Andrea Immel

Our favorite girl journalist resurfaced miraculously a few weeks ago, when the New Jersey antiquarian bookseller Between the Covers offered Cotsen two issues of The Flapper’s Magazine edited by “V. V.” and published in Teddington, Richmond by Vivie Wivie & Co. in 1918. The address, which is the same as the editorial offices of The Flapper’s Magazette, leaves no doubts as to the brains behind the operation.

Would the two issues contain information that would lead us to the real young woman? Absolutely!

One issue has no publication date, but the second carries an announcement that starting with this, the May issue, the magazine will be issued every two months. Flip through the new issues and it’s obvious that Vivie Wivie & Co. decided that the magazine needed a make-over. The silly jokes and contests that were an endearing feature of the Magazette are history. More sophisticated young women in daring hats are featured on the covers.And the contents? Each issue consists of more portraits of devastating modern beauties billed as “V. V.’s famous girls,” any one of which can be obtained as a full-page picture from Vivie Wivie & Co., according to another announcement. No price is given, however. V. V.’s glamorous creatures, some with bobs, a few with wide-brimmed chapeaus, others bedizened with huge bows or artificial flowers, and some with long braids down the back (a “flapper,” according to OED), are signed “Viven Furniss 1918,” “V. Furniss 1918,” or “ViviE 1918.” The sole man admitted to the Magazine’s pages is a handsome square-jawed aviator, whom the reader may suspect, is the object of the editor’s dreams. The only copy in the two issues are the captions. Vivien’s artwork in the 1918 issues of The Flapper’s Magazine is much more accomplished than that in the Magazette, so it seems safe to say the Magazine is the work of a teenager, and the other of a little girl.

But can it be puzzled out how old she was when she made the manuscript periodicals?

Yes! Almost exactly.

It was pure wishful thinking on my part to have imagined that Vivien must have been the daughter (or other relative) of Harry Furniss (1854-1927), the Irish-born British artist famous for his humorous drawings and caricatures for Punch and illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1993). He also illustrated G. E. Farrow’s Wallypug series, sometimes collaborating with his artist-daughter Dorothy. Dorothy was Harry’s only daughter.

So it was back to the drawing board. Now that I knew that Vivien F. Furniss put together those two issues of The Flapper’s Magazine in 1918, I could search Ancestry Library with a bit more confidence. It didn’t take that long to find our girl journalist Vivien Florence Furniss. She was the daughter and oldest of the four children of the assurance clerk Percy Furniss and his wife Maude of Richmond on Thames in Surrey. Her birth in 1903, parents, place of birth can be found in England and Wales Civil Registration Birth Index 1837-1917. That would have made her 15 when she drew the “famous girls” of the Magazine.

This inconvenient fact blows out of the water my original dating of the Magazette to the 1920s. The only evidence I could squeeze out of the text appeared in a limerick. I leapt to the conclusion that its first line “There was a young lady of Bow, / Who attended a cinema show. / She was heard to remark / “Oh George! It is dark….” (the reader to provide a last line) contained an allusion to the It Girl, Clara Bow (1905-1965) who made her first picture in…. 1921. I should have checked to see if there were other limericks that began with that line. There were several.

Is there other evidence that might establish how old Vivien was when she edited and illustrated the Magazette? The picture of “The Little Patriot” showing a blonde girl draped in the Union Jack suggests that she might not have started her first publication project until Great Britain had entered World War I in August 1914. That would have made her eleven. Without any dates in the Magazette, it is impossible to know exactly when she was inspired to begin the project, but it seems safe to guess between 1914 and 1917.

This just goes to show how easy it is to give into the temptation to invent an origin story for child-made works on the few “facts” the text seems to contain. Revising the first post is a small price to pay for the discovery that Vivien didn’t abandon her project after one number, and if any thing, she seems to have become more interested in clothes and boys. Who knows, maybe she did more than these three issues and those may surface on the antiquarian market one day. What I’d like to know is, did the future Mrs. Philip W. Hume continue to draw after her marriage? She lived to the ripe old age of 82, passing away in 1985. Vivie, take a bow!

