Element contents
Simulating Antiquity in Boys' Adventure Fiction
Maps and Ink Stains
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2022
Summary
A genre that glorifies brutish masculinity and late Victorian imperialism, boys' 'lost world' adventure fiction has traditionally been studied for its politically problematic content. While attuned to these concerns, this Element approaches the genre from a different angle, viewing adventure fiction as not just a catalogue of texts but a corpus of books. Examining early editions of Treasure Island, King Solomon's Mines, and The Lost World, the Element argues that fin-de-siècle adventure fiction sought to resist the nineteenth-century industrialisation of book production from within. As the Element points out, the genre is filled with nostalgic simulations of material anachronisms – 'facsimiles' of fictional pre-modern paper, printing, and handwriting that re-humanise the otherwise alienating landscape of the modern book and modern literary production. The Element ends by exploring a subversive revival of lost world adventure fiction that emerged in response to ebooks at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Information
- Type
- Element
- Information
- Online ISBN: 9781009158930Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication: 25 August 2022
References
Abate, Michelle Ann. No Kids Allowed: Children’s Literature for Adults. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020.Google Scholar
‘An Act to Establish a Register of Trade Marks’, pp. 1–5, in Bills, Public: Volume VI, Session 5 February–13 August 1875 (Railway Companies to Statute Law Revision). London: The House of Commons, 1875.Google Scholar
‘Aunt Louisa’s Toy Books’ (advertisement). The Athenaeum: Journal of English and Foreign Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Music and the Drama 2762 (2 October 1880): p. 421.Google Scholar
Batory, R. Dana, and Sarjeant, William A. S. ‘Sussex Iguanadon Footprints and the Writing of the Lost World’, pp. 13–18, in Gillette, David D. and Lockley, Martin G., eds., Dinosaur Tracks and Traces. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Glaser, Sheila Faria. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Baughan, Rosa. Character Indicated by Handwriting. London: ‘The Bazaar’ Office, [1880].Google Scholar
Beerbohm, Max. ‘A Defence of Cosmetics’. The Yellow Book: An Illustrated Quarterly 1.1 (April 1894): pp. 65–82.Google Scholar
Bentley, Lionel. Trade Marks and Brands: An Interdisciplinary Critique. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.Google Scholar
Bonnett, Alastair. The Geography of Nostalgia: Global and Local Perspectives on Modernity and Loss. London: Routledge, 2016.Google Scholar
Boyd, Kelly. Manliness and the Boys’ Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855–1940. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003.Google Scholar
Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. ‘The Drury Lane Boys’ Club: What It Grew from, What It Is, and What We Hope It Will Be’. Scribner’s Magazine 11.6 (June 1892): pp. 676–90.Google Scholar
Bushell, Sally. ‘Mapping Victorian Adventure Fiction: Silences, Doublings, and the Ur-Map in Treasure Island and King Solomon’s Mines’. Victorian Studies 57.4 (July 2015): pp. 611–37.Google Scholar
‘The Calli-Graphic Pen’ (advertisement). The Critic & Good Literature 4.2 (19 January 1884): p. iv.Google Scholar
‘Catalogue of Toy Books’ (advertisement), pp. 25–8, in Tales of Fairy Land. London: Routledge, 1879.Google Scholar
Chartier, Roger. The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind. Translated by Cochrane, Lydia G.. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Combs, Cody. ‘Will Physical Books Be Gone in Five Years?’ CNN, 18 October 2010. www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/10/17/negroponte.ebooks/index.html (accessed 23 October 2021).Google Scholar
Cowell, Cressida. ‘Cressida Reads Book 6: A Hero’s Guide to Deadly Dragons: Last Part Chapter 9 of A Hero’s Guide’. YouTube, 28 August 2020. www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6eXHXahoX4&list=PLBHPLU9xAmxe-3xrDoUU14G1PPhvXihqT&index=12 (accessed 18 August 2021).Google Scholar
Cowell, Cressida. A Hero’s Guide to Deadly Dragons. London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2007.Google Scholar
Cowell, Cressida. How to Break a Dragon’s Heart. London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2009.Google Scholar
Cowell, Cressida. How to Fight a Dragon’s Fury. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015.Google Scholar
Cowell, Cressida. How to Twist a Dragon’s Tale. London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2007.Google Scholar
Cowell, Cressida. ‘The Wonder of Maps’. BookTrust, 20 December 2016. www.booktrust.org.uk/news-and-features/features/2016/december/the-wonder-of-maps/ (accessed 14 January 2022).Google Scholar
