilitated by soulless work that they are incapable of any form of critical judgement, and so are condemned to be exploited by the producers of mass culture.

It is now fairly widely agreed amongst cultural critics that there are a number of problems with mass culture theory (see, for example, Strinati (1995) and Storey (1993)). Failure to take account of power relations is one key problem, in particular with respect to children’s literature and popular culture. By focusing purely on the value of high culture, or the quality end of the publishing spectrum, mass culture theory would deny any kind of learning experience for children from any other published material or cultural practice. It also fails to explore the nature of the relationships between writer, publisher and reader, beyond that of basic economics. A theory of popular culture, as Strinati points out, needs to look further than this, to explore consumption (‘how and why goods make a profit by finding large enough markets’) as well as production (‘how and why goods are produced’) (Strinati, 1995: 259). An exploration of consumption would point up a further problem with mass culture theory, in that it has an ‘inadequate understanding of the role of the audience in popular culture’ (Strinati, 1995: 46). Mass culture theory denies the audience any agency; it defines the audience as a passive, homogenised and submissive body, manipulated and exploited by the mass media, incapable of any individual thought, creative, critical or otherwise. That this view is fundamentally patronising, as well as being elitist and selective, is now widely recognised in critical theory. In choosing to dismiss the range and diversity of popular culture, mass culture theory also sets the critic in a position which both vilifies and excludes a mass audience. In effect, mass culture theory sees mass culture as harmful to its audience. Finally, and most damningly for the purposes of this book, mass culture theory is unable to account for social and cultural change. In its idealisation of an essentially mythical golden age, it is by definition backward-looking; its keywords, unity and continuity, imply closed conservatism.

If mass culture does not quite work as a mode of analysis from a twenty-first-century perspective, we need to seek out other ways of looking at culture. Raymond Williams offers three categories in the definition of culture:

• the ‘ideal’, in which culture is a state or process of human perfection, in terms of certain absolute or universal values ...

• the ‘documentary’, in which culture is the body of intellectual and imaginative work, in which, in a detailed way, human thought and experience are variously recorded ...

• the ‘social’ ... in which culture is a description of a particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning, but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour. (Williams, 1961: 41)

The three categories operate in a kind of continuum, from the Leavisian ‘ideal’, through the activity of criticism implied by definition two, which, as Williams says, could either take a view very similar to the ‘ideal’ analysis in concentrating on high culture, or consist of a process of ‘historical criticism which, after analysis of particular works, seeks to relate them to the particular traditions and societies in which they appeared’ (Williams, 1961: 42). Definition three, the ‘social’ end of the continuum, includes historical analysis, but also analyses alternative structures:

elements in the way of life that to followers of the other definitions are not ‘culture’ at all; the organisation of production, the structure of the family, the structure of institutions which express or govern social relationships, the characteristic forms through which members of society communicate. (Williams, 1961: 42)

The ‘social’ definition includes elements of the other two, aiming to study not just ways of life, but the ways in which life changes and develops. Williams sees value in all three definitions, and certainly an awareness of all three gives critical depth to any analysis of cultural artefacts. But it seems to me that the social definition has most to offer to an exploration of publishing for children, and in particular to an exploration of a specific historical period. Here is a way to answer some of the problems and difficulties of mass culture theory, by taking XSan inclusive view which focuses on lived experiences, meanings and values. For Williams, the theory of culture is ‘the study of relations between elements in a whole way of life’; the analysis of culture is then ‘the attempt to discover the nature of the organisation which is the complex of these relationships’ (Williams, 1961: 46). What we will see in the later analysis in this book are the ways in which in the 1920s and 1930s specific patterns of relationships develop: relationships between children (as readers/consumers of popular literature), their families and educational institutions (as guides to/selectors of reading experiences), and publishers (as producers).

There are problems with this approach to the study of culture, too, and in particular with the notion of using the social definition to analyse a historical period. Williams is clear on this point, that it is only really possible to know in detail our own time and place. ‘We can learn a great deal of the life of other places and times, but certain elements ... will always be irrecoverable’ (Williams, 1961: 47). Without having shared in the lived experience of a time, we can never really appreciate ‘the felt sense of the quality of life’ of that time, or fully understand contemporary ways of thinking. Williams’s answer to this is to suggest the existence of a kind of essence of life, which he calls the ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1961: 48), as a way in to understanding the culture of a period. Storey explains this as ‘the shared values of a particular group, class or society ... something that is a cross between a collective cultural unconscious and an ideology’ (Storey, 1993: 53). The place to find these structures of feeling, these shared values, is in the arts, ‘the only example of recorded communication that outlives its bearers’ (Williams, 1961: 48). Yet even here we can only approach an understanding of a past culture, because, crucially, the documentary record, in the examples of art which are studied, is selective.

No history or cultural study can be anything other than selective. A study of a past society is reliant on the documentary sources which remain, and on the various interpretations of those sources. The selective process begins in the period itself, and remains continually active as successive generations inherit, reorder and reinterpret traditions. The obvious corollary to this is a process of exclusion – what is not selected is simply discarded. Any cultural analysis which attempts to explore the social must thus also attempt to look beyond the received record in order to give space to the neglected and excluded. Mass culture theory, by comparison, attempts to exclude the popular, and for some considerable time was successful in its selectivity.

