One of the things about travel is stumbling about things that even with a good deal of Internet trolling you might not have ever stumbled upon. This happened to me a couple of times in London earlier this month--and I include serendipities pertaining to things that I know about and yet wouldn't think to seek out.
When I was growing up in London, I was aware of Billy Bunter even though he was before my time. I think the weekly in which stories about him and his friends appeared had ceased publication before I was born--but perhaps not too long before I was born. I was reminded of Bunter & Co. just before my London trip, when I reread some essays by George Orwell, including one he published in 1940 called "Boys' Weeklies," which he describes as "vilely printed twopenny papers, most of them with lurid cover-illustrations."
However, Orwell approved of the Magnet, the weekly that devoted 20,000 words or so--in each issue--to the adventures of Bob Cherry, Tom Merry, Harry Wharton, Johnny Bull, Billy Bunter, and the rest of them at a boarding school called Greyfriars (which is a lot like Hogwarts Academy, by the way). These stories had been appearing in the Magnet since about 1908--they had already been around a long time when Orwell wrote his essay (let me repeat: 20,000 words a week).
Orwell describes an English surreality: These boys live in a kind of permanent 1910--before The Great War. The slang they use was probably obsolete by 1908, when their adventures started (if it was ever real slang--they speak words that make perfect sense but were probably never a part of the real language of men, saying "dash" instead of "damn," for example). There is a sameness of style that leads Orwell to conclude that the stories had been written--and were still being written--by a succession of writers over the years who were required to stick with the official voice that these tales were told in. (Five years later Orwell found out that the stories were all written by one man: Charles Hamilton, who used the pen name "Frank Richards" and was simultaneously writing other stories under other pen names. Egads!)
As I strolled through a bookstore on King's Road (what books would they have that we don't have in New York anyway?) I came across Billy Bunter's Postal Order. Who knew such a thing existed? Well, now both you and I do. It's an audio book, three disks. And I'm glad I bought it and listened to it. Apparently CSA Word produces several of these episodes from the Magnet.
Orwell points out that the stories are what we would tend to think of as wordy, and he quotes one as follows:
'Shutup, Bunter!'
Groan!
Shutting up was not really in Billy Bunter's line. He seldom shut up, though often requested to do so. On the present awful occasion the fat Owl of Greyfriars was less inclined than ever to shut up. And he did not shut up! He groaned, and groaned, and went on groaning.
Even groaning did not fully express Bunter's feelings. His feelings, in fact, were inexpressible.
There were six of them in the soup! Only one of the six uttered sounds of woe and lamentation. But that one, William George Bunter, uttered enough for the whole party and a little over.
But you know what: It works. Although an editor today (O.K., me) would be greatly tempted to condense a passage such as the foregoing, when I listened to the audio book this writer's voice had a hypnotic quality that I found drew me deeper and deeper into the ridiculous world of Billy Bunter and Greyfriars, a world that is probably more English than the English themselves have ever lived in.
Now, if I may climb from the ridiculous back up to the sublime, I am now reading Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, by Zora Neale Hurston, a writer who is not much remembered these days. I have only got through the first 30 pages or so, but I am completely captivated by her magical phrases--I was not overly surprised to learn that she produced a literary magazine with Langston Hughes at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance.
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