Juvenile Nation

Youth, Emotions and the Making of the Modern British Citizen, 1880-1914

Stephanie Olsen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472511416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In the first five months of the Great War, one million men volunteered to fight. Yet by the end of 1915, the British government realized that conscription would be required. Why did so many enlist, and conversely, why so few? Focusing on analyses of widely felt emotions related to moral and domestic duty, Juvenile Nation broaches these questions in new ways. Juvenile Nation examines how religious and secular youth groups, the juvenile periodical press, and a burgeoning new group of child psychologists, social workers and other 'experts' affected society's perception of a new problem character, the 'adolescent'. By what means should this character be turned into a 'fit' citizen? Considering qualities such as loyalty, character, temperance, manliness, fatherhood, and piety, Stephanie Olsen discusses the idea of an 'informal education', focused on building character through emotional control, and how this education was seen as key to shaping the future citizenry of Britain and the Empire. Juvenile Nation recasts the militarism of the 1880s onwards as part of an emotional outpouring based on association to family, to community and to Christian cultural continuity. Significantly, the same emotional responses explain why so many men turned away from active militarism, with duty to family and community perhaps thought to have been best carried out at home. By linking the historical study of the emotions with an examination of the individual's place in society, Olsen provides an important new insight on how a generation of young men was formed.

1

Stakeholders of Youth

Children and youth are obviously the most important stakeholders in their own lives, yet their voices are notoriously difficult to hear. Adults concerned with these groups, and their interventions on their behalf, are much more present in the historical record.¹ Yet children’s own agency can sometimes be detected in their choice whether or not to buy a paper or to attend a youth group. That youth workers of various stripes believed in the power of children’s agency is also apparent in their attempts to appeal to them directly, in ways that were subtly adapted over the years to address them effectively, and affectively, in order to make ‘positive’ changes in their own lives and to influence their families and peers.

As childhood increasingly became isolated from the rest of the lifecycle, with its special expectations and occupations, adults became more preoccupied with children and youth who did not fit into the mould of what childhood should be. Increasing numbers of youth experts and groups intervened in this ‘problem’, in an effort to make their concept of childhood universal (though class specific).²

The juvenile publishing industry

According to M. J. D. Roberts, in the 1870s the moral status of self-denial in middle-class culture began to be questioned. This encouraged religious and voluntary leaders to reconsider their ways of functioning.³ One result was the increased attention by diversely motivated groups on juvenile publishing. In addition, advances in printing technology, railway distribution, the penny post, the repeal of ‘taxes on knowledge’ and increased government spending all had a material impact on the great profusion of newspapers and periodicals in the second half of the nineteenth century.⁴ With the market expanded by increased literacy after the 1870 Education Act, in the early 1880s, over 900 new juvenile books were issued annually and 15 secular boys’ periodicals competed for boys’ attention.⁵ There was a boom in the number of juvenile periodicals beginning at the end of the 1870s. Patrick Dunae estimates that there were only 59 such periodicals in 1874 (none was recorded in 1863). Numbers increased substantially to 100 in 1884 and continued to accelerate to 218 in 1910.⁶ John Springhall notes that ‘Fortunes were certainly made and lost by London’s publishers of cheap juvenile fiction, suggesting the scale and significance of a business catering specifically to the popular end of the juvenile market.’⁷ Products of this business atmosphere, all of the papers discussed in this book were backed by major publishers, to whom we will now turn.

The Religious Tract Society⁸

The RTS was a product of the Evangelical Revival that had begun in the mid-eighteenth century. Evangelicalism was a social as well as a religious movement, concerned with ensuring ‘real’ rather than formal Christianity through individual conversion. Like the other major organizations of the evangelical movement, the RTS, a widespread non-denominational society throughout Britain and in missions around the world, was created to disseminate spiritually improving literature to an expanding audience of Christians and the ‘unconverted’. The Society’s founder, the Rev. George Burder of Coventry proposed the establishment of a non-sectarian society for the preparation and circulation of evangelical tract literature at the London Missionary Society Anniversary Meeting in 1799. To that end, the RTS committee was formed, consisting of 12 members, both clerical and lay. According to the RTS’s own official history, published at the end of the nineteenth century, good tracts contained ‘pure truth’, ‘some account of the way of a sinner’s salvation’, and plain, striking, entertaining and idea-driven content. They should be adapted to various situations and conditions, ‘for the young and for the aged, for the children of prosperity and of affliction, for careless and for awakened sinners, and for entering into the reasonings, excuses, temptations, and duties of each, and pointing to the way of the Lord’.⁹ In its first year, 1799–1800, the RTS sold 200,000 tracts, a number which rose to 800,000 in the Society’s second year.¹⁰ The RTS quickly expanded, publishing increasing numbers of books and periodicals, all with the same high moral tone.

Throughout the 1850s, several cheap religious periodicals were established in an attempt to benefit from the growing family-reading market for weeklies.¹¹ So-called improving magazines, many of them published by the RTS, dominated this market.¹² At mid-century, the RTS began publishing two one-penny weeklies, the Leisure Hour (1852–1908) and the Sunday at Home (1854–1940), both edited for many years by James Macaulay, with his colleague and successor, W. Stevens. According to the Society’s late nineteenth-century chronicler, Samuel G. Green, the most important step in the provision of popular literature was the introduction of the Leisure Hour, which aimed to treat all topics of human interest ‘in the light of Christian truth’.¹³ Both magazines sought to reach the widest audience possible, including most of the literate working classes. The magazines were also issued in monthly parts for five pence each. Along with these two periodicals, the Society began to publish cheap religious periodicals for the popular, family weekly market, although a distinction between weekly and Sunday reading was maintained.¹⁴ These publications were cheaper than their biggest secular competitors for readership. At two pence, Charles Dickens’ weekly, All the Year Round, was double the price of the RTS family publications.¹⁵