The selective tradition is clearly a powerful force by which the dominant group reinforces its value system, but it is also inherently vulnerable, in that at any time that which has been excluded can effectively be recovered and reincorporated (Williams, 1977: 116). Because this reinterpreting and reincorporating process is itself continuous it is impossible to foresee ‘the relevance of past work in any future situation’ (Williams, 1961: 52). In other words, as well as looking at the process of selection and exclusion in the historical period itself, it is important to be aware of the whole subsequent evolution of selection up to and including our own contemporary values and interests. I make my own selection by choosing to focus on popular literature, and I do so from a particular theoretical standpoint which chooses to privilege certain interpretations above others. That this is precisely what historians of children’s literature have also done is clear from the quotations at the beginning of the Introduction to this book. Each presents a selective view of the culture of the period – whether knowingly or otherwise. Inevitably, as Williams writes, ‘we see past work through our own experience’, and few of us ‘make the effort to see it in something like its original terms’ (Williams, 1961: 53). Analysis in Williams’s terms attempts to make the personal interpretation explicit by ‘returning a work to its [historical] period, [showing] historical alternatives and [relating] the interpretation to the particular contemporary values on which it rests’ (Williams, 1961: 53).

Raymond Williams’s work has also been used as the basis of critical historical approaches to literature which have been described as new historicism and cultural materialism. These critical methods were first discussed in the 1970s and 1980s, growing out of the work of Stephen Greenblatt and others, as a reaction against the ‘traditional’ conception of history as unproblematic, dealing in facts and truths, set out as a straightforward sequence of key events. New historicism and cultural materialism lead out from Williams’s concept of selectivity and interpretation, both trying to return works to their historical periods, to look at ‘literature in history, not literature and history’ (Brannigan, 1998: 4). Such methods are also about setting writers in context, noting that they ‘must draw upon a whole life-world, and that this life-world has undoubtedly left other traces of itself’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt, 2000: 43). As Brannigan explains,

both new historicist and critical materialist critics tend to read literary texts as material products of specific historical conditions ... [both view] texts of all kinds [as] the vehicles of politics insofar as texts mediate the fabric of social, political and cultural formations ... [both] see literature as a constitutive and inseparatable part of history in the making, and therefore rife with the creative forces, disruptions and contradictions of history. (Brannigan, 1998: 3–4)

This process is much more than simply seeing history as ‘background’ against which texts can be set, and moves decisively away from the notion of a single, unquestionable history towards an idea of multiple interpretations and multiple ‘histories’.

Both approaches are also concerned to explore the nature of power, power relations, and how these are manifested in literature. New historicists borrow the concept directly from Foucault – power as seen through the forces of ideology, the self-perpetuating and inescapable determining force of society. In Foucault’s terms, this is a way forward that ‘consists in taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point … [and] in using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, find out their point of application and the methods used’ (Foucault, 2001: 329). A new historicist perspective attempts to reveal how power operates in literature, and to tie that interpretation to a specific historical period, identifying how power relations develop over time. A cultural materialist view takes the interpretation one stage further, by insisting on situating texts within contemporary power relations. While both of these methods would argue the importance of the notion that we can only make sense of history through an understanding of our own present position, it is cultural materialism which makes this understanding overtly political. There are also differences in the ways in which followers of each approach select texts on which to focus their explorations. For new historicists, the key is to draw on diverse texts, giving equal status to a range of primary sources which can include diaries, travel narratives, popular literature, newspapers and advertising as well as the canonical. The cultural materialist agenda by comparison is to reinterpret those texts which have been privileged as canonical and to offer new readings:

[texts are] reconstructed, reappraised and reassigned all the time through diverse institutions in specific contexts. What [texts] signify, how they signify, depends on the cultural field in which they are situated. (Dollimore and Sinfield, 1994: viii)

Mitzi Myers has shown how both cultural materialism and new historicism could be applied very usefully to children’s literature:

A new historicism of children’s literature would integrate text and socio-historic context, demonstrating on the one hand how extra-literary cultural formations shape literary discourse and on the other hand how literary practices are actions that make things happen – by shaping the psychic and moral consciousness of young readers, but also by performing many more diverse kinds of cultural work. (Myers, 1988: 42)

In her view, the usefulness of a new historicist approach is in exploring how and why a tale or poem came to say what it does, what were the circumstances of its production, and what uses it served for its author, its child and adult readers, and its culture. Her inclusive perspective carries both awareness of and openness to meanings and meaning-making which offer a way towards understanding the structures of feeling of a particular period. But as with other critical approaches, new historicism and cultural materialism have been popular almost to the extent of becoming the dominant form of critical theory. As might be expected, critics have begun to question the arguments. Brannigan in particular has a problem with the way new historicists view history: if the only focus of attention is on the way in which texts are vehicles of power relations and ideological manipulation, surely that prevents the critic from seeing through texts to the lived experience beneath? Power is everywhere, he writes, ‘because power is the only thing that new historicists are looking for’ (Brannigan, 1998: 77). Lynne Vallone makes a more specific criticism of new historicism in relation to the study of children’s literature. A focus on power relations might have been expected at some point to lead to an analysis of the unique position of adults in relation to children. ‘Such an unequal distribution of power, though a function of age, should have been of interest to new historicist critics’ (Vallone, 1996: 102). That this has only now become a focus of critical interest is a symptom of how low a status children’s literature and culture has hitherto held amongst mainstream academics. Later chapters of this book begin to address this lack by looking at points of connection between producers and consumers, and the ways in which child readers made and took meanings from their reading.

Another critical method which has direct relevance ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Setting the Scene: Critical Perspectives, Producers and Consumers
• 2 The Moral Code of Inter-War Story Papers
• 3 Understanding School Worlds
• 4 The Imperial Hero: Story Paper Hero-Figures
• 5 Inter-War Story Papers and the Rise of Children’s Cinema
• 6 Story Papers as Cultural Artefacts: Contexts and Content
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Boys’ and Girls’ Story Paper Reading
• Bibliography
• Index