The Ferrers Lord Adventures were written by “Sidney Drew” and first appeared in “Wolves of the Deep” in Boys’ Friend 32 (Sept. 3, 1895); Lord went on to appear in seven serials and a story. “Sidney Drew” was the pseudonym of Edgar J. Murray (1878-?), a British author of story paper stories.

Ferrers Lord is a wealthy British nobleman and inventor who uses technologically advanced submarines of his own creation to explore the wonders of the ocean and to fight the Empire’s enemies. Lord is a staunch patriot who believes in the superiority and moral righteousness of Britain and Empire, and that it is Britain’s destiny to rule the waves and the world. So Lord is happy to use his talents and his submarines in the service of the Crown. Lord's submarines are cast from the Nautilus (see: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) mold, with primitive torpedoes, rams, cannon, and electric mines. Lord’s adventures begin when, while piloting his submarine, the Lord of the Deep, he rescues a drowning man who turns out to Rupert Thurston, a friend of Lord’s from school. Lord brings Thurston to his palatial home in London, but soon after Thurston’s arrival the plans to the Lord of the Deep are stolen from Lord’s home by Michael Scaroff, Lord’s arch-enemy. Scaroff is a Russian prince and patriot, the chief of “a hundred thousand fierce Tartar horsemen.”¹ Lord attempts to pursue Scaroff, but the latter has cleverly framed Lord for murder, so Lord is forced to avoid the police and surreptitiously sneak into Ferrers Grange, his sea-side mansion. Attached to the mansion’s grounds is a coastal cave in which the Lord of the Deep is housed. Lord and Thurston take the Lord of the Deep to sea and hunt for Scaroff.

As this is taking place Scaroff is using the plans to the Lord of the Deep to construct his own submarine, the Tsaritsa. Scaroff directs his brother, Prince Paul, to kidnap Lady Violet Westermore, who is Lord’s cousin. Lord is searching around the ports of the Baltic Sea for Scaroff when he begins hearing stories of a mystery submarine. Lord then receives a message that unless he stops looking for Scaroff, Lady Westermore will be killed. Lord refuses to do so and continues searching. At one point he pauses and goes hunting on the ocean floor with Thurston, the pair using lightning bolt rifles. During the hunt Thurston and Lord are separated and Thurston is captured by Scaroff’s men. Lord realizes that Thurston has been captured and finds the Tsaritsa with the Lord of the Sea. The two submarines battle. Lord uses his sub’s electric cannon against the Tsaritsa, but a traitor on the Lord of the Sea sabotages the submarine, and then the Tsaritsa fires a torpedo into the Lord of the Sea, further damaging it. On board the Tsaritsa Thurston is rescued by Ching-Lung, a Chinese teenager who was captured by Scaroff and forced to serve him as his groom. (Scaroff, a Tartar, has horses on the Tsaritsa). Despite his eccentricities Ching-Lung is clever, and he plans an escape for both himself and Thurston. When the Tsaritsa surfaces, the pair escape and rejoin Lord.

Lord then goes to Russia to get help against Scaroff while Thurston pilots the Lord of the Sea to “Crimson Hill,” Lord’s island cavern base in the Yellow Sea. Lord recruits Ivan Scaroff, Michael’s brother and enemy. The Tsaritsa attacks the Lord of the Deep in the Yellow Sea, but the attack fails and neither sub is destroyed. Lord and Thurston attend a ball at the Russian Embassy in Peking, as they are sure that Michael Scaroff will be there. They find Lady Westermore, who tells them that everyone at the ball is French and Russian and that the two countries are planning to invade and seize China. But Ching-Lung reveals himself as “Prince of the Northern Provinces” and orders the plotters seized. However, the Russians invade the north of China with the help of Chinese rebels, forcing Lord et al to rush north. In the final battle the Russians are defeat and Scaroff is killed.

In the second Ferrers Lord serial Lord, in his submarines Victoria, Britannia, and Unconquerable, discover a sinking island, Mysteria, which is surrounded by a rosy aura and is filled with overgrown plants, cannibalistic trees, carnivorous, armored crabs and giant predatory black owls. Lord destroys the island with his submarines’ super cannon. In later stories Lord was called to Greyfriars, the public school which Charles Hamilton’s Billy Bunter attends, and St. Jim’s, another public school created by Charles Hamilton, to investigate murders and kidnappings. Lord also teamed up with Sexton Blake (see: The Sexton Blake Mysteries) on several occasions.

