Juvenile literature and British society, 1850-1950: the age of adolescence

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JUVENILE LITERATURE AND BRITISH SOCIETY, 1850–1950

Children’s Literature and Culture Jack Zipes, Series Editor Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction by Robyn McCallum Recycling Red Riding Hood by Sandra Beckett The Poetics of Childhood by Roni Natov Voices of the Other Children’s Literature and the Postcolonial Context edited by Roderick McGillis Narrating Africa George Henty and the Fiction of Empire by Mawuena Kossi Logan Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults edited by Naomi J. Miller Representing the Holocaust in Youth Literature by Lydia Kokkola Translating for Children by Riitta Oittinen Beatrix Potter Writing in Code by M. Daphne Kutzer Children’s Films History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory by Ian Wojcik-Andrews Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults edited by Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry Transcending Boundaries Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults edited by Sandra L. Beckett The Making of the Modern Child Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century by Andrew O’Malley How Picturebooks Work by Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott

Brown Gold Milestones of African American Children’s Picture Books, 1845-2002 by Michelle H. Martin Russell Hoban/Forty Years Essays on His Writing for Children by Alida Allison Apartheid and Racism in South African Children’s Literature by Donnarae MacCann and Amadu Maddy Empire’s Children Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books by M. Daphne Kutzer Constructing the Canon of Children’s Literature Beyond Library Walls and Ivory Towers by Anne Lundin Youth of Darkest England Working Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire by Troy Boone Ursula K. Leguin Beyond Genre Literature for Children and Adults by Mike Cadden Twice-Told Children’s Tales edited by Betty Greenway Diana Wynne Jones The Fantastic Tradition and Children’s Literature by Farah Mendlesohn Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800 edited by Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore Voracious Children Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature by Carolyn Daniel National Character in South African Children’s Literature by Elwyn Jenkins Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins The Governess as Provocateur by Georgia Grilli

A Critical History of French Children’s Literature, Vol. 1 & 2 by Penny Brown Once Upon a Time in a Different World Issues and Ideas in African American Children’s Literature By Neal A. Lester

Enterprising Youth Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature Monika Elbert Constructing Adolescence in Fantastic Realism Alison Waller

The Gothic in Children’s Literature Haunting the Borders Edited by Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis

Crossover Fiction Global and Historical Perspectives Sandra L. Beckett

Reading Victorian Schoolrooms Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Elizabeth Gargano

The Crossover Novel Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership Rachel Falconer

Soon Come Home to This Island West Indians in British Children’s Literature by Karen Sands-O’Connor

Shakespeare in Children’s Literature Gender and Cultural Capital Erica Hateley

Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child by Annette Wannamaker

Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature Edited by Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard

Into the Closet Cross-dressing and the Gendered Body in Children’s Literature by Victoria Flanagan Russian Children’s Literature and Culture edited by Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova The Outside Child In and Out of the Book Christine Wilkie-Stibbs Representing Africa in Children’s Literature Old and New Ways of Seeing by Vivian Yenika-Agbaw The Fantasy of Family Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal by Liz Thiel From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood Children’s Literature and the Construction of Canadian Identity By Elizabeth A. Galway The Family in English Children’s Literature Ann Alston

Neo-Imperialism in Children’s Literature About Africa A Study of Contemporary Fiction by Yulisa Amadu Maddy and Donnarae MacCann Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature Kathryn James Fundamental Concepts of Children’s Literature Research Literary and Sociological Approaches Hans-Heino Ewers Children’s Fiction about 9/11 Ethnic, Heroic and National Identities Jo Lampert The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children’s Literature Jan Susina Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers Maria Nikolajeva Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 The Age of Adolescence Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson

JUVENILE LITERATURE AND BRITISH SOCIETY, 1850–1950 The Age of Adolescence

CH A R L E S F E R R A L L A N D A N NA JACK SON

NEW YORK AND LONDON

First published 2010 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

© 2010 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ferrall, Charles. Juvenile literature and British society, 1850–1950 : the age of adolescence / by Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson. p. cm.—(Children’s literature and culture ; v. 68) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Children’s stories, English—History and criticism. 2. Adolescence in literature. 3. Boys in literature. 4. Girls in literature. 5. Literature and society—Great Britain—History—19th century. 6. Literature and society—Great Britain—History—20th century. I. Jackson, Anna, 1967– II. Title. PR830.C513F47 2009 823'.809922820941—dc22 2009019421 ISBN 0-203-86610-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-96476-8 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-86610-X (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-96476-0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-86610-8 (ebk)

To Anna’s children, Johnny and Elvira, and Charles’ children, Thomasina and Nell, in the hope that they follow the example of the adolescents in this book

Contents

List of Illustrations

xi

Series Editor’s Foreword

xiii

Acknowledgments

xv

Introduction

1

Chapter 1

Sexuality and Sacrifice in the Boys’ Stories before the War

15

Chapter 2

Romance and the Boys’ Story

39

Chapter 3

Sexuality and Romance in Girls’ Stories

69

Chapter 4

Sacrifice and Independence in Girls’ Stories

101

Chapter 5

Boys’ Stories between the Wars

127

Chapter 6

Girls’ Stories between the Wars

147

Conclusion

169

Notes

173

Bibliography

177

Index

189

ix

Illustrations

1.

The Boy’s Own Paper, November 13, 1897.

92

2.

Chums, September 5, 1894.

93

3.

The frontispiece of an 1897 MacMillan edition of Tom Brown.

94

The frontispiece of a Dean and Son edition of Tom Brown from the early 1940s, with, by contrast to the MacMillan edition, strikingly younger boys.

95

5.

The Girl’s Own Paper, November 14, 1891.

96

6.

The Girl’s Own Paper, June 4, 1892.

97

7.

A room of her own for the heroine of L. T. Meade’s Catalina: Art Student.

98

An illustration from a 1935 annual, The Girls’ Adventure Book.

99

From L. T. Meade’s 1897 novel Bashful Fifteen.

100

4.

8. 9.

xi

Series Editor’s Foreword

Dedicated to furthering original research in children’s literature and culture, the Children’s Literature and Culture series includes monographs on individual authors and illustrators, historical examinations of different periods, literary analyses of genres, and comparative studies on literature and the mass media. The series is international in scope and is intended to encourage innovative research in children’s literature with a focus on interdisciplinary methodology. Children’s literature and culture are understood in the broadest sense of the term “children” to encompass the period of childhood up through adolescence. Owing to the fact that the notion of childhood has changed so much since the origination of children’s literature, this Routledge series is particularly concerned with transformations in children’s culture and how they have affected the representation and socialization of children. While the emphasis of the series is on children’s literature, all types of studies that deal with children’s radio, fi lm, television, and art are included, in an endeavor to grasp the aesthetics and values of children’s culture. Not only have there been momentous changes in children’s culture in the last fifty years, there have been radical shifts in the scholarship that deals with these changes. In this regard, the goal of the Children’s Literature and Culture series is to enhance research in this field and, at the same time, point to new directions that bring together the best scholarly work throughout the world. Jack Zipes

xiii

Acknowledgments

A project of this nature involves reading an enormous number of popular yet non-canonical books and ephemeral material that can be found both everywhere and nowhere: Henty, Meade, and Marchant novels still gather dust in a surprising number of family homes and secondhand shops, but there are few to be found in academic libraries and most of the books we discuss are currently out of print. We therefore would like to express our gratitude to everyone who has helped us to gain access to this material. The librarians at our own library here at Victoria University have been tremendously helpful. We would like to thank particularly Erin Scudder, from interloans, for all her assistance, and the collections management team, who were extraordinarily generous in purchasing secondhand copies of books we required, from bookshops all over the world. Special thanks also to Nicola Frean, Special Materials Librarian at the J. C. Beaglehole room at the Victoria University Library, for her assistance and her patience as we asked to have a look at Meade’s Nurse Charlotte just one more time—time and time again. We would like to thank colleagues who have loaned us books from their own private collections: Harry Ricketts, Jean Anderson, Jo Bean, David Carnegie, Saskia Voorendt, and most especially Jane Stafford whose collection of juvenile literature from the period rivals either of ours (it includes Bessie Marchant’s Helen of the Black Mountains which immediately gives it the edge on anyone else’s). We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Lynne Jackett, curator of the Dorothy Neal White collection of children’s books at the National Library of New Zealand. This collection of books dating back to the early nineteenth century represents children’s reading habits from the colonial period onwards and is New Zealand’s most important resource for children’s literature scholars. Lynne is extremely knowledgeable and has been extraordinarily generous in the help she has offered us at every stage of our research. We thank the National Library of New Zealand for permission to reprint images from the Dorothy Neal White collection, and once again we thank

xv

xvi • Acknowledgments Lynne Jackett in particular for her assistance in organising the photo shoot and Les Maiden for taking the photos. We are grateful to Victoria University of Wellington for the Research and Study Leave funding that allowed Anna Jackson to travel to the United Kingdom in 2007 to read in the Bodleian Library and the British Library. We also thank the Research Committee of the School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies for a grant providing us with some research assistance. Siv Janssen kindly spent much of her time photocopying magazines from between the wars which, though wildly popular at the time, apparently now exist nowhere except in the British Library (and presumably garages across the Commonwealth). Finally, a big thank you to Saskia Voorendt, unflappable research assistant and children’s literature expert, who was sent on various impossible missions but always managed to return with buried treasures.

Introduction The clinical psychologist Nigel Latta begins his book on managing adolescents with an anecdote about a thirteen-year-old girl who had “approached an elderly woman in a supermarket car park and told her to get out of her car . . . grabbed her, pulled her out, put her in a headlock, and started to punch her” (7). This is an extreme example designed perhaps to put parents’ problems in perspective, but it is illustrative of the premise of the book, that parents need coping strategies to “get out alive” from what Latta presents as a “battlefield” (13). Teenagers, after all, “do not possess a fully functioning brain” (41) and adolescence should be regarded as a mental illness (38). This is the reductio ad absurdum of a concept of adolescence that many historians trace back to the end of the nineteenth century. Derived from the Latin adolescere, to grow up, the word “adolescence” had been used from the 1830s (Stearns 61–62). Even before then concepts of a time in life between childhood and maturity existed, sometimes as the period during which a young person would leave home to work as a servant, apprentice, or student (Gillis 2). However, as a particular concept that is recognisably like our own, according to Springhall, “the modern concept of adolescence as an autonomous age group was created almost single handedly . . . by [G. Stanley] Hall and his colleagues at Clark University” (1986: 28; see also Heywood 28–30; Mintz 3; Gillis 115; Demos 107; Kett 6). In his massive (and almost unreadable) two-volume work, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904), Hall describes adolescence as a “marvelous new birth” but also as a time of “storm and stress,” even “preeminently the criminal age” (Vol. 1: 325). Adolescence began as an ambivalent stage in life and ended up with almost entirely negative associations. Just as many historians have challenged Philippe Ariès’ contention in Centuries of Childhood (1962) that childhood did not exist before the seventeenth century, so many have also taken issue with the claim that adolescence was invented, if not by Hall, then towards the end of the nineteenth century. 1

2 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 Among them, Lawrence Stone points out that from the early sixteenth century until the late nineteenth, the London apprentices posed “a constant threat to social order” and, as a consequence, the shepherd’s wish in The Winter’s Tale—that “there were no age between sixteen and twenty-three, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting”— must “have struck a familiar chord” (316–17). The idea that adolescence was a discovery or invention of the nineteenth century is, he asserts, “entirely without historical foundation” (377). Similarly, Natalie Davis has discovered youth groups in Europe from the twelfth to the sixteenth century of men between puberty and marriage whose charivaris or youth abbeys “played certain of the functions which we attribute to adolescence,” notably the control of sexual instincts and a limited degree of autonomy (55; see also Smith 1973, 1975 and Fox). Like those they challenge, however, none question the idea that adolescence is an unusually turbulent time that might also represent a threat to public order. For the historians of earlier periods of history such “storm and stress,” or at least the perception of such, is usually accounted for by the fact that the “adolescent” has reached sexual maturity but not yet married. However, for historians and critics of later periods, this turbulence is usually attributed to the contradiction between the adolescent’s sexual maturity and social immaturity in terms of occupation. As Patricia Spacks puts it, “adolescence designates the time of life when the individual has developed full sexual capacity but has not yet assumed a full adult role in society” (7), though like Hall she stresses the ambivalence of Victorian adolescence (195). Spacks’ definition of adolescence is no doubt an accurate description of post–World War II “youth” culture. However, while we might trace it back to the end of the nineteenth century, as does Jon Savage, the author of England’s Dreaming, a history of the punk era, in his later companion volume, Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875–1945, we will argue that a quite different concept of adolescence during that period was predominant. Although many historians locate the origins of a late twentieth-century adolescence in nineteenth-century concepts of “juvenile delinquency” (Gillis, Springhall 1986), the dominant concept of what an adolescent or “juvenile” was, or at least should be, is determined by the dominant class or classes. And since these classes were educated from about the mid-century onwards largely in the public schools, institutions unique to England, it is to them we need to look for the normative concept of adolescence. For as Jeffrey Richards points out, “the public school was . . . the powerhouse of the nation, producing its ruling class, its role models, its social arbiters, stamping its imprint on the age” (1988: 212). The Boy Scout movement, for example, was an attempt to bring the ideals of the public schools to the masses (Rosenthal 7) and its notion of youth, like those of other youth movements across Europe, was quite different from the post–World War II concept.

Introduction • 3 The definition of what constitutes a public school has always been notoriously difficult. The Public School Commission’s report of 1864 designated nine schools as “public” but the number thereafter was always contestable, as new schools attempted to acquire the enormous prestige of that denomination. Nevertheless, according to John Chandos all public schools had two characteristics in common that distinguished them from all others: they boarded students and used “fagging,” a system of delegated authority in which senior boys could demand services from younger boys and assume powers almost the equal of those of the masters (25). To these we can also add the study of the classics and sports or games, the two activities that consumed most of a boy’s waking school life. As boarding schools for boys as old as eighteen and sometimes even twenty, the public schools were more likely to have contributed to the opening up of a time between childhood and adulthood than the schools for the other classes. Forster’s 1870 Education Act is sometimes referred to as an influence on the construction of adolescence, but it only provided for education up to the age of fourteen at a time when the average age of puberty for the middle and upper classes, though falling (and therefore aiding in the construction of adolescence), was about the same age (Neuman 6–7). As a consequence, the 1870 act could only have kept children or preadolescents out of the workforce, though it did no doubt contribute to what one historian of American childhood has described as the creation of the “priceless” child (Zelizer). However, just as the “priceless” child is hardly a threat to adult authority, so the seclusion of adolescents in boarding schools did not create hotbeds of youthful revolt, at least judging by the wave of nostalgia that swept over many of their old boys from the second half of the century. Old boys’ societies began to be formed from the 1870s, in part because of the sentiments of those such as Rupert Brooke who claimed that I have been happier at Rugby than I can find words to say. As I look back at five years there, I seem to see almost every hour as golden and radiant and always increasing in beauty . . . and I could not, and cannot, hope for or even imagine such happiness elsewhere. (qtd. in Wullschlager 117) E. M. Forster observed that many of these men “remain Old Boys and nothing else for the rest of their lives” (qtd. in Richards 1988: 211), arrested, according to Cyril Connolly, in a state of “permanent adolescence” (253), a condition that Richards argues may be “taken even further and applied to the nation at large in the Victorian Era” (1988: 212). Connolly attributes such nostalgia to Romanticism, with its “emphasis on childhood, on a fall from grace which is not compensated for by any doctrine of future redemption” (253), a fall which though implying no generational conflict, nevertheless registers obvious dissatisfaction with adulthood. However, these boys were also rudely removed from their homes, thus no doubt

4 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 dissipating any “trailing clouds of glory.” The worst of times can also be the best, but this historically unprecedented removal of boys from their families produced the “shock and terror . . . the cries of abandonment wrung from the lips of children ripped from their families at the age of seven or eight or nine” that one historian has observed in “practically every account” of the experience (Gathorne-Hardy 433–34). Of course, the boys who began their school lives as “fags” would grow up to be fag masters, but such authority was not an alternative to adult authority but a preparation for it and, as T. W. Bamford points out, with their draconian right to flog, these “prefects were virtually minor members of staff” (66). Similarly, while the study of classics had no utilitarian function and therefore distinguished the public school boy from the wage-earning adult, it was also precisely what defined a gentleman. Just as the delay in entering the adult world did not produce any simmering of discontent, so during the 1860s these adolescent boys hardly enjoyed the supposed promiscuity of their great grandfathers, if only by virtue of the fact that they were, of course, single-sex schools, though what they got up to amongst themselves or on their own was another matter to which we will return. Before his reforms, the public schools had been, according to Thomas Arnold, “the very seats and nurseries of vice” (qtd. in Honey 6). These vices were indulged in the surrounding towns’ inns and even less respectable houses, early nineteenth-century Eton even boasting a sixth-form brothel (GathorneHardy 45). The former Westminster old boy, William Cowper, “sums the situation up” according to Gathorne-Hardy, when he warns Would you your son should be a sot or dunce, Lascivious, headstrong, or all these at once . . . Train him in public with a mob of boys, Childish in mischief only and in noise, Else of mannish growth, and five in ten In infidelity and lewdness, men. There shall he learn, ere sixteen winters old, That authors are most useful pawned or sold; That pedantry is all that schools impart, But taverns teach the knowledge of the heart; There waiter Dick with Bacchanalian lays Shall win his heart, and have his drunken praise, His counsellor and bosom-friend shall prove, And some street-pacing harlot his first love. (qtd. in Gathorne-Hardy 45) Arnold was to change this with reforms aimed at “purifying, enlightening, sobering and in one word Christianising” (qtd. in Honey 7). In part this involved the promotion of a sense of corporate identity, something which was reinforced later in the century by the increasing separation of the school from the surrounding town and all its vices with the institution of “bounds”

Introduction • 5 and the concentration of buildings within one area, what one famous headmaster, Edward Thring, called “The Almighty Wall” (Honey 142). In part this promotion of an esprit de corps could be seen as an attempt to control or repress adolescent sexuality but it can also be seen as analogous to the revival of various chivalric or pseudo-chivalric values in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, with their aim of making the Victorian gentleman a modern-day knight (Girouard). Just as the courtly love on which such chivalry or pseudo-chivalry was based represented less a repression of sexuality than its direction towards higher ends, so the promotion of “school spirit” and within that house loyalty was an attempt at what a later generation would call the sublimation of potentially disruptive instincts. Within the schools the most striking manner in which such sublimation took place was through games or sports, “the whole equation” between sex and games, according to Gathorne-Hardy, being “clear and explicit to all Victorian and Edwardian schoolmasters” (155). Thus while the schools did open up a time between childhood and adulthood, this was not the contradictory period it would later be perceived, post-pubescent boys being sexually less advanced than their supposedly promiscuous successors and yet as young gentlemen socially more so. Although the schools were, at least in part, responsible for producing a quite different notion of adolescence, they may also, as Springhall suggests, have been responding to the “discovery” of the phenomenon (53). Of the many factors contributing to this “discovery,” “juvenile” literature, the subject of this study, was probably the most important. Literature written specifically for “juveniles” began to emerge in the late 1850s and underwent a boom following the 1870 Education Act, as publishers sought to exploit what they believed would become a large new market. In the fi fteen years after the passing of the act the number of children going to elementary school trebled and from 1866 to 1914 there were over five hundred periodicals published for juveniles and children (Dixon 135, 133). By the end of the nineteenth century about 15 percent of the book trade in Britain was classified as “juvenile” literature (Dunae 1989: 15). In 1892 –1893 a little over 18 percent of library borrowings were of juvenile literature (Bristow 15). The most popular of the boys’ writers, G. A. Henty, who was contracted to write three novels annually, sold on average one hundred and fi fty thousand copies every year (Dunae 1989: 21) while the most widely read of the more than 1one hundred periodicals for adolescent boys published in the second half of the nineteenth century, The Boy’s Own Paper, had a weekly readership of more than 1.4 million (Dunae 1989: 23). The sales figures of the most popular girls’ author, Meade, are less impressive than Henty’s, A World of Girls selling thirty-seven thousand copies and A Sweet Girl Graduate twenty-one thousand (Bittell 3) but this is still a remarkable figure in comparison with what is now perhaps the most canonical literary novel of Victorian adolescence, George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, with its sales of eighty-five hundred

6 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 (Martin lxxxii). At a time when only about one in five authors was making over £400 a year (including, of course, George Eliot), Meade’s annual earnings were between £600 and £1,000. As for The Girl’s Own Paper, it soon rivalled The Boy’s Own Paper in popularity (Beetham 138; Drotner 115).1 Because of the ferocious competition in this New Grub Street, many of these magazines were only short-lived, but Henry James was still sufficiently concerned to observe that “great fortunes, if not great reputations, are made by writing for schoolboys” (qtd. in Dunae 1989: 13). This phenomenon of “juvenile” literature was even more significant because it was part of a broader dramatic publishing surge. Literacy rates had been steadily increasing during the nineteenth century. In 1841 just over 67 percent of men and 51 percent of women could read; this rose to just over 80 percent of men and 73 percent of women in 1871; and by the turn of the century it was just over 97 percent for men and just under the same percentage for women (Altick 171). Advances in printing technology and the removal of paper duty in 1861 meant that more readers could be supplied with cheaper books, leading to such phenomenon as the ubiquitous “yellow book” in railway stations. In part this led to the decline of more genteel lending libraries and their preferred fictional form, the three-decker novel (though more popular lending libraries came into being) but both the total amount of fiction and its proportion of the book market rose. In 1874, 644 new adult novels were published; in 1894, the number was 1,315 (Keating 32). By the end of the 1880s serialised sensational novels were reputed to have sold up to two million copies a week (Fraser 227). To meet the demands and opportunities of this market the Society of Authors was founded in 1883 in a largely successful attempt to professionalise the business of writing (Keating 1–87). Both the number of newspapers and magazines and their circulation also rose dramatically over the century. In 1860 there were thirty-one daily papers; by the 1880s and 1890s there were one hundred and fifty (Brown 4). The leading weekly newspapers of the 1850s had circulations of over one hundred thousand whereas the most popular magazines of the turn of the century had circulations of around one million (Altick 396–97; see also Lee, W. Hamish Fraser 71–76, 224–31; Hayes 79). It would be no exaggeration to say, then, that the British citizen of circa 1900 could be defined as homo legens. Significantly, there was not a great difference between much of this reading material for adults and that for juveniles, even at the higher end of the market. As John M. Mackenzie observes, the main division in publishing was not between ages but genders, though girls did read much of the juvenile fiction for boys (1984: 202). The revival of “romance” during the 1890s, by writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Rider Haggard, and Andrew Lang, was explicitly connected to boyish values, Stevenson declaring that “fiction is to grown men what play is to a child” (qtd. in Bradbury 44) and Lang referring to Stevenson approvingly as “this eternal

Introduction • 7 child” (1911–12: xiv). Thus Treasure Island was originally published as a serial in a magazine called Young Folks, Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, which he claimed originated in a bet with his brother that he could write a “thriller” as successful as Stevenson’s, is dedicated to “all the big and little boys who read it,” and Arthur Conan Doyle dedicated his The Lost World “to the boy who’s half a man, / Or the man who’s half a boy.” The Union Jack, which was edited by Henty, published Doyle, Stevenson, and Jules Verne, amongst exclusively juvenile writers (MacKenzie 203) and, as George Orwell later observed, boys’ magazines were also keenly read by adults (97). The adult readership of girls’ magazines was acknowledged when the Girl’s Own Paper changed its title in 1908 to the Girl’s Own Paper and Woman’s Magazine. Significantly, the trade journal Publishers’ Circular terminated its separate categories of “juvenile” literature and popular adult fiction in 1894 on the grounds that these categories were virtually indistinguishable (Dunae 1989: 15). Far from sparking any generational confl ict, this literature provided what was called “romance” for grown men and an initiation into adulthood for boys. Nevertheless, publishers of juvenile literature did distinguish their publications from one kind of mass adult literature, that usually called the “bloods” in the 1840s and ’50s and thereafter the “penny dreadfuls” (Springhall 1990: 228). By the late 1870s, Boys of England, for example, sold two hundred and fifty thousand copies a week but would have been read by two or three times this number, or at least a fifth of all boys between ten and nineteen years of age (Springhall 1990: 87; see also Louis James).2 The “bloods” were magazines of generally eight pages, in the tradition of the Gothic novel and The Newgate Calendar, which served up a diet of crime, sensation, and the supernatural. There may have been something in these magazines to concern anxious parents, one of their main entrepreneurs, Edward Lloyd, inciting one of his illustrators to show “much more blood, spouting blood in fact, and more prominent eyes to show devouring lust” (Haining 331). Their publishers did defend themselves against charges of immorality but this was not always in the manner that would have assured the middle and upper classes, one of them claiming that In fact, the bold highwayman who cried “Stand and deliver!” upon the road, has got to be considered in the light of a species of knight-errant, whose chief business was to redress such social wrongs as came under his immediate notice in the course of the many adventures among high and low, which must necessarily fall to this lot, and this is why we follow him with pleasure. Were scenes of violence alone depicted, the only feeling that would be called into existence would be disgust at his atrocities. Such, then, being the case, it must be self-evident that it is not his obnoxiousness to the laws of the land nor the crimes of which he may have been guilty, that rivets the attention of the reader, but his courage,

8 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 address, single-mindedness, and opposition to all kinds of oppression. (qtd. in Carpenter 27) Nevertheless, Springhall points out that while lower-class characters triumph over upper-class ones, the former are either bourgeois or petit bourgeois and the latter “usually the rich aristocrat, hardly ever the grasping capitalist” (68). As one “penny dreadful” author cited by him asked in 1895, Personally, I should like to know if any members of the juries who attribute youthful crime to the so-called “penny dreadfuls”, which the tender-aged criminal is supposed to have devoured, have ever read one of the books on which they pass such wholesale condemnation? I have read every book that an example of boyish depravity has brought to notice, and so far I have been unable to find any incentive to matricide, to dishonesty, or vice of any description. The villain is invariably outwitted, the hero is all honour and bravery, and the heroine chaste as the Lady in Milton’s Comus. (1986: 93–94) Moreover, as the readership shifted more towards a juvenile market during the 1860s and ’70s, the romance aspect tended to drop away (Springhall 1990: 47). More importantly, there was nothing troubled about the youthful heroes. One typical hero, Tom Wildrake, the creation of one of the five Emmetts who competed with their great rival Edwin Brett for the lion’s share of the market, is introduced as a bold, stoutly-built, handsome fellow, who had a peculiarity for getting into scrapes . . . He loved danger for danger’s sake; and in their new home, amidst the rugged crags and mountains, the boy was continually climbing the most dangerous parts. True, this exercise tended to develop Tom’s muscles, and render his eye keen and his foothold sure, but it caused his guardian to swear most emphatically; and Ram Samme [his Indian servant], although he had a sort of fetish worship for Tom, was very miserable at times, for he feared an accident would yet terminate those exploits. Tom was of a combative turn, yet very genial, and, much to the disgust of his uncle, he would mix with the village boys, and accompany them upon their predatory excursions. (Emmett 1–2) True, Tom Wildrake and his like are extremely violent but there is nothing to indicate that they are storm and stressed Young Werthers. Nevertheless, there was something amounting to hysteria in the reaction of many respectable commentators to the penny dreadfuls, particularly in the decades after the 1870 Education Act when people feared their influence on an enlarged, largely working-class readership. As one contemporary put it

Introduction • 9 the fountain head of the poisonous stream is in great towns and cities, especially in London itself; and it is with that we now have to deal. Here the readers are to be numbered by hundreds of thousands, and supply exceeds the wildest demand. There is now before us such a veritable mountain of pernicious trash, mostly in paper covers, and “Price One Penny”: socalled novelettes, tales, stories of adventure, mystery and crime; pictures of school life hideously unlike reality; exploits of robbers, cut-throats, prostitutes, and rogues, that, but for its actual presence, it would seem incredible. (qtd. in Bristow 12) Bristow even claims that “reading among young working-class people had, by 1890 at least, become an almost criminal pursuit” (32). To counter this “poisonous stream” Henty recommended putting “the pernicious things into the fire!” (qtd. in Carpenter 7) but others were more constructive. In its Annual Report of 1878, the Religious Tract Society observed that juvenile crime was being largely stimulated by the pernicious literature circulated among our lads. Judges, magistrates, schoolmasters, prison chaplains, and others were deploring the existence of the evil, and calling loudly for a remedy, but none seemed to be forthcoming. The Committee, fully admitting the terrible necessity of a publication which might to some extent supplant those of a mischievous tendency, yet hesitated to enter upon the task. To have made it obtrusively or largely religious in its teaching would have been to defeat the object in view. (qtd. in Cox 18) Nevertheless, a week later it was decided to publish a magazine for boys which would the following year be called the Boy’s Own Paper, or the BOP as it became known (see also Warner). Fifteen years later the rather less pious newspaper magnate Alfred Harmsworth, noticing the commercial success of many of the more wholesome magazines, launched the Union Jack, a magazine “You Need Not be Ashamed to Be Seen Reading” (qtd. in Dunae 1978: 148). Harmsworth’s crusade was no doubt based more on commercial than moral considerations (Carpenter 51), and, as A. A. Milne observed, “Harmsworth killed the ‘penny dreadful’ by the simple process of producing the ha’penny dreadfuller” (qtd. in Carpenter 53). However, the fact that Harmsworth could exploit such a market is evidence of how successfully the juvenile market had countered the perceived moral degeneration of the reading masses. As MacKenzie observes, juvenile literature “acceptably reorientated [the] youthful aggression” of the dreadfuls (206). The other kind of literature out of and against which juvenile literature developed was the evangelical. The BOP was published by the Religious Tract Society but, as Bratton observes, “by the early years of the twentieth century the RTS had become so shy of the effect of the word ‘religious’ in their title that they issued books like T. B. Reid’s stories in volume form as from ‘the

10 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 office of the Boy’s Own Paper’” (192). This movement away from the evangelical and pious was part of a broader shift from what David Newsome calls “the ideals of godliness and good learning” of the followers of Coleridge and Arnold to the “muscular Christianity” of those such as Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, the co-creator and creator respectively of the two main genres of boys’ juvenile literature, adventure stories (set in the past or present) and school stories. In the second half of the nineteenth century, according to Newsome, there is a particularly striking . . . change of spirit: moral earnestness became ‘theumos’—the hearty enjoyment of physical pursuits, the belief that manliness and high spirits are more becoming qualities in a boy than piety and spiritual zeal. . . . Excessive displays of emotion came in time to be regarded as bad form; patriotism and doing one’s duty to country and Empire became the main sentiments which the new system sought to inculcate. (26) The model for the headmaster of the first school story, Tom Brown’s School Days, Thomas Arnold, had a strong Calvinist sense of original sin and belief in what he described in a letter as the “wickedness of young boys” (qtd. in Gathorne-Hardy 71). Arnold was not particularly interested in athletics and according to Sir Francis Doyle did not have “the knowledge of God Almighty’s intention that there should exist for a certain time, between childhood and manhood, the natural production known as a boy” (48). However, Hughes’ version of Arnold is admiring of his charges’ physical vitality, takes a keen interest in their games, and implicitly regards the boys as neither children nor (but for the prefects) fully realized English gentlemen. Thus by the end of the century columns such as “Some Manly Words for Boys by Manly Men,” by a Rev. George Jackson, would become a standard fare for readers of BOP: Do you foolishly think that to be “pious” is to be weak, that to be “good” is to be goody-goody, to be “saintly” is to be sanctimonious? Then turn from the Gospels for a moment, and take down your histories and biographies from the bookshelf. “We Germans,” said Prince Bismarck once in a characteristic epigram, “fear God and nothing else in the world.” And I venture to affirm that you will find the most splendid examples of simple fearlessness and heroic self-devotion among those who have counted it their chiefest joy to call Christ Jesus Lord. (127) In magazines launched a few years before the First World War, such as the Gem and the Magnet, “the word ‘God,’” according to Orwell, “probably does not occur, except in ‘God save the King’” (94). Thus just as muscular Christianity reacted against an infantilising and emasculating evangelical piety,

Introduction • 11 so the succeeding generation of imperialists and nationalists rejected muscular Christianity. Whether Christian or imperialist, such muscularity is hardly a celebration of adolescent sexuality nor is it one of childhood innocence. The heroes of the fiction are rather less sexually adventurous than Tom Jones but they are not, we shall argue, the sexless or repressed creatures they are often thought to be. Just as juvenile literature channelled the youthful aggression of the dreadfuls towards socially acceptable ends, so it sublimates the virility of youthful men into initially Christian and later national ideals. This is a concept of adolescence that might seem to have little to offer to girls. A number of scholars, notably Claudia Nelson, Jackie Wullschlager, and Catherine Robson, have outlined a shift from the idealisation of the girl in mid-Victorian culture to this new focus on the boy towards the end of the century. Yet this was also a shift in focus from early childhood towards adolescence, and, as Sally Mitchell has shown, the “New Girl” was as much a phenomenon of the late nineteenth century as the manly boy. For girls, too, the ideal was changing, as the descriptions of the heroines of the periodical fiction demonstrates. As Mitchell observes, “an extraordinary number of the heroines are described as boyish” (38). It is not so much their muscularity that is celebrated, as the qualities of pluck, integrity, and independence that distinguish the girls, as well as the boys, from the innocent children idealised earlier in the century. The extraordinary success of the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who seems to have struck a particular chord with adolescent girls (one newspaper suggested an excursion train should be started especially to convey the undergraduates of Girton to her performances), indicates the power of this new ideal. Bernhardt’s image was carefully managed to emphasise her youthfulness and sexuality, but she was also frequently photographed in trousers and was famous for her portrayals of male roles. The adolescent heroines of such books as A Sweet Girl Graduate, A Queen Among Girls, and A Girl in Ten Thousand were certainly romanticised, as the titles suggest, and they are described as brightening the lives of the people around them much as the romanticised child brightens the lives of his or her elders in stories such as Little Lord Fauntleroy or The Old Curiosity Shop. The iconic images of late Victorian girlhood by artist Thomas Gotch blur the distinction between the adolescent girl and the girl child, with his 1894 painting “Child Enthroned” depicting a girl who is apparently post-pubescent (though the model for the portrait was in fact only twelve), romanticised as a strangely saintly figure, posed, and passive, and his 1896 painting “Alleluia” depicting a choir of girls who seem to range in age from about six or seven (judging from the baby teeth displayed in the brown-haired little girl’s mouth) to mid to late teens. The illustrations of the girls’ fiction of the period, however, are strikingly different. The covers of these books depict girls in their teens riding galloping horses, swinging in trees, and vaulting over fences, or energetically climbing into buses or mounting the stairs to their London flats, the ballooning sleeves

12 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 and nipped-in waists of their costumes contributing both to their appearance of businesslike efficiency and highlighting their postpubescent femininity. For girls to be adolescent was to claim what had been a male preserve. Mitchell’s dating of the phenomenon of “the new girl” from 1880 reflects her understanding of the phenomenon as relating to the turn-of-the-century “New Woman.” In fact, the New Woman was only named as such in 1894 (though the phenomenon can certainly be dated earlier than this) and the new girl can also be understood as the delayed version of the new boy. Schools for girls in the period of Tom Brown’s Schooldays were limited in number and kind, with most girls of the middle and upper classes educated at home or at a private day school, sometimes finishing their education with a few terms in a small, private boarding school. From the 1860s, however, day schools, or “High schools,” were being established, modelled on Frances Mary Buss’ successful North London Collegiate school for girls, established in 1850. Only late in the century were there boarding schools for girls that followed the model of the boys’ public schools, with St. Leonards established in 1877, Roedean in 1885, and Wycombe Abbey in 1896. The earlier girls’ school stories tend to be set in the private boarding schools that “finished” a girl’s education in her late teens, while later girls’ fiction tends to be set in boarding schools modelled on the boys’ schools, even though in reality only a very small proportion of girls attended them; Jessie Vaizey’s Tom and Some Other Girls of 1901 is subtitled A Public School Story to emphasise this distinction. It was only in the twentieth century that girls’ school stories began to be set in the High schools, even though these were the most common schools for girls (Mitchell 75 –77). Other opportunities were also opening up for girls in the late nineteenth century. University colleges were established for women from the 1870s, and the 1880s and 1890s saw the top woman graduates performing as well as, or even outstripping, the men. Attitudes were beginning to change towards women’s employment. Middle-class occupations for women were beginning to open up from the 1880s in teaching, nursing, clerical work, and the Civil Service. There were more novels, however, about women doctors than teachers, despite the fact that, as Mitchell notes, there were only seventy-two women doctors registered in 1889 (27). As with the school fiction, the fiction about women at work did not just reflect a reality, but created an ideal. This is an ideal in which young women had access to an adolescence of romantic adventure and freedom. Nevertheless there is an important distinction between the genders. We argue that for boys there is no contradiction between sexual maturity and social immaturity because, on the one hand, adolescents are distinguished from adults by their sublimation or deferral of sexuality and, on the other, from children by their acquisition of adult duties and responsibilities. Accordingly, our first chapter explores the ways in which the boys have clearly attained puberty and yet are distinguished from married men by their capacity for sacrifice; our second, the romance of their adventures away from the adult

Introduction • 13 world of work that are nevertheless very far from being childish. However, for girls there is not the same distinction between marriage and work because the marriages they eventually make will also be their work. The deferral of marriage, emphasised in many of these novels when the heroine turns down a marriage proposal in an early chapter of the book, can be seen both in terms of sacrifice, as the heroine gives up the home her suitor offers her in order to support either herself or often her dependent siblings, and in terms of romance, with the rejection of the financial security of marriage opening up a space for adventure, whether in the workforce, at college, or further afield. Although the two chapters on the girls’ fiction look at each of these aspects in turn, Chapter 3 focusing on romance and Chapter 4 on sacrifice, it is in fact very difficult to distinguish romance and sacrifice in the girls’ novels, since the marriage that is deferred has both its material and its romantic aspects. For both the girls and the boys, adolescence is depicted as a romantic period in which vitality is combined with idealism. The depiction of teenagers by Nigel Latta, with whose views we opened this introduction, as “bristly, bulgy and globally bent-out-of-shape,” bears no relation to the depiction of heroines such as Evelyn Everett-Green’s Olive Roscoe, “a dainty vision herself . . . a tall, slim girl, with a figure at once graceful and active; a face full of intelligence and eager enthusiasm, tempered by a thoughtful sweetness . . . a clear skin, tanned a little by exposure to sea-wind and sunshine, but still preserving its softness and freshness and bloom,” or Gordon Stables’ Creggan, “good looking . . . with a depth of chin . . . the bluest of eyes, a sun-kissed face . . . fair, curly hair . . . A really good-hearted lad” who “among the peasantry . . . was always his own manly self” (The Naval Cadet 10 –11). More significantly, Latta’s assertions that teenagers should be excused their emotional outbursts since their brains are not wired for self-control and should be protected by closely involved adults from their poor judgements in managing their behaviour provide an extraordinary historical contrast to the portrayals of adolescents in Victorian juvenile fiction, in which the hero or heroine is invariably shown to be braver, stronger, more self-sacrificing, more resolute, and more realistic as well as more idealistic than the adults. The extent to which adolescents really lived up to this ideal is beyond the scope of this study. Yet while we argue that this literature for and about the adolescent was largely a romance genre, this is not to suggest that the ideal was not itself very real, and had real social effects. In studying the literature of the period, rather than the social reality, the reality of the ideal itself is brought back into focus as an object of study. Remarkably no one has seriously examined the incongruity between our own notions of adolescence and those that we all mock in school and adventure stories. The fact that we laugh at this stuff is an indication of its peculiar difference. While historians and sociologists have stressed the delinquency which in most accounts is seen to characterise both Victorian and twentieth-century adolescence, the literature of the period presents a golden age of adolescence that offers an idealised alternative.

