Bracebridge Hemyng Was A Doctor Who Villain
Posted 4 March 2009 in Books by Catriona
Apparently.
I was rummaging through Wikipedia earlier this afternoon, as you do.
Actually, I was looking for the name of the actor who played John Lumic, so that I could appear omniscient in a comment thread. As you do.
And I found that Lumic is one of many in a list of minor Doctor Who villains. Some way below him is this man:
The Master of the Land of Fiction was a human writer from the year 1926 who was drawn to the Land of Fiction and forced to continuously write stories which were enacted within that realm. The Master’s name was never revealed, but he did identify himself as the writer of “The Adventures of Captain Jack Harkaway” in The Ensign, a magazine for boys. He was freed by the Second Doctor, and returned to his own time.
I don’t know about “Captain” Jack Harkaway, but Jack Harkaway—schoolboy adventurer, all-round sterling example of the late-nineteenth-century pioneering (and occasionally violent, especially if you’re foreign or you make a pass at Jack’s girlfriend) English spirit, and proposed member of an early League of Extraordinary Gentlemen—was the most successful creation of hack writer Bracebridge Hemyng. Of course, Bracebridge Hemyng died in 1901, but then Doctor Who is a show about time travel.
Hemyng doesn’t get his own Wikipedia page, which is a kind of cultural oblivion compared to which the journey to that bourne from whence no traveller returns is a walk in the park.
He does turn up on the Wikipedia page for Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, for which he undertook some of the interviews.
But he does have his own page on the truly fabulous Albert Johannsen’s truly fabulous The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of A Vanished Literature. (And if you ever need to know anything about American dime-novel writers or—given the networks of exchange between and the piratical publishing practices of the two countries—English penny-weekly writers, go straight to Northern Illinois University Libraries’ excellent online version of Johannsen’s book.)
And he also wrote some serials for Bow Bells, which is how I came across his name originally, when I was indexing the contents of that journal.
And he once “tried to lure the Second Doctor into becoming his replacement as the controller for the “Master Brain Computer”, the controlling force behind the Land of Fiction.”
Now that is something that he should add to his curriculum vitae.
Share your thoughts [2]
1
Tim wrote at Mar 5, 03:21 am
I think it’s the TV Companion that suggests the Master of the Land of Fiction is Charles Hamilton, the creator of Billy Bunter. The Master was taken from Earth in 1926 and had been writing for at least 25 years at that point, which is possible for Hamilton but not for Hemyng. The reference to his output in number of words also suggests Hamilton. The scriptwriter for this story, Peter Ling, also said that Hamilton was an inspiration for the character.
I don’t know if there were post-Hemyng Harkaway stories in our universe, though it wouldn’t surprise me, but we can easily infer that Jack Harkaway in the Whoniverse was a serial character written by multiple authors, à la Sexton Blake.
(A recent, though I think unnecessary, fan suggestion is that the Harkaway stories are actually based on the exploits of Captain Jack Harkness.)
2
Catriona wrote at Mar 5, 05:48 am
If I could find my copy of The Discontinuity Guide, I could tell you what that says. Nick thinks it mentions Bracebridge Hemyng, but I can’t find it anywhere.
I know Hemyng doesn’t exactly fit the timeframe as laid out in the story—I did nod to that in the post, in passing—and I’m not sure whether there were any Harkaway stories by authors other than Hemyng. It wouldn’t surprise me if the journals for which he wrote tried to keep such a successful series running. But I don’t think they were ever a Sexton Blake-style property.
If we can infer that, though (and it’s a big inference), we could also infer that the career of the Bracebridge Hemyng in the Doctor Who universe ran slightly differently from that of our Bracebridge Hemyng.
I’m not trying to argue, though, that the Master of Fiction is actually Bracebridge Hemyng—or, at least, not in anything other than a slightly tongue-in-cheek way.
I am arguing that I don’t think you can pick a name like Jack Harkaway and not evoke a sense of Bracebridge Hemyng. Peter Ling may have been thinking of Charles Hamilton, but the character feels to me like a composite of a number of influential hack writers.
(As for the recent fan suggestion, I think it’s more likely that Captain Jack is based on Jack Harkaway. Jack draws—at least, this seems obvious to me—from many boys’ own heroes, mostly later ones like Biggles and Flash Gordon. But they in turn draw on the early ones, like Jack Harkaway and Broadarrow Jack.)