I made a couple of videos in relation to my trip out to Liverpool You can see them all here!
The first video is a summary of my trip, in this video you can see some of the best bits while I provide a speed drawing of the a study I did of James Hanley which was a painting on display. James Hanley was a writer who wrote 'Boy'.
This was his second novel, his "first novel of the sea", was first published by Boriswood as a limited edition of 145 in 1931.
Boy is the grim story of an intelligent thirteen-year-old boy, Fearon, from Liverpool who is forced to leave school by his parents so as to help support the family, by working "on the docks as a boiler-scaler".He hates this job and after being beaten by his father Fearon stows away on a ship. When he is discovered, as the ship is shorthanded, he is signed-on to the crew. Fearon's suffering continues on board where he is sexually assaulted.
When the ship docks in Alexandria, Egypt, Fearon has his first sexual encounter with a woman, in a brothel, where he contracts syphilis. On the return voyage this disease rapidly develops. The novel concludes with the captain smothering Fearon to put him out of his misery and his body given to the sea. Novelist Hugh Walpole, in a review, described Boy as "A novel that is so unpleasant and ugly, both in narration and in incident, that I wonder the printers did not go on strike while printing it".
Then, when it was reprinted in 1934, in a cheap (second) edition with a "scantily dressed" belly dancer on its cover, Boy was prosecuted for obscenity. See the full wiki source here
I hope you like it! Let me know if you've been affected by any of the same things I'd love to know!
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