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 15

16 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 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

Sexuality and Sacrifice in the Boys’ Stories before the War • 17 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

18 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 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 fi rst 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

Sexuality and Sacrifice in the Boys’ Stories before the War • 19 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

20 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 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 may be 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 fi nd 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

Sexuality and Sacrifice in the Boys’ Stories before the War • 21 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 stiffupper-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 pseudoscientific 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 not just, as we have suggested, a form of sublimation, but also a curative. In Wodehouse’s Mike and Smith cricket is described as a “great safety valve” (62); Vachell claimed in his autobiography that if a boy “suffers from excess of vitality, and has appetites for either work or games, he can expend his surplus energies on them. Nine times out of ten he does. The oversexed slacker has the mark of the beast, and in my time was labeled ‘rotter’” (qtd. in Richards 1988: 202); and Kipling remembered that Talking things over with Cornell Price [the headmaster] afterwards, he confessed that his one prophylactic against certain unclean microbes was to “send us to bed dead tired.” Hence the wideness of our bounds, and his deaf ear towards our incessant riots and wars between the Houses. (1990: 16) Yet despite these undeniably repressive attitudes, the fact of puberty was something open and not shameful. Significantly none of the writers of adolescent fiction sought to hide or ignore the fact of puberty. Hall estimated that the usual age of puberty for boys was fourteen and it is extraordinary how many of the heroes are at least that age when their main adventures begin. Amyas is fifteen at the start of Westward Ho! We first meet Tom Brown as a “robust and combative urchin” of four but by the end of the novel he has “grown into a young man nineteen years old” (28, 298). In the first Mowgli story written by Kipling, Mowgli is old enough to marry, though he is younger in the rest. Henty’s boys are “aged fifteen or thereabouts” (Arnold 38), as are most of Stables’ and Strang’s. Stevenson’s Davie in Kidnapped is sixteen. Most of Ballantyne’s heroes have turned twenty, according to Bratton (146), though in Coral Island they are fourteen, fifteen, and eighteen. And Buchan’s hero in Prester John is sixteen when his main adventures begin. Accordingly many of the characters are described as such. There are “precocious hairy youths” in Kipling’s stories, as Kipling noted that he was himself when a schoolboy (1990: 19), who sport, moreover, “impressive” moustaches (125). John in Horace A. Vachell’s The Hill observes at his first Sunday chapel attendance that there is “an absence of shrill treble voices,” the “booming

22 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 basses and baritones of the big fellows” making “him shiver with a curious bitter-sweet sensation never experienced before” and later we are told that “his voice had broken” (22, 142). One of Wodehouse’s cricketers, a reckless slayer of bowling, sports “a blazer that lit up the surrounding landscape like a glowing beacon” and the “beginnings of a moustache to match” (100). The hero and his companion in Henty’s The Tiger of Mysore are advised to shave before sticking false beards, for disguises, on their skin and in Ballantyne’s sequel to Coral Island, The Gorilla Hunters, the eldest of the boys, Jack, is now six years older and “Full half of his handsome manly face was hid by a bushy black beard and moustache” (17). While in the correspondence pages of the BOP there is plenty of discussion about “nervousness” and pimples, there are also advertisements for razors and moustache-grooming equipment. Such equipment was not being bought prematurely: photos of public-school sporting teams often feature at least one boy with a well-tended though generally less-than-bushy moustache, a liberty that would not be accorded to many schoolboys of today. In Tim we are informed that the oldest “boys” at the school are twenty years old. In Stables’ Jungle, Peak and Plain, when the hero returns home from one of his adventures, his sister exclaims, “You’ve positively grown a man . . . you’ve—positively—grown—a moustache” (88). John Bayley agrees with Angus Wilson that Kim is “‘flirtatious with all and sundry,’ without being even in his adolescence a fully sexual being” but he goes on to note that sexuality “is taken care of by the way in which the Woman of Shamlegh (a unique Kiplingesque mixture of a games mistress with the Wife of Bath) yearns for him sexually; while the Sahiba watches over him with all the sexual jealousy of a lover and protector” (xviii). In “In the Rukh,” Mowgli, now a grown man, is described by Muller, the Inspector General of Indian Forests, as a man “at der beginnings of der history of man—Adam in der Garden” in need of “only an Eva!” (21). This is prescient since Mowgli is soon shown with his arm around the neck of the thirteen-year-old daughter of a Muslim butler and playing a flute to her and his four “brother” wolves. Previously the forest officer Gisborne had noticed her only as a “girl . . . with a half-eye slinking about the compound veiled and silent” but now she is quite transformed, “a woman full blown in a night as the orchid puts out in an hour’s moist heat” (211). There are no Peter Pans in these stories. There is anxiety about vice but the dominant view is that the boys are sexually mature in a quite ordinary and by no means alarming fashion. After a sermon in The Harrovians about the dreadful but never-disclosed contents of a box that caused a boy to suicide, the boys mock the clergyman and one of them, clearly with the approval of the author, says he and his kind pretend that only horrid boys jaw about women. They have to pretend, like they do in school stories, that boys get into corners and whisper nasty stories, and look up when anybody passes, and drop their voices and

Sexuality and Sacrifice in the Boys’ Stories before the War • 23 giggle furtively. Not much furtive about us. And why the devil shouldn’t one discuss it? It’s the most interesting thing in life. It crops up in every page of history. We wouldn’t be here but for it. And they call it nasty conversation. There’s nothing nasty in being born, so why is it nasty to discuss why one’s born? (151) Similarly, Newbolt in The Twymans discusses adolescent sexuality in a quite open and relaxed fashion. Percival’s uncle, who has been his substitute father for most of his life following the death of his actual father, explains matters of love to his mother, Amelia: One would expect instincts to show themselves at the right moment—the moment when they could be of use—and not before. But we all begin to think of marriage in childhood: most little boys have quite a bent that way, just as most little girls nurse a doll twenty years before the maternal instinct is needed. Surely that is a very odd state of things, a pure waste of time, one would think, on Nature’s part, and it makes complications too. The miniature stage we may call that. The second is the animal stage, the stage when the boy develops his powers and becomes a perfect animal—again much too soon . . . there is a third of these apparently purposeless stages, and that is the one Percy has now reached. He is at present possessed by a feeling which is not ignorant and empty like the childish one, or instinctive and blind like the animal one: it is a passion, but an ethereal disembodied kind of passion. You might call it real love, but not love for a real person. (142–43) Thus the adolescent boy is sexually mature but unlike the adult does not direct sexual desire towards any real object. Contrary to what we might expect of the author of “Vitaï Lampada,” Newbolt was anything but a Victorian Victorian, living as he did in a happy ménage à trois with his wife, Margaret, and her bosom friend, Ella, dutifully recording on an account sheet the number of times he slept with each woman (“as much as twelve per head per month” according to his biographer, Susan Chitty (125)). This is not to say that there is much sexual frisson between boys and girls. Guy Arnold takes issue with Henty’s own claims that there was no romance in his novels, noting that The claim in fact is not true; in most of his boys’ stories he married the hero off at the conclusion and in some, at least, there are quite interesting love passages (within the conventions of Henty’s time) and it is possible to play the game of ‘spot the girl’—usually fourteen years of age when she first appears—whom the hero will ultimately marry. (10) But Arnold does not tell us where these “quite interesting love passages” are. In Maori and Settler the adult hero, Mr. Atherton, courts the boy hero Wilfred’s

24 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 sister, Marion, by treating her like a child (she is nearly nineteen after three years of adventures together and he thirty-seven), much to her annoyance. All are surprised at Mr. Atherton’s eventual declaration of love but Wilfrid’s marriage in the final page is even more surprising: there have been no reported conversations between him and his future wife, Kate, our only preparation being Mr. Atherton’s observation to Wilfrid a few pages from the end that he goes over to her place “a good deal oftener than there is any absolute occasion for, and although Kate is only sixteen yet, I have a shrewd suspicion that you have both pretty well made up your minds about the future” (348). Wilfrid then blushes but that is about as steamy as it gets in Henty. Henty’s contemporary, Stables, also frequently marries off his heroes but, significantly, their brides are frequently child lovers, mother lovers, or the sisters of their friends. Although the hero of Jungle, Peak and Plain sports, as we have seen, a moustache, the only previous appearance of the “woman” he marries at the end of his adventures is as a “little child . . . with . . . blue, dreamy eyes . . . bonnie hair . . . and winning ways” (102). In For Life and Liberty, an eighteen-year-old called Osmond falls in love with a “young lady” who, though only one month short of her teens, is “like a little mother to Osmond” (116, 103). In On War’s Red Tide the two heroes fall in love with inappropriate women, one another child lover who is a Boer and the other an Irish lady nearly old enough to be his mother, but fortunately both these women die so that the heroes can marry the women for whom they are truly destined—each others’ sisters. Nevertheless these relationships are also not as innocent or repressed as we might expect. For example, many, perhaps most, of the stories feature some strong Victorian sentimental cult of motherhood that a later generation would describe as Oedipal. In Westward Ho! the hero declares to his mother “You have such pretty feet, mother!” Instantly, with a woman’s instinct, she had hidden them. She had been a beauty once, as I said; and though her hair was gray, and her roses had faded long ago, she was beautiful still, in all eyes which saw deeper than the mere outward red and white. “Your dear father used to say so thirty years ago.” “And I say so still: you always were beautiful; you are beautiful now.” “What is that to you, silly boy? Will you play the lover with an old mother? Go and take your walk, and think of younger ladies, if you can find any worthy of you.” (61) Similarly when the hero of Staples’ On War’s Red Tide confesses that he is in love with the much older Lady O’Mara, his companion replies I know you’ll soon get over your silly passion . . . I know, because I’ve been there myself. No, no, man, not with Kathleen [O’Mara]—with a party

Sexuality and Sacrifice in the Boys’ Stories before the War • 25 much older. First we love our mother, that is real and natural, then we go mad on somebody nearly as old as our mother. It’s just like cutting your second teeth, don’t you observe? And after that we fall in real love with some dear girl we want to make our wife. (19) Although they clearly accord with the Victorian cult of motherhood, these two passages are also not that far from the popular Freudianism of the twentieth century. Only at the risk of severely patronizing their authors can we assume that their authors are unconscious of any Oedipal aspect to these relationships. In the Haggard novels this Oedipal theme becomes quite lurid. In She, for example, Ayesha declares “oh, my love, my love!” to Leo, and embraces him with something “like a mother’s kiss” on his forehead (294). Ayesha has herself a double, Ustane—who, like Leo’s ancient mother, Amentas, is also murdered by Ayesha—and Ustane, who at one point also kisses Leo on “the forehead as a mother might” (106). Moreover, Ayesha had been planning to invade England, so her death also represents the victory of another benign maternal figure, Queen Victoria. However, the main lover/mother figure in all the novels is not an actual character but the land or earth over which they travel. In King Solomon’s Mines the map to the treasure is also a map of a woman’s headless body, complete with mountains called Queen Sheba’s Breasts and further “South,” as it were, treasure caves. Similarly the cave in She which houses the Flame of Life is repeatedly referred to as a womb and Haggard frequently digresses into philosophical cum mystical meditations about Mother Nature, telling us that nature hath her animating spirit as well as man, who is Nature’s child, and he who can find that spirit, and let it breathe upon him, shall live with her life. He shall not live eternally, for Nature is not eternal, and she herself must die, even as the Nature of the moon hath died. She herself must die, I say, or rather change and sleep till it be time for her to live again. (160) Such meditations are not the conscious philosophizing of something that remains unconscious but rather an attempt to provide some kind of framework for the novel’s main narrative, the romance hero’s perilous quest across a dreamlike landscape of almost surreally charged sexuality. Both Freud and Jung were interested in Haggard and took him rather more seriously than many subsequent readers. Significantly Freud does not analyze Haggard in Interpretation of Dreams but his own dream in which he gives She to an assistant, saying “A strange book, but full of hidden meaning . . . the eternal feminine, the immortality of our emotions” (587–8). It is not Haggard that Freud psychoanalyzes but himself.

26 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 These figures of the “eternal feminine” are not benign. In She, Ayesha proposes a marriage to Leo which he narrowly avoids when she steps into what was once the Flame of Life but is now the Flame of Death, and, reversing the process of evolution, turns into a monkey and dies. Just before her death Ayesha had predicted that she would “come again” (298) and, true to her word, she reappears in the sequel, Ayesha, this time successfully sweeping the now much older Leo off to an eternal cycle of death and reincarnation. In King Solomon’s Mines and its sequels the femme fatale figure is split into two characters, an evil hag called Gagool and the beautiful native girl, Foulata, in the first of the novels, two rival sister queens, Nyleptha and Soarias, one good and the other bad, in Allan Quartermain, and, in the prequel, Allan’s Wife, Stella and her rival Henrika, a kind of female Tarzan figure raised by baboons. In King Solomon’s Mines and Allan’s Wife the bad woman kills the good, thus letting the hero off the hook of marriage, while in Allan Quartermain one of the band of explorers, Sir Henry Curtis, does marry the good queen but his companion, Allan Quartermain, dies in the battle waged “simply to gratify the jealous anger” of the bad queen (268) and Sir Henry cuts his kingdom off from the outside world, thereby effectively dying for his friends and relatives back in England. Yet despite the fact that Haggard was writing well within the tradition of “juvenile” adventure fiction, his heroes are not adolescents. Leo is twenty-five, for example, when he first travels to Africa and forty when he returns. Allan is sixty-three in Allan Quartermain; his companion, Captain John Good, “has been running to fat in a most disgraceful way” (28); and the youngest of them, Sir Henry Curtis, presumably is in his thirties. Unlike the adolescent heroes of the juvenile fiction for whom there is a taboo on any kind of sexual relationship with girls or women, Haggard’s grown men are in a position to be seduced by women. His stories take up the story of the hero of adolescent fiction after he has become fully adult. In a sense Haggard’s stories are about not some fall into sexuality but the fall from adolescence. This ubiquitous fear of female sexuality is in part the consequence of the fact that it disrupts bonds between men. In “colonial narratives,” as John Kucich points out, “heterosexual restraint and male ‘homosocial’ bonding are fundamental to the maintenance of empire and transgression against the law of celibacy can be fatal” (19). This is most explicit in Allan Quartermain where the eponymous narrator raises the hero Leo in the all-male domain of a university college, a safe haven from women which must be left in order that dangerous adventures can take place. Showalter even claims, with some validity, that some kind of homosocial bonding was even the basis for an entire literary movement. “The revival of ‘romance’ in the 1880s was,” she argues, “a men’s literary revolution intended to reclaim the kingdom of the English novel for male writers, male readers, and men’s stories” (78; see also Bristow 118). However, the fear of female sexuality does not extend towards men. In the first of Haggard’s adventures, King Solomon’s Mines, this is more fully

Sexuality and Sacrifice in the Boys’ Stories before the War • 27 developed, the narrator remembering that when he first saw Sir Henry he noticed a gentleman of about thirty . . . perhaps the biggest-chested and longestarmed man I ever saw. He had yellow hair, a thick yellow beard, clear-cut features, and large grey eyes set deep in his head. I never saw a finer-looking man, and somehow he reminded me of an ancient Dane. (12) The first description of the hero of She, Vincey, is by the fictional editor of the manuscript written by the character Holly, who remembers visiting Cambridge with a friend and being struck with the appearance of two persons whom I saw walking arm-inarm down the street. One of these gentlemen was, I think without exception, the handsomest young fellow I have ever seen. He was very tall, very broad, and had a look of power and a grace of bearing that seemed as native to him as to a wild stag. In addition his face was almost without flaw—a good face as well as a beautiful one, and when he lifted his hat, which he did just then to a passing lady, I saw that his head was covered with little golden curls growing close to the scalp. “Good gracious!” I said to my friend, with whom I was walking, “why, that fellow looks like a statue of Apollo come to life. What a splendid man he is!” “Yes,” he answered, “he is the handsomest man in the University, and one of the nicest too. They call him ‘the Greek god.’” (17) We see no reason why Haggard was not quite explicit about the homoerotic aspects of this. The other, older gentleman is Holly, the guardian of Vincey, and he is a Charon to this Greek god, a kind of Darwinian throwback who is short, rather bow-legged, very deep chested, and with unusually long arms. He had dark hair and small eyes, and the hair grew down on his forehead, and his whiskers grew quite up to his hair, so that there was uncommonly little of his countenance to be seen. Altogether he reminded me forcibly of a gorilla, and yet there was something very pleasing and genial about the man’s eye. (18) The unrelenting insistence on Holly’s ugliness in part explains his self-confessed misogyny but it also diffuses any suggestion that his admiration of his adopted son’s beauty might be inappropriate. Vincey can be both the most beautiful man alive and completely untainted by any homosexual desire. It is frequently assumed that after the Wilde trials and with the advent of sexology the passionate idealism of such romantic friendships became increasingly difficult. However, as Linda Dowling points out, Wilde’s defence

28 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 during the trials—of what he called the “pure” and “perfect” love between men “such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you fi nd in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare”—belonged to a tradition of homoerotic Hellenism whose idealism and at times considerable sexual innocence “has been inordinately difficult for late twentieth-century homosexual apologists to see” (1, 154). Similarly, while the sexologists no doubt did reveal aspects of sexuality until then closeted, they met with resistance from those such as John Addington Symonds who in “A Problem in Modern Ethics” (1891) rejects their attempt to reduce “sexual inversion” to some kind of physical illness or ethical perversion, maintaining that the “gospel of comradeship” such as can be found in the “Calamus” section of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass has “a passionate glow, a warmth of emotional tone, beyond anything to which the modern world is used in the celebration of the love of friends” but which “recalls to our mind the early Greek enthusiasm” and raises the question of “whether the love of man for man shall be elevated through a hitherto unapprehended chivalry to nobler powers, even as the barbarous love of man for woman once was.” Symonds’ essay was circulated privately and did not concern itself with specific medical details but Sexual Inversion, which he coauthored with Havelock Ellis, did provide these details. However, the majority of the “cases” Symonds and Ellis describe do not indulge in any direct sexual activity and they are concerned to show that among “moral leaders, and persons with strong ethical instincts, there is a tendency toward the more elevated forms of homosexual feeling” (2008: 106). Significantly, Ellis argues that “when the sexual instinct first appears in early youth” it is “less definitely directed to a specific sexual end” and “even the sex of its object is sometimes uncertain” (2008: 124), thereby implying that the adolescent might be even more idealistic than the adult homosexual. Moreover, while Claudia Nelson sees such earlier models of self-sacrificing androgyny as Arthur in Tom Brown’s Schooldays becoming by the end of the century the contemptuous figure of the “girlish boy” or “sissy,” someone who might grow up to be homosexual, Ellis and Symonds argue that the homosexual instinct has been cultivated and idealized as a military virtue, partly because it counteracts the longing for the softening feminine influences of the home and partly because it seems to have an inspiring influence in promoting heroism and heightening esprit de corps. In the lament of David over Jonathan we have a picture of intimate friendship—“passing the love of women”—between comrades in arms among a barbarous, warlike race. (2008: 98–99) Similar paeans to manly men can be found in Edward Carpenter’s Iolaus— Anthology of Friendship, where he argues that critics who extol the “warlike bravery” of the Greeks and “at the same time speak of the stress they laid on friendship as a little peculiarity of no particular importance” miss the point

Sexuality and Sacrifice in the Boys’ Stories before the War • 29 that such bravery is founded in the “ascetic . . . absorbing passion . . . held in strong control” of “romantic friendship,” in contrast to the “other love— the love of women [which] is . . . a mere sensuality” (38). Manliness might become more rigidly opposed to femininity but this does not mean that it becomes more heterosexual. Significantly, two of the texts recommended by Ellis and Symonds in later editions of Sexual Inversion to illustrate such higher forms of love are school novels, A. W. Clarke’s Jaspar Tristram (1899) and H. O. Sturgis’ Tim (1891), though they point out that claims in the newspapers that the public schools are “‘hotbeds of vice’ . . . have not been submitted to accurate investigation” (1919: 124).1 The epigraph of the latter, “Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women,” is David’s lament for Jonathan after he has fallen in battle in 2 Samuel I, 26, but of course David and Jonathan were never lovers. In the former of these, the eponymous hero is always falling for the “sparkling” eyes and “thick-clustering curls” of his “boy god” (99, 112), Els, even at one point observing him “down at the bathing-place . . . so perfectly formed as no more to want a covering than does a statue” (111); he also desires that they celebrate “their reintegratio amoris by taking the Communion together . . . and so uniting themselves after a fashion” (103). Ellis might also have mentioned Vachell’s The Hill, which is subtitled A Romance of Friendship, for the scene after a rugby match when “the grey eyes” of John meet “the blue unwaveringly” of the beloved Harry, the latter flushes and we are then told that “they stood alone, ten thousand leagues from Harrow, alone in those sublimated spaces where soul meets soul unfettered by flesh” (72). The Hill was published in 1905, reprinted twenty-one times in its first eight years, and recommended in 1913 by the BOP as providing a model for a competition for an essay on “An Ideal Friendship” (“The Old Boy” 264), its examples of other ideal friendships being found in Tom Brown’s School Days and the story of David and Jonathan. These romantic friendships may have not been that far from the reality. Connolly recounts how all the boys at his school “lived in the world of romantic love” and how “friendship” was a “religion,” while also confessing that he had reached his eighteenth birthday a virgin, without having masturbated or even kissed anyone (250, 212). Similarly Rupert Graves in Goodbye to All That recounts how at Charterhouse, before the Great War, the boys’ “chief interests were games and romantic friendships,” before describing how he fell in love with a younger boy, whom he calls Dick, was warned by a master to end the friendship, but was left alone after the master “lectured him loftily on the advantage of friendship between elder and younger boys, citing Plato, the Greek poets, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and others, who had felt as I did” (37, 46). He was not alone. According to Alec Waugh, in Public School Life, A boy of seventeen is passing through a highly romantic period. His emotions are searching for a focus. He is fi lled with wild, impossible loyalties.

30 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 He longs to surrender himself to some lost cause. He hungers for adventures. On occasions he even goes so far as to express himself in verse, an indiscretion that he will never subsequently commit. . . . He is, in fact, in love with love; he does not see a girl of his own age, his own class, from one end of the term to the other; it is human nature to accept the second best. (qtd. in Richards 1988: 185) For some this meant that adolescence constituted a kind of “third sex,” a term usually applied to what were called “sexual inverts.” E. F. Benson argued in his autobiography, In many ways boys are a sex quite apart from male or female. . . . For twelve or thirteen weeks three times a year they live exclusively among boys, and that at a time when their vigour is at its strongest and it would demand of them a fish-like inhumanity, if they were asked to let their friendships alone have no share of the tremendous high colours in which their lives are dipped. Naturally there is a danger about it (for what emotion worth having is not encompassed by perils?) and this strong heat of affection may easily explode into fragments or mere sensuality, be dissipated in mere ‘smut’ and from being a banner in the clean wind be trampled into mud. Promiscuous immorality was, as far as I am aware, quite foreign to the school, though we flamed into a hundred hot bonfires of those friendships, which were discussed with a freedom that would seem appalling, if you forgot that you were dealing with boys and not with men. Blaze after blaze illumined our excited lives, for without being one whit less genuine while they lasted, there was no very permanent quality about these friendships. But to suppose that this ardency was sensual, is to miss the point of it and lose the value of it altogether. That the base of the attraction was largely physical is no doubt true, for it was founded primarily on appearance, but there is a vast difference between the breezy open-air quality of these friendships and the dingy sensualism which sometimes is wrongly attributed to them. A grown-up man cannot conceivably recapture their quality, so as to experience it emotionally but to confuse it with moral perversion, as an adult understands that, is merely to misunderstand it. (qtd. in Richards 21–2) But this could apply to relationships other than romantic friendships. Hall dwells at length on the fact that some kind of fi rst communion occurs around the time of puberty in most religions, arguing, It is . . . no accidental synchronism of unrelated events that the age of religion and that of sexual maturity coincide . . . Nor is religion degraded by the recognition of this intimate relationship, save to those who either think vilely about sex or who lack insight into its real psychic nature and

Sexuality and Sacrifice in the Boys’ Stories before the War • 31 so fail to realize how indissoluble is the bond that God and nature have wrought between religion and love. Perhaps Plato is right, and love of the good, beautiful, and true is only love of sex transfigured and transcendentalized; but the Gospel is better, which makes sex love at the best the type and symbol of love of God and man. (Vol. 1: 293) Hence the at times bizarre combination of unblushing medical details about all the minutiae of the adolescent body and its changes combined with mystical or transcendentalist passages of the most purple kind. When a master discovers the hero of Newbolt’s The Twymans kissing a girl, the hero lives in fear of punishment, only later to receive from this master as a birthday present a copy of Dante’s Vita Nuova, on the flyleaf of which is written “Good is the lordship of Love, for that it draws away the mind of his servant from all things mean” (136). In Westward Ho! all of the male occupants of the town dedicate themselves to the Brotherhood of the Rose. Sir Nigel and other characters of his ilk do marry at the end of their adventures but this does not represent the end of youthful idealism but its culmination. It is unlikely that the advent of sexology and Freudianism could have cast such passionate idealism in a suspicious light for the simple fact that those such as Newbolt, Ellis, Symonds, and Carpenter openly discuss both heterosexual and homosexual desire. Perhaps the sexologists and Freudians did not reveal quite so much of the repressed as is sometimes believed because it was never quite so repressed in the first place. In boys’ juvenile fiction there are Gothic allusions to various forms of “beastliness” but the alternative is not a taboo on sex but the recognition that male adolescent sexuality is a perfectly natural and healthy phenomenon that simply needs to be diverted to higher ends. In Civilization and its Discontents Freud famously asked whether the advantages of civilization were worth the cost of neurosis. But what is striking about these works is how un-neurotic they are. The boys are not repressing their sexuality but giving it up in return for some higher good. Adolescence is a kind of golden age because it represents an accession to vitality which is nevertheless diverted into higher ends. While later generations might find this idealism suspect, they did not.

Sacrifice and the First World War The sacrifice of sexuality is part of a larger economy. In Sturgis’ Tim the eponymous hero’s love for Carol puts him in conflict with not just Carol’s fiancée, Violet, but also his father, who disapproves of “violent intimacies” between boys. As a consequence Tim wills himself to die, an act that reconciles him with paternal authority and expresses the highest form of love. When the headmaster commemorates the death of Henry in a service in the school chapel in The Hill, he remembers one

32 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 who died on another hill, and died so gloriously that the shadow of our loss, dark as it seemed to us at fi rst, is already melting in the radiance of his gain. To die young, clean, ardent; to die swiftly, in perfect health; to die saving others from death, or worse—disgrace—to die scaling heights; to die and to carry with you into the fuller, ampler life beyond, untainted hopes and aspirations, unembittered memories, all the freshness and gladness of May—is not that cause for joy rather than sorrow? I say yes. (242) Some historians have analyzed the ways in which the colonial mission was a means of sublimating sexual desire (Richards 168) but in these texts the hero’s death is not a pale substitute for romantic love but its apotheosis. As the meaning of the word “sacrifice” indicates, these sacrifices are a form of making sacred. However we can distinguish this form of sacrifice from the kind that is associated with such phenomena as scapegoating. According to Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert’s classic text on the subject, sacrifice is “a means of communication between the sacred and the profane worlds through the mediation of a victim, that is, of a thing that in the course of the ceremony is destroyed” (97). As an intermediary the victim brings the profane into a relationship with the sacred, the “very source of life,” but since the sacred is also destructive the death of the victim protects the world of the profane from the fearsome forces of the sacred (98). Destruction of the victim allows the “two worlds” of the sacred and profane to “interpenetrate and yet remain distinct” (99). Hubert and Mauss call these two fundamental aspects of all sacrifices sacralization and desacralization. We can describe the former as a form of exchange since, as Hubert and Mauss point out, there is always an aspect of “abnegation” in sacrifice that is not without “some contractual element”: “The sacrifier gives up something of himself but he does not give himself . . . because if he gives, it is partly in order to receive” (100). But the victim is also a kind of substitute for the sacrifier, something that “takes his place,” because if he “involved himself in the rite to the very end, he would find death, not life” (98). Despite their scientific pretenses, a great deal of the Social Darwinist and degenerationist discourses of the later decades of the nineteenth century, targeting as they did figures such as the criminal, the prostitute, the sexually deviant, and the insane, were displaced forms of desacralization. In the boys’ fiction, rituals of purification are found in all the various cults of mental and physical hygiene. In fact it is remarkable how often boys bathe and swim in the decades leading up until the war—at least in the fiction. The narrator of The Bending of a Twig tells us that the father of the hero “wrote patriotic poems in the winter months, and declared that to learn to swim was the Briton’s fi rst duty” with just the kind of irony (adding that “he always regretted, though never admitted, that he himself had not been taught”) that indicates what a commonplace such sentiments were. Thus

Sexuality and Sacrifice in the Boys’ Stories before the War • 33 when the war did break out Brooke’s early war sonnet “Peace” represented it as a kind of national cleansing: Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary, Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move, And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, And all the little emptiness of love! (11) The war will allow grown men consumed by the “dirty” passions of adulthood to regain something of the purity of “youth” or adolescence. In the fiction, however, discourses of sacrificial exchange predominate over those of purification. In the school stories, for example, there is frequently a scene in which a boy admits to a crime he has not committed in order to save a friend. In Wodehouse’s Mike and Psmith, the latter confesses to having painted a master’s dog, Samson, red so as to dispel the suspicions that have fallen on his friend, Mike. It turns out that the real guilty party was an old boy but the lesson learnt—that “between what is a rag and what is merely a rotten trick there is a very definite line” (181)—is far less important than what we find out about Psmith, the fastidious aesthete who has been assiduously mocking all the school ideals: that he is prepared to sacrifice his own interests for another. Similarly in The Hill the hero is prepared to make himself the “scapegoat” for the crime that he knows his beloved is contemplating, going up to London, though like Psmith he is saved at the last minute from the consequences of his self-sacrificing action (222). This is in accord with the historical shift of the genre away from the evangelical cautionary tale towards the tale of imperial adventure. Of course Hubert and Mauss are talking about ritual sacrifice, specifically that described in the Bible and certain Sanskrit texts, whereas these boys’ sacrifices are made in the context of the nation. However, during the eighteenth century there was a tendency for the nation to replace that of the religious community. Thus according to Emile Durkheim in Elementary Forms of Religious Life—a text which owes much to Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice (Strenski 163)—the flag of a nation is a kind of totem and even during the first years of that ferociously anticlerical event, the French Revolution, things purely laical by nature were transformed by public opinion into sacred things: these were the Fatherland, Liberty, Reason. A religion tended to become established which had its dogmas, symbols, altars and feasts. It was to these spontaneous aspirations that the cult of Reason and the Supreme Being attempted to give a sort of official satisfaction. (220, 214)

34 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 The notion that nationalism can be a kind of substitute or alternative religion is frequently traced back to the penultimate chapter of The Social Contract in which Rousseau observes that since Christianity is contrary to the “social spirit,” some kind of “civil religion” is necessary. “Making the country the object of the citizens’ adoration,” such a “civil religion”, teaches them the service done to the State is service done to its tutelary god. It is a form of theocracy, in which there can be no pontiff save the prince, and no priests save the magistrates. To die for one’s country then becomes martyrdom; violation of its laws, impiety; and to subject one who is guilty to public execration is to condemn him to the anger of the gods: Sacer estod. (272–73) Thus whereas in the early Evangelical stories there is sometimes a tension between the hero’s duty towards God and his nation, the “civil religion” of nation and empire in the later stories has almost entirely subsumed any Christianity. Just as the nation replaces that of the religious community, so war can be seen as a substitute for or displacement of the kinds of ritualized violence and destruction described by Hubert and Mauss. The concept of a sacred war is older even than Horace’s “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” a line which sometimes occurs in juvenile fiction, poetry and nonfiction, as we might suspect given Wilfred Owen’s later bitter use of it. In Henty’s In Times of Peril, for example, a young subaltern dying during the Indian Mutiny says to his comrade, “Well, old fellow, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, and you see it’s my case” (qtd. in Arnold 111). However, during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the emergence of citizen armies allowed militarist sacrifice to be extended beyond the aristocratic few to the entire social collectivity. As George Mosse argues, the cult of the fallen and unknown soldier during the second and third decades of the twentieth century was made possible by the French revolutionary wars and the German wars of liberation. Whereas prior to 1792 wars had been fought largely by mercenary armies, these revolutionary wars were the first to be fought by citizen-armies, composed initially of a large number of volunteers who were committed to their cause and to their nation. Those who fell in these wars were comrades in arms, the sons or brothers of someone one could have known; it was necessary to legitimize and justify their sacrifice. (9–10) This is the historical precondition for Ernst Renan’s often-cited essay “What is a Nation?” It is, he answers, the end product of a long period of work, sacrifice and devotion. The worship of ancestors is understandably justifiable, since our ancestors

Sexuality and Sacrifice in the Boys’ Stories before the War • 35 have made us what we are. A heroic past, of great men, of glory (I mean the genuine kind), that is the social principle on which the national idea rests. To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have accomplished great things together, to wish to do so again, that is the essential condition for being a nation. One loves in proportion to the sacrifice which one has approved and for which one has suffered. (qtd. in Hutchinson and Smith 15) The “national idea” might be the product of the deeds of “great” men but it is something that is “common” to all and to which all should make sacrifices. This democratization of sacrifice took place in the context of the increasing militarization of European societies during the nineteenth century. Although pacifist and internationalist sentiment was strong towards the end of the century, this was frequently in defensive reaction to the increasingly jingoistic and militarist aspects of European societies after the middle of the century, a period in which, with the exception of the Franco-Prussian and Boer wars, there were few major conflicts and yet an accelerating arms race and movement towards war as a “total” social phenomenon (Bond 72–99). In Britain there was a perceptible rise in esteem and respect for the army during the second half of the century (MacKenzie 5). In part this was the consequence of what Richards calls both the “Christianisation of the army” and the “militarisation of Christianity” (1989: 81) with the founding of such organizations as the Salvation Army and the Church Army. However, the notion of some kind of sacred war did not need to be seen in the context of religion. Thus in his address to the Royal Military Academy, Woolnich, in 1865, John Ruskin told the assembled “young warriors” that “No great art every yet rose on earth, but among a nation of soldiers” (495–6) because the creative, or foundational, war is that in which the natural restlessness and love of contest among men are disciplined, by consent, into modes of beautiful—though it may be fatal—play: in which the natural ambition and love of power of men are disciplined into the aggressive conquest of surrounding evil: and in which the natural instincts of self-defence are sanctified the nobleness of the institutions, and purity of the households which they are appointed to defend. To such war as this all men are born; in such war as this any man may happily die; and out of such war as this have arisen throughout the extent of past ages, all the highest sanctities and virtues of humanity. (464–65) Significantly the end of the century also saw the emergence of such youth groups as the Boys’ Brigade, the British Girls’ Patriotic League, the Lads’ Drill Association, school cadet corps, and Baden Powell’s Boy Scouts, the last whose motto was “BE PREPARED to die for your country . . . so that when the time comes you may charge home with confidence, not caring whether you are

36 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 to be killed or not” (qtd. in Bond 75). If the “youth” could be distinguished from the adult man, or at least those who had attained middle or old age, by his vigour and muscularity, then he was also distinguished by his idealistic propensity for sacrifice. In Sir Henry Newbolt’s “Vitaï Lampada,” for example, it is “the voice of a schoolboy” that “rallies the ranks” of the all-but-defeated regiment with what was probably the best-known line of late Victorian and Edwardian poetry: “Play up! play up! and play the game!” This sacrificial ideology has been well described by a number of historians and most people even now have at least the refrain of “Vitaï Lampada” ringing somewhere in their heads. However, what is not always remarked is the extraordinary ease with which it was assumed that boys would make these sacrifices. Peter Pan’s exclamation that “to die would be an awfully big adventure” is sounded in hundreds of books and magazines. In the nonfiction Brave Deeds of Youthful Heroes it is claimed that a boy of only ten years of age “sacrifice[d] his life to save his native village” (75). In a story in the BOP a survivor of the Charge of the Light Brigade, the improbably named James Mustard, exhorts his readers: Boys, always do your duty! Let neither fear nor favour prevent your doing that in whatever circumstance of life you may find yourselves. Certain death, unavoidable trouble, serious disaster, may stare you in the face, as it did us of the Light Brigade on that October day. But, thank God— and I say it modestly and reverently, I hope!—not a soldier flinched nor thought of retreat, though he knew the end was death. (Wade (b) 87–88) A Chums article that belonged to a long series on English heroes describes Nelson’s “glorious death . . . Knowing that the triumph he had so long sought and planned was amply his last, rich in honour and fame such as no English seaman had won for centuries” (1900: 45). For the Colours: A Boy’s Book of the Army tells the story of those who did “not begrudge life for the welfare of the motherland” and “died freely and uncomplainingly when the honour of England demanded the sacrifice” (Hayens 11). In The Red Book of British Battles the wounded General Wolfe manages a final order and feeling “that he had done his duty . . . added feebly, but distinctly, “Now, God be praised, I die happy” (Strang n.p.), a scene which was recounted almost identically in many other histories. Baden Powell begins Scouting for Boys with a brief history of all the adult scouts who “are accustomed to take their lives in their hands, and to fling them down without any hesitation if they can help their country by doing so.” In his address at the laying of a foundation stone for a memorial to the Charterhouse old boys who died serving in South Africa, he said to the boys present, according to BOP’s reportage: Those gallant Carthusians who have laid down their lives in South Africa have built up for themselves a monument that will never fade away. If an epitaph were needed for those men, one might supply it by the words,

Sexuality and Sacrifice in the Boys’ Stories before the War • 37 “They placed duty before all.” They considered their duty before their own personal aims to such an extent that they were content to lay down their lives for the benefit of their country, and that is the guiding principle that should possess everyone in every walk of life. . . . The highest principle that you can follow is the great Christian principle of sacrificing yourself for others. (The Editor 1901: 207) And if a soldier could sound like a minister, so the BOP’s Rev. George Jackson could chant the litany of men of action: Who has not cried over the story of John Brown, the abolitionist martyr, kissing the little black babe as it lay in its mother’s arms, on his way to the scaffold, then mounting the steps to die with a thanksgiving on his lips that he was counted worthy to suffer in such a cause. The time would fail me to tell of Havelock falling amid the agonies of the Indian Mutiny; of Livingstone and Mackay, pouring out the precious treasure of their lives like water on the burning sands of Africa; of Gordon, meeting death with unblanched cheek in the vastnesses of faraway Khartoum. (127) The list could go on and on. But what even the smallest sampling of these texts reveals is that the Victorian and Edwardian schoolboy must have longed for a premature and violent death. With hindsight we all know where this was leading. As one historian amongst many others has pointed out in the context of the public schools, “Two themes emphasized in the classical teaching of Victorian England— blind patriotism and the glorification of death in battle—may be said to have contributed materially to the disaster of WWI” (Honey 131). The same was true further down the literary scale in the realms of juvenile fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. However, as much as this sacrificial ethos contributed to the disaster of the war it was not the sole cause and if, for example, the machine gun had not been invented the resulting diminution in suffering would have left it less discredited. Lord Roberts’ advice to schoolboys at the unveiling of a Boer War memorial at the public school Glenalmond, that they should, like the Japanese soldiers in the Russo-Japanese War, meet death “as a bridegroom who goes to meet his bride” (qtd. in Best 145) sounds bizarrely macabre. However, such liebestods were more characteristic of the aesthetic movements to which this literature from W.E. Henley down to the BOP was explicitly or implicitly opposed. One critic has described the baptism metaphor of “Peace” as bringing to mind “the appalling image of lemmings” and one of Brooke’s other war sonnets, “The Soldier” (which begins, “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England”) as “an exercise in morbidity, with its grotesque implication that as fertilizer the English soldier is top drawer” (Eby 228, 230). But such readings are deliberately anachronistic. In the boys’ fiction, sacrifice is an ideology but it is

38 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 not one that appears to have greatly repressive aspects. Of course the function of ideology is to make its subjects willingly subscribe to what would otherwise be compelled. The person who makes sacrifices to the gods of duty, nation, and empire thinks they are doing so willingly. But in terms of sexuality it was an ideology that was rather less repressive and perverse than it would be represented in the decades after the war. The adolescent was a less complicated and certainly less troubled figure than he would become. The dark irony is that it may not have been the morbidity of the adolescent ideal that drove men to the trenches but its relatively benign aspects.