‘Currency Converter: 1270–2017’. The National Archives. www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter (accessed 8 October 8 2021).Google Scholar
Davoudi, Salamander. ‘Bloomsbury’s Ebook Sales Increase 70% Year on Year’. Financial Times, 12 July 2012: p. 18.Google Scholar
Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
[Dickens, Charles, and Mark, Lemon]. ‘A Paper-Mill’. Household Words 1.23 (31 August 1850): pp. 529–31.Google Scholar
DiTerlizzi, Tony, and Liu, Jonathan H. ‘GeekDad Interview: Author-Illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi’. Wired, 10 May 2012. www.wired.com/2012/tony-diterlizzi-interview (accessed 11 October 2021).Google Scholar
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Lost World: Being an Account of the Recent Amazing Adventures of Professor George E. Challenger, Lord John Roxton, Professor Sumerlee, and Mr. E. D. Malone of the ‘Daily Gazette’. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1912.Google Scholar
Doyle, Arthur Conan. ‘The Lost World: Chapter XV (Continued)’. The Strand Magazine 44.263 (November 1912): pp. 483–96.Google Scholar
Doyle, Arthur Conan. ‘The Sign of the Four’. Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine 45.2 (February 1890): pp. 147–223.Google Scholar
Dresang, Eliza T. Radical Change: Books for Youth in a Digital Age. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1999.Google Scholar
Durkin, Philip. ‘When Is a Book a Tree?’ OUPblog, 15 June 2004. https://blog.oup.com/2014/06/origin-word-book-etymology/ (accessed 20 July 2021).Google Scholar
‘Effect of the Electric Light upon Books’. English Mechanic and World of Science, 22 July 1887: p. 483.Google Scholar
Fernandez, Jean. Geography and the Literary Imagination in Victorian Fictions of Empire: The Politics of Imperial Space. New York: Routledge, 2020.Google Scholar
Frith, Henry. Guide to the Study of Graphology: With an Explanation of Some of the Mysteries of Handwriting. London: Routledge, 1886.Google Scholar
Fyfe, Aileen. Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Garside, Peter. ‘Literature in the Marketplace: The Rise of the Scottish Literary Market’, pp. 203–77, in Bell, Bill, ed., The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland: Volume 3 (Industry and Ambition, 1800–80). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Grebe, Anja. ‘Frames and Illusion: The Function of Borders in Late Medieval Book Illumination’, pp. 43–69, in Wolf, Werner and Bernhart, Walter, eds., Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.Google Scholar
Green, Richard Lancelyn, and Gibson, John Michael. A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Haggard, H. Rider. ‘About Fiction’. The Contemporary Review 51.2 (February 1887): pp. 172–80.Google Scholar
Haggard, H. Rider. The Days of My Life. An Autobiography in Two Volumes: Volume I. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1926.Google Scholar
Haggard, H. Rider. ‘The Three-Volume Novel: To the Editor of the Times’. The Times, 27 July 1894: p. 11.Google Scholar
Hampson, Robert. ‘A Note on the Text’, pp. 44–9, in King Solomon’s Mines. London: Penguin, 2007.Google Scholar
Hart, James D. The Private Press Ventures of Samuel Lloyd Osbourne and R. L. S. with Facsimiles of Their Publications. San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1966.Google Scholar
[Hazlitt, William]. ‘The Periodical Press: Art. IV’. The Edinburgh Review 38.3 (May 1823): pp. 349–78.Google Scholar
Henkel, Ayoe Quist. ‘Exploring the Materiality of Literary Apps for Children’. Children’s Literature in Education 49.3 (September 2018): pp. 338–55.Google Scholar
Henley, W. E. ‘Unsigned Review [in] “Saturday Review”, 8 December 1883’, pp. 131–6, in Maixner, Paul, ed., Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1998.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric. ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914’, pp. 263–308, in Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence, eds., The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.Google Scholar
How, Harry. ‘Illustrated Interviews. No. VII. – Mr. H. Rider Haggard’. The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly 3.1 (January 1892): pp. 3–17.Google Scholar
Howitt, William. Cassell’s Illustrated History of England During the Last Hundred Years: Volume V. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1861.Google Scholar
‘The Ideal Writing Machine: The Caligraph’ (advertisement). The Critic & Good Literature 4.2 (19 January 1884): p. iv.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. New Left Review 146 (July/August 1984): pp. 53–92.Google Scholar
Japp, Alexander H. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record, An Estimate, and a Memorial. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905.Google Scholar