Lord is typical of the British story paper heroes who emerged during times of crisis, real or perceived, for the Empire. The 1850s and 1860s were decades in which cultural orthodoxies were under attack, and in which the crime rate, though decreasing in reality, was thought to be increasing. The literary response to this was the sensation novel, which were perceived as a genre for women and about women, if not entirely by women. In the story papers the protagonists of these decades were usually aggressive, hyper-masculine warrior heroes, wish-fulfillment fantasy figures and safety valves for cultural nervousness (see: English Jack Amongst the Afghans). The 1870s were a time of more cultural certainty, with a corresponding flowering of diversity in story paper heroes. But the 1880s and especially the 1890s were a time of great fin-de-siècle anxiety and uncertainty (see: Fin-de-Siècle Unease). One of the responses to this was the Gothic stories of the 1890s, such as Dracula. Another was the reappearance in the story papers of the simplistic warrior hero. Ferrers Lord is one of the foremost examples of this character type. The obvious model for Lord is Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, but Nemo was a Romantic misanthrope who, as was revealed in his second appearance, The Mysterious Island, was Indian and had fought in the 1857 Mutiny against the British. Such a figure was unacceptable to Murray’s audience. So Murray changed Nemo, filtered him through the jingoistic and macho sensibilities of the story papers, and made him the adult, British version of the boy inventors of the American Edisonades.

Lord functions as a fantasy figure for the readers in several ways. He is a brave and capable fighter. His wealth is so great that his mansion on Park Lane is a “museum of wealth and wonder, filled with the treasures of East and West, of every age and from every land.”²Lord is extremely patriotic; at one point he claims, “Look at our British workman and our British soldier! The first can do as much as any foreigner, and the second can fight as well as half-a-dozen put together!”³ (This aggressive denial of the military and class anxieties of the fin-de-siècle middle class seems designed to placate Murray’s middle-class readers). Lord is brilliant; his submarines are science fictional and even more advanced than the vehicles of the Edisonade inventors or of Nemo. Lord is clever and determined and does not hesitate to treat his enemies with a brutality that, a generation earlier in The Jack Harkaway Adventures, drew horrified letters of comment from concerned parents. When two of Scaroff’s agents are caught attempting to sabotage the Lord of the Deep, Lord orders that both be given fifty lashes with the knout, a punishment which in less insecure times would never have seen print.

The politics of the Ferrers Lord stories are equally simplistic and reactionary. The propriety of Lord enforcing the politics of the Empire around the world is never questioned. England’s rivals, France and Russia, are conspiring against England and will attempt to conquer China by force (see: “Voracious Albion”). Lord describes Ivan Scaroff as

one of the greatest men in Russia - the cleverest and most honorable. He chafed under the cruel tyranny of the Government and longed to free the miserable serfs, for he had lived in England, where every man is free and equal. Consequently, the Government hated and distrusted him.⁴

In this message the reader is invited to sympathize with the Russian people while simultaneously detesting the Russian government and congratulating themselves for Ivan Scaroff having learned about freedom and equality from the English. The racial politics of the series are no more enlightened. Two recurring characters are Pierre Bovrille and Kennedy, two seamen on the Lord of the Deep who are comic relief and live up to every stereotype of the French and Irish Murray could apparently think of. And Lord tells Scaroff, “Remember, my vanquished foe, that Ching-Lung is no crawling, treacherous, corrupted Chinaman–though his skin is yellow, his heart is white and he is British to the core.”⁵

Ching-Lung is a comic relief ethnic stereotype seemingly designed to capitalize on the popularity of Harcourt Burrage’s Ching-Ching (see: The Ching-Ching Adventures). Ching-Lung is an “expert conjurer” who is always misbehaving, playing pranks, and getting into trouble and requiring rescue from Lord or Thurston. He also owns a pet rat, “Shakespeare Willyum.” The tradition of keeping mice and rats as pets in England began in the 1840s. In London during that decade there were a number of street performers, some Italian, who displayed troupes of trained white mice. These may have been the source for Count Fosco’s pets (see: The Woman in White). By the 1870s both American and English women were keeping white rats as pets. Keeping rats as pets was not something acceptable for men but was seen as something which women (including, briefly, Queen Victoria) and foreigners did.

For Further Research

E.S. Turner. Boys will be Boys: The Story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, Billy Bunter, Dick Barton, et al. London: Faber & Faber, 2012

¹ Qtd. in Geoff. Hockley, “The Ferrers Lord Saga,” in Eric Fayne, ed., The Collectors’ Digest Annual (Christmas, 1959): 132.

² Qtd. in Hockley, “The Ferrers Lord Saga,” 130.

³ Qtd. in Hockley, “The Ferrers Lord Saga,” 130.

⁴ Qtd. in Hockley, “The Ferrers Lord Saga,” 140.

⁵ Qtd. in Hockley, “The Ferrers Lord Saga,” 144.