Chapter Two Romance and the Boys’ Story

One of the main generic categories used to classify juvenile adventure and school stories was “romance.” The word was used in the subtitles of novels such as G. Manville Fenn’s Dick o’ the Fens: A Romance of the Great East Swamp and J. H. Yoxall’s Nutbrown Roger and I: A Romance of the Highway and even the penny dreadful Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was improbably described as “24 Pages of Sensational Romance” (Kevin Carpenter 33). The subjects of many nonfiction works were also frequently called romances. T. C. & E. C. Jack published a series called “Romance of Empire” (MacKenzie 215), Seeley Service had on its list a complete Library of Romance on subjects such as exploration, missionary heroism, mining, war inventions, and “savage life” and the Religious Tract Society published books such as Romance of Real Life: True Incidents in the Lives of the Great and Good. Novels and stories set in a distant and exotic period of history were invariably described as romances but as the editor of Chums asks, is there no romance in the [contemporary] world, and I answer myself, why, of course there is. But it’s the new romance, Chums, the romance of ships and seas, of distant lands and unknown countries, even the romance of this great London of ours, with its teeming millions and its terrible stories of danger and peril and want and starvation. There’s the new romance for you. And if it has not the cloaked horsemen and the “beshrew me’s” and the “gadzooks” of the old time, believe me that more happens in London in one day than happened in the mediaeval towns in a twelvemonth. (1900: 428)1 And such romance had a particular appeal for boys, the author of A Brief History of Boys’ Journals (1913) pointing out that “the boy of to-day, even as the boy of yesterday, wants one thing and one thing only, and that is romance” 39

40 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 (cited in Dunae 1989: 31). For as Stables put it in the opening sentence of the preface to For Life and Liberty “There is a thread of romance in the warp or weft of nearly every boy’s life” (9). In describing the romance aspects of these fictions, several historians refer to the genre’s most influential critic, Northrop Frye (Richards 72; White 45; Logan 35). Frye’s discussion of romance in Anatomy of Criticism is certainly useful because it alerts us to the genre’s two main aspects or axes, the “quest” and the “dialectical . . . conflict between the hero and his enemy” (187). Thus we can describe its basic structure as triangular, its poles the hero, his adversary or adversaries, and the object of his desire. However, Frye’s description of romance as the genre the least displaced from myth does not adequately apply to juvenile fiction, or perhaps even to the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott and his successors. According to Frye, The romance is nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfi lment dream, and for that reason it has socially a curiously paradoxical role. In every age the ruling social or intellectual class tends to project its ideals in some form of romance, where the virtuous heroes and beautiful heroines represent the ideals and the villains the threats to their ascendance. This is the general character of chivalric romance in the Middle Ages, aristocratic romance in the Renaissance, bourgeois romance since the eighteenth century, and revolutionary romance in contemporary Russia. Yet there is a genuinely ‘proletarian’ element in romance too which is never satisfied with its various incarnations and in fact the incarnations themselves indicate that no matter how great a change may take place in society, romance will turn up again, as hungry as ever, looking for new hopes and desires to feed on. The perennially childlike quality of romance is marked by its extraordinary persistent nostalgia, its search for some kind of imaginative golden age in time or space. (186) Yet one of the desires of a ruling class is the exercise of power. A genre that expresses so clearly the ideals of a ruling class must also be one that instructs its readers in the principles of social reality. Although like many critics Frye opposes romance to realism, there is a strong element of realism in juvenile romances. These romances express this “perennially childlike quality” but they also inculcate the sometimes harsh realities of the boy’s ruling class, adult men. They are wish-fulfi lment dreams and yet also pedagogical exercises. Moreover, while Frye also points out that quest romance has an episodic aspect, in juvenile adventure stories (and, in a somewhat different way, school stories as well) the juvenile heroes must also leave a home to which after many adventures they return, albeit one that is thereby changed. Paul Ricoeur argues that all narratives have this circular aspect, making them, according to a critic who applies his work to children’s literature and romance, J. A. Appleyard,

Romance and the Boys’ Story • 41 inseparable from dream. He proposes that a dreamlike, fairy-tale vision of returning to the origin, a vision whose form is the circle, is prior to the heroic tale of action, whose form is linear, and that true narrative sustains both dimensions simultaneously, each episode both expanding and deepening the originary vision. (70) Thus while The Odyssey begins in medias res, the action of the first book takes place at Odysseus’ home in Ithaca which is also where his adventures end, the penultimate book finishing with Odysseus and Penelope in bed, her listening enraptured to the story of his adventures, the ending of the story thereby occasioning its retelling. In the juvenile stories, we will argue, the hero’s departure constitutes a separation between a quotidian and an adventure world which with his return is closed as he brings back to the world he left the object(s) of his quest. On the one hand, the hero leaves the world of adult realities to pursue youthful fantasies that once attained become part of the adult world to which he returns. On the other, the hero leaves his childhood home on an adventure that requires the acquisition of adult responsibilities that he continues to exercise upon his return home. Both forms of circularity thereby reconcile youthful desire with adult authority, fantasy with realism. Moreover, since both forms exist in the same story, both the departure and the return also reconcile these apparently opposite aspects. The hero who departs on adventures is pursuing youthful fantasies and exercising adult responsibilities and he returns to a world of adult realities and his childhood home. Thus because the adventure world has both of these aspects, its two axes, the agon and the quest, also respectively reconcile rebellion with authority and individual desire with social convention. Appleyard describes romance as the preferred genre of children, tragedy that of the tumultuous adolescent (209–10). But whatever its undeniable appeal to children, romance is the genre favoured in the construction of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century adolescence because it can reconcile youthful desire with adult reality just as the invention of adolescence renews the genre. The writers and champions of romance during the 1880s did reject certain kinds of realism, Haggard calling for a “higher ideal” in the face of “obscene” naturalism and Lang objecting to the ways in which writers such as Dostoevsky and Zola dealt only with the unleavened “misery of man” (1887: 179; 685; see also Graham). At the same time, however, they do not regard romance as a mere flight of fantasy, both writers arguing that romance returns us to what Lang calls an “ancestral barbarism” that is still a part of our natures (1887). Thus just as Scott claims that “romance and real history have the same common origin” (qtd. in Jones 295), so an anonymous essayist in the Quarterly Review argues, Whereas at their birth History and Fable were twin sisters, so like that one could hardly distinguish between them, in their afterlife the resemblance

42 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 rapidly decreases until it disappears altogether. History becomes serious and accurate, Fable becomes artistic and romantic. . . . But though History now disowns Fable, Fable clings persistently to her inveterate connexion with History; she cannot yet afford to dispense with the aid and countenance of so respectable a dealer in hard facts. (32–37) And this would also have been known to younger readers, an essay in the children’s and juvenile magazine Chatterbox on the origins of romance claiming that minstrels were originally looked upon not only as poets and musicians, but also as historians. Their ballads were half fact, half fiction; but when history began to be taught by the monks, these wanderings singers were no longer expected to teach, but only to amuse. (Winwood 149) Thus in the practice of their storytelling, these authors ballast fantasy with the lead of realistic detail. Descriptions of exotic landscapes, amazing adventures, and fierce battles insist on their factualness or veracity, sometimes to the point of fetish. Henty, for example, tediously lists all the regiments and battalions of historical battles, their commanders, and their weaponry and then fi nishes with a list of casualties, or, in With Clive in India, what the enemy left when they retreated as well as casualties: Fifty-two cannon were left to them, and so great was the hurry with which the French retreated that they left forty-four sick in the hospital behind. The fort fired during the siege 26,554 rounds from their cannon, 7502 shells, threw 1990 hand-grenades, and expended 200,000 musketry cartridges. Thirty pieces of cannon and five mortars had been dismounted during the siege. Of the Europeans the loss in killed, wounded, and prisoners was five hundred and seventy-nine. Three hundred and twenty-two Sepoys were killed and wounded, and four hundred and forty deserted during the siege. (333) Ballantyne was so distraught at having described coconuts without husks in The Coral Island that he made a point of personally researching all his subsequent books, including diving to the bottom of the Thames (Carpenter 1). William Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 (1906) was indeed so convincingly factual that some of its readers believed England had been invaded and many of those who did not were nevertheless persuaded that Britain should rearm. The episodic nature of such romance plots (the Germans in The Invasion of 1910 famously proceeded through the towns where there were Harmsworth newspapers) allows not only for potentially endless additions of new adventures but also for the interposition of chapters, sections, or passages dealing with everything from the flora and fauna of an exotic land to the customs

Romance and the Boys’ Story • 43 of its inhabitants, from the technological aspects of warfare to the supplies necessary for various exhibitions. The Robinsonades often read like survival manuals, the school stories as sociology, the adventure stories as geography. Writers such as Henty and Haggard would often incorporate the texts of other writers, leading to charges of plagiarism for the latter (Bristow 146), a somewhat unfair accusation given that the romances did not present themselves as entirely original inventions but as imaginary worlds anchored in public facts and collective history. These juvenile fantasies are primarily opposed to certain kinds of adult realism, and yet deal with the adult realities of war, exploration, and hunting. Moreover, since many writers such as Haggard and Lang also objected to the feminization of the novel, to what the former calls the “namby-pamby nonsense” of writers “who write books for little girls in the schoolroom” (1887: 177), they are also books for men about adult subjects which nevertheless appeal to the boy’s love of fantasy. This is also the case with the language spoken by the boys, particularly in the school stories. The schools are replete with elaborate codes of conduct, punishment, and dress, complicated social hierarchies, and apparently ancient traditions that mark them off from the outside world. Thus many of the novels flaunt their schoolboy jargon as though it were the language of some cabal or special clique. Desmond Coke’s The Bending of a Twig provides at its end a glossary of schoolboy slang entitled “By Way Of Explanation” and Kipling’s schoolboys at times speak a quite opaque mix of working-class idioms, local dialect, Franglais, technical terms peculiar to their school, music-hall songs, military slang, and parodies and pastiches of ancient and modern authors. To some extent their language is, as Robert Moss observes, the kind of “secret” language that is characteristic of any adolescent group (47) and yet it is always a language that distinguishes the boys from children. Kipling’s boys pastiche various adult discourses and most of Coke’s terms—“John” (manservant), “skivvy” (maidservant), “tom smoke” (blush), “fi rms” (partnerships of food at tea)—could only be used by a boy with pretensions to maturity. These languages distinguish the schoolboy from the adult while also imitating adult speech and at the same time distinguish the older boy from the younger while remaining different from adult speech. Pastoral language and conventions also distinguish the boy’s world from the world of the adult. Although in Tom Brown there is little contrast between town and gown, in the stories after The Fifth Form, in which a boy gets himself disastrously into debt with a publican and the hero has the fi rst of what would become the stereotypical scene of fighting with the town roughs, the town is generally corrupting in some way; or, as in Newbolt’s The Twymans: A Tale of Youth, an affair of clocks, trains, postmen, and police, a tread-mill of certainties . . . The Arthurian romances themselves, which he had read while he was so inappropriately penned in by streets and factories, or a prisoner

44 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 on parole in some hospitable grown-up domain—those very adventures might well have been encountered in the deep woods at his feet, or on the white roads that run by thorpe and vale and grange to all these quite and lonely horizons. (56) Yet for all its bucolic aspects the countryside is not always a place of peace. Stalky & Co. retire to smoke and enjoy other tranquil pleasures in the surrounding countryside but are confronted by various irate farmers and landowners. Haggard’s green worlds teem with game and yet are also extremely dangerous. In Ballantyne’s Coral Island, paradise is even located under the water, the coral “the flower-beds” of a “submarine garden” (35), though we are later reminded that there are sharks in these waters. Their pastoral aspects distinguish them from the adult “tread-mill of certainties” and yet they are also adult worlds which are no place for children. Indeed, for all their youthfulness, it is striking how rarely we meet children in juvenile fiction. As dangerously exciting green worlds, these places are situated away from the workplace or market. The heroes of many of Ballantyne’s stories are traders but amongst the second generation of novelists they are soldiers, sailors, explorers, hunters, naturalists, and the like. Robinson Crusoe never stops working but the heroes of the Robinsonades after The Swiss Family Robinson do virtually no work. In the school stories the boys are made to work hard at Latin and Greek but this, as we have already observed, does not train them for any occupation other than that of gentleman and most of their effort is usually spent in elaborate schemes to avoid doing this work. Moreover there is frequently active hostility to the market or workplace. In Eton and the Empire Geoffrey Drage argued that the patriotism and piety of Eton was antithetical to the mammonism and individualism of the Manchester School (Mack 217) and while many public school boys did enter the professions, the ethos dictated that this was for public duty, not private gain (Wilkinson 60b). Accordingly a villain such as The Hill’s Scaife is from a lower class than the hero and he is motivated entirely by calculations of personal gain. When the old boys return to play the schoolboys at rugby in Stalky & Co. we are told that those “failing for the Army, [who] had gone into business or banks were received for form’s sake, but in no way made too much of,” a distinct contrast to the hero worship that is accorded those who graduated from Sandhurst (170). When Sir Nigel goes to town and has to bargain with a goldsmith, “It was the new force mastering the old: the man of commerce conquering the man of war— wearing him down and weakening him through the centuries until he had him as his bond-servant and his thrall” (87). In Allan Quatermain, the eponymous narrator observes that the “greed of money . . . eats like a cancer into the heart of the white man” (1949: 14). And the highland hero of Kidnapped, Alan Breck, recklessly gambles away his money just as one of his followers advises Davie that “there is a thing that ye would never do, and that is to offer your dirty money to a Hieland shentlman” (179).

Romance and the Boys’ Story • 45 Such anti-mercantile sentiments are in accord with the Tory or conservative politics of the writers of the “new romance” or the generation of the 1880s. Nevertheless, while many of the writers of boys’ stories were Tory imperialists, any expression of party political views, at least in the stories specifically for juveniles, is avoided. In Tom Brown the squire is described as “a true blue Tory to the backbone,” but Hughes then tells us that “he held therewith divers social principles not generally supposed to be true blue in colour,” “foremost” that a person not be judged by “rank, fortune, and all externals whatsoever,” a belief that is “a wholesome corrective of all political opinions . . . whether they be blue, red, or green” (56). However, Hughes and the other more sophisticated writers can be described as belonging to the tradition of thinking described by Raymond Williams in Culture and Society that opposes the idea of an “organic” society to the laissez faire principles of middle-class industrialism and commercialism, though, needless to say, none gave this “organic” society a “future reference” in terms of some kind of socialism (47). In the fiction, actual feudal societies and colonial societies modelled on some kind of feudal model abound. Many of the boys inherit estates and titles at the end of their adventures or achieve what Haggard describes in the dedication of Allan Quatermain as “the highest rank whereto we can attain—the state and dignity of English gentlemen.” The stories provide a critique of mercantile, laissez faire, individualist values but only in terms of conservative values. As the century progressed, such medievalism ceded to primitivism as the spatially distant empire substituted for the temporally remote Middle Ages. Henty’s novels set in the various colonial wars of the nineteenth century were, for example, more numerous and successful than his historical romances. Ernst Haeckel’s theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, the individual that of the species, would not have been known to many of these writers, but the equation of the youthful with the primitive (and, vice versa, the civilized with the adult) is assumed without question. Both Lang and Haggard associate youthful romance with savagery, Kipling’s typical schoolboy in Stalky & Co. is “as ignorant as the savage he so admires,” and one of the young heroes of Ballantyne’s The Gorilla Hunters, the sequel to Coral Island, declares, “Isn’t it jolly to be out here living like savages? I declare it seems to me like a dream or a romance” (3). Similarly in the historical romances, Kingsley’s young Amyas Leigh, the fi rst and model for all subsequent heroes, is described as an “ignorant young savage” (11) and Conan Doyle in his preface to his romance about a young knight, Sir Nigel, warns his readers that they might fi nd certain incidents “brutal and repellent” because during the late Middle Ages “The fantastic graces of chivalry lay upon the surface of life . . . beneath it was a half-savage population, fierce and animal, with little ruth or mercy” (v, vi). It is possible that such savagery or at least violence increases from the midcentury, though Westward Ho! and Tom Brown’s Schooldays certainly glorify their heroes’ fighting qualities. Whereas Martin Rattler says “I don’t ever

46 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 fight if I can help it” (30) and his creator, Ballantyne, declared that “There is indeed much that is glorious in the conduct of many warriors, but there is no glory whatever in war itself.” (qtd. in Hannabuss in Richards 1981: 68), Thomas Mayne Reid anticipated the second generation of writers in his lamentation that “my scenes are of a sanguinary nature; some of them extremely so; but alas! Far less than the realities from which they were drawn” and a certain Miss Yonge could recommend “a pretty book with plenty of killing” (qtd. in Avery 138, 143). In the later fiction there is a certain delight in imagining fantastic forms of violence, Haggard’s Zulu warrior Umslopogaas, for example, being characterized by his joyous ferocity and use of a battle axe called the “woodpecker” for the way in which it “pecks” at his enemy, leaving him with “a neat little circular hole in his forehead or skull, exactly similar to that which a cheese-scoop makes in a cheese” (97). Similarly one of Tarzan’s favoured methods of killing is to lower a noose over his victim’s head, raise them thrashing into his tree, and then “plunge” his hunting knife into their body or have it “drink deep” of their “heart’s blood” (71, 156). “Few were his primitive pleasures,” we are told, “but the greatest of these was to hunt and kill” (73). While such violence appeals to the savage instincts of boys and yet is certainly not for children, the adult activity of killing is nevertheless invested with youthful fantasy. Such savagery requires that the boys adopt native customs or “go native.”2 Kipling’s Kim speaks “the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song” (3), wears local garb, and trips about the bazaars like any Indian boy. Many critics argue that this qualifies the sense of racial superiority that can be found in such notorious texts as “The White Man’s Burden.” Kipling himself was a divided person, according to Ashis Nandy, his Indian self identifying with “the romance, the colour, and the mystery of India” that his English imperialist self rejected (64). But what few observe is that this division is de rigueur in even the least sophisticated of the boys’ adventure stories. In Henty, for example, who is usually taken as a kind of icon of racist imperialism, there is hardly an adventure, at least amongst those that take place in one of the nineteenth-century colonial wars (and they were the majority of his most popular novels) in which the civilized English hero does not know at least one native language or dialectic and disguise himself as a native. The fantasy of going native was not restricted to the fiction, Baden Powell’s Scouting for Boys beginning with the example of Kim “who went . . . among the natives as one of them” and then teaching boys an Ingonyama war dance, how to track like a “native Indian,” “Red Indian,” or Zulu, to keep clean like the “Japs,” find paths like “Red Indian” scouts, build huts like the Zulu and bridges like the Ashanti, to live in the open like the boys of Zulu and Swazi tribes, and be independent like the Swazi (15, 50, 65, 77, 99, 152, 162, 188). And such games were also for grown-ups. The Savage Club for gentlemen was founded in 1857 and its members, as well as those of affi liated clubs in former colonies, still address each other as “Brother Savage.”

Romance and the Boys’ Story • 47 Moreover, many of the boys do not even need to adopt the customs of natives since they are at least born part native. In Henty’s The Tiger of Mysore, the “half caste” mother is the daughter of an English woman and a “young rajah” and while she was educated in England and can therefore pass as English she nevertheless communicates with her son in the native language and her brother, the hero’s uncle, was “brought up like the sons of other native princes” (14). Even in the historical romances the hero’s mother can be culturally hybrid, the hero of Henty’s novel set in post-Norman conquest England, Winning his Spurs, for example, being the issue, like many others of his generation, of a “mixed marriage” between a Norman and therefore culturally sophisticated father and a mother of rude but vigorous Saxon stock. Similarly, although both (later Sir) Nigel’s parents are dead, his grandmother is a kind of substitute mother and “Her thoughts and memories went back to harsher times, and she looked upon the England around her as a degenerate and effeminate land which had fallen away from the old standard of knightly courtesy and valour” (34). Alternatively, a native woman might adopt an English son. The woman who looks after Kim and pretends to be his mother’s sister is a “half caste” (3). Although Kim’s adopted “mother” is an opium smoker who only pretends to useful employment, : her equivalent in the Mowgli stories is a rather more formidable figure, defending her newly adopted son against the villain, Shere Khan, with a ferocity that amazes Father Wolf (12). While the main mothers in Peter Pan are Mrs Darling and her substitute, Wendy, the children’s nurse, Nana, is a dog and there is a strong suggestion that Peter wants the Redskin maiden Tiger Lily to play the role of his mother (64). Tarzan is adopted by the ape Kala after her son has been killed and when she is killed by a native he falls on her body and sobbed out the pitiful sorrowing of his lonely heart. To lose the only creature in all his world who ever had manifested love and affection for him was the greatest tragedy he had ever known. What though Kala was a fierce and hideous ape! To Tarzan she had been kind, she had been beautiful. Upon her he had lavished, unknown to himself, all the reverence and respect and love that a normal English boy feels for his own mother. He had never known another, and so to Kala was given, though mutely, all that would have belonged to the fair and lovely Lady Alice [his biological mother] had she lived. (67) Miscegenation within the present rather than within a previous generation is, as far as we know, taboo, but the fact that an English lord can feel such sentiments for an animal is an indication of the strength of this primitivism, qualifying claims that such romances register an “anxiety about the savagery of late imperial conquest, and about the proximity of ‘civilized’ humanity to its primitive origins” (Jones 21).

48 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 However, in order to be adopted by these native mothers, the boys must lose or leave their English mothers. And for all their fantasies of being reborn as natives, they must also face some rather adult realities. In the Robinsonades, the shipwreck or event that leaves the boys stranded in some exotic location is both a wonderful opportunity to cut the apron strings and go native and some kind of reality principle that awakens them from the comforting dreams of childhood. In the school fiction, the new boy frequently daydreams about the wonderful world to which he is going but his first day or days at school usually involve some humiliation which later proves to be a kind of initiation rite. This is also a moment during which he becomes gendered as fully male. At the start of Tom Brown there are references to the Browns’ fighting qualities and a lengthy description of the bloody fairground game of “back sword” but Tom has his first fight at the private school he attends before Rugby after he is called “Young mammysick!” by another boy (48). When Stephen’s mother in The Fifth Form reminds him to air his flannel vests as the train departs, he is “greatly disturbed,” believing that the people in the carriage would have heard and “be sure to set him down as no end of a milksop and molly-coddle” (13). The hero of The Harrovians arrives at school full of school-story-inspired daydreams of his heroic first day, only to find, when the obligatory fight with another schoolboy, in this case a Spaniard, occurs, that the others taunt him, saying he fights like a girl, and reduce him to tears, one of them shouting “Hallo, cry-baby, does oo want oo’s mother?” (11). In many ways, this is also a kind of second birth, the boy’s expulsion from the feminine constituting his masculinity. The boys’ relationships with their fathers have the same dual aspect, though fathers are rarely part of the adventure proper but represent what the restless boy hero wants and sometimes needs to leave behind. In W. H. G. Kingston’s The Wanderers, the hero, with other members of his extended family, deserts his father in Spanish Trinidad to embark on a series of adventures after the latter betrays his faith by converting to Catholicism in “the hope of securing worldly advantages” (5). In another of his novels, In the Rocky Mountains (1878), the boy hero tells us that “There are people with minds so constituted that they only see one side of a question; and my father was unhappily one of these” (61) and soon after this father conveniently dies. Henty’s fathers are much the same, since, as Guy Arnold points out, they must necessarily be disposed of early in his books; or, if permitted to live, they are curious recluse characters of weak or erratic dispositions who give a virtually free hand to their sons to go their own ways or organize and save the family fortunes. The collapse of the family fortune was often the event which sees the young hero off on his adventures. (40) Thus in Maori and Settler, the father, whom the hero regards with “a somewhat contemptuous affection,” is “an eminently impractical man, weak and easy in disposition, averse to exertion of any kind, and without a shadow of

Romance and the Boys’ Story • 49 the decision of character that distinguished his son” (15, 14) and when the family emigrates to New Zealand the harsh exigencies of colonial life require that he relinquish the role of head of the family to his son. In The Tiger of Mysore the father is part of the main action, but he is someone lacking initiative and energy and must be rescued by his son. In Peter Pan the children fly to Never Land to escape the petty tyranny of a father who consequently becomes so overcome by self-indulgent guilt that he lives in a dog kennel, to the great delight of a good proportion of London. However, unlike the heroes of the juvenile stories, Peter does not of course want to grow up. If in the juvenile stories (as opposed to children’s stories) the weak, ineffectual and dead fathers permit the heroes to enjoy youthful exploits, these heroes must also assume adult responsibilities in lieu of their fathers’ abdication of paternal authority. Having left his father at home, at the office, or in the grave, the boy must nevertheless return home to an adult world. In the school and adventure fiction this is often represented as preparation for his adult life. The final chapter of Stalky & Co., which largely describes Stalky’s exploits as an army officer in Afghanistan, makes clear that the lessons the boys have learnt at school, albeit largely outside the classroom, are the perfect preparation for their lives as army officers, foreign journalists, and imperial administrators. As the character modelled on Kipling, Beetle, observes, “India’s full of Stalkies—Cheltenham and Haileybury and Marlborough chaps—that we don’t know anything about, and the surprises will begin when there is really a big row on” (296). Isabel Quigly claims that Stalky & Co is the only school story which shows school as a direct preparation for life. Most others actually make the world outside school seem irrelevant, an anticlimax, an unimaginable void. Kipling, for all his intense feeling for the school atmosphere and the moods of adolescence, shows school as the first stage of a much larger game, a pattern-maker for the experiences of life. (1987: xv) Yet if in some of the other stories there is little description of life after school, it is still made abundantly clear that school life is a preparation for what is called at the end of one of the novels “the larger School of Life” (Coke 350). The institution of fagging—or what The Bending of a Twig calls “the main principle of Public School existence,” “the rule of boys by boys” (205)—teaches both parties crucial lessons. As Lunn declares, A boy spends his life in propitiating those who can kick him and kicking those who feel the need of propitiating him. He expects no mercy, and he gives no quarter in the rough warfare of school life. That is why school is such an excellent training for real life. (207) This would seem to contradict the kind of circularity in which a boy is toughened up not for the adult but for the home world into which he returns. However,

50 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 a staple of this fiction is the boy’s return back to the comforts of home after his first term but with his childhood illusions gone. Moreover, the world of the school represents not just a place where the boy is toughened up but sometimes also a place of high jinks, even rebellion and license. In Stalky & Co. the boys learn not discipline but the kind of spirited disregard for convention and authority that will make Stalky such a successful officer in Afghanistan. Alternatively in Vachel’s The Hill, “[t[he most sentimental and complacent book ever written about the public schools” (Mack 248), romantic friendship rather than the kicks of a prefect, prepare the hero for his life after school. At the end we find the main protagonist, John, now an old boy at the end of the novel, distraught because his best friend Henry had not sent him a final letter before he had died fighting in the Boer War. Finally the longed-for letter arrives in which Henry declares his love for John and says that “if we don’t meet again in this jolly old world, it may be a little comfort to you to remember that what you have done for a very worthless pal was not thrown away” (246). The letter and the novel concludes with Henry imagining himself charging up a hill, thereby associating his military life with that of Harrow, which is nicknamed the Hill. Death is an obvious reality of the adult world of battle, but it is John’s love for Henry at school that has taught him how to love his country. Since, as Tom Brown makes clear, what happens outside of class is more important than what happens in it, the boys’ adventures in exotic locations are also a preparation. In Kipling’s Captains Courageous a spoiled rich boy called Harvey Cheyne Jr. falls overboard from a transatlantic steamer and is rescued by a fishing boat upon which he is obliged to work, thereby eventually acquiring the moral attributes that make him a son worthy of his father, the proprietor of a shipping line. At the same time, however, after some initial tantrums he begins to enjoy his work aboard and what he learns makes him capable of eventually becoming a “captain” of a ship or shipping line. A few years after the publication of Captains Courageous the BOP published a story called “Fred and Bill; or, Exchange not Robbery!” in which two boys from opposite ends of the class spectrum exchange places, the wayward upper-class boy going to sea, from where, after being licked into manliness, he can return home, the lower-class boy getting the classical education he craves (apparently by virtue of being Scottish) which will make him a gentleman in adult life (Kuppord). Such circularity can be also achieved by embedding the tale of adventure within a framing story. This is a quite common device in such Gothic stories as The Castle of Otranto, in which the preface informs us that what we are about to read is the translation of a medieval manuscript recently found “in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England,” or in The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, in which the description of the wedding contains the ancient mariner’s ghastly tale. Although Patrick Bratlinger’s coinage “Imperial gothic” implies that the gothic was the main imperialist genre, adventure stories were far more popular and gothic stories can be regarded as adventure tales that have gone bad, as inverted romances. Nevertheless, as either a gothic or an

Romance and the Boys’ Story • 51 adventure, the framing story is both a contrast to the embedded story and one that resembles it. Thus in Heart of Darkness the anonymous narrator is one of several ordinary professionals and businessmen who listen to Marlowe’s nightmarish tale of his journey up the Congo and yet they are aboard a ship near the mouth of the Thames and about to begin their own adventure, albeit one that is unlikely to rival Marlowe’s. Similarly in She, Holly recounts his incredible adventures in a manuscript delivered to an anonymous and therefore unremarkable narrator, who recounts what was for him the unusual experience of seeing Holly and his adopted son, Leo, for the first time. The same effect can be achieved by a first-person narrator recounting his adventures with a hero. Storyteller and adventurer, Marlowe the ordinary seaman is a contrast to the “remarkable” Kurtz and also a considerable adventurer in his own right; Holly is middle-aged and incredibly ugly and yet the companion of Leo “the Greek god” on his adventure; Mustard tells of the Charge of the Light Brigade to youthful readers who are exhorted to follow his example. In John Millais’ painting The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870), which was reproduced in Scouting for Boys, we see two spellbound boys in Elizabethan ruffs listening to a barefoot, earring-wearing seaman pointing to the sea’s horizon and presumably telling them of adventures that we know from the title of the painting one of the two boys will eventually exceed. Sometimes, however, the narrator is a boy, such as in Kidnapped where Davie’s lowland—and therefore lowly—manners contrast with those of the romantic highlander, even while he proves to be every bit as courageous as the sometimes childish and vainglorious Allan. In The Coral Island, the narrator Ralph has a “quiet” and “old-fashioned” nature which acts as a foil to the impishness of Peterkin and “hearty” and “lion-like” “disposition” of the “strapping” and “handsome” Jack (start of Chapter 2), but as Ralph’s last name, Rover, indicates, he has just as much wanderlust as his companions. These first-person narrators are distant from the fantasies they recount and also at the same time what invest them with reality. Similarly, the framing story is both a portal to another fantastic world and also what guarantees its veracity. But not all stories are narrated in the first person. Most of the heroes have names such as Tom Brown, Jack Martin, Jim Hawkins, and countless other Toms, Dicks, Harrys, Jacks, and Jims, indicating that they are ordinary boys as well as heroes, characters with whom the juvenile reader can identify as well as admire. In the school stories, the embedded story invariably has its own embedded narrative, the sporting contest. Like Tom Brown many of these stories culminate with a game, usually rugby or cricket. Many of the shorter stories are often little more than the description of a match and longer, serialised stories are sometimes simply a series of matches. The sporting contest is able to play such a role because it is also marked off from the ordinary school world by its own rules and customs. However, the contests fi rst recounted in Tom Brown were markedly different from their predecessors. As Pierre Bourdieu explains,

52 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 The shift from games to sports in the strict sense . . . took place in the educational establishments reserved for the “élites” of bourgeois society, the English public schools, where the sons of aristocratic or upperbourgeois families took over a number of popular—i.e. vulgar—games, simultaneously changing their meaning and function. . . . We can say that the bodily exercises of the élite are disconnected from the ordinary social occasions with which folk games remained associated (agrarian feasts, for example) and divested of the social and religious functions still attached to a number of traditional games . . . The school . . . is the place where practices endowed with social functions . . . are converted into bodily exercises, activities which are an end in themselves, a sort of physical art for art’s sake, governed by specific rules, increasingly irreducible to any functional necessity, and inserted into a specific calendar. . . . What is acquired in and through experience of school, a sort of retreat from the world and from real practice, of which the great boarding schools of the élite represent the fully developed form, is the propensity towards activity for no purpose, a fundamental aspect of the ethos of bourgeois élites, who always pride themselves on disinterestedness and defi ne themselves by an elective distance—manifested in art and sport—from material interests. (823–24) This shift was certainly evident to contemporaries, Hughes, for example, lamenting at the start of Tom Brown the decline of village games and recognizing that “we as a nation . . . are in a transition stage, feeling for and soon likely to find some better substitute,” the sports played at Rugby that he will describe later in the novel (46). Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s equation of sport with aestheticism is somewhat anachronistic, “beautiful game[s]” such as football or soccer largely emerging during the mid-twentieth century. While many stories are told by or from the point of view of a scholar who worships the beauty of a “blood” or sportsman, it is the inadequate scholar who frequently has all the aesthetic leanings. The “dunce” and “idiot” of The Fifth Form, Simon, fancies himself a poet but is really a McGonagall (50) and such cartoons as the one in Chums which showed a long-haired bohemian poet wondering what rhymes with “joys” only to have a child empty his toy box on his head were standard fare (1900: 243). When a writer in Chums boasted that the English were better at games than other nationalities he was asserting not the aesthetic but ethical superiority of the English (1900: 268). This is made clear in the penultimate chapter of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and final chapter concerning his life at school, “Tom Brown’s Last Match”: “But it’s more than a game. It’s an institution,” said Tom. “Yes,” said Arthur, “the birthright of British boys old and young, as habeas corpus and trial by jury are of British men.”

