Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850-1950

The Age of Adolescence

Charles Ferrall, Anna Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135235079
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this study, Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson argue that the Victorians created a concept of adolescence that lasted into the twentieth century and yet is strikingly at odds with post-Second World War notions of adolescence as a period of "storm and stress." In the enormously popular "juvenile" literature of the period, primarily boys' and girls' own adventure and school stories, adolescence is acknowledged as a time of sexual awareness and yet also of a romantic idealism that is lost with marriage, a time when boys and girls acquire adult duties and responsibilities and yet have not had to assume the roles of breadwinner or household manager. The book reveals a concept of adolescence as significant as the Romantic cult of childhood that preceded it, which will be of interest to scholars of both children's literature and Victorian culture.

Chapter One
Sexuality and Sacrifice in the Boys’ Stories before the War

It is frequently assumed that adolescent fiction either ignores boys’ sexuality or hints at it in darkly censorious tones. Henty claimed that after receiving “a very indignant letter from a dissenting minister” when a twelve-year-old boy kissed a girl of eleven, he vowed to “never touch a love interest” (qtd. in Arnold 10). In contrast, George Orwell points out,

In the ’nineties The Boys’ Own Paper . . . used to have its correspondence columns full of terrifying warnings against masturbation, and books like St Winifred’s and Tom Brown’s Schooldays were heavy with homosexual feeling, though no doubt the authors were not fully aware of it. (93)

Orwell is certainly right about the “guilty sex-ridden atmosphere” of some of the novels and magazines. In the BOP the following reply to an “Anxious Youth” was quite typical:

Be pure in thought and deed, or everything else will fail. Try a teaspoon of Fellow’s syrup in water. It is constantly employed as a tonic by medical men. Take it twice a day after breakfast. Take a cold bath in the morning and cold local douches frequently. Moderate exercise. Hard bed. (1891: 160)

But there are quite a few “anxious” youths in the correspondence columns who may not have committed any sexual vice and cold baths and exercise were the standard remedy for just about every malady in which a visit to the doctor was not advised. In terms of genre, school stories evoke such guilt far more strongly than the Robinsonades and adventures stories, presumably because much of their action takes place indoors. The most blood-curdling reference to illicit sexuality is in Erik, or Little by Little, the first major school story after Tom Brown’s School Days, where Frederic W. Farrar refers to Kibroth-Hattavaah, the place in the Book of Numbers where those who suffered “that burning marl of passion . . . found nothing but shame and ruin, polluted affections and an early grave” (94). Jonathon Gathorne-Hardy argues that this reference must be to the specific vice of masturbation (88), which is surely right given that these “shadows” warn the “boy who reads this page . . . by the waving of their wasted hands” (86). For all its Gothic hysteria, however, this is the only allusion to such a vice in the novel.

In Tom Brown there is a young boy who is described as “one of the miserable little pretty white-handed, curly-headed boys, petted and pampered by some of the big fellows, who wrote their verses for them, taught them to drink and use bad language, and did all they could to spoil them for everything in this world and the next” (207), but it is by no means certain that this is an allusion to homosexuality. In the novel’s only footnote, Hughes tells us that

a kind and wise critic, an old Rugbeian, notes here in the margin: ‘The small friend system was not so utterly bad from 1841–1847.’ Before that, too, there were many noble friendships between big and little boys, but I can’t strike out the passage; many boys will know why it is left in. (170)

Hughes’ dilemma is common to all these writers: raising the issue of sexual vice draws attention to it and may, as in the case of Farrar’s reference, send boys running to such inflammatory books as the Bible. But while the unusual remedy of a footnote might provoke considerable interest in those curious “white-handed” boys, it nevertheless clearly marginalizes whatever they might be doing with them in terms of the story. “Beastliness” (as it was often called) may be a problem but it is not worth a jeremiad.

