Broad Arrow Jack was written by E. Harcourt Burrage and first appeared in The Boys’ Standard. Burrage (1839-1916) was one of the most prolific penny dreadful authors of the nineteenth century and was popularly known as “the boys’ Charles Dickens.”¹ He wrote hundreds of serials for various journals, and was noted for being a staunch opponent of corporal punishment for schoolchildren; none of the boys in his stories were ever beaten by their masters. Burrage was better regarded by the press than most of the other boy's novels authors and was seen as someone who, in the words of a contemporary, “carefully avoided all that tends to immorality,” a statement rarely heard with regards to other authors of penny dreadfuls.

Broad Arrow Jack is about John Ashleigh, a young Englishman who is emigrating with his family to Australia when their ship runs aground. Ashleigh, his father Gerald, and his delicate younger brother Cecil are the only survivors. Once ashore they begin walking to civilization. In the nearest village they encounter the notorious outlaw, “the Ogre,” along with his gang. The gang kidnaps Jack and out of sheer cruelty brands him on the back with the Broad Arrow, the traditional symbol of British authority. After this Jack breaks the rack he is bound to and flees. He returns to his father and brother and swears vengeance on the Ogre, vowing not to wear a shirt and to continue to expose his brand to the world until the Ogre is dead. The Ogre’s men shoot Jack’s father and brother, but do not kill Jack, and he utters darker and more violent oaths of vengeance against the Ogre. Two years pass and the Ogre’s gang have forgotten about him. But he delivers a threat to the gang, promising that they will all die, and the feud between them beings. The Ogre is kidnapped by Jack, who is now the Robin Hood-like leader of his own gang of men. Seeing how strong Jack is, several of the Ogre’s men defect to Jack’s gang.

Jack discovers that the Ogre was actually an old enemy of Jack’s father Gerald. As a young man Gerald had fallen in love with the daughter of Lord Mordenton. But before the wedding an adjoining estate was bought by “Rajah Rala Singh,” who begins wooing Lady Mordenton. The Rajah’s attempts were unsuccessful, and he was revealed to be a convicted thief wanted in Paris for forgery. The Rajah left England and reappeared in Australia as the Ogre. Before Jack can execute the Ogre he escapes from Jack’s mountain headquarters. Jack tracks down the members of the Ogre’s gang who were responsible for the death of his brother and father and challenges them to duels, killing them with whatever weapon they choose. Most of the criminals die wretchedly, but occasionally one will fight manfully, and when those men die Jack regrets it. After the usual series of reversals, adventures, and escapes the Ogre dies and Jack returns to England, now wealthy.

Broad Arrow Jack has several unusual elements. The novel’s racism, especially toward native Australians, is customary for a penny dreadful, but the emphasis on the Ogre’s “half-caste” background as being the source of his villainy is greater than normal. Jack is among the grimmer heroes of the story papers; he is somber, lacks any sense of humor, does not hesitate to kill in combat, and is eager for bloody vengeance. Broad Arrow Jack is a more melodramatic text than many dreadfuls, certainly more so than Burrage’s The Lambs of Littlecote or any of The Ching Ching Adventures. While the plot is no more melodramatic than many similar dreadfuls, the dialogue is full of statements like “Tell them, when they see the Broad Arrow stamped or cut upon aught that is theirs, to tremble.”²

Burrage excessively romanticizes the Australian environment, lavishing an affection on it that most penny dreadful authors saved for Britain. And yet the tone of Broad Arrow Jack and much of the content of the serial is contemptuous of Australia and its people. Broad Arrow Jack’s treatment of Australia and Australians was not that of The Adventures of a Mounted Trooper or Blue Cap the Bushranger; Burrage was English and had never been to Australia when he wrote “Broad Arrow Jack.” So Burrage’s treatment of Australia–as barbaric and dangerous, though beautiful–and white Australians–as uncouth savage criminals and drunkards–came from a place of ignorance. Burrage, in Broad Arrow Jack, propagates negative stereotypes of Australians which were common among Victorians who had no experience with Australia, and appeared regrettably often in Victorian fiction.

Jack’s headquarters is in a building built on the top of a mountain by a lost race (see: The Lost Race Story):

It was made by men whose dust has long been lost in the earth–by men who may not have known the value of things they worked with. See those glittering eyes, each a rare diamond, cut and polished with an art which our boasted civilization cannot rival.³

The modern reader is likely to see what Broad Arrow Jack's 19th century audience did not: that stories like these weren't simply innocuous bits of flavor which Burrage added to the narrative to spice it up, but part of an ongoing imperialist campaign to convince British audiences that their colonial subjects are ignorant savages who do not and cannot value the valuables they possess, and that therefore it is entirely justifiable for the British to take possession of them even when their current possessors object. Further examples include the troublesome/"cursed" Hindu gem motif, found in The Moonstone among others.

Despite its viciousness, Broad Arrow Jack has two goofy moments. The first occurs during the trial of one of the Ogre’s henchman, when the ghost of one of his victims testifies. The ghost is drunk. The second occurs at the end of the novel, when the Ogre, who was previously wounded in a duel with Jack, dies. He is trying to hide from Jack and attempts to crawl inside a hollowed-out tree. But he gets his head caught in the tree and dies of starvation, a death so out of the ordinary for a penny dreadful villain that the reader might be forgiven for thinking that the novel was prematurely ended–the Ogre’s death is described a few short paragraphs–and Burrage was forced to hurriedly kill off his villain.

Broad Arrow Jack is not remembered as one of the depraved dreadfuls, but in its time its savagery provoked a negative reaction. As John Springhall notes, “’Broad Arrow Jack’ when reprinted [in 1887] excited critical opprobrium for its powerful undercurrent of sadism and cruelty.”⁴ In retrospect this is not surprising. The serial was not unusual in its violence and cruelty when published in 1878; a decade later the environment had significantly changed, and what had passed as unremarkable in the late 1870s now seemed to be unusually appalling.

Broad Arrow Jack will never be mistaken for great prose, but it has aspects that may interest modern readers.

Print: E. Harcourt Burrage, Broad Arrow Jack. London: Best for Boys Publishing, 1890.

¹ John Springhall, “Disreputable adolescent reading: low-life, women-in-peril and school sport 'penny dreadfuls' from the 1860s to the 1890s," in Mike Huggins and J.A. Mangan, eds., Disreputable Pleasures: Less Virtuous Victorians at Play (New York: Frank Cass, 2004), 117.

² E. Harcourt Burrage, Broad Arrow Jack (London: Charles Fox, 1887), 16.

³ Burrage, Broad Arrow Jack, 44.

⁴ John Springhall, “‘Boys of Bircham School’: The penny dreadful origins of the popular English school story, 1867-1900,” History of Education: Journal of the History of Education Society 20, no. 2 (1991): 84.