Dick Lightheart

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It is irresistable to open by quoting a modern-era review, by Victorian Fantasy aficionado Jess Nevins:

Dick Lightheart is a typical, and tiresome, square-jawed two-fisted self-righteous Victorian adventurer, a young man full of his own moral superiority and willing to shove it down everybody else's throats. (He's also a racist, which is quite typical of much of the young man's adventure fiction of the time) He is on the Indiana when they find the survivor of an encounter with a "sea monster." The ship goes after it, but when they find it only bonehead Lightheart and his chums are willing to try to kill it; the rest of the crew has more sense than that. Sure enough, when they do try to harpoon it, the monster sinks the Indiana (how many deaths on your conscience now, Dick Lightheart?) and Lightheart and his boys are sent into the water, where they are rescued, after a time, by the sea monster, which turns out to be...a submarine.

Is any of this sounding familiar yet?

Sure enough, Dick and his posse are brought into the submarine (which is called the Enigma) and made the guests/prisoners of its chief, Captain Nemo. Like the Verne character, he is a moody misanthrope, and as in the Verne novel, the Hemyng story features an underwater burial, an attempted escape to a cannibal-filled island, a visit to a giant pearl that only Nemo knows about, a trip through a submarine tunnel, and an attack by a giant squid.
The crew of the Enigma use special rifles to hunt and kill undersea creatures, and Hemyng's Captain Nemo is a Confederate veteran whose fiancée, convinced that he was dead, married someone else. For this "Nemo" (née Harold Duggan) swears vengeance, sinking ships and acting much as the Verne Nemo does.

Dick Lightheart and his chums eventually escape, thanks to the Enigma suffering from mechanical difficulties. Unfortunately for the reader, our escape is not so easy; we'll carry the memory of the ripoff of Verne with us for a long, long time. Shame on you, Bracebridge Hemyng! Shame!

                               - Jess Nevins (Victorian Fantasy Website, 2003)


Of course the character of Dick Lightheart was dropped for the character of Allan Quartermain in the playable 1919 Jung Version, and "Captain Nemo II" was re-written as the original Verne Captain Nemo.  In a letter to Dolores Cooke April 1925, Jung says that "Quartermain was of course better known, and somewhat less of a horse's ass."

The substitution sparked some outrage even in 1903, since the Bracebridge Hemyng's adaptation was not nearly as well known or remembered as Verne's, though it had been published in the U.S. by the American News Company in Frank Leslie's American Boys.  Apparently, however, King had read it as a boy and adored it, and had a copy of the UK Novel "The Scapegrace at Sea," which he passed to Bucher, who found it delightful. 

Possibly they were attracted by passages such as this, cited by modern reviewer James D. Keeline:  'When the group tries to escape, they kill one of Captain Nemo's crew, one of Duggard's former slaves, who speaks in dialect. When Lightheart learns what they have done, Teddy replies "it was only a nigger."'

Certainly, the use of the Hemyng version allows for the introduction of a square jawed Muscular Christian hero, of the sort that King fancied himself to be and Bucher admired rather than Professor Arronax, who Bucher would have called "an effete Frog."

Principally, Captain Nemo II is an ex-Confederate, and the Civil War element simply delighted Horatio King, while the entire story entertained Bucher.  Henrietta Wallace refused to read the character at all, on no other principal than that "she did not wish to read Boys' Stories," an example of her refusal on several counts to read many of the male or adventure characters in the game on the simple basis that a lady did not read that sort of writing.  

Ironically, Hemyng was pirated by a pirate himself.  From August - Sept 1895, his Scapegrace novel ran in Young Sports of America as "The Wizard of the Deep; or the Search for the Million Dollar Pearl," under the pseudonym "Theodore Edison," and this made it into hardcover as "The Wizard of the Sea" (Mershon, 1900).  It survived to be reprinted in 1907 and even later, using the pseudonym "Roy Rockwood" and thus it was probably written by or commissioned by Edward Stratemyer, whose publishing Syndicate hired authors to complete works on his outline.  Stratemyer created such characters as "The Bobbsey Twins," "Tom Swift," "The Hardy Boys," and "Nancy Drew."

It is reasonably to suppose that the authors relied on the recent publication for recognition, but they used most of the names from the Hemyng version, probably because the Stratemyer plagiarism omitted the Confederate sub-plot that King and Bucher adored.

Regrettably, no trace whatsoever of the Dick Lightheart Character Sheet survives, and there is some evidence that after 1907, the character may have become Mont Folsom from the Stratemyer version.  However there is no extant copy of that sheet either, which is unusual since Lightheart/Folsom was a fairly significant character.