Union Jack (magazine)

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The Union Jack

Cover Sexton Blake in Baku, 1908
Categories	Story paper
Frequency	Weekly
First issue	1894; 130 years ago (1894)
Final issue	1933 (1933)
Company	Amalgamated Press
Country	United Kingdom
Based in	London
Language	English

The Union Jack was a British story paper for children of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There were two story papers called Union Jack. The first appeared in the 1880s but was only very short-lived. The name was then used by Alfred Harmsworth in 1894^[1] for a new halfpenny story paper intended as a companion to the successful Halfpenny Marvel.

Harmsworth considered it his moral duty to put the "penny dreadfuls" out of business,^[2] though some considered his papers to simply be "halfpenny dreadfullers". The first issues of the Union Jack stated that it was a "Library of high class fiction".^[3] The editorial at the end of the very first issue stated "there will be nothing of the 'dreadful' type in our stories. No tales of boys rifling their employers' cash-boxes and making off to foreign lands, or other such highly immoral fiction products".

The paper claimed to be offering good value by "securing the very best authors" but only presenting their stories on cheap paper, rather than "wasting" money on colourful bindings and high-quality paper. However, the actual quality of the stories, especially in the early years, could be variable. Also many writers used pseudonyms to make it appear that more people were writing for the paper than actually were.^[4]