In contrast, Horace Vachell’s later school story The Hill tells the story of a love triangle in which the villain and competitor for Harry’s love, Scaife, “Captain and epitome of the brains and muscles of the Eleven,” grows in the course of the novel into “a powerful man, with the mind, the tastes, the passions of manhood” (175), which he certainly satisfies since we are told that “he denied his body nothing it craved” (182). Because of Scaife’s omnipresence in the story, we are frequently reminded of sexual vices and while these probably involve liaisons with prostitutes from the slums where his grandfather was born (94), the beloved Desmond, we are told, “knew that beasts lurked in every house, in every school in the kingdom” and later the boys are relieved that the headmaster has called an assembly to warn them against gambling, not “something worse,” as he puts it, “ah, yes, unspeakably worse . . . one of those cases from which every clean, manly boy must recoil in disgust” (163). Nevertheless Scaife is the villain and therefore not one with whom we can have any sympathy and Desmond is clearly not tempted.

Nearly a decade later, in 1914, G. F. Bradby’s The Lanchester Tradition does devote a whole chapter called “In Dark Places” to the way in which a new and controversial headmaster, Flaggon, makes a “deep impression” on the masters for his swift expulsion of a number of boys when it becomes known that the school has become corrupted by some unnamed vice that is variously described as “very vile,” “rotten,” “hideous,” and an “evil thing” (182–86). Yet the main concern is not with this vice but how the new and controversial headmaster will deal with the crisis.

Many of the stories make no reference to sexual vices. Despite what Robert Buchanan famously described as the “hooligan” behavior of Kipling’s Stalky & Co., they never dream of any sexual transgression. This was the main problem with the novel for A. C. Benson, a writer who had been a master at Eton, who felt that

the difficulty to my mind is to imagine boys so lawless, so unbridled, so fond at intervals of low delights, who are yet so obviously wholesome indeed and manly. I can humbly say that it is my belief, confirmed by experience, that boys of so unconventional and daring a type would not be content without dipping into darker pleasures. (qtd. in Richards 1988: 163)

But Kipling later pointed out in his autobiography, Something of Myself, perhaps with this criticism in mind, that

Naturally Westward Ho! was brutal enough, but setting aside the foul speech that a boy ought to learn early and put behind him by his seventeenth year, it was clean with a cleanliness that I have never heard of in any other school. I remember no cases of even suspected perversion, and am inclined to the theory that if masters did not suspect them, and show that they suspected, there would not be quite so many elsewhere. (16)

The repeated reference to hygiene might sound like he is protesting too much but Kipling’s reversal of causal logic, his view that suspicion creates vice rather than the other way around, is eminently sensible.

Kipling does not deny that perversions took place at other schools and A. C. Benson was not the only suspicious schoolmaster. The headmaster of Wellington, E. W. Benson, contemplated placing wire lattices over the boys’ cubicles and instructed

young boys to retire a certain time earlier than older ones. While they are undressing, steward and matron to walk up and down in the middle of the dormitories to report any boy who goes out of his own dormitory to another, and by the time that the candles are to be put out the prefects are to come up to bed, and preserve the same order of silence. (qtd. in Newsome 45)

But the reality was no doubt far less alarming. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy estimates that “perhaps some twenty-five percent had sexual relations with each other on any regular basis” but that most boys were chaste and sublimated sexual passions into romantic friendships “of the most passionate . . . and idealized intensity” (164, 166). Villains such as Hughes’ Flashman or Talbot Baines’ Loman of The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s might not be “manly” but they are certainly not “homosexual.” There is some concern about homosexual activity—or what the “Labouchere Amendment” to the Criminal Law Act of 1885 described as acts of “gross indecency”—but little if any anxiety about “homosexuals,” a category of person which was still in the process of construction (Weeks 12; Foucault 43, 101).