James Gillray, “The Plumb Pudding in Danger” (1805). The British Prime Minister William Pitt the younger and Napoleon carve up the world, represented as an enormous plum pudding, between them.

During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the picture book came into its own in England. This period of extraordinary fertility was dubbed “the dawn of levity” by F. J. Harvey Darton, even though it coincided with the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815). The protracted war with the French cast its shadow over English children’s books nevertheless. An overtly militaristic school book like John Evans’ New Geographical Grammar (1811), described preparations supposedly being made in French port towns for the invasion of England. The Naval Heroes of Great Britain: or, Accounts of the Lives and Actions of the Distinguished Admirals and Commanders who have Contributed to Confer on Great Britain the Empire of the Ocean (1806) contained accounts of martial valor that were supposed to stir up the desire to serve one’s country.

Other children’s books bear out the truth of the Duke of Wellington’s sorrowful observation that the only thing as sad as a battle lost is a battle won. I can’t remember when I began to notice pictures of disabled veterans in Regency children’s books. After the Battle of Waterloo, the sight of an old soldier with a cork or wooden leg must have been common in England. Only an high-born officer like Henry Paget, second earl of Uxbridge could afford a sophisticated prosthetic device to replace a limb shattered on the battlefield.

Some disabled veterans scraped together a living performing on the streets of London. Billy Waters, an American-born freed slave, who fought in the British forces during the American War of Independence, became something of a local celebrity. This is one of three pictures of Billy Waters I have found in Cotsen–the other two are in The Cries of London Drawn from Life (1823) and a book of London cries lacking a title page published ca.1821 by J. Bysh.

Hodgson’s The Cries of London (London: Hodgson & Co., ca. 1824).

Pictures of amputees may be more common in children’s books issued by the Quaker firm of the Dartons and they may be an indication of pacifist tendencies. This one from My Real Friend is unusual for showing quite graphically the daily accidental humiliations to which an amputee had to endure. The passage the picture accompanies follows.

The title vignette for My Real Friend: or Incidents in Life, Founded on Truth. 2nd ed. corrected (London: W. Darton, 1812). The old soldier’s peg leg has gotten caught in the style.

Perhaps the most unusual sighting of a disabled veteran I’ve found so far is the frontispiece by R. Stennett for Parlour Amusements; or A New Book of Games and Forfeits (ca. 1820). It shows a group of children playing the game of “Old Soldier” which is described inside. One person is supposed to impersonate the impoverished veteran and notice how the boy has improvised a wooden leg from a pair of bellows. The verse rules are followed with a model dialog between imaginary players to show how the process of questions and answers ought to play out.

The game of “Old Soldier,” which also goes by the name of “Here Comes an Old Soldier from Botany Bay,” was played for almost a century in the English-speaking world. Halliwell-Phillipps included it in Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales (1849) under the title “The Poor Soldier.” The second edition of Cassell’s Book of In-door Amusements, Card Games, and Fireside Fun described it as old in 1882, but didn’t speculate as to its probable age. The 1901 volume of the Pennsylvania School Journal recommended “The Game of the Poor, Old Soldier” as an amusing one for small children in 1901, as did Grace Lee Davidson’s 1916 Games and Parties for Children.

This appearance in Parlour Amusements seems to be the earliest recorded and perhaps it is a relic of the Napoleonic Wars. The larger question is to consider what exactly such a game tells us about attitudes towards the disabled veteran during the nineteenth century. Here he seems to be treated simply as a character type that offers a good opportunity for dress up, rather than as a brave soul whose broken body deserves respect as a symbol of patriotic service to his country. Whatever its meaning, the frontispiece of Parlour Amusements, along with the other illustrations shown here, offers a surprising glimpse into the impact of war on civilians.

This post was originally published in 2016, but it is worth reading again as two wars rage simultaneously in two countries. It is a sad reminder that children are not always spared the realities of war in the books they read.

Cotsen Children’s Library

Princeton University

Author Archives: Andrea Immel

Made by a Child: Vivie Wivie Redesigns The Flapper’s Magazette: More Issues of a Manuscript Magazine Acquired

In Time of War: Disabled Veterans in Children’s Books of the Napoleonic Era