Gunpowder Treason and Plot, and Other Stories for Boys

Gunpowder Treason and Plot, and Other Stories for Boys is a collection of historical fiction for boys by Harold Avery, the English children’s author who lived from 1867 to 1943 and who produced a substantial body of school stories, historical fiction, and adventure tales for the substantial late Victorian and Edwardian boys’ fiction market.

Avery worked alongside the better remembered school story writers of the period including Talbot Baines Reed and the slightly later P G Wodehouse in his early school story work. Avery’s particular contribution was a substantial number of solid school stories set at English public schools and a substantial body of historical fiction that took various dramatic episodes from English history as the subject matter for boys’ adventure stories.

The Gunpowder Treason and Plot of the title refers to the famous attempted Catholic conspiracy of November 1605 to blow up the Houses of Parliament during the State Opening, killing King James I and a substantial portion of the English ruling class. The plot was discovered just before its planned execution, the conspirators were captured and executed, and the event became one of the central dramatic episodes of early seventeenth century English history. The anniversary of the foiling, November 5, has been commemorated as Guy Fawkes Day in England since the early seventeenth century with bonfires, fireworks, and the burning of effigies.

The title story uses the Gunpowder Plot as the historical setting for a boys’ adventure narrative, with invented young characters whose connections to the actual historical events of the plot provide the dramatic action. The other stories in the collection use various other dramatic episodes from English and Scottish history as similar settings for adventure narratives aimed at young readers.

Avery was working within the substantial late Victorian and Edwardian tradition of historical fiction for boys that had been established by writers including G A Henty and that drew on dramatic episodes from British and European history to provide both entertainment and what the authors and publishers understood as moral and patriotic instruction for the young male readers who made up the substantial commercial audience for the genre. The treatment of the historical material reflects the assumptions of late Victorian and Edwardian British patriotic education and would feel dated to modern readers in various ways.

The book runs to about three hundred pages and is best read by selecting individual stories of interest. It is of interest now to historians of late Victorian and Edwardian boys’ fiction and to readers of the substantial English historical fiction tradition.