Romance and the Boys’ Story • 53 “The discipline and reliance on one another which it teaches is so valuable, I think” went on the master, “it ought to be such an unselfish game. It merges the individual in the eleven; he doesn’t play that he may win, but that his side may.” (300) Thus in the school fiction which followed there is nearly always a scene in which a boy performs an act of personal renunciation on the sporting field for the sake of his team. Like art, sport is situated outside the means-end rationality of everyday life and the marketplace but it is more an ethical than aesthetic activity. Moreover, while it does fulfi l the three main aspects of play proposed by perhaps the best known philosopher of its autonomy, Johan Huizinga— that is, freedom, disinterestedness, and secludedness—it nevertheless does have a purpose: to prepare boys for the “larger school of life.” As a form of play, sport is a quintessentially childlike activity but it is also how boys learn to become adults. The disinterestedness of sport ideologically disguises the material interests of the classes who play it, but it also demands to be applied to the world outside the sporting field. Just as T. S. Eliot points out that the doctrine of “art for art’s sake is a theory of life” (420), so Newbolt’s imperative to “Play up! play up! and play the game!” applies less to the sporting field than the world outside. The school story contains its own microcosm but the framing story is itself framed by the author’s life. Since “Most of the boys’ writers had experience of colonial life or of warfare and war reporting” (Mackenzie 208), a surprising number of these writers actually did have very adventurous lives. The first writer of adventure stories for boys, Marryat, attempted as a boy to run away to sea, eventually joined the famous frigate Impérieuse, rose to the rank of captain, fought in the Mediterranean, the West Indies, off the coast of North America, and in Burma, chased smugglers in the English Channel, was awarded the Royal Humane Society’s honorary medallion for designing a lifeboat and saving lives at sea (he jumped overboard on nearly a dozen occasions), and was elected to the Royal Society and awarded the membership of the Légion d’honneur largely for his adaptation of a signaling system (Laughton). Following the decline of his father’s fortunes, a direct consequence of the bankruptcy of Sir Walter Scott, whose novels were published by his uncle, Ballantyne went to work for the Hudson’s Bay Company, trading with Indians for furs and traveling across large parts of Rupert’s Land and Canada by canoe and sleigh (Butts). Mayne Reid immigrated to the United States at the age of twenty-one, moved all around the country taking a variety of jobs, fought in the Mexican-American War, was wounded and promoted to lieutenant (Butts). As Bratton observes, “his life . . . was as romantic as his fiction” (136). Before devoting himself full-time to writing adventure novels and stories, Henty had covered as a journalist the Crimean War, the Austro-Italian War of 1866 (during which he was arrested as a spy and boxed against George Meredith for Garibaldi), the inauguration of the Suez Canal, the Franco-Prussian

54 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 War, mining disturbances in Wales, the exploits of Colonel Fred Burnaby in Russia and those of Sir Garnet Wolseley in West Africa, the Second AngloAsante War, the Spanish Civil War of 1874, the tour of India of the Prince of Wales, and the Turco-Serbian war (Peter Newbolt). Even the more adult and literary writers led lives of adventure before becoming writers, Conrad being a captain in the merchant navy, Kipling and Haggard journalists (in India and Africa, respectively), and Stevenson traveled extensively throughout his adult life. All of this would be irrelevant to boy readers except for the fact that the authors and their publishers drew attention to their lives. Marryat published as Captain Marryat, Mayne Reid as Captain [sic] Reid (gilding the lily and pure invention were common), Stables as Dr. Gordon Stables, RN, and in prefaces and articles they would frequently draw attention to their adventurous pasts. For all the ways in which their lives as men of action differed from their apparently less serious lives as writers of boys’ fantasies, the former also gave veracity to the latter and would have suggested to their ordinary readers that they too might one day have such adventures. For as much as the fiction imitated the life, so many lives imitated the fiction. Stables had been a naval officer and war correspondent but after he became a writer his life seems to have copied his fiction as much his youthful experiences. According to Dunae, Stables lived in Ruscombe, near Twyford in Berkshire, in a large bungalow called “The Jungle.” The house was well named, for it stood amid a forest of overgrown shrubs and trees and sheltered what can only be called a menagerie—several large dogs, rabbits, cats, hamsters, pet mice and cockatoos. Nearby was a small, rudely-furnished shack that Stables called the “Wig-Wam.” There, in a spidery hand and violet ink, the doctor composed adventure tales for boys. . . . He would consume large amounts of Scotch whisky, and would become garrulous and irascible. Then the man who was known in the pages of the BOP as “the Boys’ Friend” became a dangerous character. The lads in Ruscombe were terrified of him. Many years later, they remembered him as cantankerous recluse, who perpetually wore a kilt and sported a fearsome skean-dhu; who would emerge from the “Wig-Wam” to berate delivery boys; who could be seen staggering out of the local pub, with a cockatoo perched on his should, a vicious dog in one hand, and a naval cutlass in the other, bellowing and flailing at anyone who came in his way. . . . In the early 1900s Stables would often steer his horse-drawn caravan—or “land yacht,” as he preferred to call it [to the house of a married woman he admired] . . . “The Wanderer,” as the land yacht was christened, would lumber up the High Street, seemingly oblivious to any rules of the road. Stables—who would be swearing vociferously at the irate tram-drivers—looked like an infuriated Don Quixote with his long moustaches waving in the wind. (1989: 31)

Romance and the Boys’ Story • 55 Others were somewhat less quixotic. Sir George Younghusband observed that actual soldiers only began talking like the soldiers in Barrack-Room Ballads after Kipling became a literary celebrity (Eby 153), Henty claimed that many boys joined the army as a consequence of reading his books (Arnold 63), and an article in the Spectator in 1888 claimed that a story in The Times about an attack on a mission in Africa was “simply chapters iii. to viii. in ‘Allan Quatermain’ rewritten” (qtd. in Katz 31). As Wendy Katz points out, Romance is the sort of writing wherein the boundaries between writer and work are subject to collapse at any moment. Haggard has Quatermain make long-winded speeches that are nothing but pure Haggard, and his works are in fact a giant repository of his own attitudes. The formlessness that results from this sort of writing has the effect of creating a work with no end; nothing is self-contained . . . With all its apparent distance from reality, romance does not distinguish itself as a separate, only more fanciful, world, but seems always to be arguing for a place in the affairs of every day. (33–34) For the adult reader this conflation represents the possibility that youthful fantasies can come alive in the everyday world, that the older man can become a boy, but for the younger reader it means that his youthful fantasies are a part of an adult world, that the boy must also be an adult. This brings us to a world of the adventure considered independently of the quotidian worlds of home and work. Within this world the two main activities are sport and fighting or warfare. Both are quintessential forms of romance because, as well as taking place away from the ordinary world, they rigidly separate their participants into heroes and villains who contest for a goal. The two activities were habitually associated, as the great popularity of Newbolt’s “Vitaï Lampada” suggests. The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Rugby (even though the cult of sport did not exist at Rugby in 1815) and the games of rugby in Tom Brown’s Schooldays are described as a form of warfare (78). Moreover, like games, war has a strong appeal for boys and young men, Stables declaring in How Jack MacKenzie Won his Epaulettes that “There is a glamour and romance about war that appeals to the heart of every young man worthy of the name in these islands” (v). Typically, in his preface to For Life and Liberty he reaches for an analogy with “savages” rather than Europeans: There can be no true bravery without a little dash of poetry, just to fire the blood. Even savages, in every land in which it has been my lot and luck to travel or sojourn—notably, perhaps, the Indians of the western wilds of America—possess that quality, and this it is which gives dash and élan to their battle charges, and lends a kind of music to their voices as, spear in hand, they rush yelling on to meet their enemies.

56 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 However, as much as war and games appeal to youth and as much as their players are “savages,” the heroes of both activities also fight “savages.” The ordinariness of the boy heroes enables their readers to identify with them but it also indicates that they exemplify conventional and therefore perfectly civilised English or British values. Thus their native adversaries are usually superstitious, frequently being reduced to terrified awe by some relatively ordinary piece of technology, usually a gun, and therefore in some way childlike. Such childishness does not always render the native harmless, the “dreadful superstitions” of Ballantyne’s otherwise “jovial” natives, for example, transforming them into “cruel bloodthirsty fiends . . . darting through the woods besmeared with blood and yelling like maniacs or demons,” thereby lacking the “restraint,” to use Marlowe’s word in Heart of Darkness, of the civilized Englishman (Gorilla Hunters 61). The enemy is also frequently an undifferentiated other, often figured as a swarm, flood, or seething mass. In Allan Quatermain, for example, the heroes fire a “storm of bullets” into a kraal that contains “a “thickening mob,” a “seething black mass,” and “human whirlpool” of natives (91, 92, 95). If these figures can be seen as standing for a childish lack of differentiation, then the figure of the lone or isolated Englishman or boy fighting these masses can be taken for the kind of individuality that only an adult possesses. Similarly, while the boy heroes rebel against various forms of adult injustice, they are also figures who exemplify conventional authority. When the younger boys in Tom Brown’s Schooldays are forced to be the fags of the fi fth form (which includes the villain Flashman), thereby serving, as Tom puts it, “a double set of masters . . . the lawful ones, who are responsible to the Doctor at any rate, and the unlawful—the tyrants, who are responsible to nobody” (154), his friend East cries “Down with the tyrants! . . . I’m all for law and order, and hurra for a revolution” (153). The aim of the revolution, or “strike” as it is also called, is to reinstitute traditional authority. Similarly when Stalky and his schoolmates cheer the head in “A Little Prep,” after learning that he has courageously saved the life of a boy by sucking diphtheria from his throat, the head canes them for their “impudence,” only to fi nd that the cheering extends to even those waiting to be caned (200), one of the scenes that has prompted one critic to accuse Kipling of sadomasochism (Seymour-Smith 275). Tom Brown and his schoolmates hero-worship the Doctor and regard the masters as “natural enemies” (237), though by the time they have reached the sixth form they have allied themselves with the latter. Thus revolts against the masters can sometimes be in the service of the head’s authority. Much the same paradox applies to the adventure stories since the heroes are frequently in confl ict with some kind of adult authority figure, such as David’s treacherous uncle Ebenezer in Kidnapped, while also fighting natives who themselves are often rebelling against English authority.

Romance and the Boys’ Story • 57 The doctrine of muscular Christianity that the boys embody has the same paradoxical qualities. Just as we know that Martin Rattler is a good boy because we are told that he is bad, so the apparently impious stress on the body’s vigour and manliness, such as we find in Rev. George Jackson’s column “Some Manly Words for Boys by Manly Men” in the BOP, is precisely what indicates the presence of higher, spiritual values. Muscular Christianity was gradually replaced with imperialism and nationalism but there is still the same apparent contradiction. In “The Flag of Their Country” chapter of Stalky & Co. the heroes are disgusted with a patriotic speech delivered by “an impeccable Conservative” (214) MP that culminates in him shaking out a Union Jack and declaring it “the concrete symbol of their land—worthy of all honour and reverence!” (219). The boys later call him “a Flopshus Cad, an Outrageous Stinker, a Jelly-bellied Flagflapper (this was Stalky’s contribution), and several other things which it is not seemly to put down” (220) but not because the flag represents everything they are in rebellion against but precisely because it was so “sacred and apart” (219). The axis of the quest also reconciles individual desire and social convention. Very rarely do boys simply return with treasure of one kind or another and if they do it must be put to good social use, such as delivering a mother from penury. The boys’ return as army or naval officers and acquire estates but these rewards for heroism carry new responsibilities. In the better writers, the goal of the quest can be epistemological, as Robert Fraser argues: Stevenson looked for his childhood, in the pre-moral world of boys; Haggard sought the roots of Western man in his African counterparts. . . . Kipling drew on constructs of Aryan, Indo-European humankind in the face of which the supposed sophistication of modern city dwellers, which at one level so alienated him, was of little account. Conan Doyle quested back further still, to mankind’s primordial past. . . . The Golden Fleece of quest romance, allied to the Holy Grail of Anthropology, was the nature of man himself. (76–77) But the return has a paradoxical aspect: while it represents the wrestling of an object from civilisation, it is at the same time the origin of civilisation. For the more conventional stories the most common object of the quest is not knowledge, actual treasures, or the rescue of a girl or woman but glory or societal recognition. In a large number, perhaps even the large majority of juvenile stories, such recognition is accorded by a mentor figure. These mentor figures are substitute-father figures and represent the common childish and adolescent desire for more glamorous and romantic parents. Thus whereas Davie’s father in Kidnapped is merely a schoolteacher, his mentor figure, Alan Breck, is a Jacobite rebel. Although Jim’s father is dead at the start of Treasure Island, actual fathers can still be present and have authority in the story but this is secondary to that of the mentor. In Marryat’s

58 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 Masterman Ready (1841), the middle-class father’s purely theoretical knowledge is supplemented by the practical knowledge of an old sea salt, the eponymous hero. Although the father’s authority is never in any real doubt, even he must admit to Masterman that “you are my superior—knowledge is power” and as the title of the book indicates it is the working-class man who has all the glamour (40). Similarly, while the title of Kipling’s Captains’ Courageous indicates that there are two paternal heroes, our sympathies are more consumed by the tough old Yankee fisherman who fishes the hero out of the sea and teaches him his life lessons than the boy’s father, the wealthy, self-made captain of industry. When the fathers are not present, there can be complementary mentor figures, though in this case the authority is with the more exotic or unconventional figure. In Kingston’s Captain Mugford, which features a shipwreck that has been converted into a classroom in a “wild part” of Cornwall, the boys have been left by their father in the hands of two mentors, the one whom they call their “salt tute,” the Captain Mugford who teaches them sea craft, and the other their “fresh tutor,” Richard Clare, who teaches them Greek and Latin. Again, the title of the novel indicates where the greatest authority lies. Although the father is described as “an honest man, and a kind man, and a true man, and a brave man,” the existence of two complementary mentor figures generally means that the father is superfluous or weak in some way. Mowgli’s two mentor figures— Baloo, “the sleepy brown bear . . . who can come and go where he pleases because he eats only nuts and roots and honey” (14) and the “cunning,” “reckless” panther Bagheera, with a “voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree” (14–15)—are so complementary psychologically that, apart from the necessities of the plot, there is no need for any father (Shere Khan says that Mowgli’s parents “have run off,” presumably after seeing him). Kim’s mentors, an English colonel involved in the Great Game and a Tibetan lama, are an apparent exception since they are rough equals in terms of authority. Critics often praise Kipling for this elevation of a non-Western authority figure, perhaps unaware that the more unconventional figure in boys’ fiction is always accorded more authority, though there is obviously something more radical in a mentor who comes not from another class but a radically different culture. Yet while these members are romantic figures and recognize the boys for their unusual qualities, they are nevertheless figures of adult authority. Moreover, what they recognize in the boys ultimately accords with dominant societal values. At the end of his school days, Tom Brown realizes that the Doctor has, as another master puts it, “watched over every step in [the boys’] school lives,” more specifically that he was able to turn Tom from his “mischief” by putting the new boy Arthur in his study, “in the hope that when you had somebody to lean on you, you would begin to stand a little steadier yourself, and get manliness and thoughtfulness” (307). This does mark a turning point in his life but it is only his realization of this much later that ensures that

Romance and the Boys’ Story • 59 “the Doctor’s victory was complete” and he is turned into a Carlylean hero worshipper (309). There is a similar turning point for the hero, Stephen, in The Fifth Form at St. Dominic’s when a master’s interest in him “acted like magic to his soul” and “saved Stephen from becoming a dunce” (68), while in a Stalky story, “Satisfaction of a Gentlemen,” an old boy who has returned to the school asks the head after they have been remembering old “lickings,” “Bates, dear, is there one single dam’ thing about us that you don’t know?” to which the head replies, “We-ll! It’s a shameful confession, but, you see, I love you all” (257). Similarly in Westward Ho! the relentless progression of the hero through the ranks culminates in him being knighted by Sir Francis Drake, though his desire for revenge on his rival in love leaves him a crippled and repentant figure at the end. In novels such as With Buller in Natal, With Clive in India, With Cochrane the Dauntless, With Frederick the Great, With Kitchener in the Soudan, With Lee in Virginia, With Moore at Corunna, With Roberts to Pretoria, and With Wolfe in Canada, a Henty boy’s progress will typically bring him closer and closer not to some treasure but to a general or sea captain who notices his exploits and rewards him with promotion. Thus the fantasy of an alternative parent, for all of the ways in which it registers discontent, is also a mystification and celebration of authority. This is not to say that there were not critiques of adolescent romance, particularly in the school fiction. G. F. Bradby’s The Lanchester Tradition begins with a brief tour of the “ancient schoolrooms, noble grounds, and salubrious climate” and introduces us to the Arnoldian figure of Dr. Abraham Lanchester, the school’s headmaster at the end of the eighteenth century, who “found the place little more than a country grammar school” and “left it an institution of National, almost Imperial, importance” (7–8). The self-appointed inheritor of this Lanchester tradition is a conservative house master, Mr. Chowdler, who epitomizes what had become by 1914 the virtually stereotypical aspects of the public school ethos. When his house wins a game of rugby, for example, the narrator notes with mocking irony that “Mr Chowdler was swept away by a wave of intense, almost religious, emotion,” “a sense of thankfulness, joy, and exultation” that he had not felt “since the relief of Ladysmith, where his own son was beleaguered” (129). Chowdler comes into conflict with the new headmaster, Flaggon, a radical with no interest in athletics and someone who, unlike Chowdler, had never been to a public school but, after a childhood in a humble Cumberland vicarage, had attained “a scholarship at a decaying provincial grammar school, and finally a classical exhibition at a small Oxford College” (51). The mockery of Chowdler, who is forced to resign by the end, might suggest that the novel is a satire of the public school ethos. However, another master, called Bent, a radical and apparent cynic, is finally revealed to be, like Stalky & Co., a true believer and he edits the papers of Dr. Lanchester and reveals that the great man, contrary to the beliefs of those such as Chowdler, had been a radical. If the rebelliousness of Stalky & Co. is in the service of a higher authority, tradition in this novel is the product of innovation.

60 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 Wodehouse’s delightfully eccentric Psmith in Mike adds the silent first letter to his name in a quite un-public-schoolboy desire for distinction, calls all his schoolmates “Comrade,” wears a monocle, dresses fastidiously, and when asked about his health by a master replies, “Sir, I grow thinnah and thinnah.” Most of the conventions of the school story are mocked at one stage or another, Psmith asking his soon-to-be study mate and fellow rebel, Mike, when he first meets him, for example, “Are you the Bully, the Pride of the School, or the Boy who is Led Astray and Takes to Drink in Chapter Sixteen?” (15). The novel is also replete with mock heroic references to all kinds of literature. When he first meets Psmith “Mike felt as Robinson Crusoe felt when he met Friday,” Mike broods in his study as Achilles refuses to leave his tent, a master’s eye is observed “rolling in a fine frenzy from heaven to earth,” and Mike fancies that his dignity has “a touch of the stone-walls-do-not-a-prisonmake sort of thing” (17, 72, 168, 195). The main butt of all this banter is the captain of the school cricket team, Adair, a dogged, humourless fellow who “had that passionate fondness for his school which every boy is popularly supposed to have, but which is implanted in about one in every thousand” (42). However, after Adair and Mike fight over the latter’s refusal to play cricket, the victorious Mike feels the “bad blood” is “drained” out of him and he comes to realize that he has “been making an ass of himself” (162). Mike then discovers what Psmith calls his “secret sorrow,” the fact that he too is a fi ne cricketer, and the two help their team to victory. In fact both had been refusing to play, out of resentment that they had been sent to Sedleigh, a new and minor public school, from more established schools after bad school reports. The team they defeat, Wrykyn, is Mike’s former school and he has only been allowed to play after an old boy confesses to having painted a master’s bull terrier red, a bad-taste prank that Psmith had previously claimed as his own in an attempt save Mike from punishment. The boy who takes the blame for something he has not done is, as we have seen, a staple of these school stories but Mike and Psmith’s decision to play for the school is, if anything, more noble than similar actions in previous stories. Sacrificing one’s own self-interest for the sake of the school is one thing, but it is quite another to do so after having also admitted, if only implicitly, to moral failings. Playing the “game” for an established public school is honourable, but playing it for a lesser school is more so. Similarly all the mockery of Adair and what he stands for only makes their final submission to him and his ideals all the more intense. Like Stalky & Co., the iconoclasts are the true believers. One of these late novels, Lunn’s The Harrovians even goes so far as to critique the cult of athletics practised by those such as Wodehouse. The main protagonist, Peter, is a scholar who begins his school life by worshiping the athletes but by the end of the novel he is leading a “revolt against the athletic gods” (275) that will result in the hegemony of the athletes being replaced, after he has left school, by that of a succeeding generation of scholars. Accompanying this assault on athleticism is a realistic demythologizing of the nature

Romance and the Boys’ Story • 61 of school hierarchies in general. Rather than any romantic revolts of fags against fag masters, Lunn makes it clear that the fag merely wants to become a fag master. Masculinity is not a kind of idealism but merely a will to power. However, as we have seen, this is precisely what makes school “such an excellent training for real life.” Just as Peter “learned physical endurance” in his earlier years, so when he becomes Head of the House he learns the “moral independence” of being able “to maintain an imperturbable exterior in face of insult” (239). Moreover, when Peter returns as an old boy he recognizes that during his time at Harrow he had lived the most intense years of his life. The current Head of the House says to him that all the “whopping” they received seems to him “like a mediaeval yarn” (304) and Peter finds himself agreeing with another old boy, albeit with his characteristic irony, that the current generation might have it a bit soft. Hard-headed realism has become old boy nostalgia, the worst of times now the best. What Lunn does to athletics, Coke does to romantic friendship in The Bending of the Twig. As with other tales of romantic friendship, Lunn’s story concerns the love of a timid, bookish boy, Lycidus, for a handsome, popular “blood” called Russell. Throughout the novel there are numerous scenes whose main purpose is to demonstrate that school stories do not prepare a boy for school life. In one, which is called “Homeric Happenings,” for example, Lycidus tries to fight someone who he has been told is the school bully, only to be laid across this much older boy’s knee and gently smacked, as he realizes to his utter humiliation that this boy has only been pretending to be that stock character. In another, Lycidus tries to reenact a scene from The Hill by admitting to something he has not done to save his friend, but the master punishes them both for their “tomfoolery” and the ungrateful Russell then “violently” kicks his acolyte and sentences him to six more mornings of doing his homework. After several years of being spurned and humiliated by Russell, Lycidus becomes the Head Boy and as such, after continual confrontations with Russell, must punish him for the sake of the house. He has learnt the hard lesson that he is not living in a school story but he has also learnt the even harder lesson of assuming what the House Master at the end calls “the responsibility of monitorship” (347). Thus at the end of the novel Lycidus’ house master says to him, “I want your School . . . to be a kind of minor religion with you, ranked by the side of Patriotism” and Lycidus leaves the school, choking back tears and resolving “that when Fate ordered him to quit the larger School of Life” he would “leave such a name behind him, that should win approval from those who would come after” (350). The harsh lessons of realism are themselves a kind of religion. Finally, mention should be made of Arthur Herman Gilkes’ alternative to the conventional figure of the Victorian headmaster in The Thing That Hath Been; Or a Young Man’s Mistakes. Gilkes was himself a far-from-orthodox master, disliking the cult of athletics, any form of public school snobbery, and the kind of flamboyant public display that was expected of headmasters

62 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 (Quigly 38–39). His fictional headmaster, John Martin, has been brought up by a widow of quite humble origins, whose ugliness, albeit as a rebuke to the sentimental figure of the Victorian mother, is rather bizarrely emphasized. Although he is a Socratic figure who repeatedly admits to not understanding the public school ideals that his colleagues take for granted, he is also someone who cannot stop himself from saying the truth. As a consequence, John is disliked by the other masters, an unpleasant lot forever engaged in various kinds of petty jealousies and rivalries, who epitomize the various types of schoolmaster, and at the end he loses his job because he cannot profess an orthodox Christian faith. But the courage with which he admits his lack of faith and the equanimity with which he is prepared to accept the consequences impress even his colleagues and he is recommended for a job as a librarian that he accepts. John is the antithesis of the Victorian headmaster but thereby the very epitome of his Christian ideals. Because these revisions are written for adults as critiques of a genre that is strongly identified with children and adolescents, they largely favour, as our discussion has implied, the form of circularity in which childish fantasy is dispelled by adult realities, only to be reasserted in a higher form at the end. Nevertheless, in sometimes criticising the harshness of schools actually in existence, the revisions are also criticizing the genre’s unthinking acceptance of the conventions that enable schoolboy misery. The school story is criticized for its lack of reality but also for its rigid, constraining form. Like any form of ideology, the public school ethos is unreal and yet only too real. Thus, as they demonstrate, the actual grubby realities of schoolboy existence nevertheless have an ideal dimension, so they also show how there is an inherent vitality to these same imperfect boys that can nevertheless be accommodated to a reformed school system. The anti-adventure stories of the pre-war period are also largely critiques of the childish fantasies of the genre. At the start of Heart of Darkness, the unnamed narrator sounds not unlike a narrator from the BOP when he says that the Thames had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled—the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen’s Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests—and that never returned. I had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith— the adventurers and the settlers; kings’ ships and the ships of men on ‘Change; captains, admirals, the dark ‘interlopers’ of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned ‘generals’ of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword,

Romance and the Boys’ Story • 63 and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires. (5) This is immediately undercut, Marlowe declaring to his audience that “this also . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth” (5). Similarly in Lord Jim, On the lower deck in the babel of two hundred voices [Jim] would forget himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sea-life of light literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shellfish to starve off starvation. He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men—always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book. (9–10) Jim has the looks to play such roles; Marlowe’s first impression was of an “upstanding, broad-shouldered,” “clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, [and] as promising a boy as the sun ever shone on” (39). He even blushes, suggesting that he has that blend of innocence and homoerotic charm so distinctive of the adventure hero. Nevertheless, Jim’s dreams of heroism are bitterly dashed when he abandons his apparently sinking ship, the Patna, and about eight hundred Muslim pilgrims, by leaping to the safety of a boat, an act of cowardice that becomes a “joke hatched in hell” (99) when the ship ends up not sinking. Yet the Marlowe of Heart of Darkness is ambivalent towards the colonial project. What “redeems” it, he says, is the idea only. “An idea at the back of it; not sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea— something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to” (7). Even towards the end he commends Kurtz as a “remarkable man.” Similarly, while Jim cannot fulfi l his romance fantasies, the French lieutenant of the gunboat that tows the Patna into port spends thirty hours aboard the stricken ship and when he recounts his experience to Marlowe, he says, with all the modesty usually characteristic of the stiff-upper-lipped English hero, that the worst part of his ordeal was having to eat his meals without his customary glass of wine. Straight after the lieutenant’s story, Marlowe recounts a comic incident involving a man who does go down with the ship after struggling to get a much larger, panic-struck woman into one of the boats. Although incongruous and comic, these acts are genuinely heroic. Moreover, Jim is not entirely a failure. When the inquest takes place, he faces his accusers, unlike the other officers who also abandoned ship. The head of this inquiry, Captain Montague Briely, who until then had had the kind of career of which Jim

64 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 dreams, commits suicide soon after, apparently identifying with Jim, and yet just before he leaps from his ship he is meticulous in carrying out his duties and is later hero-worshipped by his bewildered first mate. After working as a water clerk in ever more remote ports, Jim finally seizes his “chance” (the word is used frequently) and becomes the “Tuan” or lord of a remote Malaysian town. According to Stein, the man who gave him this “chance,” Jim is a “romantic” but he plays this role with all the kind of “devotion to duty” of which he had once dreamed. Eventually the dream is destroyed when the vicious Gentleman Brown, who has the Iago-like ability of locating other men’s weaknesses, insinuates that he shares a bond with Jim and yet, in vainly rejecting this insinuation, Jim behaves like an honourable gentleman. Such behavior does lead to the death of the chief’s son, who, as in the adventure tradition, is his inseparable friend and comrade. Jim has failed again but instead of escaping the town he faces the chief knowing that he will be killed: They say that the white man sent right and left at all those faces a proud and unflinching glance. Then with his hand over his lips he fell forward, dead. And that’s the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic. Not in the wildest days of his boyish visions could he have seen the alluring shape of such an extraordinary success. For it may very well be that in the short moment of his last proud and unflinching glance, he had beheld the face of that opportunity which, like an Eastern bride, had come veiled to his side. But we can see him, an obscure conqueror of fame, tearing himself out of the arms of a jealous love at the sign, at the call of his exalted egoism. He goes away from a living woman [the mistress he deserts in going to his death] to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct. (374) “Unflinching,” here used twice, was the word that described the actions of which Jim dreamed at the start of the novel. He commits suicide at the end but does fulfi l his “ideal of conduct.” The “egoism” of his adolescent ideal is nevertheless genuinely something “exalted.” Conrad originally conceived Lord Jim as one of three interrelated short stories, the others being Heart of Darkness and Youth. In the third of these, which Conrad wrote was made “out of the material of a boys’ story” (1986:417), Marlow tells of his first voyage as a young second mate to the East, how he and the rest of the crew made three attempts at the voyage but on each occasion had to turn back, how on their fourth attempt the ship had caught fire, how they had refused to be picked up by another ship, how they finally abandoned her, and how he then captained one of the two boats in horrendous conditions. Having finally arrived to shore, Marlowe remembers that all the East is contained in that vision of my youth. It is all in that moment when I opened my young eyes on it. I came upon it from a tussle

Romance and the Boys’ Story • 65 with the sea—and I was young—and I saw it looking at me. And this is all that is left of it! Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour—of youth! (38–39) Marlowe concludes his tale and the unnamed narrator says that he and his companions, a lawyer, financier, and accountant, are looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone—has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash—together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions. (39) Yet it was not an illusion. Marlow and the rest of the crew had acted courageously, he had had his moment of vision, adolescence passes but it did once exist. Although the story was written and published before Lord Jim, later works do not have more authority than earlier ones. If the novel undercuts this vision of adolescence then it can equally be said that this is an answer to Lord Jim’s failure. Moreover, for all the ways in which these stories contrast adult realities, particularly the work of honest and capable administrators and seamen, to youthful fantasies, they also show how these fantasies can be reduced to a form of imperial domination. While they insist on the reality of work, they also contrast its nobler aspects to the realities of this domination. And as the reality of work is finally invested with ideal characteristics, so its initial ideal aspects eventually take on a practical aspect. Thus, like the school stories, they largely trace a circular movement from illusion to reality back towards some kind an ideal, but they also move in the opposite direction, away from the brutal realities of the colonial project and towards the assertion of ideals that nevertheless exist within the practical realities of what is benign in colonialism. Significantly, Conrad, Stevenson, and Kipling largely write against a certain kind of adventure story, not the genre as a whole. Even after the publication of these two novels and the short story, Kipling could write an essay praising Marryat. In Heart of Darkness Marlowe is not some disinterested Spencer of legend searching for a Dr. Livingston but carrying out a mission for an organization that he describes as a “Company” and “Trading Society.” This trade mission is, as Marlowe puts it, “just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale.” Such robbery is justified in terms of a civilizing mission, Kurtz beginning his report for the company, “we must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings . . . By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.” It is not adolescent romance but the civilizing mission that terminates with the scrawled imperative at the end of Kurtz’s report, “Exterminate all the brutes!” (51). The first generation of adventure writers did extol the civilizing mission. In Kingston’s The Rocky Mountains, for example, the adolescent hero offers up

66 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 the following meditation which is worth quoting at length because it is quite typical of all his novels: Far removed from the benign influences of Christianity, these red men only acted according to the impulses of their barbarous nature. The thought came upon me with great force, Is it not the duty of white men who are Christians to send the blessed light of the gospel, by every means in their power, to their benighted fellow-creatures? They have souls as we have, and they are as capable of receiving the truths of the gospel as we are. Bold, energetic men, imbued with the love of souls, are required, who, ready to sacrifice all the enjoyments of civilization, will cast themselves fearlessly among the native tribes, and by patience and perseverance endeavour to induce them to listen to the message of reconciliation, and to imitate the example of Him who died for them. (162) There are similar passages in Ballantyne’s novels except that he also makes his missionaries into traders and his traders into missionaries. In Ungava, for example, the hero comments that The missionaries trade . . . in order that they may live and preach. ’Twould be a good thing for the Indian country if the same principles and practice actuated the traders; with this difference, that instead of missionaries becoming fur-traders, the fur-traders would become missionaries. (222) Although the narrator only hints at the possibility that the missionaries’ “brief intercourse with the traders” has “sown” the “good seed” of Christianity, in other novels, such as The Coral Island, its sequel The Gorilla Hunters, and The Rocky Mountains, the main native protagonists do convert to Christianity. However, amongst the later generation the civilizing mission is rarely if ever evoked, as we would expect given as we have seen their anti-Evangelical aspects. Of course Evangelism was replaced by imperialism, but in Stables and Henty there is no desire to turn the natives into miniature Englishmen. Similarly, while there is hero worship of various imperial figures, the emphasis is not on the boy lording it over the natives but his submission to authority, even his sacrificial acts. No adolescent ever assumes Kurtz’s or even the older Jim’s godlike powers. Indeed the presence of mentors makes this impossible. There are similar white god figures in other adult adventure stories. Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” tells the tale of two “loafers” or disreputable whites who travel to a remote region of Afghanistan with a cargo of rifles and some Masonic secrets that convince the natives that they are gods. In Stevenson’s The Beach of Falesá the white god figure is a gentleman trader called Case who runs his competitors off the island or to early graves, in part by convincing the natives that he is in league with a local devil called Tiapolo. One of Stevenson’s other late and dark Pacific stories, The Ebb Tide,

Romance and the Boys’ Story • 67 also features a gentleman called Attwater, a terrifying madman who executes the fate of a vengeful Old Testament God, explaining that he “gave these beggars [the natives] what they wanted: a judge in Israel, the bearer of the sword and scourge; I was making a new people here; and behold, the angel of the Lord smote them and they were not!” (1996: 204). Just as Kurtz is discovered to be “hollow at the core,” so these white gods are shown to be false idols. Kipling’s hero comes unstuck when he decides to marry a woman, breaking both his contract to have nothing to do with women and alcohol and a native taboo against gods marrying mortals, and she bites him in fear, thereby revealing him to be flesh and blood. When the narrator of The Beach of Falesá, Wiltshire, goes to Case’s mountain retreat, he discovers that the natives have been scared not by a devil or devils but by such children’s toys as aeolian harps that moan in the wind and masks painted with luminous paint to produce ghostly effects at night. Only Case remains a formidable presence, having terrified one of his former white adversaries into an infantile Christianity, but this is because his power in the narrative is largely exercised upon the white rogues, not an innocent native population. Moreover, all these adventurers are motivated not by the desire for adventure like the boys in the juvenile fiction but the lowest of commercial motives. They are traders of one kind or another, Kurtz after ivory; Case, copra; and Attwater, pearls; and while Kipling’s rogues simply want to found an empire (for which they expect an eventual knighthood), their background is in various kinds of petty extortion and blackmail. As Attwater explains, “I have had a business, and a colony, and a mission of my own. I was a man of the world before I was a Christian; I’m a man of the world still, and I made my mission pay” (1996: 204). Just as the civilizing mission is a fraud played on native superstition, so the quest for riches is merely a criminal racket. Of course, elsewhere Kipling does notoriously evoke the civilizing mission, most notoriously in “The White Man’s Burden,” where he does appeal to the United States to assume its civilizing responsibilities but as the title makes clear this is “no tawdry rule of kings, / But toil of serf and sweeper—/ the tale of common things” (129). One of its companion poems that achieved a more lasting and deeper resonance within the popular imagination, “Recessional,” does not even invoke the civilizing mission, instead prophesying that Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! (130) The notions of duty and sacrifice proposed in “The White Man’s Burden” and “Recessional” reverse the basic colonial relationship between the civilizing mission and trade: whereas in the latter something spiritual (civilization) is given in return for something material (the riches of the foreign land), duty

68 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 and sacrifice demand that the European or English subject give up something material in exchange for the spiritual renewal of civilization. Of course such notions can be an ideological justification and mask for this basic colonial exchange since ideology frequently works by reversing the relationships of reality. This did not escape many of these writers’ contemporaries. As J. A. Hobson argued in Imperialism: A Study (1902), All the purer and more elevated adjuncts of Imperialism are kept to the fore by religious and philanthropic agencies: patriotism appeals to the general lust of power within a people by suggestions of nobler uses, adopting the forms of self-sacrifice to cover domination and the love of adventure. So Christianity becomes ‘imperialist’ to the Archbishop of Canterbury, a ‘going out to all the world to preach the gospel’; trade becomes ‘imperialist’ in the eyes of merchants seeking a world market. (198) However, sacrifice cannot be reduced to simply the colonial exchange of civilisation for material wealth. Significantly, in none of these stories about white god figures is any kind of sacrificial ethos critiqued as a justification for domination. With the exception of Jim, these white god figures are all middle-aged men of decidedly cynical dispositions and even Jim’s real fall occurs not when as a youth he suffers the “joke hatched in hell” but as a more mature man when he fails to live up to his sobriquet “Lord.” Similarly, while romance can “cover domination,” it cannot be reduced to it. As White points out, in Conrad’s writing “adventuring and pioneering, while often admirable endeavors, were not synonymous with empire building; they were in fact antithetical” (4), a distinction that also can be applied to Kipling and Stevenson. This is even more the case with adolescent romances in which the boys receive recognition from adult mentor figures precisely for curbing and denying their dominating instincts. Conrad, Kipling, and Stevenson could have taken aim at the adolescent ideal but instead chose the antithetical figure of the adult white god. It is a measure of its strength that these anti-romances and antiadventure stories left the adolescent ideal largely intact.

