The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

The Jack Harkaway Adventures (1871-1901)

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

The Jack Harkaway Adventures were written by Bracebridge Hemyng and began with the serial “Jack Harkaway’s Schooldays” (Boys of England no. 249-269, July 23-Dec 10, 1871). Hemyng (1841-1901) was a barrister who decided to fill in the time between his briefs, which were not as numerous as he had hoped, by writing fiction. He proved to be successful at it, creating several popular serials and penny dreadfuls as well as writing the “London Prostitution” section of Henry Mayhew’s landmark social study London Labour and the London Poor (1861). Harkaway went on to appear in nineteen serials, eleven by Hemyng and eight by other authors. Jack Harkaway was the most successful and most reprehensible of the schoolboy adventurers of the nineteenth century.

In his first appearance Jack is an orphan, adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Scratchley. His penchant for practical jokes leads to his parents enrolling him in Pomona House Academy in the hopes that the school will have a calming influence on him. On arriving at the Academy Jack immediately attracts the attention of Hunston, the school bully, who picks a fight with Jack and is soundly thrashed. (Hunston became Jack’s nemesis and bedevils Jack through many serials and novels, although Jack always defeats Hunston). Jack becomes popular with the other students by using his ventriloquism to provoke fights between Mr. Crawcour, Mr. Mole, and the other instructors at Pomona House. Eventually Jack’s pranks lead to a fire at the school, and Jack is forced to leave the Academy. He goes to sea, but not before one final prank in which he notifies the local paper that Mr. Crawcour, the school’s Headmaster, has died. Jack has various adventures at sea, meeting up with his chums from school and getting stranded on a Pacific island full of cannibalistic natives. Eventually he returns home to his beloved Emily, the biological daughter of the Scratchleys and the woman he loves. In his third story Jack went to Oxford and achieved several triumphs at sport, saving Oxford from a defeat at cricket with a 153 run inning and heading the list of double firsts. When Jack graduated from Oxford he married Emily and soon fathered a son, also named Jack. Further adventures follow. Jack and his adult son go “in search of the Mountain of Gold,” “among pirates,” on the prairies of America, “out west among Indians,” “at the Haunt of the Pirates,” in Australia, China, Greece, “the Isle of Palms,” and to the Transvaal.

Bracebridge Hemyng was a successful author of story papers and dime novels, but nothing he wrote came close to approaching the popularity of his character Jack Harkaway. Harkaway was enormously successful and inspired numerous imitators. The Jack Harkaway stories influenced the school story genre in the 1870s nearly as much as Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays had in the 1850s and 1860s. The Harkaway stories made Hemyng so wealthy that he was able to move to a mansion on Staten Island in New York state. There are stories of news agents fighting with each other in the street outside the publisher's office in order to be first to get copies of a new Harkaway, so great was the demand by the readers. The Harkaway stories became a franchise for Hemyng, and he continued to write them until his death.

It is easy to see why the Harkaway stories appealed to their readers. Hemyng’s prose style is straightforward and uncomplicated. Harkaway himself is an obvious wish-fulfillment figure: he is stronger, smarter, more stylish, more popular, and simply better than everyone else. The atmosphere of the school stories is cozy and familiar to the reading audience from a previous generation’s worth of stories; there is considerable surface similarity between Jack Harkaway’s Schooldays and Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The Harkaway stories also flattered their audience and confirmed their basest moral and patriotic impulses. The stories have a huge amount of bloody adventure, and good (in the form of the English and Jack Harkaway) always triumphs over evil (in the form of Hunston and foreigners). Lastly, time passes at a realistic rate. Harkaway begins, in his first adventure, as a public school boy. As the years passed and more stories were published about him he gradually aged, so that a reader who first read a Harkaway story as a teenager would, in twenty years, read a story about a thirty-year-old Jack Harkaway. Harkaway’s grandson is born in Jack Harkaway’s Journal for Boys in 1893, and in Jack Harkaway and His Son’s Adventures Round the World (1901), the original Jack Harkaway dies. The progression of real time and synchronicity of aging between a character and his audience was unusual, and readers responded to it.

