‘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.
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