By 1850 Evangelical enthusiasm was less pronounced, but the cultural legacy of the movement remained powerful, particularly in the intertwining of Christian values and middle-class mores. Though magazines of the non-improving variety grew, particularly from ‘the 1890s, the bulk of the domestic literature of the British family remained strongly evangelical in origin at least until the 1910s’.¹⁶

The Leisure Hour, and even more the Sunday at Home, reflected the much larger Sabbatarian movement, devoted to preserving Sunday as a day of rest and of religious observance. This movement was important for members of the RTS who wished to set aside Sunday as a day when fathers could abstain from work outside the home and spend time with their families, to combat the perception that fathers were increasingly becoming ‘strangers’ in the home. The RTS clearly targeted the family circle, as is indicated in its magazines’ subtitles: the Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation, and Sunday at Home: The Illustrated Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading. Both periodicals often led with fiction, and included at least one large illustration in each issue. As a Sabbath magazine, Sunday at Home was more sober in its presentation and contents than the weekly Leisure Hour, providing appropriate reading for all ages on the day of rest. This periodical was more overtly religious, but was still intended to be non-denominational.

Most aristocrats resisted militant Sabbatarianism, and many members of the working class could not strictly adhere to it. But for the middle classes, Sunday tended to be quiet, and at least an external observance of Sunday was regarded as a normal requirement of respectability.¹⁷ By the 1880s, this was beginning to change. Gradually the taboos on Sunday recreation were being lifted.¹⁸ Yet by providing entertaining family reading, the RTS encouraged men to remain at home on Sunday with their families, instead of the often morally dubious activities of pub-going or the increasingly popular homosocial environment of the club. The Sunday at Home continued to be published even as middle-class interest in Sabbatarianism waned, since RTS members wished to preserve Sunday as a day of rest and family time in which the father could be an active participant. According to one article in the Sunday at Home, ‘There can be no doubt that there is a wave of unbelief and ungodliness passing over this country. According to reports from the clergy the Archdeacon declares that it is more difficult to get men to church on Sundays, in town and country.’¹⁹ The remedy to increasing ungodliness was for fathers to lead family prayers every day.

Though historians like Callum Brown now see late nineteenth-century fears about secularization as exaggerated, it is clear that many Britons at the time were concerned about declines in religious adherence, especially in church attendance and piety, and the consequent effect on morality and on the family.²⁰ The RTS was a prime location for these kinds of concerns. In a history of the RTS published by its current incarnation, the Lutterworth Press, in 1949, author Gordon Hewitt described the challenge the RTS faced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:

The secularization of English society which had begun in the closing decades of the nineteenth century became more marked in the early years of the twentieth. Church attendance fell away, Sunday Schools declined; the Christian religion was not openly repudiated or aggressively attacked, but it came to be commonly assumed that a man’s religion was his own affair, and that he was a competent judge of it without making reference to the specialists and without making any practical experiments.²¹

This secular trend, though perhaps overestimated in significance, created serious problems for a society that had been founded primarily to promote Christian evangelism at home. As Hewitt concluded, ‘The old tracts appealed to the Bible as an ultimate authority accepted alike by writer and reader, but acceptance on the reader’s part could no longer be assumed.’²² At the fin de siècle, because of these external societal pressures and increasing competition from ‘secular’ publishers, the RTS focused less on tracts (its former mainstay) and more on its periodicals for families and girls and boys. It also attracted children by giving away many prizes awarded for proficiency in Bible studies classes. As it realized that the acceptance of religious messages could no longer be taken for granted, the Society adapted the content of its periodicals to suit the tastes of a more ‘modern’ reading public.

The RTS claimed to have an enormous influence in this domain. In the autumn of 1900, for example, the society sold more than 100,000 copies of the annual volumes of its leading magazines. It was estimated that each of these actually exerted ‘some influence upon the mental and spiritual development of from ten to fifteen readers’, as the magazines were placed in libraries and reading-rooms, given away as presents or sold second-hand. Thus, the estimated readership was from a million to one-and-a-half million. ‘And when it is born in mind’, according to one Sunday at Home article, ‘that the ultimate purpose of all this reading matter is not only to amuse and instruct, but, if possible, to benefit directly, both morally and spiritually, all who read its pages, the tremendous power of this agency becomes at once apparent.’²³ Sales income peaked in 1885 at over £180,000 a year.²⁴ Such a massive increase in sales was made possible by the new publishing programme, with its broader appeal particularly among the middle- and lower-middle classes with spending power. The high point of the programme was the launch of the Boy’s Own and Girl’s Own Papers in 1879 and 1880, which were voted the most popular periodicals among youth in 1888, and which greatly boosted sales income.²⁵ The Boy’s Own Paper (BOP) provided evangelical messages of purity. It served as the antidote to other papers for boys and families. Even religious leaders admitted that the ‘proper’ message could be dull, dry and sanctimonious, noting that ‘anything evangelical was rather flat-footed, and lacking richness and variety’.²⁶ In order to increase readership, religious papers were promoted as having interesting topics for boys that were pervaded by a Christian tone, rather than containing doctrinal religious teachings per se.

By the end of the 1870s, the RTS committee was convinced of the need to provide improving literature for both boys and girls. In the 1879 Report, the committee expressed the urgency of cr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction
• 1 Stakeholders of Youth
• 2 Moral and Emotional Consensus
• 3 Domestic Bliss? Husband, Wife and Home
• 4 The Child: Father to the Man?
• 5 Recasting Imperial Masculinity: Informal Education and the Empire of Domesticity
• 6 Storm and Stress: The ‘Invention’ of Adolescence
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index