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|title=Fifty Years In The Fiction Factory: The Working Life Of Herbert Allingham

|author=Julia Jones

|borrow=Yes

|isbn=9781899262076

|pages=388

|publisher=Golden Duck

|date=September 2012

|website=http://golden-duck.co.uk/about-golden-duck/

|summary=An examination of the life and work of Herbert Allingham, a prolific writer for the halfpenny comics a hundred years ago, based on family archives, diaries, and account books.

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Herbert Allingham was one of the most prolific authors of his time. Between 1886 and his death in 1936 he was a busy writer of melodramatic serial stories in the mass-market halfpenny papers which flourished at the turn of the century. Yet nothing he wrote was ever published in book form with his name to it, and the magazine proprietors made fortunes while their authors were the unsung heroes of the trade.

Lives of the well-known novelists from this period are not hard to find, so by way of contrast it is interesting to read a life of a writer who was equally industrious yet received little acclaim or recognition, beyond that of earning a reasonable living, for so long. The comics for which he wrote were very much a sign of their times, as a prevailing indicator of the tastes in their days when they were one of the primary sources of entertainment, and it has shed a worthy light on one of the unsung heroes of the profession.

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