Chapter Three Sexuality and Romance in the Girls’ Stories

The boys’ stories might be full of “unblushing medical details” but can we expect the same from the stories written for girls? If adolescence for Victorian boys was not so much a time of innocence, but rather a time in which their acknowledged sexuality was not yet directed towards a sexual relationship, innocence has a rather more important role to play in defining the adolescence of Victorian girls. There is as much anxiety expressed over girls’ knowledge as there is over boys’ behaviour. If we are looking for an example of a Victorian Victorian writing on this subject, we can do no better than Queen Victoria herself, writing in 1885 about her anxiety over her youngest daughter’s approaching wedding: I count the months, weeks and days that she is still my own sweet, unspoilt, innocent lily and child. That thought—that agonising thought which I always felt, and which I often wonder any mother can bear of giving up your own child, from whom all has been carefully kept and guarded—to a stranger to do unto her as he likes is to me that most torturing thought in the world. While I feel no girl could go to the altar (and would probably refuse) if she knew all, there is something very dreadful about the sort of trap she is being led into. (qtd. in Munich 192) Girlhood, understood as a continuation of childhood, is here figured not so much as a biological stage of life but as a condition that can itself be “kept and guarded” for as long as the girl can be kept from the knowledge of adult sexuality. Marriage at once puts an end to girlhood, not because of the adult duties involved in taking up what, for a woman, was the equivalent of a career for men, but because it puts an end to innocence.

69

70 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 In her study of Victorian girlhood, The Awkward Age, Sarah Bilston has observed how frequently girls’ stories, advice manuals, and magazine articles quoted lines from Longfellow’s 1841 poem “Maidenhood,” in particular the lines from its third stanza depicting the “maiden” Standing, with reluctant feet, Where the brook and river meet, Womanhood and childhood fleet! The image of the brook and river meeting provided the title or subtitle for novels from the mid-century up to the century’s end. While these novels concern themselves, as their titles suggest, with the “meeting” of brook and river, that time when the girl stands “Between Brook and River” as one subtitle puts it, the image itself suggests that childhood is one state, womanhood another quite different state. Adolescence itself is not represented in this image, except as a temporary suspension between the two alternative states, a reluctance to make the move from childhood into womanhood. Yet the same books that quote this image are themselves primarily concerned with the representation of adolescent girlhood, creating for it the kind of space the image itself denies. These are books written primarily for girls, and which represent girlhood as a time that is clearly distinguished from childhood, on the one hand, and adulthood on the other. It is not represented as a time of indecision, reluctance, and delay, but rather as a time of principled idealism, action, and aspiration. No longer a child, but not yet married, the adolescent girl is represented as being motherly, without being a mother; romantic, without being engaged. Bilston presents a sustained and nuanced study of the representation of girlhood in Victorian fiction, arguing, as we do, that there was more recognition of this “awkward age” in the decades before the publication of G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence than has been generally assumed and than the river and brook metaphor might suggest. She argues that these representations of girlhood were as significant for adult women, writers, and readers, as for girls themselves. Reading girlhood as a time both of rebellion and possibility, Bilston suggests that these representations offered a way of questioning femininity and the traditional roles of a Victorian woman in a way that may have “helped lay the groundwork for fin de siecle feminist challenges to traditional Victorian gender norms” (7). Her understanding of adolescence in Hall’s terms, however, as a time of awkwardness, self-absorption, and rebellious discontent, has an effect both on her selection of texts and on her reading of those texts. She gives an extended account of the significance of Jane Eyre, discussing its importance as a novel revolutionary in its charting of emergent sexuality, a discussion we will return to, and yet she argues that what is most striking to the modern reader of Jane Eyre is “the comparative absence of an adolescence.” She compares

Sexuality and Romance in the Girls’ Stories • 71 Jane’s rebelliousness as a child with her “prosaic assumption of adult tasks and responsibilities” (Bronte 29). Jane’s childhood rebellion, however, is worth looking at closely, because both the nature and the timing of the rebellion fit our reading of Victorian adolescence as a time of romantic idealism. Jane is no rebel without a cause, but even as a child rebels against what she recognises as injustice and hypocrisy. In particular, she insists on the value that is emphasised in girls’ fiction of the period again and again, the value of truth: “I am not deceitful: if I were, I should say I loved you; but I declare, I do not love you: I dislike you the worst of anybody in the world except John Reed; and this book about the liar, you may give to your girl Georgiana, for it is she who tells lies, and not I.” (36) In response, Mrs. Reed backs down, arguing only instead, “But you are passionate, Jane, that you must allow” (37). Jane is indeed represented as passionate in the novel, from the first scenes representing her at ten, till her marriage to Rochester in the final chapter. Yet we are told that the resistance she shows to John Reed in the opening scene of the novel was “a new thing for me” (12), and that she had never before spoken back to him or “declared aloud” any of her feelings (11). She describes herself as a child always trying to please her relatives, “to win anyone’s favour” (15), and, indeed, the servants’ complaint about her is that she is “an underhand little thing” (12). Gilbert and Gubar’s reading of Jane’s imprisonment in the “Red Room” as symbolic of the onset of menstruation might seem questionable, given that Jane is only ten at the time (and, we are told, appears younger). Nevertheless, it is surely significant that the novel begins with Jane’s first-ever act of resistance, and a new feeling of “passion” that is no longer simply addressed to actual relationships but to an abstract ideal, the idea of truth. It also begins with Jane’s departure from the only home she has known, as she is sent away to school. Beginning with this departure from home, and ending when Jane is at last able to establish a new home with Rochester, the narrative can be read as taking place entirely within the space of adolescence, the space between childhood and womanhood. Jane Eyre is about girlhood, but it is only problematically a story for girls. In one of the earliest girls’ school stories, Meade’s A World of Girls (1886), the novel Jane Eyre is singled out for notice as a banned book the girls are forbidden to read. Girls were kept and guarded from this novel because of what Jane knows. According to Margaret Oliphant, Jane represents the destruction of an ideal: [We had an] ideal . . . in the old halcyon days of novel-writing; when suddenly there stole upon the scene . . . a little fierce incendiary, doomed to

72 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 turn the world of fancy upside down. She stole upon the scene—pale, small, by no means beautiful—something of a genius, something of a vixen—a dangerous little person, inimical to the peace of society . . . Such was the impetuous little spirit which dashed into our well-ordered world, broke its boundaries, and defied its principles—and the most alarming revolution of modern times has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre. (qtd. in Bilston 29–30) Bilston herself emphasises the gap between Oliphant’s portrayal of Jane Eyre, and Bronte’s own portrait of her heroine, noting that Oliphant’s equation of girlhood with anarchy is ironically closer to modern conceptions of adolescence—and to the version of girlhood Bilston herself is interested in exploring. Nevertheless, Bilston’s detailed analysis and explanation of Oliphant’s criticism is very helpful. In particular, she identifies the most radical aspect of Jane Eyre’s story to be what Jane knows. Jane is no innocent, neither shocked nor surprised by Rochester’s account of his love affairs. While much of the tension of the novel comes from Jane’s uncertainty about Rochester’s intentions towards herself, she recognises his feelings for her, and has no uncertainty about her own feelings for him: as Bilston puts it, Jane Eyre offers an “account of premarital sexual desire.” In its representation of a space for desire and maturation outside marriage, Bilston argues, Jane Eyre was an “assault on contemporary conceptions of the transition to womanhood” (29). According to Kelly Hager, in a conference presentation Bilston cites, both Charlotte and Emily Bronte, through their representations of emergent sexuality between childhood and maturity, “defi ned for us what we now unthinkingly call adolescence” (29). Oliphant worried that the “startling and original [doctrines] propounded by Jane Eyre” were dangerously influential, copied by “a host of followers or imitators.” Let us look then at the novels written a generation later, soon after Queen Victoria’s daughter had been led as an innocent child into the trap of marriage, and when Jane Eyre was singled out as a book banned from schoolgirl reading. One of the most interesting novels of this generation is Mona Maclean, a story of a young medical student, published in 1892. A contemporary review in The New York Times suggested that “as likely as not we shall have a ‘Mona Maclean craze,’ for this romance will find its way into many study rooms and hospitals (“Newest of Spring Novels”). This was no doubt the case: the novel went through fifteen editions by 1900, and was still being reprinted as late as 1910. The story of a young medical student, Mona Maclean begins with the heroine’s failure to pass a set of medical examinations, and focuses on the uncertain time in her life afterwards when she temporarily leaves her studies to spend time with cousins on the two very different sides of her family before finally, at the end of the novel, taking her exams a second time, marrying a young doctor, and setting up a practice with him on equal terms. Although the novel ends with Mona’s marriage, its focus is not

Sexuality and Romance in the Girls’ Stories • 73 on romance. Mona’s story is largely about the negotiation of class, with the different sides of the family having very different social rankings, in relation to which Mona must position herself. Mona’s idealism makes it impossible for her to “cut” her poor relations, as her friends advise, even though she herself is appalled to take up an invitation to stay with her cousin Rachel only to find she is expected to serve behind the counter of a shop. Her status is further complicated even within her usual middle-class circle by the fact of her being a medical student. The author, Margaret Todd, was herself a medical student, whose initial failure to pass her medical examinations may have been a result of the fact that she wrote the novel before completing her studies. In this novel, Margaret Todd explicitly addresses the issue of what girls should know and, in particular, is concerned to distinguish between different kinds of knowledge. Mona’s wealthy uncle, Sir Douglas Munro, declares, “when I think of all that girl must know, it makes me sick—sick!” (50). The kind of knowledge a medical student must acquire makes impossible the kind of innocence that allowed Queen Victoria’s daughter to be led to the altar as an unspoilt lily. Nevertheless, Sir Douglas has to admit that “when I am speaking to her—upon my soul, I don’t believe it has done her a bit of harm!” (51). His expectation, as he admits in a conversation with her on the topic, is that a medical training must make a women “hard and blunted,” and yet, he concedes, though he has searched her face for “the hard lines that must be there,” he can find “not a trace that is not perfectly womanly” (21). Although it is the necessary loss of innocence that medical training entails that makes Sir Douglas “sick—sick!,” he also understands the study of medicine only in terms of facts. Mona does not feel able to explain to him “the wonder and the beauty of the work,” the way “variations of a common type” can be seen to develop “in accordance with fi xed law” so perfectly that, she believes, it would seem “like an impossible fairy tale.” Sir Douglas may not understand her passion for medicine, but what he sees in her as she struggles to find words is “a light . . . only seen in the eyes of those who can see the ideal in the actual,” a light that makes her “beautiful” (22–23). It is Mona’s idealism, the romance of “fi xed law,” which makes her womanly, and prevents her being hardened by the study of medicine. Sir Douglas is unable to address directly the relation between medical knowledge and the sexual knowledge that is his real concern. In the novel, this issue is addressed separately, when Mona is living not as a doctor or a medical student but as an assistant shopkeeper. Once again, however, Mona’s idealism and belief in “fi xed law” makes it impossible for her knowledge to harden her. Twice, while living with her shop-keeping cousin in Scotland, she is faced with the kind of sexual improprieties that Sir Douglas might wish girls not to know about. First, she becomes aware of an improper relationship developing between a young girl with whom she is acquainted and an older man, who has been arranging secret meetings with the unchaperoned girl. It

74 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 is clear that Mona herself has a clearer understanding than the girl, Matilda Cookson, does of the dangers of the relationship, asking her “do you know how men talk about girls who ‘give themselves away’ as they call it?” (216). Her appeal is to Matilda’s idealism, the “dream” of high ideals that is, as Mona insists, the one “real chance in life” (217). On learning that Matilda’s one wish is to marry, she does not consider whether or not this relationship is likely to lead to marriage or compromise the girl’s chances, but asks instead if marriage should really be thought “the end of life.” And Matilda’s wish to marry is presented as surprising to Mona, who “had met many girls who chafed at home duties, and longed for a ‘sphere’, but [never before] a girl who longed for a husband, qua husband” (217). The second incident involves the return home of a girl with her newly born illegitimate child. Mona’s innocence is emphasised in relation to the “great gulf of experience and sorrow” which separates her from the young mother, even as the young mother is repeatedly referred to as an “ignorant child,” a “butterfly . . . frivolous and unprepared,” an “injured and suffering child,” and as “poor little Maggie” (328–32). When the girl’s own mother returns home, Mona must persuade her to allow her disgraced daughter to stay under her roof. Mona says, “I am not a child, Jenny . . . I know as well as you do what the world would say, but we are away from the world just now” (340). It is this distance from worldliness, not ignorance, which defines Mona’s innocence. About halfway through the novel, the mid-Victorian ideal of girlhood innocence is made the subject of a discussion between Mona and one of her close friends, Doris. Mona is laughing about Doris’s attractiveness to men, and Doris retorts, “I have scarcely had an offer of marriage in my life!” (181). Discussing the matter more seriously, they agree that no girl can expect her first proposal, which should come like “a slap in the face.” After that, she should be knowing enough not to encourage any further proposals, except, presumably, the one she intends to accept. “I imagine that very few women who really respect themselves have more than one,” Mona says. As Doris puts it, after that first proposal, “one gets to know when there is electricity in the air” (182). The tone of this conversation is complex. Indeed, it is almost too complex for the girls themselves: talking about the mysteriousness of men, Doris “did not in the least mean it for wit,” though Mona assumes that she does. So it is hard to be sure quite how serious they are about the ideal of girlhood innocence lasting up until that first proposal. Nevertheless, the mathematics do not quite add up, suggesting the transition from girlhood innocence to adulthood as a married woman can’t be as simple as the brook and river metaphor implies. If the first proposal is a slap in the face, followed by knowingness, then it is the knowingness that characterises the space of adolescence, the period between the first proposal and the second proposal which the girl might expect. Even Doris’s retort that she has “scarcely” had an offer of marriage suggests that perhaps she has had at least one proposal, or become aware of some degree of “electricity.” Mona herself has several proposals in the course of the novel.

Sexuality and Romance in the Girls’ Stories • 75 The first proposal comes from “the Sahib,” Dickinson, a friend of her uncle’s, who knows her through her society connections. But from the start “she looked upon him precisely as she looked upon the women who were her friends” (67), and when he proposes to her, “it was so absolutely unexpected, that for a moment Mona thought it was a joke” (314). She is annoyed by his proposal, but it comes as a surprise not because of her own innocence, but because she is more knowing than he is about his feelings. She is well aware that he does not love her, but only “admired her, sympathised with her,” and the proposal annoys her because it suggests he can only imagine “marriage for a woman, like money for a beggar, the sole standard by which all good feeling was to be tried” (314–15). The second proposal, true to Mona and Doris’s framework, is more expected, partly because Mona’s cousin is so evidently eager to set up what she considers a good marriage to the impossibly unromantic Mr. Brown, owner of the most prosperous shop in Borrowness. Mona does do her best not to encourage this proposal which is clearly unthinkable for her, given the reader’s understanding of her true social status. Nevertheless, Mona’s knowingness is not enough to keep her from having to turn down this second proposal, the proposal she had assumed “very few women who really respect themselves” ever should receive. Mona then is as knowing as Sir Douglas could possibly fear. And yet, for all she knows, she preserves an innocence that is as idealised in this novel as Queen Victoria’s idealisation of her youngest daughter’s ignorance. The independence of this kind of innocence from being affected by any other kinds of knowingness, in fact, could be understood as the main message of the novel. It is interesting that Mona’s “innocence” is regarded again and again by other characters in the novel in terms of “honesty,” the single quality that most characterises the idealised adolescent girl of Victorian fiction. Her “honesty” is observed by a good family friend and mentor of hers, the elderly Mr. Reynolds, when she is talking about her life with her cousin Rachel in Borrowness. Mona reveals that part of what has made her life bearable has been the occasional company of “some one there a great deal more cultured than myself.” The honesty he admires in her is demonstrated by the “simplicity” with which she talks of her friendship with a man, her comment that he is “nice enough to be a woman” showing how absolutely unaware she is that there could be any other basis for their relationship: “Man or woman?” “Man, but he was nice enough to be a woman.” The words were spoken with absolute simplicity. Clearly, the idea of love and marriage had not crossed her mind. . . . “Honest is not the word for her,” he thought. “She is simply crystalline.” (207–208) The innocence of Mona’s relationship with the Sahib is explained early on as being a result of “the excitement and enthusiasm of adolescence” and the “determination to live to some good purpose,” distracting her from any

76 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 thoughts of matrimony (67). If this adolescent determination looks ahead to an adult purpose in life, however, it preserves an innocence that is regarded, at least by the men in Mona’s life, as childlike. “What a simple-hearted child she was,” thinks Mr. Reynolds, when he realises the extent of her crystalline honesty (208). Similarly, when the Sahib realises she has turned his proposal down not because of feelings held for anyone else, but through her adolescent idealism, he brightens visibly at the thought “that this clever woman was more of a child in some respects than half the flimsy damsels in the ball-room” (316). Nowhere in the novel is the apparent childishness of Mona’s innocence emphasised so much as in the scene where Dr. Ralph Dudley finally makes her the proposal she is able to accept. Apparently completely unaware of her feelings towards him, or what they might mean, she takes his hand “almost unconsciously” as he helps her into his gig, and wonders whether she is drugged or mad, she feels so utterly lacking in savoir faire. She is said to be “unguarded as a child,” and yet the fact that she feels so consciously unconscious, so unlike herself in her lack of savoir faire, does suggest the tremendous work of psychic repression going on to allow her to remain so innocent of her feelings. Nevertheless, this innocence means that, despite everything Mona knows, despite the two marriage proposals she has previously received, this moment comes to Mona as just as much of a shock as that “first proposal” she and Doris joked about. “This is death,” Mona thinks, her heart beating frantically, but the reader is reassured that “it was life, not death” (345). This novel is unusually complex in its treatment of adolescent innocence, and, at the same time, unusually focused on the issue, since Margaret Todd is writing with the purpose of defending medical training for women. In the ways it links the issue of innocence with issues of class definition and a contrast between worldliness on the one hand and a romantic idealism on the other, however, it is very much of its time. It is interesting that the Sahib contrasts Mona’s childish innocence with “the flimsy damsels in the ballrooms.” The contrast between the simple, innocent adolescent with a more sexually aware, worldly type is one that is made frequently in girls’ fiction of the period. The heroine’s innocence preserves the romance of adolescence from the worldly considerations which compromise marriage for girls just as the workforce represents a place of compromise for boys. That marriage can be understood in basely materialistic terms is made very clear throughout the novel, from Mona’s aunt’s hopes for her marriage with the owner of the most prosperous general store in Borrowness, to the Sahib’s “vulgar tangible coin of an offer of marriage,” as Mona regards it (314). Yet a very clear distinction is made between this childlike innocence and a childish ignorance. Where innocence is associated with idealism, ignorance in contrast is typically associated with worldliness and frivolity. Compared to Mona Maclean: Medical Student, the enormously popular Olive Roscoe by Evelyn Everett Green, first published in 1896, seems to belong to an earlier generation (except for the name Olive, absolutely of its era, and popular for another couple of generations to come, maybe in part because of

Sexuality and Romance in the Girls’ Stories • 77 the influence of the novel). Olive Roscoe is no medical student, but “a dainty vision” dressed, like the typical heroine of a novel, very simply in pale grey. She expects to live “from childhood to old age” in the South Devon parish where she has been brought up by her aunt and uncle, having been exposed to “none of the new-fangled desires after revolt and ‘liberty’” (23). She learns, however, that she was not orphaned as she supposed, but sent away as a baby when her mother, suffering a nervous collapse, refused to accept her as her own child. Now her mother has died, and her father takes her back into the family home as a “new sister” to her siblings, sisters Margaret, Pearl, Madge, and Ciss, and brothers Fergus, Basil, and Robbie. The story centres around the interactions and comparisons between Olive and two of the sisters, Pearl and Madge, as well as around Olive’s relationship with Basil, the brother crippled in a mining accident. The distinction between romantic idealism and worldly materialism is made even more sharply in this novel, the worldly Pearl regarding the heroine Olive as a “Puritan,” “old-fashioned” in her emphasis on “duty and dull things like that” (232). But there is another distinction that is equally important, between Olive’s idealistic determination to live, like Mona, “to some good purpose,” and Madge’s determination to remain a child. The names Pearl and Madge are, curiously, both versions of the name Margaret, suggesting the ways in which these characters serve as contrasting versions of girlhood. Margaret herself is relatively unimportant both in terms of theme and plot. As Margaret’s father explains, “she has her mother’s place to fill” (75), and so it is Olive who replaces Margaret as the standard for girlhood, by which the other girls are judged. Pearl is one of those “flimsy damsels in the ballroom” that Mona made such a contrast with for the Sahib in Mona Maclean. At the age of eighteen, Pearl is far too “knowing,” conscious of her own charms, constantly monitoring the quality of attention she receives from potential suitors, and canny too in weighing up her suitors’ likely prospects, watching to see “which will first climb high in the ladder of success” (134). As Pearl herself says, “I can’t help knowing that I can pretty well pick and choose . . . I want to make sure of finding one who will be able to give me the things I want” (232–33). This is the knowing worldliness that the popular antifeminist journalist and novelist Eliza Lynn Linton represents almost as a form of prostitution in her provocative 1865 article, “The Girl of the Period.” While Lynn Linton regarded this kind of worldliness as a social phenomenon very much of the 1860s, in fact “the Girl of the Period” was almost as timeless a type as the “old-fashioned” girl in grey, and the phrase continued to be used for the rest of the nineteenth century, before long being used to contrast the girl of the current period with the newly idealised old-fashioned girls of 1865 and later. Being “of the period” remains a constant marker of worldliness. Even Pearl’s name emphasises how tied to her period she was, since Pearl was a newly fashionable form of the name Margaret in the 1890s, while Margaret had been one of the ten most common names for girls since the fifteenth century. Pearl only became fashionable in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, and declined sharply in popularity again after the First World War.

78 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 The name Madge, in contrast, is hardly a name at all, but a variant of Margaret that would normally only ever have been used as a pet name. Whereas the name Pearl reflects Mr Roscoe’s idea of Pearl as a “treasure” and her own sense of self-worth on the marriage market, the name Madge reflects this younger sister’s overlooked status, though also, perhaps, her relative freedom. Madge is “not very tall, and is often taken for thirteen or fourteen; but as a matter of fact she is close upon sixteen” (75). Dismissed by Pearl as “just a tomboy,” “forever with the children,” she is described more positively by Basil as “the wild hawk of the family.” Mr. Roscoe explains, “I haven’t the heart to insist [that she look less of a child] when she begs so hard to be allowed her freedom a little longer” (75). But this petted status prevents Madge from having any real presence or importance in the world. While Pearl must learn humility, and to think less of her clothes and her looks, Madge learns under Olive’s influence to pay more attention to her appearance, transforming herself “from a big girl into a young lady” by lengthening her skirts and putting up her hair. Newly self-conscious, she emerges “kindling and glowing half with pleasure and half with a sort of sheepish shame” (172). It is interesting that Madge is “kindling and glowing” at this point, because this was the accepted sign in the Victorian novel of a girl’s awareness of a man’s intentions towards her, or of her own feelings for him. Much literature of the period stressed the need for this kind of awakening to be delayed until that first, and ideally only, proposal. The headmistress Lucy Soulsby, in an address to her charges published as Stray Thoughts for Girls (1903), explained: There are many things which it is not wholesome to talk about among yourselves . . . this includes everything which makes you feel at all hot, with a sense of something not quite nice; everything in books which it would make you hot to read out loud (an excellent test). (55) This “excellent test” is applied by Doctor Alec, in Louisa May Alcott’s novel Rose in Bloom (1876). Rose is reading a French novel, and when she asks why she ought not to read it, Doctor Alec suggests she reads it aloud, which she finds herself reluctant to do. “You may not see, but don’t you feel why not?” asked Doctor Alec gravely. Rose leaned her flushed cheek on her hand and thought a minute, then she looked up and answered honestly: “Yes, I do, but I can’t explain it; except that I know something must be wrong, because I blushed and started when you came in.” (174) Yet Madge’s new maturity is directed towards a social purpose rather than romance. Her transformation takes place when Olive invites her to join her work educating the daughters of the miners, and as Olive says when she sees

Sexuality and Romance in the Girls’ Stories • 79 her, “Now I do know that you must be very much in earnest!” (171). Although Madge does begin “to be noticed and admired and ‘taken up,’” she “was hardly conscious of this herself, so full was her mind of other things” (256). When Rolfe Lester, Olive’s childhood friend and one-time suitor, comes to visit, Madge remains completely unaware of his growing attraction towards her, “too frank and simple” even to be embarrassed when the miners observe the two together and assume they are sweethearts. She does not even blush at this stage, although later, she “looks up at him quickly with brightening eyes, and then hers suddenly fell before his, she did not know why” (274). She remains innocent of her own feelings even when they are obvious to others. An aunt, visiting, remarks, “Rolfe and Madge are simply head and ears in love with one another; and he knows it, though she . . . awaits her awakening still” (366). Rolfe’s proposal then does come to Madge like “a slap in the face,” leaving her, as she tells Olive later, “awfully astonished and taken aback” (375). The blushes and tears which accompany her conversation with Olive, however, reveal, as the narrative observes, her “underlying joy” (374). Madge’s transition to adulthood is not quite as simple as the image in the Tennyson poem suggests, involving as it does two stages, one “transformation” in dress and social role, followed by the romantic “awakening” which will transform her social role once again. But it is Olive’s transition between childhood and adulthood which is typical of a fictional heroine, and it is the more self-possessed, womanly Olive who is presented as the ideal role model for Madge herself as well as the novel’s readers. Olive’s story begins not with the revelation about her true family in Chapter 2, but with a preceding chapter which shows Olive as unprepared for Rolfe’s proposal as Madge was. She looks him “full in the face,” his words “only slowly dawning upon her” (15). When her heart begins to beat “just a little faster than its wont,” she still “scarcely knew why,” although as Rolfe keeps talking she “could not but understand then,” and “the colour rose in her cheek” (16). This first proposal then represents Olive’s awakening, and her expectation of living always in the same place “from childhood to old age” takes on a different kind of reality, as she imagines herself married to Rolfe, as daughter-in-law to his parents. It is suggested that “to many an inexperienced girl [this] would have been sufficient to settle the crisis of her life in that one moment” (17) but Olive’s “thoughtfulness” is described with approval. She asks for time to better know her own feelings, and Rolfe agrees, asking her only “not to let any other fellow make love to you till this matter between you and me is decided” (19). This all takes place before the revelations of Chapter 2 set the course of Olive’s story in such an unexpected direction, and for a long time Rolfe is forgotten, both by Olive and by the reader, as family politics and the politics of the mining community take over as the main concerns. Olive’s relationships with Pearl, Madge, and Basil, her attempts to establish a useful relationship with the daughters of the miners, the threat of industrial action, a mining accident, and an even more dramatic threat to the pit ponies, threatened with

80 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 starvation by the unfeeling union members and heroically rescued by Olive and Basil, provide a range of narrative platforms for the display of Olive’s heroic qualities of self-sacrifice, idealism, and courage. Less central to the plot is the relationship that develops between Olive and Basil’s friend Everard Dacre, yet when Everard proposes to Olive towards the end of the novel, it comes as “no shock of surprise. Had she not known it a long while now?” (393)

The World of Romance The two proposals that often bracket a girls’ novel of the period, then, frame a somewhat different space than the two proposals that are equally likely to frame a Jane Austen novel. The first proposal is the “shock of surprise” that awakens the heroine from the innocence of childhood, while the second proposal has typically been expected “a long while now,” and in fact very often doesn’t even need to be put in to words: Everard Dacre only needs to speak Olive’s name for them both to know “what was coming.” Ralph Dudley’s proposal to Mona Maclean was equally unspoken, with not even a word passing between Ralph and Mona on the carriage drive that nevertheless settled their future together. But the space that adolescence opens up for the heroines of these novels is romantic not because of a focus on these relationships, but rather in the freedom from such a focus that is provided by the turn towards social service and the discovery of self through self-sacrifice. Typically, the first proposal which the girl turns down is represented mainly in terms of the financial security it would offer her, while the second proposal represents romance. But in the space between the first and second proposal, the heroines of these novels are romantic heroines in much the same way that the boys are the heroes of adventure romances. In Maud Melville’s Marriage, a historical novel for girls by Evelyn Everett Green, Maud leaves home in defiance of her brother’s demand that she forget her betrothal to Richard Melville, a betrothal made for political and material reasons that no longer favour Maud’s family. Her adventures in London include the dramatic rescue of Richard Melville from Newgate Prison. Another historical romance, A Young Oxford Maid in the Days of the King and the Parliament, by Sarah Tytler, is similarly full of perilous times and stirring adventures, before it ends happily with the heroine safe in Islip-Barnes. Romantic adventures can also, of course, take place in exotic locations. Rachel Willard’s Veiled Hearts: A Romance of Modern Egypt describes the adventures of a young, female doctor, whose eventual marriage to a medical missionary she meets in Egypt is preceded, as the blurb assures the reader, by “plenty of incident and no little plot.” Even Hesba Stretton, known for her stories for younger children about the “street Arabs” of London’s slums, sets a novel for older girls, The Highway of Sorrow, in modern Russia. In contrast with these romantic settings, the romance of a shop, to borrow the title of a novel by Amy Levy, must seem somewhat limited. Of course

Sexuality and Romance in the Girls’ Stories • 81 Levy’s title deliberately plays on the unlikely juxtaposition of shop work and romance, and yet the world of work was indeed very much a romantic space for the heroine of the girls’ novel in the later part of the nineteenth century. In turning our attention now to the genres of the work novel, the college novel, and the school story for girls, we are turning to material well covered by Sally Mitchell, in her groundbreaking study of girls’ literature of the period, The New Girl. As Mitchell’s title suggests, she understands the new concept of girlhood as arising from the feminist movement alongside the emerging concept of the New Woman. Mitchell devotes a chapter to the work of Meade, who edited the girls’ magazine Atalanta with an explicitly feminist agenda, and who wrote over two hundred novels for girls. Many of the titles of Meade’s novels—A Girl of To-day, Daughters of To-day, Polly: A New-fashioned Girl—draw attention to her celebration of a new generation, distinguished from the generation before by their new opportunities (the “present craze about women’s education”) and their new boldness (“girls aren’t nervous nowadays”). These connections are important, yet they direct attention away from the characteristics the new girl shares with the heroes of the boys’ adventure romances (which the girls of the 1880s and 1890s were also reading), and, as we will explore in the next chapter, make for a puzzling contradiction between the principles of sacrifice and independence, which is resolved as soon as we read the heroine of the girls’ novel as a Victorian adolescent. Even some of the differences between the girls’ novels and the boys’ novels—the flowering of the gender specific “girl at work” novel between 1880 and 1910, and the features of the school story that are distinct to the girls’ school story—are illuminated when read in relation to the boys’ romance. In the decades from 1880 to 1910, the novel about the girl at work was as popular a genre as the school story and the historical romance. Perhaps if the genre had lasted longer, early classics of the genre such as Secretary Ethel or our favourite Mona Maclean: Medical Student would have a similar place in the canon to novels such as Tom Brown’s Schooldays or A World of Girls. But the genre depended on a relationship between work and adolescence which was unusually historically specific, and which was also gender specific, since it was only for girls that entering the work force represents adventure. Mitchell suggests that the heroine of Evelyn Everett Green’s Adventurous Anne is typical in anticipating that a waitressing job will give her “the time of my life.” This is a time that Mitchell reads in terms of a new culture of girlhood, that depended on girls’ access to a culture of girlhood outside the home, at school or at work, even if many girls only had access to this girlhood culture through literary representations of it. She contrasts the term “girl” with the terms “young person” and “young lady,” the first term applying to adolescent youths, boys and girls, from the working classes, and the second term applying to the girl at home, who will never have to work for a living. The term “girl” in contrast does not define the girl in terms of class, but in terms of a stage in her life. Crucially, for our argument, Mitchell suggests it is a term that

82 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 “unsexed the worker” (25). While the “young lady” is on the marriage market, this is not true of the working “girl.” Rather, Mitchell suggests, girlhood is a period of “prolonged latency,” in which “girlhood’s innocence is invoked to permit their unprotected independence” (38). Economically, Mitchell points out, the understanding of work as a temporary phase for girls between childhood and womanhood had its disadvantages, particularly for the women who did in fact have to support themselves beyond adolescence. Yet, she argues, “the world of work was indeed one of the key components that created a culture of girlhood as a distinctive—and extended—passage between puberty and marriage” (44). As we have suggested, this “latency” or “innocence” is not the innocence of childhood, as the marriage proposal which is often made at the start of the girls’ story makes clear. But the typical plot of a novel about a girl at work begins with a different sort of “awakening,” when the heroine’s previously sheltered life comes to a typically abrupt end, either with the death of a father, or through some sort of financial crisis. She can rely on no immediate family help, with any living parent ineffectual, either through illness, childishness, irresponsibility, or often a combination of more than one of these traits. There is often now a second “awakening” of sorts a few chapters into the novel, when the heroine receives her first proposal from an apparently suitable young man, but invariably she turns him down, either because she is not yet aware of her own feelings for him, or out of a sense of duty to her family, choosing to support her family rather than accept a husband’s support for herself. Most of the novel concerns her life at work, with her entry into the workforce representing, as Maggie Symington puts it in Working to Win, the real beginning of the story of her life. Novels fitting this pattern include Meade’s Nurse Charlotte, Catalina: Art Student, and The A.B.C. Girl, Jessie Vaizey’s The Independence of Claire (with the difference that she doesn’t have a family to support, only herself), Ellinor Davenport Adams’ A Queen among Girls (without the engagement, or the marriage), as well as Maggie Symington’s Working to Win. There is a second plot pattern, a variation on the first pattern, almost as typical of the genre. In this variation, several girls, usually sisters or cousins, set up a flat together in order to support themselves. Novels fitting this pattern include Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop, Meade’s Daughters of To-day (originally published as Engaged to be Married: A Tale of To-day), and Ethel Heddle’s Three Girls in a Flat. The girls in these novels are equally lacking in the family support that would keep them at home, but there is less emphasis on the helplessness and ineffectualness of the adults who might be expected to support them. Instead, an important role is played in these stories by an older woman, representing romance and sacrifice, and having a somewhat ambiguous status often as part role model, part warning. The girls themselves are of contrasting types, usually including an old-fashioned girl, a New Woman or “girl of To-day,” and the racier “Girl of the Period.” Their stories diverge accordingly, as they make different choices. One always marries happily,

Sexuality and Romance in the Girls’ Stories • 83 and of the rest, possible variations include marrying unwisely or, even more unwisely, having an affair, marrying for material gain at the expense of the other girls, or even choosing to find fulfi lment through the permanent commitment to a career. While the moral issues of these novels centre around relationships between men and women but also between women as literal or metaphorical sisters, there is a “romance” too to this period in the girls’ lives when they first experience the independence and possibilities of life in the workforce. The romantic nature of the central heroine, Gertrude Lorimer, is emphasised from the beginning of The Romance of a Shop. She is described as having “an arching, unfashionable forehead, like those of Leonardo Da Vinci’s women, short-sighted eyes, and an expressive mouth and chin,” and although she is grieving for her father’s death, and faced with supporting a family of sisters on a small income, she is nevertheless presented “with the young life coursing in her veins, with all the world before her, an undiscovered country of purple mists and boundless possibilities” (70). Levy’s book is wittier and more literary than these quotes might suggest, and the most apparently romantic of the sisters, the fragile beauty Phyllis, is also the sharpest: when they decide to confirm their intention to run a photography shop with a list of good intentions, Phyllis chimes in, “Yes, let us pave the way to hell a little!” (66). But the order of the resolutions is interesting: they vow “Firstly, we won’t be cynical . . . Secondly, we will be happy,” and “Thirdly, we will never, never mention that we have seen better days!” (67). Of course, all of these novels are founded on the fact that the heroines have seen better days. But it is interesting to see the priority even Levy’s sophisticated, literate heroines give to rejecting cynicism in favour of romanticism. Their shop, or photographic studio, is fitted out “into a perfect bower of art and culture” through the addition of “a little cheap Japanese china, and a few red-legged tables and chairs,” and is given an additional air of romance by the “spectacle of that gorgeous youth,” the family friend Fred, carpentering for them, and, across the road, the even more intriguing spectacle of their neighbour Mr. Jermyn, whose dark good looks suggest “he might have stepped straight out of a Venetian portrait” (78, 89). Marjory’s career as a governess to an impoverished rectory family has less potential for romance than the Lorimer sisters’ undertaking as photographers, but Maggie Symington’s Working to Win sets Marjory up as just as romantic a heroine as Gertrude, and her decision is made in a spirit of equally determined optimism. This is one of many novels that opens with the brook and river lines from Longfellow as an epigraph, and yet Marjory’s awakening from maidenhood first takes place as an awakening not to sexual awareness, but to a sense of purpose. The novel begins: Were the task given to each of us to tell the story of our lives, few, I presume, would begin with their first conscious act therein. In re-tracing the

84 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 dim vista of the years, should we not rather select as a starting point for the narrative of our experiences that important moment when we began to penetrate, as it were, the deep, sweet mystery of the whole, and to acknowledge that life has a purpose beyond what had hitherto contented us? (5) It is not until Chapter 3 that Marjory is confronted with the marriage proposal from the childhood friend she had thought of as a brother, the “awakening” scene that is repeated in so many of the novels of this period. (It even takes place at the bank of a river.) Instead it is the earlier awakening, to a sense of purpose (from reading A Woman’s Thoughts about Women!) that marks not only the beginning of Marjory’s story, but the end of Marjory’s childhood. This is what makes her ready to take her place at her father’s side when fever strikes the village, and prepares her for the sacrifices she must make after her father’s death leaves her, her sister, and her mother without a home or income. It is significant that in several of these novels, it is the heroines’ first acts of initiative in the workforce that cause them, like Madge in Olive Roscoe, to flush in the way that is usually associated with a sexual awakening. In Working to Win, Marjory’s truly romantic ambitions are roused not by her work as a governess but by her literary ambitions, and it is when she first sends out a manuscript that “Marjory was amazed at her own boldness, and for several days could not recall what she had done without her cheeks flushing painfully” (172). Similarly, in The Independence of Claire, when the heroine Claire is brought to “a most disagreeable awakening” to the fi nancial realities she and her mother now face, “the blood flooded her face.” Curiously, both of these novels begin with marriage proposed as a false sacrifice the heroines consider making. The Independence of Claire begins with Claire asking herself “once and again” if she can marry an older man for financial security, “with the baffling result that every single time her brain answered instantly, ‘You must!’ the while her heart rose up in rebellion, and cried, ‘I won’t!’ When Claire is released from her duty to marry Robert Judge with the happy discovery that it is her mother, not herself, that he intends to make his wife, she is free to make her own decision to support herself independently, a decision she “knew in her heart” was the right one. The exclamation mark that ends the chapter indicates the excitement that accompanies her release from the anticipated marriage: “The future was London and work!” In Working to Win, Marjory is even more willing to entertain the idea of marriage as a solution to the family’s financial difficulties, but having agreed to the marriage finds herself feeling “as a bird might feel who is enclosed in a glittering cage, hung up in the sunshine, and told to sing” (94). Now she finds the thought of any occupation “was full of enticement,” and her feeling that work “would surely be a blessing” is confirmed by Aunt Est’s remark that “work is no hardship; I find it a blessing” (104). Released from her engagement, Marjory “accepted her freedom as one receives a joy one only half believes in for awhile” (106).