Such hysteria, albeit sporadic and largely contained, sits rather oddly with the tendency of juvenile fiction during the second half of the nineteenth century to increasingly eschew any kind of overt moralising. In the most popular adventure story for late-nineteenth-century boys (Green 1990: 95), Crusoe never fails to remember what he calls his “original sin” (163), not some sexual transgression, since Crusoe is one of the most asexual characters in English literature, but his failure to heed his father’s warning about the dangers of going “abroad upon adventures” (2), an act of disobedience for which his stay on the island is repeatedly interpreted as a penance or expiation. However, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau discussed Robinson Crusoe at length in Emile (1762)—thus rescuing it from the realms of purely popular and vulgar fiction—he dismissed everything that happened both before and after Crusoe’s stay on the island (Green 1990: 40), thereby expurgating the story’s cautionary, anti-adventurous aspect. That is how it remained in the popular imagination. In the first of the Robinsonades, Johan Wyss’ The Swiss Family Robinson (1812), the authoritarian father of the shipwrecked family never loses any opportunity to draw moral lessons from even the least significant event or natural phenomena and the first Robinsonade in English, Frederick Marryat’s Masterman Ready (1841) has, as Green points out, a “severely evangelical ethos [that] runs counter to the spirit of adventure” (88) but in subsequent Robinsonades overt moralizing is either absent or shrugged off as an impediment to adventure.

Many of the authors of the first generation of adventure tales were evangelicals and many of their heroes were either missionaries or traders with strong missionary tendencies. But even amongst the earlier generation the evangelical impulse is not necessarily present. Although the son of a Presbyterian minister, Reid rebelled against his religious upbringing, instead choosing a life of quite remarkable adventure (Bratton 135). Marryat’s life was, if anything, as we shall see, even more adventurous. In one of the most popular stories, and certainly for later writers the most influential adventure story, Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855), the boy hero, Amyas Leigh, who is distinguished only by his “good looks” and “extraordinary size and strength,” is not

what would be now-a-days called by many a pious child; for though he said his Creed and Lord’s Prayer night and morning, and went to the service at the church every forenoon, and read the day’s Psalms with his mother every evening, and had learnt from her and from his father (as he proved well in after life) that it was infinitely noble to do right and infinitely base to do wrong, yet (the age of children’s religious books not having yet dawned on the world) he knew nothing more of theology, or of his own soul, than is contained in the Church Catechism. It is a question, however, on the whole, whether, though grossly ignorant (according to our modern notions) in science and religion, he was altogether untrained in manhood, virtue, and godliness; and whether the barbaric narrowness of his information was not somewhat counterbalanced both in him and in the rest of his generation by the depth, and breadth, and healthiness of his education. (Vol. 1: 11–12)

Amyas is the model for all subsequent heroes: handsome, vigorous to borderline violent, non- or anti-intellectual. Thus five years later even the evangelical R. M. Ballantyne can introduce the hero of one of his tales in the first sentence of the novel with the simple declaration “Martin Rattler was a very bad boy” (11). These naughty boys became so prominent that after 1880, according to Jackie Wullschlager, they replaced the previously predominant figure of the girl (109).

The school stories register this shift towards the celebration of the bad boy a little more slowly than the Robinsonades and adventure stories. Although Amyas and Tom Brown have much in common, the latter’s boisterous energy is diverted towards higher ends by his deeply pious friend, Arthur. As P. G. Wodehouse, amongst others, mischievously observed, there is a change in tone in Part Two of the novel due to the fact that it was actually written by the “Secret Society for Putting Wholesome Literature Within the Reach of Every Boy and Seeing That He Gets It” (1978: 184). The second of the school stories, Erik, has been much ridiculed for its cloying piety, Mack for example describing it as “the nightmare emanation of some morbid, introverted brain” (17) but the novel is, as Newsome points out, “a truer reflection of Arnold’s ideals than . . . Hughes’s” novel and more typical of the Evangelical sentiments and ideals of twenty years earlier (37, 6).

Whereas the main protagonist of Erik falls little by little into ever greater misdemeanors terminated only by his pitiful death, in the third of the Victorians’ most popular school stories, Talbot Baines Reed’s The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s, it is not the hero, Oliver, but the school cad, Loman, who falls into sin, stealing an exam paper in order to win a scholarship so as to pay off a debt to a scoundrel publican. Not only is Oliver and by implication many a schoolboy incapable of such behavior, but Loman “hadn’t been naturally a vicious boy, or a cowardly boy, or a stupid boy” (233) and though, like Erik, he flees the school and falls ill, we discover later that far from paying Erik’s ultimate price he reforms himself through “four or five years’ farming and knocking about in Australia” (291). The story has a strong cautionary aspect but as Richards points out it is a combination of Erik and Tom Brown, of the earlier Evangelical tradition and the emerging tradition of muscular adventures (1988: 103).