But the modern reader is not likely to find Harkaway to be a likeable character and is likely to be appalled by the stories themselves. The dominant ethos of the series is cruelty, and the means by which this is enforced is violence. In Jack Harkaway’s Schooldays Jack throws a stone over a hedge and hits the wife of the headmaster of Pomona House. For this he is tied to a wall and beaten unconscious. In later stories Hunston has his arm amputated after Harkaway shoots him. Another student, Davis, has his ear nailed to a door, after which the door is slammed, ripping the ear from his head. Jack leads a student riot in which a teacher is chained, tarred, and feathered. A student is killed when a press drops on him. On a Pacific island Jack discovers natives playing football with a decapitated human head. Hunston buries Jack up to his neck in hot sand and leaves him to die. In retaliation, Harkaway has the natives pierce and tattoo Hunston from head to toe. Later in that story Hunston is crucified by the natives over slow-growing bamboo.

The British school story has rarely been free of cruelty and bullying; Harry Flashman, in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, tries to roast Tom Brown in front of a roaring fire. British public schools of the mid-nineteenth century were not gentle places. Some of the violence in Jack Harkaway’s Schooldays is a fictionalized version of the brutality which Hemyng experienced at Eton, with the rugby games in particular being both physically and psychically scarring. But the amount of violence and sadism in the Jack Harkaway series is disturbing.

There is also a sexual undercurrent to this cruelty. Hemyng makes much of the attractiveness of Emily, Jack’s girlfriend, and uses Emily as both an object to be threatened–never with actual rape, but with symbolic rape, via being kissed by Hunston or some other unacceptable character, which is a recurring threat, and as a weapon for Jack to use against the other characters. When Jack confronts Davis, a fellow student, over his feelings for Emily, Jack makes Davis watch as he kisses Emily. Davis’ only offense, in this case, was his desire for Emily.

Nor is the world as portrayed by Bracebridge Hemyng any better. In the world of the Harkaway stories torture is justified as long as the victims are criminals. Only whites have any value. Jews are grasping ingrates. The Spanish are scum. Teachers, like Harkaway’s unfortunate professor Mr. Mole, deserve to lose limbs and suffer constant humiliation, only because they are teachers who have authority over Harkaway. Anyone who expresses a romantic interest in Emily deserves tarring and worse. Blacks and native Australians are subhuman and must be beaten until they are domesticated. (Oddly enough, Hemyng generally portrayed Native Americans as Rousseauvian Noble Savages, although he did assert that the cruelty of the colonizers of the New World was matched by the cruelty of the natives they colonized). The world of Jack Harkaway is one of moral turpitude, jingoism, Victorian imperial bigotry, and relentless fawning over Harkaway, who is the hero because the author deems him so and for no other reason. Jack commits reprehensible acts and Hemyng applauds him for it.

Many of Hemyng’s adult readers were alarmed by the Harkaway stories and feared their effect on younger readers. W.L. Alden (see: “A Darwinian Schooner,” Von Wagener’s Ways), wrote in Harper’s Magazine in January, 1882:

In these delightful stories new forms of profanity and slang are taught in the most effective way. The pleasures of burglary and highway robbery, the manliness of gambling and fighting, and the heroism of successful lying are set forth in what is regarded by youthful readers as glowing eloquence, while the great truths that all parents are tyrants, that all religious people are hypocrites, and that disobedience to fathers and teachers is obedience to the nobler instincts of juvenile nature are sedulously taught. Such stories as these develop all that is manly and lawless in our boys, and teach them lessons that cannot fail to be of immense service to them in whatever criminal career they may adopt¼the truth is that fathers either do not care what their boys read, or that they have no fault to find with ‘Jack Harkaway’ and the ‘Boy Burglars.’¹ 

The “Boy Burglar” reference is to Charles H. Ross’ Fanny White and Her Friend Jack Rawlings. That Alden should see the Jack Harkaway stores as comparable to Fanny White, one of the most infamous of all penny dreadfuls, is an indication of how seriously adult moralists took the Harkaway stories.

The Jack Harkaway series are educational, insofar as it gives the modern reader some indication of the mindset of its audience, lower-middle-class British boys subjected to the cruelties of the British educational system in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But the mindset is a ghastly one, and the Jack Harkaway stories are to be avoided as if they carried some sort of disfiguring disease.

Recommended Edition

Print: Bracebridge Hemyng, Jack Harkaway at Oxford. Los Angeles, CA: Hardpress Publishing, 2012.

Online: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007662050

For Further Research

Louis James, “Tom Brown’s Imperialist Sons,” Victorian Studies 17, no. 1 (Sept. 1973): 89-99.