Sexuality and Romance in the Girls’ Stories • 85 Where romantic friendships play a part in girls’ stories, the idealism the friendships awaken more often than not is connected to the romance of work. For girls, as for boys, romantic friendships were regarded as ennobling. Describing the friendships of “budding maidens” in his 1868 study of The Friendships of Women, William Alger describes how “sentimentality, fired by the glorious contagion of self-forgetful admiration and loyalty, is raised into sentiment, or even divinised into enthusiasm” (qtd. in Oulton 10). Dinah Mulock Craik similarly espouses the girl’s “first friendship, as delicious and almost as passionate as first love,” as “one of the purest, most self-forgetful and self-denying attachments that the human heart can experience,” and she warns against making light of such friendships “lest we be mocking at things more sacred than we are aware” (Oulton 10). Oulton’s claim that these intense friendships between adolescents existed “either in place of, or in preparation for, expected marriage” is supported by the next paragraph in Craik’s essay, in which she goes on to suggest that such a friendship as she has just celebrated “is not the real thing—not friendship, but rather a kind of foreshadowing of love: as jealous, as exacting, as unreasoning . . . as vivid and sincere as any after-passion into which the girl may fall. . . . Yet it is but a dream, to melt away like a dream when love appears” (qtd. in Oulton 10). In the girls’ fiction of the period, however, romantic friendship has a reality quite apart from adult love, and when the sentimentality that it entails is, as Alger puts it, “divinised into enthusiasm,” it is an enthusiasm that leads away from rather than towards a heterosexual impulse. The relationship which develops between Mona Maclean and the young girl she mentors, Matilda Cookson, is an example of a romantic friendship for Matilda, at least, who “followed Mona like a shadow; taking her hand whenever she dared, and gazing up into her face with worshipping eyes” (356). As we have seen, Mona’s influence on Matilda was to redirect her desires away not only from the inappropriate flirtation she was engaged in, but also from her more general yearning for “marriage qua marriage” as the only “sphere” she imagined for her future. Similarly, in Alice Stronach’s college novel A Newnham Friendship, the influence of the “splendid” Vi Maynard inspires her friends to think beyond “their narrow sheltered world” (though it is the world of the college, not the domestic sphere or marriage market, they refer to in this instance) and yearn instead to join her in her charitable work in London’s East End; Carol’s decision to join Vi in the workforce gives her “a new expression in the eyes, an added eagerness and animation, and some of the rapture that lights the face of a religious devotee on the eve of a novitiate” (146). Romantic friendship seems important primarily at this early stage of awakening, directing the romantic girl’s energies towards the workforce. The novels about the world of work itself either concern the fortunes of one girl, typically more romantic and idealistic than her colleagues, or, when they involve the fortunes of more than one main character, the girls are typically cousins or sisters. In fact, the relationship between cousins or sisters itself tended towards the sentimentality, even the sensuality, that characterised the

86 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 romantic friendship. It is interesting to note that the cover illustration to Lillian Faderman’s study of friendship and love between women, Surpassing the Love of Men, is in fact a photograph of two sisters, and one of the examples she gives of how surprisingly explicit representations of intimacy between two women could be in the nineteenth century is Christina Rosetti’s “Goblin Market,” again a story of two sisters. The romantic friendships rarely involve such physical intimacy as a relationship between sisters, or a less romantic but often closer friendship between two more equal friends (it is Mona and her friend Lucy who call each other pet names and stroke each other’s hair, intimacies Matilda could never hope for; and it is her college friend Betty whom Carol kisses and leans against rather than the more dazzling Vi Maynard). Nevertheless, sisters too can support each other’s romanticism, as we saw in The Romance of a Shop, where the girls support each other in their romantic decision to go into business. There is a romanticism to the very poverty of the lives of the heroines of this and other novels of its kind, even if their poverty is improved by Japanese china. The charm is sometimes more apparent to an outside eye, unaware of the work that has gone into creating the romantic effects. In Ethel Heddle’s Three Girls in a Flat, visitor Dr. Dunbar is too charmed by the decorative touches to notice how poor the girls are, though the girls themselves are painfully conscious of the “little makeshifts” they resort to in order to “be picturesque even in dusters” (126). Of the three girls, however, it is only the shallow Mabel, the one who represents the “Girl of the Period,” who envies the rich furnishings of their acquaintance Lady Mainwaring, enough to “do almost anything for six hundred a year,” including, as it turns out, marrying Lady Mainwaring’s rather foolish and ineffectual son in a most unromantic marriage. Mabel is the realist, who criticises the other girls for their romanticism: “‘You writers always idealize people,’ she said. ‘You daren’t put down human nature as it is; but human nature goes on being human, all the same. It won’t live up to your picture of it’” (285). But our sympathies are with the idealists, who are ultimately rewarded with truly romantic marriages and, in one case, a glittering literary career. In Meade’s college novel, A Sweet Girl Graduate, even the romance of cheap chinoiserie, which in most of these novels represents the courage of heroines determined to make a romance out of their need to support themselves, is regarded as materialistic, and less noble than the heroine Priscilla’s determination to save her shillings and devote herself to her studies in a monastically plain room. In Catalina: Art Student, the heroine’s passion for art is equally removed from an interest in home furnishings and fashion: while Catalina “lived and breathed for Art,” she finds it “horrid . . . to have to sit in the ugly drawing room and listen to the vapid uninteresting conversation.” While her mother and sisters drive the family further into debt trying to keep up appearances, their rise in society meaning they must keep up with families increasingly wealthier than themselves, Catalina hates the “humbug” and “pretence,” and longs only to “forget everyone and go back into her own dreams.” (46)

Sexuality and Romance in the Girls’ Stories • 87 Yet although the heroines are frequently labelled dreamers by the other characters, they are the ones who take action when it is needed. It is Catalina who resolves to travel, alone, to Manchester, where she will demand support from a wealthy uncle, or “overcome the dragon in his den,” as the narrative puts it (188). She is as “amazed by her own boldness” as Marjory was when she sent off her manuscript in Working to Win: “I am the most daring girl in the world,” thinks Catalina on the drive to her uncle’s office (203). The attribute most typical of the heroine of a girls’ story after honesty, is “pluck.” Catalina is pronounced a “plucky little thing” by her fellow students in the first chapter, and it is her pluck, along with her honesty, that wins her uncle over: he mutters “plucky” under his breath when he first encounters her, and later, after his interview with her, he “muttered a solitary sentence of approval” once again under his breath, in which the words “pluck” and “plucky” are used four times (242). While the pluck of a heroine of a girls’ story might be shown chiefly in her daring social calls on unfriendly relatives, or in her daring decision to enter the workforce, rather than in a raid on pirates or armed combat with rebellious natives, it is nevertheless written up in romantic terms: Catalina is not the only heroine to overcome dragons, or “put her head into the lion’s den” to borrow another metaphor from the same book. It is interesting to see that in several of the girls’ books, the pluck of the heroine is contrasted with a younger brother’s timidity. In A Queen among Girls, Augusta, known as Gussy, is declared by her uncle to have “ten times the self-will” of her brother, the timid and artistic Adrian, whom he labels in contrast “a coward beneath contempt.” (127) Her pluck is required when Adrian is disinherited and Gussy refuses her uncle’s offer to make her his heir in Adrian’s place, resolving instead to run away and support both herself and Adrian independently. Still more pluck is required of the heroine of Meade’s Robinsonade, Four on an Island. When four cousins, two boys and two girls, are cast away on an island, Isabel, the eldest girl, proves as adept as her brother at “swarming” up trees, lighting fires, and shooting a gun, while her more feminine accomplishments, as she airs out bedding, invents new recipes, and sews entire wardrobes for them all, also prove invaluable. As Ferdinand admits, “You are the real leader, the real captain. You have had twice my pluck, twice my courage, from the first.” (201) Some of the most extraordinary adventures take place in the girls’ school stories. Meade’s A World of Girls, credited with introducing what were to become the staple motifs of the girls’ school story genre—the tomboy heroine, the midnight feast, the wrongful accusation (though this of course is borrowed from the boys’ school story)—also includes the infi ltration of a gypsy camp as part of a daring rescue of a stolen child. One of the differences between the girls’ school story and the boys’ is that the girls’ school story often involves more adventures that take place beyond the bounds of the school. The more interesting difference, however, is the frequency with which the heroine is observed, at the beginning of the story, to look too grown-up

88 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 for her years. The hero of a boys’ school story leaves behind the nursery and his mother, to undergo the toughening up that is necessary to transform him from a babyish and feminised child to a schoolboy. The heroine of a girls’ school story, however, is often much older as the story begins, and seems even older than her years. Nell’s School Days, by H. F. Gethen, is typical in its opening description of such a departure: “Nell looks about fourteen, but was really a year younger, and she walked with a somewhat languid air, and let her father assist her into her carriage as if his aid were essential” (8). Similarly, Honor, in A. M. Irving’s The Girl Who Ran Away, is, at fifteen, “dressed as like a grown woman as Honor could manage, with hair elaborately coiled around her head” and sighed over by her father as much too worldly and sophisticated for her age. On her arrival at school, much is made of the contrast between her sedate manners and ladylike appearance, and the boisterousness of the other schoolgirls, “romping all over the place.” Even Meade’s Irish heroines, whose Irishness, as Mitchell points out, allows them to be wilder, more boisterous and uninhibited than an English schoolgirl could respectably be, also tend to begin their schooldays overdressed and worldly in appearance. When the English schoolgirl Ruth first sees Bridget, the Irish heroine of Meade’s Bashful Fifteen, she declares, “I don’t believe she’s a new schoolgirl at all. . . . No schoolgirl that ever breathed would dare to present such a young-lady-grownup appearance” (5). As Isabel observes in Four on an Island, the tomboy pursuits that girls indulge in as schoolgirls prove invaluable to a heroine who finds herself washed up in an adventure romance. Another Robinsonade, Mrs. George Corbett’s Little Miss Robinson Crusoe, similarly represents this tomboy stage as particularly suited for the adventure romance, since “one cannot sit and moan . . . when one is only fourteen and full of healthy vitality” (5). Accordingly this “Miss Robinson Crusoe” sets to making herself a home, concocting meals out of exotic ingredients, taming a monkey, even making herself a doll, before discovering a valley of jewels and rescuing a band of shipwreck survivors from an earthquake. Mrs. George Corbett clearly distinguishes the tomboyish youth of her heroine from a more womanly stage of girlhood, describing the heroine as “a tall girl who had not yet begun to lose the lamp-post equality of width that distinguishes the hobbledehoy stage” (5). It is interesting to see the term “hobbledehoy” becoming common at the same time that Mitchell observes girls being described frequently as “boyish,” since “hobbledehoy” is a term which had previously been applied only to adolescent boys and only towards the end of the nineteenth century began to be used primarily to describe younger adolescent girls. In Meade’s later, twentieth-century novels for girls, this emphasis on the freedom of a hobbledehoy stage of girlhood begins to erode the distinction between girlhood and childhood that has allowed adolescence to be constructed as the special space of romance we have represented. Perhaps it seems odd to describe as disappointingly childish a heroine such as Ruffles who, at

Sexuality and Romance in the Girls’ Stories • 89 fifteen, drives the family’s Napier car around the country to foil a kidnapping plot, and who speaks openly of her own good looks, and the demands her looks will allow her to make on her lover when she has a lover of her own. But these plans are made in such childish terms (to be “the jealous-est and selfish-est of all the loverest girls”), and are combined with such a thoughtless insistence on the “romance” and “fun” of the adventure, as to suggest an innocence quite unlike the sophisticated innocence of Mona Maclean. Her parents indulge her pursuits as the scrapes of “a naughty little child,” and she in turn confides everything to her “Mumsy-Pumsy.” Perhaps it was becoming impossible in the twentieth century to retain the innocence of the adolescent heroine, without at the same time keeping her a child. Ruffles, however, like other equally cloying heroines from Meade’s later novels (Jill, the Irresistible being one of the most resistible novels Meade has written), provides a salutary example of the dangers of preserving the “wild hawk” stage too long beyond childhood. As the cosy relationship between these heroines and their parents or guardians suggest, there is little genuine wildness left in them. These are the jolly girls who will become the heroines of the pulp fiction for girls between the wars, the name Ruffles already suggesting the Buntys and Worralses to come. The insistence in so many of the late Victorian school stories, however, on restoring overly sophisticated girls to a wilder, less self-conscious girlhood does not just look ahead to the early-twentieth-century construct of the sexless schoolgirl, but preserves a Victorian adolescence of romance and idealism. Tom and Some Other Girls, for instance, is named not after the heroine of the story, Rhoda, but the head prefect she comes to idealise, the noble and androgynous Tom. When it is first proposed that Rhoda be sent to school to spend some time among girls her own age, her brother Harold anticipates the reaction of her fellow schoolgirls to Rhoda’s precocious sophistication: “They’ll take it out of her! They’ll take it out of her!” (9) This is of course exactly what Rhoda needs “if she is to make a woman worth having.” (6) The schoolteachers hardly figure in the story, except for the youngest, most glamorous teacher, almost a contemporary of the girls, whose role is to be injured and require rescuing firstly by Tom and then through marriage to Rhoda’s brother. The real work of education, however, is undertaken by the girls themselves, as they discuss their prospects and moral attitudes towards paid and unpaid employment, and as Tom takes them aside one at a time for a talk, “man to man,” about the questions of honour and duty that schoolgirl life entails. The novel ends with Tom preparing for further education, for her eventual career as a headmistress, and with Rhoda now a “stately young lady,” being prepared for the marriage market, as is indicated by her father’s jokes about how busy her mother will be as a chaperone. The education the girls have shared, however, is represented as equally suitable for both their futures. Rhoda’s celebrated appearance in the final chapter with her hair up is the realisation of Harold’s expectation that it is school, with

90 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 all it takes out of her as well as all it instills, that will “make a woman worth having.” A character like Ruffles is eventually going to have to leave behind everything that makes her (supposedly) winning as a character and successful as the heroine of an adventure story of this kind. The heroines of the Victorian school story, however, or the Victorian Robinsonade, historical romance, or girls’ work novel, will only serve their adulthood better for bringing to it the idealism and romance of adolescence, just as the heroine of Little Miss Robinson Crusoe, who literally brings back treasure from her island adventure, is able to serve her foundling family as a wealthy and independent woman.

Illustrations

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1.

The Boy’s Own Paper, November 13, 1897.

2. Chums, September 5, 1894. These two young men, smoking in their well-appointed study, are actually only “between seventeen and eighteen.”

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3.

The frontispiece of an 1897 MacMillan edition of Tom Brown.

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4. The frontispiece of a Dean and Son edition of Tom Brown from the early 1940s, with, by contrast to the MacMillan edition, strikingly younger boys.

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5. The Girl’s Own Paper, November 14, 1891. This illustration of cousins Enid and Maud in the artist’s studio they have set up in Rome nicely conveys the romance of work for the adolescent girl.

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6. The Girl’s Own Paper, June 4, 1892. In this illustration Susan Meade, who is considering finding work as a seamstress, has her eyes opened to the reality of such a career by a girl her age and an older woman from the working class. Note the pinched face of the girl seamstress, highlighting the sacrifice involved in living independently of marriage.

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7. A room of her own for the heroine of L. T. Meade’s Catalina: Art Student. The model of the horse and the artist’s palette indicate her artistic sensibilities, while the bareness of the room maintains a distinction between her love of beauty and her mother’s concern with keeping up appearances.

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8. An illustration from a 1935 annual, The Girls’ Adventure Book. Despite its title, most of the stories in the annual are school stories.

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9. From L. T. Meade’s 1897 novel Bashful Fifteen. The heroine Bridget is sent to school at fifteen, proud to look at least seventeen. This scene takes place after she has learnt to fit in with the other girls, but although the girls wear white dresses appropriate for their age they nevertheless are clearly young ladies rather than the children in gym-slips depicted in the 1930s.

Chapter Four Sacrifice and Independence in the Girls’ Stories

Mabel’s flippant remark, in Ethel Heddle’s Three Girls in a Flat, that “a rich man can always be endured,” would not be out of place in a Jane Austen novel, but in a Victorian novel for girls it sets her apart from the other characters. The heroine of a Victorian novel is romantic not because she dreams of love but because she rejects the materialism that sees marriage as a business arrangement and friendship in terms of social climbing. Even the world of business is romantic in comparison. Nevertheless, the novels do typically conclude, as feminist critics have noted, with marriage providing the happy ending. As we have already discussed, marriage for girls fills the same function that work does for boys, marking off adulthood in terms of adult roles and duties and in terms of a materialism that is in marked contrast with the romantic idealism that defines the space of adolescence. At the same time, marriage also, of course, for girls as for boys, defines adulthood in terms of adult sexuality and is for girls, as it is for boys, the return home that gives the romance genre its circular form. While the deferral of marriage opens up adolescence as a romantic space for girls, at the same time it can be understood also in terms of sacrifice, as the heroine gives up the comforts that marriage would provide in order to make her own way in the world or, often, to support other members of her family. As we have seen, a common plot structure involves two marriage proposals, one refused towards the beginning of the novel and one accepted at the novel’s conclusion. This typically allows a sharp contrast to be drawn between a business model of marriage, and marriage as romance. One of the best examples of such a contrast can be found in The Independence of Claire, by Jessie Vaizey. In the last chapter we looked at the opening of the novel, with Claire’s awakening to the financial difficulties her mother has got into leading her to the conclusion, against her own rebellious heart, that she must accept the proposal she anticipates from Robert Judge, who is not only much older, but has 101

102 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 a brown neck, and a “strong kindly face” which nevertheless “made no appeal to her own heart” (4). This decision is described as “sacrificing personal inclination on the altar of fi lial duty,” the fi lial duty being to support her mother financially, and it is somewhat surprising to find the word “altar” used here in a way which casts such a sacrificial shadow onto the wedding altar she will eventually be married at, just beyond the final chapter of the book. In fact, of course, there are no real shadows cast on the romance between Claire and her second, or actual, suitor, Erskine Fanshawe, beyond those required by the plot. When Claire and Erskine meet at his mother’s house, Claire “felt as if she were in fairyland,” and we know Erskine shares in the romance when he asks her, “urgently,” to walk up the flight of steps known as “The Flowery Way” so he can see her standing there in the moonlight (237). When he is at last in a position to propose, he vaults over a window sill to do so, his strong hands gripping the sill and his “eager eyes” meeting her own (292). It is rare, however, for the contrast between the two proposals bracketing a girls’ story to be quite this dramatic, and it is interesting to observe how often the first, rejected proposal is made by the same man the heroine is eventually able to accept. Sometimes the heroine is simply not ready for the first proposal, and it is not until she has more experience of her own feelings that she is ready both to love, and to recognise the love she feels. This is the case for Marjory in Working to Win, whose decision to marry her childhood friend Bert, while feeling no more for him than “our old childish affection,” (30) is represented as a sacrifice she is wrong to think of making. By the end of the novel, however, Marjory has come to tremble when she meets him, “her heart swelling in her breast,” and when at last he is free to “cast himself down . . . by her side,” she is more than ready to receive his proposal (442). In many girls’ novels, however, the first proposal comes as no more a “slap in the face” than the second. The heroine of Meade’s Nurse Charlotte makes the decision to find work and support her family, impoverished because her father insists on devoting himself to writing poetry (a surprisingly common plot motif), even though she understands this decision to mean she must turn down the proposal that, interestingly, has not yet been made to her. She is right, of course, to anticipate the proposal from her long-term friend and admirer, Arthur Shirley, and indeed her very attempt to forestall it prompts Arthur to make his case for marriage to her. Perhaps she might have been persuaded to accept his proposal—described as seeming to her to offer “a vision of Paradise; there were golden gates opening before her” (47)—but when he attempts to win her acceptance by arguing “could anything be easier?” he ensures her refusal. Although he is referring to the financial security he could offer her, nevertheless marriage to Arthur Shirley would not represent the materialism that is opposed to romance (the way Claire’s marriage to Robert Judge would have), but rather represents the ease and domestic happiness that the heroines of these novels are ready to sacrifice, when sacrifice is called for. As Charlotte’s friend Agatha recognises, she “is going to give up everything,” for, as Charlotte explains, “Oh, Agatha, it is right not to think

Sacrifice and Independence in the Girls’ Stories • 103 of yourself now and then” (31). While it is always represented as wrong for a heroine to sacrifice herself in a marriage without romance, it is nevertheless represented as heroic to give up a romantic marriage, either for the sake of independence, or for the sake of dependents the heroine must support. Going to work for these heroines, therefore, is not simply a liberation but more often than not represents a real sacrifice. As we have seen, the significance of sacrifice in the boys’ stories has been well recognised. The heroes of the boys’ adventure romances do not just put aside their own desires, but “take their lives in their hands . . . to fling them down without any hesitation” (Baden-Powell). The close connections drawn—and, indeed, evident—between the ideal of sacrifice and the ideology of empire show how little contradiction there needs necessarily to be between the idea of sacrifice and independence. The heroines of girls’ fiction make the sacrifices they do with an equal sense of purpose, and with no more sense of a contradiction between this and the value they place on independence. The critical response has been very different, however, because the girls’ fiction has invariably been approached through a feminist framework which regards as contradictory the ideals of sacrifice and independence that structured the plot of juvenile fiction for boys and girls alike in the nineteenth century.

The Angel in the Shop Sacrifice and independence are important ideals in almost all girls’ fiction of the period, but they are most central to the plots of the working girl novels which, we have seen, were so popular a genre in the 1880s and 1890s. This is also the genre which has produced the most contested and contradictory readings by feminist scholars from the 1980s onwards. The list of titles Mitchell gives in The New Girl seems to provide compelling support to the connection she makes between the “new girlhood” of the late nineteenth century, and the feminist campaign for a wider sphere of influence and access to traditional masculine activities for women: it includes such titles as Secretary Ethel, The Newspaper Girl, and Dr Janet of Harley Street, as well as Mona Maclean, Medical Student, that we discussed in Chapter 2, and Nurse Charlotte, one of the novels we look at in this chapter. She includes too a number of images from frontispieces and dust jackets, such as the splendid dust-jacket image for Ethel F. Heddle’s 1896 novel Three Girls in a Flat that depicts the girls in very fashionable 1890s dress, bustling energetically up a stairwell. The impression given, however, of a genre celebrating work as part of a first wave of feminism is only partly accurate. Mitchell herself acknowledges that the genre is complicated by “contested and conflicting messages,” as the “ideal of service and self-sacrifice is reconstituted to encompass women’s employment” (24). In contrast to Mitchell’s representation of the girls’ story of the 1880s and 1890s as part of a new and liberating girl culture related to first-wave feminism

104 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 and the New Woman, Kimberley Reynolds’ study of juvenile fiction of the same period insists on its conservatism, as a “primary vehicle for transmitting these values” of “old-style Victorian femininity” (99). Reynolds believes more generally that “children’s literature resists change at all levels” (98), but she does suggest that the girls’ fiction of this period was particularly reactionary, as “a conservative backlash” (98) against the feminist movement. While Mitchell stresses the popularity of the literature, and argues that the commercial success of the literature depended on girls choosing to read it, Reynolds focuses on the control of girls’ reading by parents and teachers, and of literary production by “those who controlled institutions such as publishing houses” (99). She explains the contradiction between the feminism of authors such as L. T. Meade and Evelyn Everett-Green, and the reactionary fiction they wrote, by supposing them to feel “required to write what would be acceptable to editors, publishers, and adult purchasers, while inwardly rebellious” (112). Given that both Mitchell and Reynolds single out Meade for particular attention, and Everett-Green, the other writer Reynolds considers in detail, is represented in Mitchell’s study too with more-or-less detailed accounts of eleven of her works, such contradictory representations of girls’ popular fiction itself calls for some analysis. One of the most considered attempts to resolve the differences in critical readings of Meade is given by Helen Bittel, in her 2006 article “Required Reading for ‘Revolting Daughters’?: The New Girl Fiction of L. T. Meade.” Although Bittel’s own reading of Meade’s fiction is closer to Mitchell’s, she too pays careful attention to Reynolds and earlier writers such as Judith Rowbotham, Patricia Craig, and Mary Cadogan, whose readings, she suggests, “remind us that the novels do not cleanly support either a feminist interpretation or a New Woman agenda” (18). In fact Mitchell’s reading of Meade is already alert to the ways in which “a feminist interpretation or New Woman agenda” is compromised particularly by the endings of Meade’s novels, and what she assumes was “the pull of traditional conventions.” What is new in Bittel’s approach is to move on from reading the departures of the novels from a “New Woman agenda” either as indicative of the true meaning and conservative purpose of the writing, or as disappointing lapses from a longed-for but compromised feminism. Rather, Bittel suggests that a model can be found in the new approach to sensation novels and New Women fiction by critics such as Lyn Pykett and Kate Flint, who argue that both can be read, in Pykett’s formulation, as sites “in which the contradictions, anxieties, and opposing ideologies of Victorian culture converge and are put into play.” Such a reading can also be applied, Bittel suggests, to the girls’ stories by Meade, and other popular fiction for girls “coming of age during the heyday of the New Woman” (1). Yet Bittel’s suggestion that “the very inconsistencies that have made Meade’s novels such uncomfortable subjects of feminist criticism are precisely what make them so important to study” still assumes these novels are essentially contradictory in the ideal, or ideals, of girlhood that they offer their readers. But many of the “inconsistencies” that

Sacrifice and Independence in the Girls’ Stories • 105 make these novels alternatively so troubling, or so important, to feminist critics today would not have seemed inconsistent when the books were first read, especially not to girls accustomed to reading their brothers’ school stories and adventure romances. The girls in the novels of working life tend to be older than the adolescents of the boys’ adventure romances, and older, too, than the heroines of the girls’ school stories (though many of the school stories focus on girls in their last year or two of schooling and some even include a chapter on their lives after school is over). Nevertheless, they are marketed, and often subtitled, as stories for girls, and in novel after novel, the “story” is represented as beginning for the heroine herself, not just for the reader of the book, with her decision to enter the workforce and “her adventures, her noble efforts, her struggles to put wrong right” that follow on from that decision (Meade Nurse Charlotte 4). For most of these girls, too, the entry into the workforce represents her first real departure from home, and in fact it is in these novels, rather than in the girls’ school stories, that we find the emphasis on the departure from home that is so marked a convention of the school story for boys. While the titles of novels such as Three Girls in a Flat and The Romance of a Shop celebrate the new home the girls set up for themselves, The Romance of a Shop is typical in opening with a description of the “large, dun-coloured house . . . more suggestive of comfort than of splendour” before even introducing the girls who must leave the house for their new lives (51). Three Girls in a Flat, despite its jaunty title and indeed a certain amount of jauntiness to the opening of the first chapter—”Their names were Lilias—commonly called Lil—Janet, and Mabel, and they were cousins. And the flat was in Chelsea”—nevertheless allows Lil her paragraph of staring out at the fuchsia, sighing, and feeling “as if her heart-strings were being torn-up” at the prospect of leaving home (3). Charlotte Home, the heroine of Meade’s Nurse Charlotte, is introduced to the reader as a girl who “had a very affectionate heart, and loved her home beyond anything in the world” (6), and Claire of The Independence of Claire, making her decision to seek her future in London, “turned her head from side to side, taking in the well-known scene with wistful intensity” (22). Working to Win goes on for several pages, listing all the details of the home Marjory would be sorry to leave, from “the servants who had formed so familiar a part of the household for so long” to “the seat under the orchard trees by the river” (74). Many of these novels include an account of the girl’s journey to her first situation as detailed as the account of Tom Brown’s stagecoach ride to Rugby. But her journey is typically rather less fun and even more of an ordeal. In The Independence of Claire, our heroine remains happy and smiling through the storm that has all the other passengers on the ferry crossing from Antwerp “thoroughly ill and wretched,” and continues to bear up in the face of London’s drizzle and the “bleak and cheerless” terminus, but even her courage falters when she finds herself missing half her luggage, and having to accept assistance from Erskine Fanshawe, whose mother has just snubbed Claire on

106 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 discovering her status as a schoolteacher. Marjory’s journey to her first post as a governess in Working to Win is even more dispiriting, from the “passionate sobs and tears” of her farewell to Aunt Est on the station platform (149), through the “miserably slow pace” of the train journey (149), the long wait at the final station for the fly to arrive, and finally the jolting ride to the “unwarmed . . . carpetless” house containing the “cheerless-looking little room” that is to be hers (154, 155). Even so, to journey is generally happier than to arrive in these novels, and to be faced with a tea such as Marjory is offered: The tea was without cream or milk, and consequently nauseous to her taste; the bread was home made, and heavy, with a dark seam of saddened dough next to the crust; and the butter, Marjory could not think what made it so abominable, she had never tasted anything like it before . . . Mrs Bell had had an egg boiled for her, thinking she must require something after her journey, but it was only half cooked, and more than half cold, a state of all others most objectionable in an egg; Majory did manage to eat it with much difficulty, and to drink half a cup of the most distasteful tea, but one mouthful of the bread and butter was almost too much for her. (156) For Claire it is the coffee rather than the tea which proves undrinkable, and the rooms are not so much bare, as overly patterned, with the “ochre wall bespattered with golden scrawls, a red satin mantel-border painted with lustre roses, a suite of furniture covered in green stamped plush, a collection of inartistic pictures, and unornamental ornaments” (50). Perhaps this represents the change in taste that has taken place between 1892 and 1915, but the effect is just as dispiriting to a heroine of Claire’s sensibilities, and the coldness of the unheated rooms and of the leftover bacon she is offered is just as distasteful in 1915 as it was in 1892. With so much emphasis on the girls’ unhappiness in the face of cold tea or coffee, it might begin to look as if these are rather pathetic heroines, hardly up to the life of adventure the hero of a boys’ novel would be expected to embrace. And yet, as we saw in Chapter 2, a boy’s adventure also typically begins with him homesick and humiliated. In the boys’ stories, it is the hero’s attachment to his mother which is emphasised, rather than to the home as such, and proving his masculinity means denying charges of femininity as well as babyishness. But the same qualities that prove his masculinity—bravery, stoicism, and a readiness for action—are just as important to the girl heroine, even if her bravery consists of eating a poorly boiled egg rather than taking on the school bully or casting a pirate ship adrift. Whereas the hero of the boys’ story has to distance himself from charges of being “mammy-sick,” the heroine of the girls’ story has typically been more of a support to her own mother than her mother ever has been of her, and the distancing between the generations

Sacrifice and Independence in the Girls’ Stories • 107 is emphasised instead through the difference between the bravery of the adolescent heroine, and the helplessness of the “little mother.” In an extraordinary number of girls’ stories, particularly in the genre of the working-girl story but also in school stories and historical fiction, the heroine does actually call her mother “little mother” or a variation on this phrase. The mother is often described as physically smaller, and frailer, than her daughter, but her smallness is more a smallness of character. In particular, the adolescent heroine is distinguished from her mother, or other less heroic adults in her life, by her willingness to face up to reality. As we have seen, the working-girl novel typically begins with the heroine having to face up to a financial reckoning that comes as a complete shock to her, and represents an abrupt awakening from a previously carefree childhood. Typically, however, she responds as Claire does in The Independence of Claire; on taking in the news, we are told, “her spirit rose to meet it.” In contrast, Claire’s mother “shrank from all disagreeables, great and small, and systematically turned her back on anything which was disturbing or painful” (1). Even their physical responses to the news are different: Claire is flushed and angry, her mother is “pathetic and pale” (4). Much is made of the mother’s girlish appearance, such that “it seemed . . . quite ludicrous that such a relationship of mother and daughter should exist between two women who looked so nearly of an age” (1). Claire herself refers to her mother as her “pauvre petite mere,” a variation on the “little mother” phrase that can be attributed to Claire’s upbringing in France. In Working to Win, the description of the “little mother” is followed by an explanation of Mrs. Owen’s purpose on earth, which must also explain her purpose as a character, and explains the frequency with which these characterless characters appear in the novels: Mrs Owen was so small, and childish, and delicate, that though they loved her dearly, she rather looked up to them, especially to Marjory, than they to her; ‘the little mother’ as Marjory sometimes called her . . . was a poor little feeble, tenderhearted, but almost characterless woman, one of those that seem sent on earth for no other possible purpose than to give others the chance of exercising the best qualities of their hearts’ unselfish devotion, protection, and love. (42) Sometimes a mother is given the excuse of illness. This is the case in Nurse Charlotte, in which Mrs. Home lives upstairs as an invalid in her bed, protected from any anxiety because her life is understood to be endangered by her weak heart. Even so, the unselfish devotion, protection, and love lavished on Mrs. Home by Charlotte, as the eldest daughter in the household, strikes the modern reader as almost immoral: the younger children are clearly starving, yet are expected to share a hopelessly insufficient pot of porridge between them, while Charlotte organises ham, eggs, pigeon, and port for her parents. Also questionable is Charlotte’s decision to protect her mother from

