A story paper is a periodical publication similar to a literary magazine, but featuring illustrations and text stories, and aimed towards children and teenagers. Also known in Britain as “boys’ weeklies”, story papers were phenomenally popular before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Among the most well-known British story papers was Boy’s Own Paper, which ran from 1879 to 1967.
The first known edition of what would later become known as a “story paper” was The Young Gentleman’s Magazine, published in 1777. The first story paper to really take off was The Boys’ and Girls’ Penny Magazine, first published in September 1832.
In 1866, Charles Stephens began selling Boys of England on the English streets for a penny—the first “penny dreadful”. Story papers in this style minimized the expense of writing in order to produce an extremely cheap product. Strictly speaking, the “penny dreadful” died off by the turn of the century, but this term was still used to refer to story papers throughout their history. The Halfpenny Marvel, first published in 1893, was “founded to counteract the pernicious influences of the Penny Dreadfuls”, according to its title page. A book about these weeklies (also called “bloods” because of their savage contents) was created in 1948 by E. S. Turner, called Boys Will be Boys.
Denis Gifford designated the period between World War I and World War II as the “Golden Age” of story papers. Sales of the story papers were at their highest during these years, as were the fecundity of the authors, the range in genre of magazines, and the colourful variety of the heroes. The most famous story paper hero, Sexton Blake, reached his apex during these years.
World War II caused chaos in Britain, and among other things the story papers had to be shut down as funds were redirected to the war. This is known as the Dark Ages for story papers, and nearly all of the papers ceased printing in 1939 or 1940.
In the 1950s and 1960s, some story papers such as The Rover briefly flourished, but television had a growing influence on the attentions of British children. Mergers between publishing houses finished off the remaining story papers, or modified them to become comic books, in the 1970s. The Rover was the last survivor and ceased publishing in 1973.
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The reason why the story papers were called by that name was that they contained all-text stories, like a novel, instead of using the strip-cartoon format. They increased in popularity during the 19th century because, prior to that, public education dud not exist: as school age children learned to read and write, from the early 19th century, they became able to read such publications. Actually, the reason why the story papers came to an end in the Second World War was the simple fact that a paper shortage, caused by the war in the Atlantic, prevented Britain from importing timber from Canada, so the limited home grown supplies were needed for more urgent purposes, and children’s comics had to go out of business when they could no longer obtain the paper needed to print the weekly issues.
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The reason why story papers did not manage to re-establish themselves after World War 2 was that the new format of comics, which published strip cartoon style stories, were more popular than all-text comics. This was natural and inevitable: give a small child a choice between reading or looking at pictures, and what outcome would you expect? Strip cartoons replaced a thousand words with a single picture, so soared in popularity.
Eventually, in the 1970s, the new craze among children became moving pictures, i.e. television, which from 1960 onwards had gradually killed off the comics. When colour tv was introduced in Britain in 1969, that signed the death blow for children’s comics, and by 1975 they had almost all gone out of business.
A few niche comics survived, including those aimed at very young children, but the older children all turned instead to television. Hardly any comics aimed at children aged over ten years old survived by the mid 1970s, it was not just the handful of surviving story papers which went out of business.
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hi–i am researching story papers or and uk pulps with edgar rice burroughs..recently got tv21 1-88 and new series 27,30-54 with tarzan and trying to find out if i am missing any w/tarzan–i think i can find this out but interested in the boys papers–cheers
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