Katz, Wendy R. Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire: A Critical Study of British Imperial Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Kestner, Joseph A. Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915. New York: Routledge, 2010.Google Scholar
‘King Solomon’s Mines. A Thrilling Tale Founded on an African Legend’ (advertisement). Morning Post, 19 October 1885: p. 1.Google Scholar
Koehler, Karin. ‘Judging by the Hand, Handwriting and Character in Victorian Literary Culture’, pp. 220–40, in Gregory, James, Grey, Daniel J. R., and Bautz, Annika, eds., Judgement in the Victorian Age. London: Routledge, 2019.Google Scholar
Krashinsky, Susan. ‘Amazon E-book Sales Surpass Paper’. Globe and Mail, 20 May 2011: p. B9.Google Scholar
Lellenberg, Jon, Stashower, Daniel, and Foley, Charles. Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. New York: Penguin, 2007.Google Scholar
Levy, Michelle and Mole, Tom. The Broadview Introduction to Book History. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview, 2017.Google Scholar
Littau, Karin. Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.Google Scholar
Lloyd, John Uri. Etidorhpa, or, the End of Earth. Cincinnati: The Robert Clarke Company, 1896.Google Scholar
Lord, H. W. ‘Report on Printers, Bookbinders, Stationers, &c.’ in Children’s Employment Commission (1862): Fifth Report of the Commissioners. Presented to Both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1866.Google Scholar
Magee, Gary Bryan. Productivity and Performance in the Paper Industry: Labour, Capital, and Technology in Britain and America, 1860–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Translated by Moore, Samuel and Aveling, Edward. London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowry, & Co., 1887.Google Scholar
Mathison, Ymitri. ‘Maps, Pirates and Treasure: The Commodification of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century Boys’ Adventure Fiction’, pp. 173–85, in Denisoff, Dennis, ed., The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.Google Scholar
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.Google Scholar
Menke, Richard. ‘New Grub Street’s Ecologies of Paper’. Victorian Studies 61.1 (October 2018): pp. 60–82.Google Scholar
Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Morris, William. ‘The Ideal Book’, pp. 179–86, in Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, Session 1892–3. London: The Bibliographic Society, 1893.Google Scholar
‘Morris, Mr. William’s Kelmscott Press Publications’ (advertisement). The Morning Post, 14 October 1896: p. 8.Google Scholar
‘The New Patent Novel Writer’. Punch, or the London Charivari, 14 December 1844: p. 268.Google Scholar
‘Notices of Books: The Art of Paper-Making’. The Chemical News and Journal of Physical Science, 9 May 1890: p. 226.Google Scholar
Osbourne, Lloyd. ‘Note by Lloyd Osbourne’, pp. ix–xi, in Treasure Island. Prince Otto. New York: Heinemann, 1922.Google Scholar
‘Our Letter Box’. Young Folks: A Boys’ and Girls’ Paper of Instructive and Entertaining Literature 19.571 (12 November 1881): p. 7.Google Scholar
‘Our Letter Box’. Young Folks: A Boys’ and Girls’ Paper of Instructive and Entertaining Literature 19.572 (19 November 1881): p. 7.Google Scholar
Patel, Nilay. ‘CafeScribe Gives Ebook Readers Musty Smell of the Real Things’. Engadget, 24 August 2007. www.engadget.com/2007-08-24-cafescribe-gives-ebook-readers-musty-smell-of-the-real-thing.html (accessed 16 June 2021).Google Scholar
Peterson, William S. The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Pinto, Edward H. Treen: Or, Small Woodware Through the Ages. London: B. T. Batsford, 1949.Google Scholar
Rains, Stephanie. ‘Reading the Hand: Palmistry, Graphology and Alternatives Literacies’, pp. 176–90, in Barr, Rebecca Anne, Buckley, Sarah-Anne, and O’Cinneide, Muireann, eds., Literacy, Language and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Raven, James. ‘The Book Trades’, pp. 1–34, in Rivers, Isabel, ed., Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays. London: Continuum, 2001.Google Scholar
‘Readers Find Room for Physical and Digital’. The Dominion Post (Wellington, NZ), 17 May 2017: p. 5.Google Scholar
‘Reading Group Guide’, pp. 484–6, in The Search for Wondla. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012.Google Scholar
Richards, Jeffrey, ed. Imperialism and Juvenile Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Richtel, Matt, and Bosman, Julie. ‘To Serve the Young, E-Book Fans Prefer Print’. New York Times, 21 November 2011: pp. B. 1, B. 9.Google Scholar
Saler, Michael. As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Scally, John. ‘Illustration’, pp. 49–64, in Bell, Bill, ed., The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Scott, Sir Walter. Tales of the Crusaders, in Four Volumes: Volume I (The Betrothed). Edinburgh: Archibold, Constable and Co., 1825.Google Scholar