108 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 “disagreeables,” by hiding all money worries from her, even recruiting the children into making up stories for her about their ample breakfasts, despite Mrs. Home’s very clear and quite reasonable request to be kept informed of all their troubles. It is Mr. Home who simply refuses to face facts in this novel, complaining, “I don’t think I should be worried on any further matter today” when Charlotte tries to discuss their difficulties with him (18). In contrast, Charlotte’s story begins with her decision to “take the bull by the horns” (6): “Yes, I must do it; and I must tell Arthur Shirley. I must tell him the truth.” Her lips quivered. She knew what this meant to her. (7) An ineffectual, childish parent seems to be such an essential element of the genre that even when the orphaned status of the girls in A Romance of the Shop makes that exact role impossible, an older half-sister takes the ineffective parent’s place. Fan is described as “a stout, fair woman of thirty, presenting somewhat the appearance of a large and superannuated baby” (52). Where Gertrude, the main heroine of this story of four sisters, has “an arching, unfashionable forehead . . . and expressive mouth and chin” (51), Fan, in contrast, has “small, meaningless features, and faint, surprised-looking eyebrows” (52). Like a typical member of an elder generation, she is a “picture of impotent distress” (53), “poor” and “hapless” (54), “behind the age” (54), the “shuttlecock of fate” (57), “a round, sentimental peg in the square, scientific hole of the latter half of the nineteenth century” (56). Not even their formidable aunt takes any account of Fan, “who was such a poor creature, that one could do nothing but pity her” (64). In contrast, Lucy, the middle sister, is characterised by her “air of firm resolve” (53), and even Phyllis, younger and frailer, having “outgrown her strength” (53), supports Gertrude’s plan for their independence as “a perfectly splendid idea,” and at once envisions herself being “like that good young man in Le Nabab” (55). Gertrude’s status as the main heroine of the story is confi rmed when we discover, in Chapter 2, that she has had to face up not only to her father’s death and the sudden fall in his fortune that precipitated it, but a further bitter blow, in the “sincere condolence” offered to her by the young man she had expected would offer her the support of a husband, bound to her as she understood him to be “by every tie but the tie of words” (58). Her character is proved, if the plan she proposed to her sisters to make themselves independent as the proprietors of a photography shop had not already proved it, when, in the face of this additional blow, She had looked her trouble fairly in the eyes; had not, as some women would have done, attempted to save her pride by refusing to acknowledge its existence; but from the depths of her humiliation, had called upon it by its name. Now for ever and ever she turned from it, cast it forth from her; cast forth other things, perhaps, round which it had twined itself; but stood there, at least, a free woman, ready for action. (59)

Sacrifice and Independence in the Girls’ Stories • 109 Perhaps this insistence on the importance of facing up to the truth accounts for the vehemence with which many of these heroines reject romance as a literary genre, even when their own stories are often likened to romances by other characters within the novel. None of these heroines are so foolish as to try and earn money writing poetry, unlike so many of their feckless fathers, but many of them, earning a living writing fiction, find themselves forced to write romances. Maggie Symington’s Marjory is unusual in fi nding some guilty pleasure in writing out her “brilliant fancies” involving false lovers, religious vows, a shipwreck, and aristocratic honours. We are far more likely to find the heroine sighing over her work, as the exhausted Lil does in Ethel Heddle’s Three Girls in a Flat: “If I could only think of a new sensation,” she used to say to Janet desperately, “or a new tragedy! I’ve used the fires, and the shipwrecks, and the Gretna Green marriages, and the elopements, and the secret panels, and the dungeons and the ghosts! What is there left, Janet, under the sun?” (138) As Janet comments, “You make-believe very hard” (140). Yet what Lil yearns to write, and eventually does write on her own account, is “a series of sketches of Scotch life.” It is writing of this kind that Marjory, too, learns to value and to write in Working to Win, and it is “a sensible story . . . an every-day tale” (279–80) that brings recognition, and eventually reunion with the man who will marry her, to Emmy Thorn, who is the Lil-like character of Meade’s story of three girls in a London flat, Daughters of Today. Even the heroines of stories more obviously belonging themselves to the genre of romance, stories including shipwrecks like Four on an Island and Little Miss Robinson Crusoe, or ghosts and secret panels, like Ethel Heddle’s The Secret of the Turret, or dungeons and disguises, like Maud Melville’s Marriage, tend to emphasise the reality of the dangers they face, and to contrast their own situation with a storybook adventure. The heroines of Robinsonades have invariably read Robinson Crusoe, and in noting the differences are less likely to comment on the exotic fruit and animals lying about than on the bad luck of having no nails and supplies to pull from the sea. Joy, the heroine of The Secret of the Turret, whose own dream has always been “to live on a desert island, with dear old Robinson Crusoe,” is equally thrilled to fi nd herself sent to live in the Highlands, with their “romance and legend.” Unlike Catherine Morland of Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Joy Desborough would not be wrong to suppose herself in a Gothic-tinged romance. The legend, the curse, and the prediction of the rhyming verse inscribed on the bell tower all come true, and the turret does indeed prove to contain a secret. But these romantic motifs are constantly apologised for, along with the infrequency of the post and lack of other modern conveniences: “It is all a little crazy, like all these old Gaelic things” (17); “the place is full of queer customs” (15). The characters jokily

110 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 refer to rattling bones of contention, keeping skeletons locked up, and the “ghost” in the ruined wing, known as “the Blue-Beard Chamber,” as if they were in a quite different genre of story, and yet by the end of the story we have indeed encountered a strange hermit figure, living in a cave on the Island of the Dead; the son and daughter discover the father they believed dead is in fact hiding in their own home; there has been secret ruin, fraud, and disgrace, along with secret generosity, honour, and romance. The romance of the stories told in these novels is often recognised by the more minor characters. A Queen Among Girls seems to start out as a school story, then turns into the story of a working girl, as the heroine Augusta takes up governessing to support her younger brother. But it is the romance elements of the story that are striking to outsiders, such as the doctor turned to for advice when Augusta is ill: “A family feud—a runaway marriage—an irreconcilable parent. Romance and drama in the nineteenth century!” (239). Augusta herself looks to realist fiction to fi ll out her ideas about what governessing will entail, just as the heroines of the Robinsonades look to Robinson Crusoe for a guide: as Augusta observes, “the trials and virtues of the typical governess of fiction have been since Edgeworthian days a favourite subject among writers of girls’ story books” (154). It is her younger brother Adrian who is better versed in romance, and, nicely, proves a great help to Augusta in her governessing duties, through his knowledge of Scott, Marryat, Fenimore Cooper, and “the wizard Henty” (160). But the characters themselves only compare their lives to romance as a joke. Augusta’s cousin, Leonard, uses an absurd combination of schoolboy slang and high-flown romantic language to announce the arrival of her Uncle Erle, the uncle whose home she and Adrian left when she made the decision to support Adrian on her own terms: “I say, Gussy,—Gussy! Here’s a go! Your worthy uncle, the hated Erle, the Implacable One, has presented himself e’en at the enemy’s portal, and would have speech with him—that is, with you!” (267) In the working-girl novels, as we have seen, the heroines often write romances for money, while yearning to write realist fiction. They themselves insist on a realistic approach to life, facing up to the “disagreeables” that one or more of their parents prefers not to acknowledge. In the chapter on romance, we observed how often the heroine is contrasted with her more materialistic mother and/or sisters, but there is an equally typical contrast between the heroine’s realism and the romantic nature that we see in Claire’s mother, for instance, whose girlish charm is the equivalent of the poetry writing which flaws so many of the heroines’ fathers. There is ambivalence too in the portrayal of the older women who frequently serve as mentor figures of a kind in these stories. There are two contrasting types of mentor figures most frequently found in these novels: the pragmatic, worldly, and fi nancially secure women who provide introductions, jobs, and advice; and the impoverished, idealistic, independent women who offer an example of romance and bravery that extends beyond adolescence. Occasionally a mentor figure will

Sacrifice and Independence in the Girls’ Stories • 111 fulfi l both roles simultaneously. Charlotte Home, in Nurse Charlotte, originally receives assistance from a wealthy benefactor who is idealistic and independent to the point of self-sacrifice, almost starving to death so as to preserve all of her income for charitable purposes. This benefactor, Miss Muriel Beck, is an ambivalent figure, whose romantic impulses, while admirable, need to be tempered with realism. More typical is Miss Trip, the elderly spinster who, at the end of Three Girls in a Flat, is celebrated as “a beacon light in this sad and sinful world” (298). She is in no position to act as a benefactor for the girls, being rather in need of assistance herself, yet she does “visit at three hospitals, and has a Bible-class, and a sewing-class, and a mothers’ meeting; and she visits the sick and goes to all sorts of low places in Chelsea” (32). Despite being frail and faded, she still retains something of an air of romance, as her name, Miss Beaujolais de Breton Trip, suggests. Her room is a mixture of romantic and pathetic, with its shabby sofa, unsteady chairs, singed pink silks, and old piano. The girls do what they can to protect her from overwork and find ways of providing her with extra food, though they themselves are desperately short of resources for much of the story. Although she is presented as a beacon light, whose life is one on which “the angels smile,” she seems to serve equally as a warning of what a spinster life might really mean. Not one of the three heroines of this story is left unmarried at the end, to face a similar fate. Yet Miss Trip does serve as a model for the girls. When Lil talks of how inspired Miss Trip made her feel, she gives Mabel “her most direct look,” and this is the look of honest self-scrutiny that most characterises a girls’ story heroine. Miss Trip represents both realism and romance, as well as the self-sacrifice and independence that to girls of the period would have seemed less of a contradiction. She is “little, matter-of-fact Miss Trip,” who teaches Lil to regard religion as “a wearable, everyday possibility” (62), and, at the same time, a romantic, who thinks “pure love . . . the most sacred thing in this world.” Miss Trip’s attitude makes “this world possible” for Lil, and helps her appreciate Janet’s tissue lampshades and all the other makeshift touches Janet has made to try and disguise the girls’ poverty. Lil determines to “put a stout heart to the stey brae and warsle through,” her use of a Scots dialogue playing up both the realism and the romance of such an attitude. In The Independence of Claire, the role of this sort of character as a warning is made very explicit, as Claire, “from within the shelter of her lover’s arms,” thinks of “Cecil with her blighted love, Sophie with her blighted health, with the thousands of others for whom they stood as types; the countless hordes of women workers for whom life was a monotonous round of grey-hued days, shadowed by the prospect of age and want” (296). The status of the older spinster figure, as romantic figure or figure of pity, depends on the extent to which work is figured as romance or sacrifice, in contrast to marriage as materialism and duty, or in contrast to marriage as domestic happiness. The Independence of Claire could just as easily have been titled Claire’s Sacrifice, and it is more

112 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 conventionally a romance, with Erskine Fanshawe figuring fairly early on as a romantic interest, in precisely the measure it is less of an adventure romance, with work figured largely in terms of sacrifice and hardship. In fact there is more of a contradiction drawn between romance and sacrifice, than between sacrifice and independence, in these novels, and this is the contradiction that the novels themselves work to resolve. Cecil is typical of the characters in these novels that offer a foil for the more romantic heroines. While Claire, as we have seen, is unlike her romantic mother in the courage and realism with which she faces their fi nancial hardship, she is equally unlike Cecil in her refusal to complain and her determination to live as romantically as possible in the circumstances. Her first act, on settling in to the economical rooms she is to share with Cecil, is to buy a decent coffee machine. She refuses to accept the “poor-spirited attitude” Cecil shows in putting up with the horrible coffee provided, and dressing badly in a utility blouse of grey flannel. Cecil’s poor spirit may make her somewhat to blame for her own unhappiness—Claire manages much better on the same money, not only improving the coffee situation but also cooking excellent omelettes out of their meagre resources—but Sophie, the young and pretty gym mistress, presents a more frightening example. Sophie does not lack spirit—“I must go on, I must fight it out,” she declares, determined to hide her worsening rheumatism from the headmistress rather than risk losing her position—but all the bravery in the world cannot keep her from the collapse that will mean absolute poverty and starvation, not only for her but her dependent younger sister. The girls in these stories do in fact face very real dangers. Lil, in Three Girls in a Flat, very nearly dies of starvation on their rice and porridge diet; Phyllis, in The Romance of a Shop, actually does die, of a complicated combination of consumption, heart disease, and bronchial fever. Augusta, in A Queen Among Girls, manages very well as a governess until she falls ill, but the financial anxiety of not being able to work, along with the impossibility of eating well on no income, makes recovery impossible. Even when the heroine might otherwise be able to support herself living independently, her determination to help out a more desperate colleague will often put her own situation in jeopardy. Meade’s The A.B.C. Girl offers a good example of this particular plot pattern, as well as many other standard plot motifs of the genre. The A.B.C. Girl opens with the heroine, Rose, newly orphaned and facing up to her lack of any fi nancial security. Typically, she decides not to rely on the charity of friends but instead runs away, in a kind of elopement from the proposal she could expect, to support herself independently in London. The novel offers one of the best examples of the unpleasant arrival, when Rose arrives at the lodgings she has arranged in London to find she is not only expected to share a bed, but to share it with a girl who pinches. Unusually for a girl brought up as a lady, she finds work waitressing in a tea shop: the A.B.C. chain was one of the new establishments that offered a respectable place where middle-class girls and women could socialise or eat alone, and a respectable position outside

Sacrifice and Independence in the Girls’ Stories • 113 of service for a girl of the working class, but not usually work for a lady. Rose is therefore considered by the manager a valuable commodity, able to raise the tone of the establishment through her presence. The anxieties surrounding the material aspect of marriage take on a melodramatic urgency in this setting, culminating in Rose’s implausible decision to marry the profoundly unpleasant manager of the shop, saving the career of a desperate colleague by giving in to the manager’s blackmail. But Rose herself is saved, in turn, by a working-class heroine, Christina Deerwood, a hard-working woman who has built herself a truly independent living as a manageress. Recognising something wrong, she elicits the full story out of Rose, and further manages to track down Rose’s friend and would-be suitor, who promptly arrives to rescue Rose from shopwork and restore her to her rightful middle-class status as his fiancée. The previous chapter, on romance in girls’ stories, emphasised the distinction between adolescence and adulthood in terms of the deferral of the adult duties associated with marriage, and a rejection of marriage as materialism, while arguing that adolescence can also be distinguished from the innocence of childhood by the girl’s awakening to a sexual awareness. But adolescence can also be distinguished from childhood innocence, as we have seen in this chapter, by the need to face up to financial realities, and the romance of adolescence is not the romance of play, but the romance of idealism, which involves sacrifice as well as opportunity. Marriage can also, therefore, function as rescue, and this is how marriage often is presented at the conclusion of a girls’ story. This accounts for what might otherwise seem a rather odd quotation at the end of Three Girls in a Flat. Mitchell cites the title of this novel because it so nicely suggests the independence of the girls by reference to the property they can claim as their own, and yet the novel concludes: “Mabel is still a success in London society circles. And Janet at the manse, and Lil in London—each is happy ‘in the home of her husband,’ and the heart of her husband delighteth in her, very safely we are sure” (297). The quotation comes from Ruth 1:9, an Old Testament account of what could be read as an extended adolescence: Ruth leaves the comfort of home for spiritual reasons, and undergoes hardship labouring until Boaz offers her a new home and haven. The full quotation reads, “The Lord grant you that ye may find rest, each of you in the house of her husband,” and it is the rest that Janet and Lil will find in marriage that is being celebrated in the conclusion of Three Girls in a Flat. As Lil says, when she accepts Dr. Dunbar’s proposal of marriage, “I am never happier and more restful than when with you” (290). It is her focus on the conclusions of the novels that provides the basis of Reynolds’ representation of them as conservative in ideology, and, specifically, antifeminist, and it is the conclusions, on the whole, that suggest to Mitchell that Meade must be “afraid of what she starts to do” (20). One approach to the endings is to understand them structurally, reading these stories as a form of adventure romance comparable, at least in part, to the boys’ stories of heroism in far-flung lands. The conclusions that take the heroines into the adult world of

114 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 marriage preserve the space of adolescence as the space of romance, defining it by giving it closure. After all, the boys’ stories too usually end with the heroes back in England, entering the workforce, or marrying, and this is not seen as a cancellation of the values of sacrifice and independence belonging to the romantic space of adventure. To read the stories in terms of adventure romance is to read them in terms of a genre usually understood as conservative. But as we have seen, conservative values can be combined with challenging action, and conservative institutions are sometimes best served by rebellion. A commitment to principles, rather than rules, and to values, rather than material rewards, can have radical results. At the same time these stories are not simply romances, but are realist as well, as is reflected in the insistence of the heroines of so many of the novels on the value of realism over romance. While Mitchell acknowledges that “the dream/ideal of girlhood in its archetypal form perhaps never did exist, or existed for only a very few girls” and should rather be understood as “a cultural reality” (3), nevertheless it is an ideal of girlhood that is tested by, and tests in turn, settings and situations portrayed more or less realistically. It is between romance and realism where the real tension can be found in these novels, a tension that comes from the dual function marriage serves for girls as both duty and pleasure, defining adulthood for girls in the way that work on the one hand, and marriage on the other hand, defines adulthood for boys. Yet it is a tension rather than a contradiction, since sacrifice, identified with realism in the girls’ fiction, is also, as we have discussed in the chapters on boys’ fiction, a key aspect of romance. The next two sections of this chapter, “Angels and Spheres” and “Girlhood and the New Woman,” look at two other points of tension, or contradiction, that are contained within two particularly complex representations of Victorian femininity, the “angel in the house” and the “New Woman.” These two terms have become useful shorthand references for what appears a clear contrast between the conservative, self-sacrificing Victorian wife and the feminist, self-realising women at the turn of the century. Virginia Woolf’s essay “Professions for Women” makes this contrast particularly apparent when she describes “killing the Angel in the House” as “part of the occupation of a woman writer” (286). However, while we argue that feminist critics of Victorian fiction, particularly of girls’ stories, have regarded as contradictory what should rather be understood as a single ideal involving both sacrifice and independence, we want equally to show that the terms “the angel in the house” and “the New Woman” have come to suggest much more singular concepts of femininity than they represented when they were first used in the nineteenth century.

Angels and Spheres When Kimberley Reynolds notes that Frances Mary Buss, headmistress of the North London Collegiate School for girls, “regularly read her girls passages

Sacrifice and Independence in the Girls’ Stories • 115 from Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House,” this is presented as evidence for her claim that even the pioneers of women’s education could not be assumed to hold progressive beliefs; rather “old-style Victorian images of femininity continued to be handed down to young girls” (99). Throughout the chapters on girls’ fiction, Reynolds uses the phrase “the angel in the house” as a shorthand for that Victorian femininity. Her chapter on the work of Meade and Everett Green is titled “Angel Voices,” referring to the emphasis on domestic service and self-renunciation that she sees as characteristic of the fiction, and as the expression of the “angel in the house” ideal. It is a phrase that usefully refers at once to the Victorian concept of a woman’s “sphere” being limited to the home, and to the self-sacrifice that makes an “angel” of a Victorian woman. The assumption that these two ideals—a woman’s sphere being domestic, and femininity being defined by self-sacrifice—were inextricable from each other is so unquestioned that when the plot of a girls’ story contradicts this assumption, Reynolds simply ignores the contradiction. Reynolds gives two examples of Meade novels to support her premise that these are stories that carefully resist “challenging the idealised social construction of the domestic angel,” transforming the school setting into “the means of new and greater opportunities for self-denial, service and adherence to the established principles of femininity” (135). Yet one of these, A Sweet Girl Graduate, makes an absolute distinction between the ideal of self-sacrifice, and the ideal of marriage and domesticity. The heroine of A Sweet Girl Graduate, Priscilla Peel, is a classics scholar, which Reynolds glosses as “indicative of a precarious state of femininity” (137). The shift in a girls’ curriculum to increasingly include classics can be understood, as Mitchell discusses in The New Girl, as an appropriation of an education previously understood as suitable only for boys; indeed, Mitchell reproduces the copy of an issue of Atalanta, the magazine for girls edited by Meade, which depicts girls in classical-looking tunics that are something in between gym-slips and togas, representing the appropriation of both athletics and classics, the two “key signifiers of their brothers’ masculine world” (12). Reynolds’ argument that in A Sweet Girl Graduate Meade supports an “orthodoxy” condemning classics as inappropriate for girls is as unsupported by textual evidence as Meade’s promotion of the classics in Atalanta would suggest. Rather than signify “a precarious state of femininity,” classics scholarship seems rather to suggest idealism and a capacity for romance. Priscilla’s love for the classics—“I love Latin and Greek better than anything else in the world” (83)—is accompanied by a love for art that sees her moved to tears by a painting, and a love of flowers that gives her “a luminous light in her eyes” as she kneels reverently over a chrysanthemum. Her capacity for romance extends, too, to the romantic friendship she shares with Maggie, a fellow student—“I love her—I have a very great love for her . . . I would do anything—anything in the world for her,” she explains to Mr. Hayes, the clergyman she turns to

116 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 for counsel (193). Maggie is an appropriate choice for such a friendship, having herself a great capacity for romance, again evident in her own love of the classics. Reading the classics alone in her room, “a fine fire fi lled her eyes; her brow, as she pushed back her hair, showed its rather massive proportions . . . She read on without interruption for nearly an hour. At the end of that time her cheeks were burning like two glowing crimson roses” (66). It is this loved study of the classics that Priscilla gives up as, in Reynolds’ interpretation, “the book thunders to a close in a celebration of self-renunciation and femininity” (138). Priscilla’s decision to give up the classics, and “put blessedness before happiness—duty before inclination,” Reynolds argues, promotes the “containment” of the girl reader, through her identification with Priscilla, in “her place in the home and a moral ambience based on feminine idealism” (138). Yet Priscilla gives up the classics not for “her place in the home” but in order to study the modern languages that will better secure her “a good paying situation” (209). It is not Priscilla but Maggie who marries, after bringing honour to the college by taking first class in her Tripos examinations, and her marriage is clearly no sacrifice. Coming to the headmistress with the news of her happiness, “Maggie’s eyes were glistening through the softest rainbow of tears” (286). It is marriage and sacrifice which are presented as opposites, independence and sacrifice which are linked. Yet independence is something of value in its own right, something to keep even as it requires other possibilities to be given up. As Priscilla says, “My father and mother were poor and independent. Aunt Raby is very poor, and also independent . . . I have made my resolve. I will keep my independence” (284–85). The ending of A Sweet Girl Graduate makes the distinction between sacrifice and marriage particularly clear with the different conclusions to Priscilla’s and Maggie’s stories, and Priscilla’s resolve to maintain her financial independence into adulthood. Typically, adolescence provides a space in these novels in which both romance and sacrifice structure the stories. “The angel in the house” is an image of a domestic ideal that girls might aspire to but which belongs properly to the married life that follows (and puts an end to) adolescence. It is worth looking at in the context of adolescent idealism, however, since it is not just an image of self-sacrifice in domestic servitude, as sometimes seems to be assumed, but represents an idealism which is as romantic as it is sacrificial. In fact, although the phrase “the angel in the house” is so usefully portable, Coventry Patmore’s actual poem is almost absurdly complex, not only long but multiple in its voice and narrative strands. The idealisation of Honoria, the “angel” of the poem, is presented from the start not quite as a fiction, but in terms of literary convention. Felix Vaughn, the narrator of the poem, writes in order to “make his name,” and comes up with the idea of celebrating his wife, and his courtship of her, only after “meditating much and long / What I should sing, how win a name” (61). Her question, “What is it, Dear? The life / Of Arthur, or Jerusalem’s Fall?” (62), places the narrative firmly

Sacrifice and Independence in the Girls’ Stories • 117 within the genre of romance, but of course at the same time mocks the poet’s pretensions. It is hard not to read his decision to make his subject “your gentle self, my Wife” (62) as a letdown (though perhaps also a reprieve), particularly since it is clear that whether or not she takes her place “with Laura and with Beatrice” (62) will depend less on her perfection as a subject and more on his capacity as a poet (even though he hopes that critics might make up some of the difference between himself and Dante by finding “deep-conceiv’d devices . . . beyond my purpose and my ken”) (62–63). If the poet’s pretensions are parodied, how does this reflect on Honoria? Firstly, Honoria’s perfection, presented to us as it is through Felix’s account, is always going to be more about his ability and his intentions as a poet than about any actual qualities that might distinguish Honoria. But secondly, where a mismatch between Honoria’s actual qualities and a poetic idealisation of her can be recognised, this very mismatch has its own appeal. One of the curious “preludes” that interrupt the narrative suggests that the very perfection of a girl makes her unsatisfactory as a subject for idealisation; preference goes to the girl whose worship requires a more romantic act of will: Anne lived so truly from above, She was so gentle and so good, That duty bade me fall in love, And, “but for that,” thought I, “I should!” I worshipp’d Kate with all my will, In idle moods you seem to see A noble spirit in a hill, A human touch about a tree. (73) For a wife to be idealised proves almost as much of a stretch as the romanticising of a hill or tree (presumably a daphne). Honoria, remembered by Felix from when she was a “prude” of a girl and “would not let me pull the swing” (67), remains difficult into womanhood, and the details that make up domestic life interrupt Felix’s rhapsodies in a way that suggests a house is as unlikely a place to look for an angel as a shop. Indeed, following the wedding chapter, the very first scene of wedded life does take place in a shop, with Felix’s romantic gaze, fi xed on the ocean, interrupted by the demand that he pay for his wife’s sand-shoes. “The angel in the house” has become such a cliché that it is hard to hear it now as a paradox that suggests the same sort of contradiction held by Amy Levy’s book title, The Romance of a Shop, and yet the contradiction between the will to idealise and domestic reality is emphasised again and again in the poem, to comic effect. The prologue to Book II has the poet, about to recite this second book, get no further than four dramatic lines on the subject of “the pulse of war” before he is interrupted by the children rushing in with a hedgehog, and before he and the poem can proceed further, Honoria, immortalised as his “Venus” in the poem and referred to as Venus

118 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 throughout the fracas, must be calmed down and the offending hedgehog “rolled into a ditch” (139–40). In the girls’ stories, the belief in a romantic idealism belongs to the girls themselves, and it is their own actions, rather than a male gaze, which figure them as angels, or, as the book titles present them, as “daughters of to-day,” “a girl in ten thousand,” “a queen among girls.” The same contradiction between the realities of sand-shoes and hedgehogs, on the one hand, and the ideal of romance and sacrifice, on the other, is emphasised not so much for its comic potential or to highlight the role of the worshipping poet but as a difficulty faced by the heroine herself. In Mona Maclean, Mona counsels a younger girl who says (considering herself more grown-up than she is: usually a sign she should be sent to boarding school), “Long ago, when I was a girl, I began to believe in self-denial, and high ideals, and all that sort of thing. But you can’t work it in with your everyday life. It is all a dream.” Mona responds, “A dream! . . . Everything else is a dream. That is real” (217). Mona’s insistence on bringing idealism into the real world extends beyond the home and into the world, whether she find herself in high society or in the narrow, provincial society of Borrowness, in the ballroom or behind the shop counter. It is this idealism which is behind the emphasis on principles rather than rules in so many of the stories, especially the school and college stories. Reynolds stresses the conservative aspect of this “self-imposed regulation” as it appears in A Sweet Girl Graduate, but she conflates the vice-principal’s assurance of the “almost perfect immunity from the bondage of rules” that the college offers the students, relying instead on “their honour, their rectitude, their sense of sound principle,” with Maggie’s explanation of how college etiquette undermines democracy and advancement in womanhood when she warns Priscilla, “let any student dare to break one of our own little pet proprieties and you will soon see how conservative we can be.” In fact, a contrast is being drawn between rules and proprieties on the one hand, and principles and honour on the other, and Priscilla and Maggie’s friendship is strengthened when each of them recognise the nobility in the other that leads them to break rules and offend propriety under the guidance of higher principles. The girls who insist on proprieties being followed and a narrow interpretation of the rules are exposed as shallow and worldly through a subplot involving an ill-advised auction. An emphasis on principles rather than rules can have a conservative aspect—it conserves ideals—but it also allows for change and, as the character Maggie demonstrates, for rebellion. Specifically, it allows for the principle of self-sacrifice and an associated ideal of femininity—or womanliness, to use the more Victorian term—to be extended beyond the domestic sphere and into the workforce. The distinction between the ideal of womanliness and the traditional forms it has taken can be surprising: Mona Maclean, arguing in favour of an unmarried life for women, declares, “Mothering is a woman’s work without a doubt, but she does not need to have children of her own in

Sacrifice and Independence in the Girls’ Stories • 119 order to do it” (49). Mona of course does marry at the end of Mona Maclean, but she does not give up her medical work. The final scene represents Mona sitting by the fire, “her bright, strong, womanly face” showing her ready to receive the young girl seeking medical—and womanly—advice. Of course the phrase “the angel in the house” is used by critics writing about Victorian literature because it does represent an ideal of femininity that had a real cultural currency, and which did, indeed, structure the representations of girls and women in much Victorian fiction, as we see in the contrast between the selfless but sunny Esther Summerson and the far-from-angelic Mrs. Jellaby in Dickens’ Bleak House, to give just one well-known example. In the girls’ stories, in contrast, an interest in charity work is invariably evidence of a noble character and of a self-sacrificing idealism which belongs equally within and without the domestic sphere. The determination of so many of these girls to find a sphere of influence beyond the home—and those who are not determined to, nevertheless typically are forced to—is what relates them to the idea of the New Woman; yet, as we will see, the relation between the new girlhood of the girls’ fiction and the heroines of the New Woman literature is not straightforward.

Girlhood and the New Woman H. G. Wells’ satiric novel about the New Woman phenomenon, Wheels of Chance, centres on the figure of a bicycling, seventeen-year-old girl, whose plan to live her own life is derived from the New Woman books she has read: She had read her Olive Schreiner and George Egerton and so forth, with all the want of perfect comprehension of one who is still emotionally a girl. She knew the thing to do was to have a flat and go to the British Museum and write leading articles for the daily papers until something better came along. (240) Here is the perfect, contemporary illustration of the influence of New Woman literature on the turn-of-the-century “new girl.” Wells’ heroine Jessie, however, would have been more likely to find a helpful guide to living her own life in the popular girls’ fiction of novelists such as Meade, Heddle, or Vaizey than in the fiction of Olive Schreiner or George Egerton. Meade gives numerous accounts of girls setting up their own flats and working in the British Museum, where they are likely to meet older women already successful in their careers. Indeed, in Merry Girls of England the successful older novelist is such a compelling role model that the heroine, aspiring author Barbara, is tempted to plagiarise her work and pass it off as her own. Heddle’s Three Girls in a Flat gives a detailed account of Lil’s career

120 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 as a writer of commercial fiction, while also allowing her literary success when she turns to serious fiction, a distinction made. Mitchell has remarked on the excitement with which pupil-teachers recall reading Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm in the 1890s. However, as pupil-teachers, “desperately anxious about qualifying, getting to College, getting jobs in a wider world,” as one teacher recalls, they had a clear career path already mapped out. They were not looking to Schreiner for guidance on how to live their own lives, but rather perhaps for an emotional chord the novel struck, as the recollection of the reading experience as “thrilling, liberating and highly secret” suggests (Mitchell, 37). Lyndall’s passionate protest against “not what is done to us, but what is made of us,” her refusal to accept that men should work, women seem, must have resonated with the pupil-teachers who were typically the first generation of women in their family to take up a professional career. Perhaps even more emotionally satisfying, however, may have been the representation of this feminist character as worshipped by all the male characters in the novel and by her cousin, the humble and domestic Em, and even her lingering and much romanticised death at the end of the novel, attended by a devoted suitor, Gregory Rose, dressed in women’s clothes, may have allowed the novel’s hard-working and “desperately anxious” readers to indulge themselves in a fantasy of complete rest and renunciation. What Lyndall’s example does not offer is a model of how to live as a woman at the turn of the century. The narrative skips over Lyndall’s adolescence, dwelling for most of the novel on her childhood and then, more briefly but with great emotional intensity, on her death after the birth of a baby born out of wedlock. Her life in the world beyond the farm and beyond the sickroom is only narrated in retrospective conversations, with her boarding-school education dismissed as the systematic compression of a human soul and her brief experience of the world resulting in the pregnancy that costs her her life. Egerton’s fiction is equally discouraging. Marriage is generally represented as the opposite of romance: the heroine of “A Cross Line” gives up her romance with a passing stranger to stay with her prosaic husband and bear him a child; the heroine of “An Empty Frame” has given up a man who loved her but would not marry her for the husband she now realises is unable to fully appreciate a nature as complex as her own. The most damning indictment of marriage is given in “Virgin Soil,” in which the heroine is given away in marriage as a child, innocent of what marriage involves, and returns to the family home five years later, “no trace of girlhood” left in her, to accuse her mother of having sold her into a legal prostitution. Yet free relationships along the lines of the one the heroine of “An Empty Frame” refused are also represented as problematic, the men in stories like “Now Spring Has Come” or “Gone Under” growing tired of the women who initially attract them, and leaving them bereft of reputation, happiness, and beauty. Only in the fi nal story of Egerton’s second collection, “The Regeneration of Two,” does Egerton present a vision of how a New Woman’s life might be shaped, and the life she

Sacrifice and Independence in the Girls’ Stories • 121 imagines, in which the heroine runs an open house for women and their illegitimate children who apparently support themselves through spinning wool on spinning wheels, offers a much less realistic guide to life in the twentieth century than the girls’ fiction of the period provides with their representations of reading in the British Library, coming home to a makeshift tea in a shared flat, and writing late into the night, supplementing this work by writing or typing up manuscripts of more-established authors. Significantly, none of these stories are stories of adolescence, “Virgin Soil” having a five-year narrative gap at the centre of it that corresponds to the fouryear gap at the centre of Lyndall’s story, and most of the other stories focusing on a woman’s life after marriage or after an affair is over. Yet typically the heroines are described as childish: “a little girl—but a remarkable little girl” (“Now Spring Has Come”), an “imp” (“A Cross Line”), “the most charming mixture of child and woman” (“A Little Grey Glove”), a “slight, weak thing” (“An Empty Frame”). Story after story emphasises the smallness of the heroine’s hands, “as small as a child’s” (“Now Spring Has Come”), “of a perfect shape but perfectly brown” (“A Cross Line”), “such little hands! I never saw the like . . . slim child-hands” (“An Empty Frame”). In The Story of an African Farm the smallness of Lyndall’s hands is remarked on almost as frequently, emphasised as it is by the large ring she wears after her time away from the farm; she is distinguished, too, by her “tiny, very tiny feet,” her “little lip,” her hair “soft as silk, like a wax doll’s,” her “little white, white face.” By the end of her life, Lyndall has been “refined by suffering into an almost angel-like beauty” (250). Although the “angel in the house” is still too often used as shorthand for a simplistic idea of Victorian femininity, it has been well recognised that “the New Woman” has been, as Lyn Pykett writes, “a shifting and contested term” that could represent an extraordinary range of ideals and anxieties. Sarah Grand was asking in 1898, Who is this New Woman, this epicene creature, this Gorgon set up by the snarly who impute to her the faults of both sexes while denying her the charm of either—where is she to be found if she exists at all? For my own part, until I make her acquaintance I shall believe her to be the finest work of the imagination which the newspapers have yet produced. (Broomfield and Mitchell. (668) Yet Sarah Grand’s novels The Beth Book, The Heavenly Twins, and Ideala are generally considered New Woman novels, and Grand’s 1894 article “A New Aspect of the Woman Question” is credited with having introduced the term “the New Woman” into popular currency. Grand here is arguing against the caricature of the New Woman as she appears in newspapers and magazines at the time, in the Punch cartoons and opinion pieces in the Westminster Review, as mannish, strident, unattractive, and absurd in her adoption of fashions

122 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 such as rational dress, enormous sleeves, smoking, and cycling. She herself, however, had created a fine work of the imagination in “A New Aspect of the Woman Question,” presenting the contemporary focus on the “woman question” as “the sudden and violent upheaval of the suffering sex in all parts of the world . . . awakening from their long apathy.” Her “new woman” she presents as “a little above” the men of the period who, confronted with this awakening, object in chorus as a “Bawling Brotherhood”; the New Woman sits apart, “thinking and thinking” until she is able to diagnose “what was wrong with Home-is-the-Woman’s-Sphere” (Broomfield and Mitchell 660). Her claim in this article that what is wrong is essentially men failing in a “manliness” defined in terms of chivalry, truth, earnest purpose, and noble self-sacrifice, is more fully worked out in her novels, in which what is wrong with her heroines’ marriages includes the risk of syphilis, and the solution for her heroine Evadne in The Heavenly Twins is to refuse to consummate the marriage, despite the increasingly strong attraction she feels towards her own husband. The explicit material in her novels—as well as their length—distinguishes them very clearly from the popular girls’ stories with which we are concerned, as does their generally discouraging narratives. Like the heroines of the fiction of Schreiner and Egerton, Grand’s heroines risk syphilis, nervous breakdown, madness, and/or suicide, with those who marry unfortunate enough to witness their children, too, suffer and die. Her newspaper articles, however, present a version of the New Woman much closer to the heroines of the juvenile fiction of the period. In particular, it is interesting how conservative a portrayal of the New Woman she gives in “The New Woman and the Old,” and how close her “Old Woman” is to Eliza Lynn Linton’s “Girl of the Period” of a generation earlier. It is the “Old Woman” who flirts and dissembles, who depends on men’s approval for her own self-worth, who is “a creature of clothes” and a slave to the fashion papers. But it is the New Woman who is able to embrace new ideas, new ways of living, and to move beyond the narrow sphere previously allowed to her, with no risk to her moral purity because “she creates about herself the moral atmosphere she prefers” (Broomfield and Mitchell 673). When the heroines of juvenile popular fiction call themselves New Women, it is this move beyond the domestic sphere that they are claiming for themselves. The need to define the “New Woman” in her own terms is recognised by the heroine of Meade’s Merry Girls of England, who counters the objection to her becoming “one of those monsters of the present day—a New Woman” with the reply, “If to be a New Woman means to be well educated and taking an interest in life, and seeing plenty of my fellow men and women, then I am going to become one” (129). It is interesting that whereas many heroines are represented as beginning their literary careers by writing romances for the popular press, while they would prefer to write and generally are allowed eventually to succeed in writing more literary fiction, the heroine of Merry Girls of England sets herself to collecting “all the proper ingredients for the

