‘Hang on,’ said my husband. ‘That’s not right. I’ve read that book.’
He had too, the book being The Hooligan Nights. It purported to be an account of a young hooligan from Lambeth called Alf, and was published in 1899, a year after the feared and anathematised youths came to prominence in the press.
The frontispiece was a drawing by William Nicholson showing the type: long-headed with a forelock over the low brow; wearing the check muffler fashionable among the gangs. The Daily Telegraph reported in August 1898 that the hooligan’s ‘crop-and-fly-flap’ haircut cost sixpence, when an ordinary haircut was only twopence.
But the thing my husband thought wasn’t right was the subtitle: ‘Being the Life and Opinions of a Young and Impertinent Criminal Recounted by Himself and Set Forth by Clarence Rook.’ That’s what it says on the title page of the 1979 Oxford University Press edition.
Certainly Alf was impertinent, but my husband could have sworn it should have been ‘Impenitent’. Sure enough, when I looked out a copy of the first edition ‘Impenitent’ it was.
The OUP edition has an informative introduction by Benny Green, the jazz saxophonist and writer. I doubt he was to blame for the mistranscribed subtitle, but it’s funny no one noticed then, or through further editions. To add to this oddity, the first American edition published in New York in 1899 has ‘Unrepentant’.
Was impenitent an unfamiliar word? Could there be any connection with the 1611 Authorised Version of the Bible using the word repentance, but never penitent, impenitent or penance? The Catholic Rheims translation of 1582 had impenitent, following Jerome’s 4th-century Latin translation.
Still, penitent was good enough for Protestant Milton and for Jonathan Edwards the Calvinist preacher in a celebrated sermon in New England in 1747.
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