Boys' Weeklies Summary

All large towns have newsagents' shops stocked with garish comic postcards and dozens of daily or weekly periodicals. The topics of these periodicals accurately reflect the thinking and feeling of the common English person. A specific type of periodical is the so-called boys' weekly, often described as "penny dreadfuls," which include serialized stories aimed at boys from the ages of about twelve to perhaps sixteen. Titles include the Gem, Magnet, Modern Boy, Triumph, Champion, Wizard, Rover, Skipper, Hotspur, and Adventure. Nearly every English boy who reads at all passes through a phase of devotedly reading every issue of one or more of these weeklies.

The Gem and Magnet have been in continuous publication for over thirty years' time. These two papers are "sister" papers, published by the same company, and the standard characters from each paper often make brief appearances in...