After The Fifth Form the piety and cautionary aspects vanish almost entirely. In a Chums story of 1903, “Chronicles of St. Simon’s: As Recalled and Told by Jones III,” the schoolboy narrator begins by declaring,

Most school yarns are done wrong. There is too much preaching, if I may say so. The Good Boy is overdone. In real life things happen differently. Now, my idea is to tell a yarn as it occurred, without dragging in a lot of moralizing, which I hate. . . . Mind you, when I think of it, there maybe a chance moral in some of these Chronicles, and when it occurs it will have to be pointed out, of course; that’s only fair. About the Good Boy, too, I’m afraid he will have to come in sometimes; but you’ll hardly recognize him; he isn’t treated in just the ordinary way; and I fancy generally, also, he doesn’t come to much good. (Barrow-North 366)

But the stories he has in mind belong to an older generation. A quite unremarkable but very typical BOP story called “Swinton’s Open Secret; or, the Puncturing of Perigol” by John Lea (1904–1905), for example, concerns a trick played on a tyrannical monitor called Perigol to make him falsely accuse a boy he has bullied of puncturing his bicycle tire. The story does involve a kind of trial presided over by the prematurely wise school captain and Perigol’s arrogance is justly punctured but the boy who has tricked Perigol out of anger that he was falsely accused of smoking is nevertheless a smoker. The trickster is not an exemplary Good Boy and the Bad Boy’s sins are not ones that would tempt any of the other boys. In other stories there are not even Bad Boys who get their comeuppance. The stories that constitute Eden Phillpotts’ The Human Boy, for example, are told in the first person by a number of boys who are unable to reflect on the moral aspects of the various scrapes they find themselves in. As the title suggests, these narrators are not heroes or villains, just ordinary though likeable boys, for all their foibles. Moreover, like the later adventure stories, the second generation of school stories also rejects the muscular Christianity that was itself a rejection of Evangelical piety. After a bishop speaks too familiarly to the boys with outdated slang in Arnold Lunn’s The Harrovians, for example, the narrator tells us that “Boys dislike muscular Christians” (104) and one of boys exclaims

What a horrid swob that Bish was! . . . talked to us as if we were a blooming board school. He and his damned curates. He was a Man—M-A-N—Man”, he says quoting the bishop, “and don’t you forget it, my beloved ’earers; A Man, not a bally ’ermaphrodite, like the old Bish. (104, 106)

None of all this anti-piety necessarily means a more relaxed attitude towards sexuality. The reaction against Evangelism also meant the adoption of more rigid gender roles. In The Fifth Form at St. Dominic’s the boys walk arm in arm on one occasion (239), something that is more characteristic of earlier fiction but would be inconceivable in later fiction after the emergence of the stiff-upper-lip and manliness cult of the 1870s and ’80s (Newsome 83). Moreover, the shift from Evangelical to imperialist discourses observed by many historians simply displaces Christian anxiety towards sexuality into the pseudo-scientific discourses of degenerationism and social Darwinism. Hall’s purely “scientific” description of the symptoms of masturbation—lethargy, morbidity, nervousness, depression, premature senescence, suicidal tendencies (Vol. I: 442–52)—is much the same as earlier ethical diatribes (Laqueur). And the cult of muscularity and athleticism that overtook the public schools during the 1870s was...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One Sexuality and Sacrifice in the Boys’ Stories before the War
• Chapter Two Romance and the Boys’ Story
• Chapter Three Sexuality and Romance in the Girls’ Stories
• Illustrations
• Chapter Four Sacrifice and Independence in the Girls’ Stories
• Chapter Five Boys’ Stories between the Wars
• Chapter Six Girls’ Stories between the Wars
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography