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Subversive Performances, Masculine Pleasures
serves him admirably in whatever role he plays and he proves himself a master of the
accessories – monocle, watchchain, hat and gloves, cigar and, most notably, the umbrella.
For Sloper it is the umbrella, the symbolic insignia of the city clerk, that gives him
additional powers, serving variously as a truncheon, cane, slap-stick, wand, hold-all and
auxiliary phallus. In the manner of modern subcultures that make their own selection
and combination from the dominant culture. Sloper creates his own style and conventions,
and encourages others to do likewise. 32
An encouragement to emulate was aided by the ubiquity of the Ally Sloper figure
beyond the pages of the comic. The urban lounger could hardly miss his distinctive
silhouette in his journeys round the city. Besides his reproduction on commodities
ranging from buttons and socks through to pickle jars and firework displays, the
consumption and replication of Sloper’s adventures by a working-class audience,
and their translation into behavior and attitude on the street, was viewed with some
concern by more “discerning” contemporary commentators. 33 Richard Whiteing,
never slow to incorporate local color and topical debate into his novels of London
life, referred directly to the genre’s appeal and its allegedly demoralizing effect in
his discussion of working-class reading habits in No 5 John Street, crediting a
thinly disguised Half Holiday with an insidious influence, as profound as that
wielded in the suburbs by the romantic yellow back:
These weekly comics, as they are called, are nearly all illustrations. They have hundreds
of cuts to the issue, and but a thin black line of legend to each. There is no vice in them
in the sense of conscious depravation; it is but the bestiality of bad taste . . . Covey’s . . .
selection had failed to please him. “Swipey Loafer ain’t up to much this week” he
murmurs, as he lays it aside with a sigh of disappointment. In this elegant trifle, a typical
family, and especially the typical head of it, lives before the public on a nutriment of
winkles and gin. It gives us the humours of the beanfeast and of Margate sands, varied
by glimpses into the backyards of Somers Town. All the men are drunk, and most of the
women are in short skirts. It is ’Arry in ’Eaven, a heaven of plenty to eat and drink, plenty
to wear, and a celestial choir for ever on the spree. Words cannot tell its vulgarity, its
spiritual debasement. Better vice itself, if redeemed by a touch of mind. The police sheets
detain him longer – the sheets in which the same scheme of social observation is more
or less associated with crime. “That’ll do to begin with” he says, laying aside one in
which sprightly young women kick off the hats of maudlin young men in evening dress.
As gin and shell fish are the principal ingredients of the first dish, so leg and chemisette
are indispensable to the last. These in their innumerable varieties form the mirror of life
for the slums. They should be carefully stored in our literary archives, for they will be
priceless to the future student of manners . . . They represent the visible world as the
incarnation, under an innumerable variety of forms, of the universal cad . . . The creative
spirit moves upon the slime and we have organisms and institutions. In the first it is the
cad as swell, as plutocrat, as strumpet, or as thief. In the other, it is the environment of
the gin shop, the race course, the prize ring, and the police cell. 34
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