Magazines as Mirrors of Their Times

It is very difficult not to take this as an excuse, an eminently respectable academic excuse, for a nostalgia trip into the days of the Gem and the Wizard and the world of Billy Bunter, savored with a bottle of Tizer or possibly of Dandelion and Burdock. These essential accompaniments to English children's reading in the 1930s do not figure in the index or the text of this book, and are no doubt unknown to Kirsten Drotner, whose sensible native Denmark probably did not put such unhealthy fizzy drinks in the path of its young. The fizz, however, was a vital ingredient in the ambience of this literature, an ambience of pleasurable and slightly naughty frivolity and fantasy, for even though the reading was undertaken under the protection of vague parental approval it was decidedly not classed as in any way improving or educative. It was a permitted indulgence, in some ways better than a weekly ice cream or Mars bar because it lasted longer, in some ways worse because it wasted time that might have been more constructively occupied. I would certainly have been astonished to have been told at the time, even if I had been capable of understanding what was meant, that the Wizard was exerting any influence whatever on the molding of my character or my value systems. I would be astonished still in 1991, but am open to being convinced by a psychoanalyst or literary critic that the forgotten adventure stories left their mark, for all I know a deeper mark than the somewhat more serious literature of Kipling or Rider Haggard, or the more sustained literature of Arthur Ransome or Dornford Yates, which I recall reading at the same time.

In a way this is to enter Kirsten Drotner's book half-way through, at the point, after 1918, when English schoolchildren (she sometimes says "British," but there are no noticeable Scottish or Welsh elements in the book) had been identified by commercial magazine publishers as a distinct and autonomous market in command of its own real, if diminutive, purchasing power. In another sense it is to enter it at the beginning, in which she lays the theoretical foundations of her study in literary criticism, poststructuralism and all, in which reader-response theory and reception theory play a prominent part. Mercifully for the historian this turns out to be no more than mandatory lip service to the gods of theory, and although we are cautioned to keep always in mind the plurality of readers and the plurality of meanings of the texts, the body of the book is a clear, uncluttered, and largely jargon-free exposition of the leading contents of these magazines from the Lilliputian of 1751 to Just Seventeen of 1983, liberally sprinkled with fascinating and informative excerpts and potted stories from the didactic to the titillating. All the same, the difference between what the print, or the picture, says and how the reader responds is very important, and it would have been helpful to be shown at least the methodology for pursuing it further, for it would link that special world of children's magazines to the broad, and difficult, context of the cultural milieu and the socialization process of different groups and social classes, and would suggest how magazines fitted in with other elements in individual and group formation or reproduction.

Gender differences are dealt with very fully, and indeed form one of the main organizing principles of the text. Changing conventional concepts of gender roles were accurately reflected in the magazines, with a fairly constant undercurrent of male aggressiveness and female submissiveness, and with a slow unfolding of inquisitiveness about puberty and juvenile sexuality from the coy "good girls make dutiful wives and good mothers" of the Victorians to the guarded openness of the post-permissives. For most of the period, boys' papers emerge as distinctly bloodthirsty, callous, cruel, racist, and uncharitable, and girls' papers as mild-mannered and rarely more objectionable than mild distaste for a "jolly hockey sticks...