Authors Electric

Last night I picked the final piece of paper from my newly emptied attic floor and placed it in Box 16 of 22 (labelled Amalgamated Press serials 1931-1935, print and manuscript, since you ask). I turned the page and this was how the story began. WOMEN WORSHIPPED HIM! MEN ADMIRED AND ENVIED HIM! WHO WAS THIS HANDSOME STRANGER WHO CAPTURED ALL HEARTS? Well, the answer to that question was not Herbert Allingham – the author of The Spell of a Rogue and about 300 other magazine serial stories. The issue of The Oracle  that I was packing away was published in March 1934 when Allingham was approaching the end of his fifty year working life.  Less than two years later Allingham would be dead but neither The Oracle  nor any of the other cheap papers would mention the fact – let alone pay tribute to his lifetime of work. The first instalment of Allingham's first serial story had been published in 1886, the last would be completed posthumously in 1937. Allingham...

The morning after, with the cable repair in progress ‘I Took My Life and Threw It on the Skip’ Poem by James Fenton Francis Wheen remembers meeting James Fenton in the early 1980s in a state of high excitement. He’d just found an Adana printing press on a skip in the Gray’s Inn Road … The morning after the night before did not bring quiet sorrow. An employee from the National Grid called early. They had been searching for a break in a main power cable. Somewhere, 10,000 volts was pouring into the ground. Their search had led them to our house. On the previous night (Friday 13 th for the superstitious) the two rooms and roof space that contained my partner Francis Wheen’s current and past writing; his letters, articles, books and CDs collected over forty years, had burned down, with a sudden and shocking thoroughness. Now, our grief at what had been lost was moderated by a realisation that we were lucky, all of us, to be alive. One end of the severed cabl...

Herbert Allingham was born in 1867, the year of the Second Reform Bill. Not everyone was happy about this modest extension to the franchise. “The only thing we can do is as far as possible to remedy the evil by the most universal means of education that can be devised. I believe it will be absolutely necessary that you should prevail upon our future masters to learn their letters,” said Robert Lowe MP. The Education Act of 1870 was the vital first step towards compulsory education for all. For the remainder of the nineteenth century young people were more likely to be able to read than older people and males more likely than females. Most of the new readers who wished to continue reading after they had left school wanted fiction. They bought weekly newspapers or magazines, nothing costing more than a penny or, preferably, a halfpenny. These were Allingham’s customers from 1886 when he was 19 years old and his first serial story was published in a penny weekly paper for boys. Over the ...