‘The Selection of Paper’. The American Bookmaker: A Journal of Technical Art and Information 10.1 (January 1890): p. 4.Google Scholar
Senchyne, Jonathan. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Sickert, Walter. ‘Impressionism’, pp. 59–61, in Robins, Anna Gruetzner, ed., Walter Sickert: The Complete Writings on Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Sickert, Walter ‘Transfer Lithography’, Saturday Review 82.2148 (26 December 1896): pp. 667–8.Google Scholar
Siegert, Bernhard. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real. Translated by Winthrop-Young, Geoffry. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Southward, John. Progress in Printing and the Graphic Arts During the Victorian Era. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1897; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Spooner, W. A. ‘Handwriting and Character’. Murray’s Magazine 4.23 (November 1888): pp. 656–65.Google Scholar
Spicer, A. Dykes. The Paper Trade: A Descriptive and Historical Survey of the Paper Trade from the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century. London: Methuen, 1907.Google Scholar
Starre, Alexander. ‘The Pleasures of Paper: Tethering Literature to Obsolete Material Form’, pp.127–44, in Tischleder, Babette B. and Sarah Wasserman, eds., Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Robert Louis. ‘To W. E. Henley (August 1881)’, pp. 257–9, in Colvin, Sidney, ed., The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends: Volume I. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1886.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Robert Louis. ‘My First Book – “Treasure Island”’. The Idler Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly 6.1 (August 1894): pp. 3–11.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Robert Louis, and Osbourne, Samuel Lloyd. Not I, and Other Poems. Davos, Switzerland: S. L. Osbourne & Company, 1881. https://digital.nls.uk/99384416 (accessed 19 June 2021).Google Scholar
Sweney, Mark. ‘Printed Book Sales Rise for First Time in Four Years as Ebooks Decline’. The Guardian, 13 May 2016. www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/13/printed-book-sales-ebooks-decline (accessed 26 July 2021).Google Scholar
Thomas, William. Diary, 1914–15. National Library of Wales, Aberystwth, GB 0210 WILMAS. www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=32167 (accessed 15 October 2021).Google Scholar
Thornton, Tamara Plakins. Handwriting in America: A Cultural History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
‘Treasure Island. A Story of the Spanish Main’ (advertisement). The Pall Mall Gazette, 20 November 1883: p. 16.Google Scholar
Varty, Anne. Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.Google Scholar
Vranken, Thomas. Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing: Beyond Serialisation. London: Routledge, 2020.Google Scholar
Wall, Barbara. The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.Google Scholar
[Walter, John ]. ‘London, Tuesday, November 29, 1814’. The Times, 29 November 1814: p. 3.Google Scholar
Webb, Sidney, and Webb, Beatrice. Industrial Democracy: Volume One. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897.Google Scholar
Wernick, Andrew. ‘Resort to Nostalgia: Mountains, Memories and Myths of Time’, pp. 207–23, in Nava, Mica, Blake, Andrew, MacRury, Iain, and Barry Richards, eds., Buy this Book: Studies in Advertising and Consumption. London: Routledge, 1997.Google Scholar
Whalley, Joyce Irene. Cobwebs to Catch Flies: Illustrated Books for the Nursery and Schoolroom, 1700–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.Google Scholar
‘Why Does Paper Turn Yellow?’ Chamber’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art 4.176 (14 May 1887): p. 320.Google Scholar
Wilson, Frederick J. F. Typographic Printing Machines and Machine Printing. A Practical Guide to the Selection of Bookwork, Two-Colour, Jobbing and Rotary Machines. With Remarks Upon their Construction, Capabilities, and Peculiarities. London: Wyman and Sons, 1879.Google Scholar
‘Writing Superseded’. The Flintshire Observer (Flintshire, Wales), 7 January 1876: p. 2.Google Scholar
Wynne, Deborah. ‘Reading Victorian Rags: Recycling, Redemption, and Dickens’s Ragged Children’. Journal of Victorian Culture 20.1 (January 2015): pp. 34–49.Google Scholar
Zeitchik, Steven and Reid, Calvin. ‘January E-book Sales Show Surprising Strength’. Publisher’s Weekly 250.13 (31 March 2003): p. 12.Google Scholar
Accessibility standard: Unknown
Why this information is here
This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.Accessibility Information
Accessibility compliance for the HTML of this Element is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.