Bracebridge Hemyng was the most successful writer of boys' stories in the later Victorian era. His great creation was Jack Harkaway, a mostly clean-living, always hard-hitting, true British schoolboy hero, whose adventures were chronicled in well over thirty serials. Harkaway visited most parts of the world — America, Greece, Malaya, China, South Africa — in some of the latter stories with his son Dick. The character became the archetype of the boys' serial hero, and most of those that followed him are in some ways his imitators. Hemyng wrote the first Harkaway story in 1871, and continued with the strand almost up to his death in 1901. Although he wrote many other one-off serials, Harkaway and his heritage were his greatest achievement.

In 1875 Hemyng's publisher, Edwin J. Brett,

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Citation: Collins, Dick. "Bracebridge Hemyng". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 December 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12497, accessed 23 November 2024.]