GEORGE EMMETT

Subtitle
Author/Publisher: Captain Jack, or One of the Light Brigade (dates)

According to EJB's notes 1415, Private William EMMETT - 8th Hussars was born in Camberwell, London, on the 28th of July 1837.

[PB, September 2015: What was EJB's source? Is there a link with the Penny Dreadful publisher George Emmett, author inter alia of Captain Jack, or One of the Light Brigade, also born Camberwell? George Emmett wrote in great detail about life in the Crimea, claiming he was himself a Cavalry officer who rode in the Charge. Did he base his writing his brother's experiences (albeit not of the Charge itself, since William Emmett did not arrive in the Crimea until April 1855)?]

It would be good to know more about George Emmett. In June 2010 on the Yahoo Group devoted to "Bloods, Penny Dreadfuls and Dime Novels", the contributor "gunbyhadath" [Richard ] wrote:

While George Emmett was born in Surrey (Camberwell, to be precise) his grandparents were Irish - Thomas Emmett (c1790-1841) was his grandfather, and he in turn was the grandson of Robert Emmett (1729-1802), physician to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and a cousin of Thomas Addis Emmett (1764-1827) and Robert Emmett (1778-1803). Thomas Addis and Robert were Irish patriots who became involved in the United Irish Society. Thomas settled in America in 1804, after serving a prison sentence in Scotland following the uprising in 1798. Robert was arrested for treason after plotting a second uprising in 1803, and was executed on 20 September 1803. George Emmett's father was born in Exeter, England in 1808. It wouldn't be at all surprising if George played on his Irish roots - he was, after all, a bit of a fraud, as it's now known he exaggerated his involvement in the Charge of the Light Brigade - viz there is no record of him actually being there.

[Source: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/BloodsandDimeNovels/info]

The phrase "It's now known he exaggerated his involvement in the Charge of the Light Brigade", seems to imply somebody has researched the issue, and possibly published something?

[PB: John Springhall writes about George Emmett (and his brothers) as follows.]

School stories with added sport

The mould-breaking serial 'Boys of Bircham School' (1867-70) started in the Young Englishman's Journal on 8 June 1867, and written by the author, editor and proprietor George Emmett, appears to have been the first genuine school story to be written for a boys' weekly periodical, ten years after Tom Brown's Schooldays but 12 years before the first issue of the BOP.

Along with his brothers Robert, Henry Charlton, and William Laurence, George Emmett ran Hogarth House, an underfunded publishing firm based near Panch's offices in Bouverie Street, off Fleet Street. Here George. who commuted in from Peckham Rye, acted as the editor and proprietor of several cheap secular and 'sensational' boys' periodicals, to which he and his versatile brothers contributed weekly serials. The small publishing offices in the City of London were crowded with 'bohemian' writers, underpaid journalists, eccentric well-bred scribblers, improvident artists and despised plagiarists, who together made up a fascinating literary subculture.

Fleet Street reminiscences portray George as a bluff, heavily bearded, drink-sodden gentleman who claimed to have been present as a cavalry officer at the siege of Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny and to have been wounded in the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Yet George's account of the latter, in 'Captain Jack; or One of the Light Brigade' (1868), written to increase sales of the Young Englishman's Journal, owed as much to Alfred Lord Tennyson as to personal experience. Details of the famous charge also varied in the telling at the Cheshire Cheese and other Fleet Street watering holes. [note 18 - unfortunately, not shown in web version - seek out?]

[John Springhall, "Disreputable adolescent reading: low-life, women-in-peril and school sport 'penny dreadfuls' from the 1860s to the 1890s", in Disreputable Pleasures: Less virtuous Victorians at play, Editors Mike Huggins, and J.A. Mangan, Frank Cass, London and New York, 2004, pp103-123.]

[PB: Add info from ?'s blog about the numerous stories George Emmett wrote.]