Sacrifice and Independence in the Girls’ Stories • 123 well-known girls’ novel” (175). This is also the novel in which one of the older characters observes, “In my day, Hero, little women were in fashion. Now it is all the rage to be big and masculine!” The heroines of novels such as Merry Girls of England are certainly represented as sturdier characters than the weak and childish heroines of Egerton or Schreiner’s New Woman fiction. The heroine of Polly: A New-Fashioned Girl is described as “tall and very slim” with “big, dark, restless eyes [that] reflected each emotion of her mind” and appears in the first scene “lolling against the mantelpiece, and restlessly changing her position from one leg to another” (17); Helen Channing, the New Woman character in Daughters of To-day, is described as “upright and fairly good-looking,” having “an earnest, purposeful, and yet calm face” (11); Bridget O’Hara, heroine of the misleadingly titled Bashful Fifteen is described as “a tall, fully-developed girl,” with “eyes . . . of that peculiar, very dark, very deep blue” here represented as “an Irish girl’s special gift” but in fact rather typical of the Meade heroine (14). Nor is it only Meade who creates strong and individual heroines. The more sturdy beauty of Everett-Green’s Olive Roscoe is contrasted favourably with her sister Pearl’s fragile delicacy; Levy’s Gertrude Lorimer is saved from plainness only by the expressiveness of her mouth and chin and the nobility of her arching forehead; Rhoda, in Vaizey’s Tom and Some Other Girls, is “not regularly pretty,” yet “her air of assurance forced onlookers to think her so, despite their better judgement, and there was about her a breezy atmosphere of health and youth” (8). Perhaps more significant, though, than the difference in appearance between the heroines of the girls’ stories and Schreiner and Egerton’s heroines is the difference in the point of view from which they are observed. Even when Egerton’s heroines are given a first-person narrative, they imagine their appearance from the man’s point of view: the heroine of “Now Spring Has Come” looked at herself in a mirror when she was alone “to fancy how he saw me . . . I had colour, life, eyes like stars, trembling, smiling lips” (18). Later, when the affair is over, “I felt as if I were being totted up. Item, so much colour, item, so much flesh . . . Had I been worried? I had lost that buoyant childishness that was so attractive.” Even her hands are no longer so pretty as they were: “he thought they were not so small . . . Might be my wrists were less round, that made a difference! Did it? They certainly were larger, and not so white” (22). Most of the stories are told in the third person, but with the viewpoint often that of a man, especially when the appearance of the heroine is described. Egerton’s one positive vision of the New Woman in “The Regeneration of Two” is dramatically different from her usual portrayal of childlike heroines, depicting her (in the second part of the story, after her regeneration) as “big and bonny, with clear eyes and glowing cheeks,” yet just as in the other stories this is a vision of the heroine through the eyes of the male character, whose “eyes are wide open, and gaze wonderingly up at her” (158). It is because of his earlier dissatisfaction with her pretty clothes, corseted waist, and refined manners, and his lament that all the women he has met have been

124 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 either “half-man or half-doll” that she has made such radical changes to her life and to her appearance, and her reward is his approval: “Now you are a whole woman” (169). Perhaps the most important aspect of the independence of the heroines of the girls’ stories is the heroines’ independence from valuing their appearance primarily in terms of their attractiveness to men. The descriptions are given early on in the stories, for the sake of the reader’s imagination, and they are generally given as an indication primarily of character. It is in terms of character we read Gertrude Lorimer’s high forehead and lack of ordinary beauty, her sister Phyllis’s slender delicacy and wide, grey eyes, and Fanny’s small, meaningless features and faint eyebrows, and a similar range of character types is offered with Helen Channing’s “earnest, purposeful yet calm face” and “deeply set grey eyes,” Dorothea Channing’s frizzy hair that would never stay smooth, her eyes “dark and dancing,” her cheeks with “a wild-rose bloom about them,” and Emmy Thorn’s slight figure, pale cheeks, and “pretty soft brown eyes” that “were not remarkable for either size or brilliancy” but were nevertheless “sweet eyes” that made everyone think of her as lovely, despite her nondescript features. In Working to Win, the emphasis on character is such that although the description is introduced with the remark, “Marjory’s face is a very fair title page to her story, therefore, let me describe it to you,” in fact the description passes so quickly on from the delicacy of Marjory’s face to a history of her health and discussion of her faults of character that we get to the end of the paragraph having learnt nothing concrete about her appearance at all, neither the colour of her hair or eyes, what kind of features she has, nor whether she is beautiful or not, only that she appears somewhat delicate and grave. She is set up as a thoughtful heroine, and not in order for men to be enchanted with her lively talk of “Tolstoi and his doctrine of celibacy. Ibsen’s Hedda. Strindberg’s view of the female animal” as in Egerton’s “Now Spring Has Come,” but as a heroine for whom the trials ahead of her will be deeply felt but conscientiously taken on, and the moral implications of her decisions fully thought through. As Mitchell has observed, this is an independence lost after the First World War, when “girls’ culture, no longer new, lacked the range and promise and daring agency of its first generation,” and the “less open, less fluid” girl culture between the wars began “to teach her that romance is at the core of life,” so that “the man, rather than the self, becomes the focus of her interest” (188). While the school story for girls remained as a genre that, as feminist critics have noted, allows for the representation of an independent world for girls and women, this independence can only be represented within what has become a separate world, and a world essentially for children, as enclosed as the Victorian nursery. Mitchell explains the narrowing of girl culture after the First World War in terms of its growing distance from the first wave of feminism and from the concept of the New Woman, but the difference between the girls’ fiction and the New Woman fiction suggests this is only a partial explanation.

Sacrifice and Independence in the Girls’ Stories • 125 Just as the new concept of girlhood can be more fully understood when it is seen in the wider context of the Victorian concept of adolescence, so too can the changing concept of girlhood in the twentieth century be best understood in relation to similar changes in the concept of boyhood and adolescence more generally. Accordingly, we return now to boys’ juvenile fiction in the period between the wars.

Chapter Five Boys’ Stories between the Wars

The story about the British officer who threw the rugby or soccer ball into noman’s-land, exhorting his men to chase it, is frequently told to demonstrate the kinds of public school absurdity that could not survive the carnage of such battles as the Somme. However as Jeffrey Richards points out, The conventional wisdom . . . that the public school spirit, chivalry and empire all reached their peak in WWI and thereafter, with the bitter words of the war poets, and the disillusionment of the post-war generation with everything their fathers stood for, the ideals went into eclipse. . . . is a view based almost entirely on the evidence of the high culture (1988: 216). The implicit distinction between “high” and “popular” culture is important but it also needs to be qualified. Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” changed utterly a phrase known to every public school boy (and not a few non-public ones) but at the start of the Spanish Civil War, according to Orwell, the Left intelligentsia, amongst whose ranks were many former public school boys, swung alarmingly quickly from “‘War is Hell’ to ‘War is glorious’” (204). Similarly while Robert Graves in Goodbye to All That quotes without comment from the letter of “A Little Mother” declaring that “the corn that will wave over land watered by the blood of our brave lads shall testify to the future that their blood was not split in vain” as though such sacrificial rhetoric were beneath contempt, Cyril Connolly could refer to the Civil War’s “Rupert Brooke period” (189; qtd. in Hynes 242). Hemingway’s Frederic Henry says that “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates” (165) and yet before the war Kurtz’s soaring rhetoric culminates in “Exterminate all the brutes!” (51). Indeed from Wordsworth and Coleridge’s admonition in the Lyrical Ballads 127

128 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 to avoid the “personifications of abstract ideas” to Ezra Pound’s 1913 Imagist caution to “Go in fear of abstractions,” there is a strong tradition in high culture that combats the kinds of idealist rhetoric that was so characteristic, as we have seen, of the pre-war decades (27, 5). The modern gods of abstraction survived the war just as before many had refused to make them sacrifices. Nevertheless, it is hardly surprising that high culture was more critical of such language than popular culture. During the war the BOP would frequently publish accounts of the heroic actions of youthful, even boy heroes, such as sixteen-year-old Jack Cornwell’s refusal to leave his post on H.M.S. Chester, a “glorious deed” that resulted in his death but which, according to a letter to the magazine from Admiral Lord Beresford, set[s] an example of devotion to duty which will be an inspiration to British boys for all time. It will not fall to the lot of every boy to prove so devotedly his obedience, discipline, and self-sacrifice; but every boy can endeavour to live up to his example of practising discipline and being obedient in small things. In this way character is formed, and we are able—when a crisis arises and there are big things to be done—to do them. (1916/17: 138) As well as stories of derring-do in the trenches, at sea, and in the air, the magazine would also publish the kind of verses that were almost indistinguishable from the patriotic verse of the pre-war years: “I have fought a good fight,” said the soldier, When the battle-day was done; “We have beaten the enemy backward. Tho’ the victory was hard, it is won. We stood with our ranks unbroken, Our courage never gave. The fight was hard, with gun and shard, But our men were stout and brave.” “I have finished my course,” said the runner, As he stood with tape at his breast; “The race was a long and weary one, But I kept my place with the best. I heard the crowds that were cheering, But I steadily kept on my way. I am faint and weak, strength is far to seek, But at least I have won the day.” “I have kept the Faith,” said the martyr. In the arena there he stood;

Boys’ Stories between the Wars • 129 The savage beasts were round him, And thirsted for his blood. Unmoved he watched their prowling, Stood with unquickened breath. When at last they sprang, a song he sang, And went with a smile to Death. (Frank Ellis 346) The battle of the Somme had occurred in July of that year (1916). After the war the popularity of juvenile adventure and school stories continued unabated. The creator of Billy Bunter, Frank Richards, was the most prolific author the world has ever known, producing, it is estimated, more than seventy million words and thereby earning an entry in The Guinness Book of Records (Cadogan 1). The best known of the papers in which Bunter and his Greyfriars schoolmates appeared, The Magnet, had at its height a weekly print run of more than two hundred thousand, a figure which, because of swapping and lending, needs to be doubled, even tripled to determine the number of actual readers (Richards 1988: 289). And many of these readers were from the working classes, Robert Roberts remembering that he and his schoolmates “developed an addiction” for what were for them the “young knights” of the Famous Five, such that “In the final estimate it may well be found that Frank Richards during the first quarter of the twentieth century had more influence on the mind and outlook of young working-class England than any other single person, not excluding Baden-Powell” (127, 128). There were two other boys’ story cycles that were scarcely less influential. Between the wars, the investigations of the “office boy’s Sherlock Holmes,” Sexton Blake, were the subject of four novels a month and a hundred stories a year (Hodder). Richards’ output almost defies belief, but Sexton Blake’s existence was dependant on the work of about two hundred writers (incidentally, including Flann O’Brien) (Hinrich 3). Partly because of their collective authorship, Dorothy Sayers could conclude with her typical inscrutable irony that The really interesting point about them is that they present the nearest modern approach to a national folk-lore, conceived as the centre for a cycle of loosely connected romances in the Arthurian manner. Their significance in popular literature and education would richly repay scientific investigation. (Sayers 16) The third of the great figures, “Captain” Johns’ Biggles, would become in the two decades after his first flight in 1932 the most popular juvenile hero in the world (Peter Ellis 208). During the 1930s the popularity of the Bunter and Blake stories declined but the stories of the rival Thomson press were just as popular as their Amalgamated predecessors. Of the main Thomson weeklies, the so-called “Big Five” (Wizard, Rover, Skipper, Hotspur, and Adventure), the most popular, Wizard, may have had a circulation as high as eight hundred

130 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 thousand in 1937 (no precise circulation statistics exist) (Brightwell). The Greyfriars boys, Sexton Blake, Biggles, the heroes of the Big Five, and countless other minor characters were the role models of virtually every British boy. Nevertheless, after the war there is a noticeable decline in the kind of sacrificial rhetoric we have just sampled, perhaps as we would expect given that it was no longer necessary. While in some respects post-war boys’ weekly papers did, as Orwell asserted, stop the clock at 1910, they were not untouched by the war and the economic, social, and cultural turmoil that succeeded it. High cultural attitudes can no more be reduced to those of “Dulce et Decorum Est” than popular and middlebrow culture to the sentiments of Henty and “Vitaï Lampada.” Accordingly, the adolescent ideal, we will argue, remained but in a somewhat reduced state. Adolescence is still a precious between-time but it has become harder to distinguish it, on the one hand, from the innocence of childhood and, on the other, from the experience of adulthood. The most obvious marker of this reduction is attitudes towards sex. Orwell maintains that in the boys’ papers after the war sex is completely taboo, especially in the form in which it actually arises at public schools. Occasionally girls enter into the stories, and very rarely there is something approaching a mild flirtation, but it is entirely in the spirit of clean fun. A boy and a girl enjoy going for bicycle rides together— that is all it ever amounts to. Kissing, for instance, would be regarded as ‘soppy’. Even the bad boys are presumed to be completely sexless. . . . In the Gem and Magnet sex simply does not exist as a problem. (102) The owner of the Amalgamated Press, Lord Northcliffe, had instituted this taboo, though it may not have been necessary if all his writers had been like Richards: “I have never yet,” he maintained, “come across a love novel as interesting as a game of cricket” (Cadogan 112, 214). Richards did write one romance novel but this was the result of a bet with a woman at a dinner party. Bunter frequently boasts that girls from the neighbouring school of Cliff House are “spoony” on him but this is a consequence of his unassailable “fat conceit” and on one occasion he—or to be more precise, his cousin and double—is chased by a Cliff House schoolgirl who wants to box his ears before he is then run through a gauntlet by his schoolmates for acting like a “crawling cad” for making such an improbable claim (1919: 6, 10). Jeffrey Richards describes Bunter as a “School-boy Falstaff” and “a catharsis for anarchic impulses, the epitome of everything that one should not be” but sex is not one of these impulses (1988: 272). Nor is it for any of the other characters. The girl who tried to box Bunter’s ears, Clara Trevlyn, was rather more inclined to be flirtatious than any of her friends. She does not want fellows to be spooney: sitting and holding hands, kissing,

Boys’ Stories between the Wars • 131 waist-claspings, and all that sort of thing are not in her line. But the flirtatious is not objectionable to her. When she is a few years older she will probably dangle many scalps at her girdle before coming across “Mr. Right.” (1917 (c) 13) But Clara never takes her flirtations too far, unlike her friend Phyllis Howell: The kiss which Miss Howell gave Bob Cherry caused quite a lot of excitement among our readers at the time. Some of them wanted more kissing in the stories; they seemed to look forward to a perfect orgy of it! They did not get it. That was a special kiss—one by itself—on a very special occasion. There was any amount of friendship in it—affection even—no one needs to be ashamed of loving honest Bob—but it was chiefly excitement, and it was not the very least spooniness. Phyllis wanted Greyfriars to come out on top in the sports every bit as much as any Greyfriars fellow could want; and she was almost beside herself with joy when Bob told her the result. Perhaps she would not have kissed any of the others, even in those circumstances; but that does not matter. (1918: 16) Thank goodness! The girls range from those like Clara, who is “modern” and affects “a slangy form of speech,” to those such as Marjorie Hazeldene, the sister of a weak and wayward Greyfriars boy, whose self-sacrificing nature was apparently “not up-to-date enough” for some readers (1917 (b) 13). But they all have the kind “spirit” and “pluck” that makes even the least boyish of them ideal companions for the boys. Nevertheless, Orwell’s description of these prepubescent adolescents does need some qualification. His supposition that “When the Gem and Magnet were started, it is probable that there was a deliberate intention to get away from the guilty sex-ridden atmosphere that pervaded so much of the earlier literature for boys” (93) is quite plausible but the earlier issues did occasionally raise romantic and sexual issues. In “Wingate’s Folly” (1911 a) the eponymous character falls in love with a nineteen-year-old pantomime actress, although she sacrifices their “little friendship” for the sake of Wingate’s career (27). The fifteen-year-old Nugent falls for another pantomime actress, Conchita, whom he believes is seventeen, only to discover that in fact she is thirtyseven and engaged. Arthur Courtney takes things the furthest when kissing his sweetheart Vi’s forehead; she raises her lips to his, “with the innocence of a child, but the love of a woman,” actually managing a kiss, though fortunately one immediately interrupted by the “Ting-a-ling-ting” of a bicycle bell. The only kiss in the history of Greyfriars is later sanctified when Arthur dies rescuing Vi’s bounder brother in a fire and some time afterwards she dies of an unexplained cause (1918: 4). As late as 1920 Wingate—the captain of the school, no less—falls in love with yet another older woman, the fi lm star Miss Elsie Mainwaring (alongside whom he plays a cowboy in an American

132 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 western fi lmed on the coast of England) and yet again the “lovers” must forever part, her saying that “later you, too, would know that it was only a dream of your boyhood” (1920: 13). Before the war advertisements for such products as “Mousta,” a “moustache forcer” (1909), can still be found but during the 1920s and ’30s boys had other things on their minds, as the motto “Clean, Wholesome Literature” indicates. Like the Greyfriars stories, the early Sexton Blake stories are not averse to some romance: in one published before the turn of the century a certain Miss Ray had “given [Blake] more than half a promise that she will some day reward his devotion to her in the way he most desires” (qtd. in Moorcock 3). However, Blake soon became a confirmed bachelor, for reasons explained by the following dialogue between him and one of his early temptresses: “I want some happiness in life, [explains the temptress]. Am I ugly? Am I repulsive? Am I lacking in intelligence? Other men have not found me so.” “Nor have I,” said Blake in strained tones, “You are none of those things. It is necessary for me to tell you that you are very lovely and very, very desirable.” “Then why won’t you . . .” “No. If I admit any of the softness of what you suggest into my life it means my career would suffer. I have always put it first and must continue to do so. I am sorry, but I can’t.” (qtd. in Moorcock 5) Blake’s equivalent of Watson, the cockney boy Tinker, faces no such dilemma. When we first meet him he is prepubescent but as the series grows up so does he. As a “youth” in a 1925 story, “Tinker’s Secret,” he falls in love with a dancer called Nirvana. Although only sixteen years old, Nirvana has red lips that pout “disdainfully,” a throat that is “a perfect white column” that sweeps down to a body that is “all that beauty and perfect rhythm of movement could express” and limbs that are “beautiful in their soft curves, unspoiled by the suggestion of muscles like those of so many dancers,” while one of her dances is of the most seductive dances which the hot blood of Andalusia, the dreamy songs of Brazil and the savage emotion of the Argentine pampas have blended into those exotic movements which make the pulses race as one is carried along through shadowy aisles where the heavy scent of jungle blooms seem to beat upon one’s senses and wicked eyes lure one while soft arms reach out to drag one back into caves of eternal twilight.” (6) Like the rest of the male audience, Tinker becomes wildly infatuated, though his mission becomes the redemption of this young femme fatale from the life of crime into which her “fiendish” but nearly as beautiful older sister Marie has dragged her. Yet rescuing one fallen girl-woman does not inoculate him

Boys’ Stories between the Wars • 133 and on several later occasions it is suggested that the adult Tinker has had not a few romantic dalliances. After the Second World War we are told that he was “interested in chess ‘to some extent’ and red-heads ‘to a larger extent’ (Hodder), while Sexton Blake, not to be outdone, hires a leggy honey-blond secretary, Paula Dane, whose devotion to the great detective is not entirely professional. Many of the covers during the 1950s feature women with legs like Paula’s and heaving breasts, and in 1957 one apparently steamy story was withdrawn in the context of public concerns about obscenity (Hodder). Reading the Greyfriars stories alongside the Sexton Blakes suggests that the juvenile market was pulled in two directions. On the one hand, those such as the Greyfriars stories have made the world of adolescents not just more innocent but also more childish. On the other, the Sexton Blake stories provide virtually adult reading matter for adolescents. Significantly, the main heroes of the Greyfriars stories, the Famous Five, are not in their final year of school but the fourth form or the Remove and are on average fifteen years old, though of course the adventures of older boys are also recounted. In contrast, Tinker is a grown man by the 1930s and when the juvenile paper The Union Jack folds in 1933 the adult paper Detective publishes some of the stories, albeit only until 1940. Moreover, as one Blake aficionado points out, many of the writers were also producers of popular hardback thriller fiction. Many of them indeed “de-Blaked” their stories of the great man and published them with renamed heroes through such firms as Wright and Brown, principally for the private circulating library trade so prevalent before the Second World War. A few even managed later to re-Blake such a book and sell it, with a change of title, all over again to the Amalgamated Press. (Hinrich 3) In contrast, the novels about the third main hero do not just go in one of two opposed directions but in both at the same time. When we meet Biggles for the first time he is described as “a slight, fair haired, good looking lad still in his ’teens, but an acting Flight-Commander” (curiously with hands that are “small and delicate as a girl’s” (qtd. in Harris), but he ages without acquiring a juvenile sidekick. The first Biggles stories were published in the adult magazine edited by Johns, Popular Flying, and when they were reprinted in the 1950s, references to drinking and swearing were omitted, such as the episode in which lemonade is substituted for twelve bottles of whisky initially won for the capture a German balloon (Harris). In the first collection of stories, The Camels Are Coming (1932), Biggles meets the great love of his life, Marie Janis, who unfortunately turns out to be a spy, though she attempts, unnecessarily as it turns out, to save his life. As a consequence, in the next episode, Biggles takes to drinking half a bottle of whisky in the morning and flying with total disregard for his own life. On the only occasion in which he meets Marie again, significantly in a novel published in 1965, Biggles Looks Back,

134 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 so much time has passed that he does not recognise her, and in the intervening years he never has such a romance again. Despite this initial swerve away from romance, however, the only changes are those of setting and the kind of conflict in which Biggles finds himself. Johns once explained that Biggles was “the reverse of the material for most thriller heroes. No sex. No hard liquor. No violence. No course expletives.” On another occasion, though, he complained that his editors compelled him to leave out all but the violence (Peter Ellis 222–23). Despite these restrictions, however, the Biggles stories are effectively adult ones without such corrupting material. They are suitable for prepubescent boys and for adults who want a ripping war story but not for those in between, sexually aware adolescents who are nevertheless too young, as it were, to fly in the British air force. Significantly, as Boyd observes, there is less emphasis on manliness during the interwar years and indeed that marvellously rich Victorian word “manly” largely ceases to be used, except in outmoded contexts (102). The OED defines the word as “having those qualities or characteristics traditionally associated with men as distinguished from women or children; courageous, strong, independent in spirit, frank, upright, etc.,” though it has no sexual connotations. Thus the decline in the use of the word signifies that there is less interest in a process of gendering which occurs, at least before the Great War when representations of feminine prepubescent boys were acceptable and common, largely during adolescence. In contrast, while there are still episodes of sexualised sacrifice in the post-war stories, notably Arthur’s sacrifice of his life while rescuing his sweetheart’s brother, even that episode is only implicitly about such a theme, and elsewhere the rhetoric of sacrifice is notable by its relative absence. The time between childhood and adulthood has contracted. On the one hand, some aspects of adolescence have become indistinguishable from adulthood while on the other hand others have merged into the (supposedly) sexual innocence of childhood. One aspect of this contraction of adolescence is the virtual disappearance of romantic friendships between boys, a phenomenon that begins before the war. The first Greyfriars and Magnet story (1908) introduces us to a boy, Harry Wharton—“A handsome, well-built lad, finely-formed, strong and active,” with a face that has “well-marked features and large, dark eyes”—who is in many ways indistinguishable from his nineteenth-century predecessors (1). Indeed it is hard to find a boy who is not explicitly described as good-looking in any of either the Amalgamated or Thomson papers. A description of their appearance, usually with sparkling eyes and curly hair, is the standard way in which the majority of the stories begin. But they never go any further. These are characters that the reader wants to be, not to admire. There are also native characters who are characterised by their remarkable physiques, Biggles’ partner, Ginger, observing in Biggles in Borneo, for example, One of the most magnificent savages. . . . He stood a full six feet four inches in height, with arms of proportionate size; muscles rippled under

Boys’ Stories between the Wars • 135 the skin of a mighty brown torso—or what could be seen of it, for it was festooned with an amazing assortment of articles, from teeth and claws to empty cartridge cases and tin lids. (19) But unlike Haggard’s description of native men there is no lingering over the body as the narrator quickly moves to the things that most interest him, the various baubles signifying native superstition. The less manly type of boy was also a significant character, as in the nineteenth-century stories. One such is Frank Nugent, a member of the Famous Five and supposedly one that Richards based on himself: Handsome in a somewhat girlish way, Frank Nugent has never been a molly-coddle. He is good at games; when resolution is needed he is not found wanting—physical resolution, that is. He has less moral resolution. He is, for all his real charm, for all his lovable qualities, essentially the weakest of that little brotherhood of five. (1917 (a) 16) Although he is a relation of Arthur from Tom Brown’s School Days, Frank is a very distant one, entirely lacking as he does the former’s moral and religious intensity. Such intensity is precisely what the stories in general lack. Whereas the Boy’s Journal, one of the Harmsworth “penny dreadfullers” and therefore hardly the most pious of the papers, could declare that it was written by “writers whose work is naturally imbued with lofty ideals—love of home and of the homeland; a strong sense of the greatness of one Empire; patriotism and good comradeship; purity of mind and body; moral as well as physical courage; and contempt for anything that is untruthful, petty, base or brutal” (qtd. in Boyd 129), Richards was altogether more modest, claiming that his sole purpose was “To entertain his readers, make them as happy as possible, give them a feeling of cheerful security, turn their thoughts to healthy pursuits, and above all to keep them away from unhealthy introspection” (Richards 1940: 5). This does not mean that there is not an implicitly strong moral code in the stories: the boys, or at least the good ones, are loyal, honest, plucky without needing to be overly courageous, and decent. Moreover, contrary to Orwell’s assertion that the antisnobbery aspects of the stories are quite superficial, they are in fact reasonably deep. Orwell notes that the scholarship boy Tom Redwing “makes fairly frequent appearances” but does not add that the “villains” are frequently snobs and the biggest snob of all is Bunter. Foreigners are invariably comic butts but the boys come from the far-flung reaches of the Empire. Hurree “Inky” Singh’s version of the English language—“the delayfulness will be only momentful, my esteemed chum” (1917 (d) 2)—is apparently comically inexhaustible but he is a member of the Famous Five. Richards was not unjustified in claiming that “he felt that he was contributing his mite towards the unity of the Commonwealth, and helping to rid the youthful mind of colour prejudice”

136 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 (Hamilton 38). Nevertheless this mildly benign sense of the Commonwealth is quite different from the virtually religious forms of nationalism that preceded it. Richards maintained that “religion in a work of fiction is out of place: either it looks like humbug or it makes the rest of the story seem silly” and much the same applies for notions of the sacralized nation (though he did, incidentally, attempt unsuccessfully to publish a book with the less-than-fervid title of Faith and Hope and one of his substitute writers did comply with his editor’s request for a “sob-stuff story with religious overtones” on one occasion) (Hamilton 287; see also Samways 89). Some forms of such nationalism mutated into fascism between the wars but, as Orwell also notes, the politics of the Amalgamated papers never had any kind of “Fascist tinge” (100). The worlds in which Sexton Blake must move are certainly much darker, necessitating a more flexible moral code. As Blake puts it, We do not interfere in disputes between man and wife, nor do we pursue defaulting clerks, but if there is wrong to be righted, an evil to be redressed, or a rescue of the weak and suffering from the powerful, our hearty assistance can be readily obtained. We do nothing for hire here; we would cheerfully undertake to perform without fee or reward. But when our clients are wealthy we are not so unjust to ourselves as to make a gratuitous offer of our services. (qtd. in Moorcock 5) Which is not much more inflated than the code of a hardboiled detective such as Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. Finally it is hard to imagine a Henty hero singing “Rule Britannia,” as does Biggles on one occasion, not only in a “rather unmelodious baritone” but with the intention of fooling the natives into thinking he is involved in some mysterious rite (1946: 168). The Biggles stories are full of the kind of deflating, laconic humour characteristic of those who, like Johns, fought in the First World War. Referring to that war, Johns wrote that only politicians saw the romance in it then, with their beautiful speeches about ‘our boys’—to be an immortal, undying symbol—a wonder spirit of self-sacrifice—the unquenchable fire which must bring us glorious victory—and so on—you know the stuff. Glorious victory, my hat. With most of us the war was a personal matter. Another fellow shot at you and you shot back; you shot at another fellow and he shot back; and it jolly well served you right. That’s all there was to it. (qtd. in Peter Ellis 71) Biggles is certainly a lot more heroic than someone who merely shoots back but like his creator he never uses that kind of language. Attitudes towards sport are a good indicator of this diminution in moral intensity. Whereas before the war cricket and rugby dominate the stories, sports such as boxing, car racing, and horse racing become more popular

Boys’ Stories between the Wars • 137 between the wars. Boys certainly have plenty of opportunity to demonstrate their pluck in these individual sports, but what they cannot do of course is sacrifice their interests to the greater good. Thus while we might learn in a nonfiction article that “No [football] player plays a cleaner game than Andy [Wilson], and what is more, he is too artful a manipulator of the ball to have to stoop to shady tactics to overcome opponents” (Adventure 1921: 119), another typical article by Jack Silcock of Manchester United refers to only the technical aspects of being a good forward and makes no reference at all to any ethical aspects of the game (41). In the Greyfriars stories, games are not compulsory and there are no cadet corps, chapels, and houses. In contrast, the romance of the stories is largely undiminished after the war. The heroes are just as righteous and powerful, the villains just as evil and perhaps, with the emergence of the super criminal, even more dangerous, the victories just as glorious and the settings just as remote from the ordinary world of most boys. In terms of the axis of the agon, the heroes are probably no less inclined to rebellion against established authority than their predecessors. The Greyfriars boys and their rivals at other schools get up to the same kinds of pranks or “japes,” sometimes of a quite serious kind: during the war a newly appointed master who attempts to Prussianize the school by substituting military drills for cricket is tarred and feathered (at the end we discover he is half German) (Richards 1915), while on another occasion the boys walk out of the school when their master Quelch is unfairly dismissed and the aristocrat Mulvey buys a mansion that they convert into an alternative school (Richards 1928). Biggles is as much an outsider figure as any of the unconventional military figures from the nineteenth century. As he points out in Biggles Air Commodore, I have my own way of doing things, and they are seldom the official way. If I got tangled up with your red tape I should never get anywhere. It is only because I’ve played a free hand that I’ve sometimes been—well, successful. (13) Thus a recurring theme in many of the novels is the bungling ineptitude of the “top brass.” And Blake spends just as much time tracking down criminals at the top as the bottom end of society. In other Amalgamated and Thomson stories these rebel figures are frequently boys who tackle some adult villain. However, the complementary narrative, in which the hero defends civilisation against a savage adversary, is, at least implicitly, less concerned with such a generational aspect. The number of stories set in “primitive” locations, notably Africa, diminishes significantly. Even in the stories that are set in the far-flung reaches of the empire, there is, as Boyd observes, “a clear shift in the vision of the empire as a place where colonial boys grew into unproblematic men,” as “fears of degeneracy shifted from the youths of England to those of the colonies,” as Britain had begun to

138 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 realize “that the dominions . . . were eager to cut themselves free from control from London” (126). Perhaps partly for that reason far more stories are set in Britain, whether in a circus, a racetrack, a football or cricket field, or dangerous underworlds. According to Orwell, the favourite subjects are Wild West, Frozen North, Foreign Legion, crime (always from the detective’s angle), the Great War (Air Force or Secret Service, not the infantry), the Tarzan motif in varying forms, professional football, tropical exploration, historical romance (Robin Hood, Cavaliers and Round-heads, etc.) and scientific invention. The Wild West still leads, at any rate as a setting, though the Red Indian seems to be fading out. (106) With the exception of the Tarzan-type stories, which we will soon qualify, none of these settings are necessarily “primitive,” even the Wild but not “Red Indian” West. These worlds are just as exciting and remote from the ordinary worlds of the average schoolboy and to that extent just as imbued with romance, but the relative decline of the “primitive”—relative because superstitious, credulous, and therefore childish natives are still stock figures— implies, given that the equation of the primitive with the childish remains an unassailable assumption, that the social values that the hero epitomises are less invested with the characteristics of adulthood. Even if there are as many rebellions against adult authority as in the nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury fiction (and that is by no means certain), the complementary narratives about the defence of adult civilisation against infantile barbarism are significantly less. This is also the case with the other axis of romance, the quest. We have seen that frequently in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century narratives the hero’s quest constitutes a return to origins that renews an aged and decrepit civilisation with youthful vigour. After the war this narrative declines somewhat in popularity, though primitivism thrives in high culture. While it is difficult if not impossible to accurately measure this decline, the narrative in which a hero’s quest culminates not in the discovery of some treasure hidden in the primitive wilds but in the recognition of a mentor figure, is clearly less evident. In an increasing number of stories, of which the Biggles ones are the most obvious examples, there are no boy heroes and therefore no adult mentors. In the stories from the nineteenth-century magazines it is very rare to fi nd a story without any boys, whereas by the 1940s such stories are quite common. There are, of course, many stories in which there are both boy and adult heroes, but in a significant number of these they interact as rough equals. The old-timer “Papua Pete” from Wizard Book for Boys is a pilot and knows his way around the cannibals of Papua New Guinea but when he returns home with the boy hero, Red, both receive a reward for bringing back a fly that eats

Boys’ Stories between the Wars • 139 the moss that has been sending Queensland sheep mad (Anon.). The same volume also has a story about an ornery old-timer from the West, his son who wants to remove his father’s shack around which the main street bends in the name of “progress” and a grandson who sides with his grandfather against his own father. The story seems to resemble the nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury pattern in which a boy rebels against some paternal authority figure for the recognition of a mentor figure but the orneryness of the grandfather makes him more a rebel figure than a mentor and thus more of a companion for his grandson (“Grandpa Jones”). Johns’ “Gimlet” series, which he began in 1943, features Captain “Gimlet” King, the baronet of Lorrington Castle, Devon, and “Cub”, the sixteen-year-old Nigel Peters, but this traditional pairing of an ordinary boy and glamorous adult is part of a band of heroes that also includes Corporal “Copper” Collson, a former policeman (obviously) and Private “Trapper” Troublay, characters whose superiority in age is balanced by their working-class status (Hodder). Similarly, in “The Spook Hunters” from Adventure, the adult hero, Prof. Andy Winkle, is from a distinctly lower class than “his friend,” Posh Marston (who incidentally, like so many of these boys, including Bunter, is a ventriloquist). Sometimes race substitutes for class, such as in “Runaway Roy” from Adventure in which the boy hero’s companions are Dan the Hunter and Juvo, the giant Patagonian who remains subservient to Roy despite the latter’s insistence that they are “partners.” In other stories the reduction of the adult hero to the size of the boy can be achieved by force of circumstances, such as in Adventure’s “Winning Breed” where the owner of a country house that has “fallen into a state of neglect” has had his health “shattered by the hardships he had suffered as a soldier in the great war” so that the eighteen-year-old jockey who rides his horses is more a “staunch, loyal comrade” than an employee (200). Similarly, “The Eyes of the S.S. Tiger” from The Wizard Book for Boys tells the story of a boy who is able to help an old salt who is going blind for which the latter rewards him by making him the joint owner of his ship. Such friendships extend beyond the stories to the editor’s relationship with his readers. In one of the editorial addresses of the Wizard, which were captioned “Step Right In! and have a Chat with your Editor” and accompanied by a drawing of the editor sitting at a table with seven boys, the editor remembers as a boy wondering what the Editor would be like to speak to. I felt somehow that I was a bit afraid of him, and that if there was anything I wanted to write to him about I just didn’t have the courage to do it. Well, your Editor is not a bit like that. He just wants to be your pal. I often laugh at my own youthful fancies. Ever since becoming Editor of your favourite story paper I have always tried to make a point of writing to you as a pal, and I want you to regard me in the same way. (1917 (a) 16)

140 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 He then goes on to describe some of the forthcoming stories and the Wizard picture card collection, all without any of the high-minded moralising that would have characterised his pre-war predecessors. Nevertheless, there are many stories in which boys have close relationships with adult authority figures, though these are not always primarily of a mentoring kind. Tinker is a resourceful lad whose exploits are frequently recognised by his “guvnor,” but the main hero is the latter. Just as Watson is at least one step behind Holmes, so Tinker largely follows in the footsteps of Blake, albeit less guilelessly than Watson, thereby registering the boy reader’s amazement at his genius for deduction (and, unlike Holmes, his fighting prowess). This is also the case for most of the other detective stories, such as those from Adventure about Dixon Hawke (whose last name indicates he is another Holmes figure) and Tommy Burke (whose first name indicates he is the boy assistant). Such stories are about boys’ hero worship of men, not the kind of heroism that boys must display to become men. Even adult heroes who are schoolteachers do not always play a mentoring role. “The Big Stiff” from Hotspur would have been every boy’s dream of a schoolmaster—the first thing this handsome young athlete does is break the school’s stock of canes—and in the first story he recognises that the schoolboy “village outcast” (120), Tommy Mulligan, is a brilliant footballer, but such recognition is secondary to the heroic ruse he plays on the poor law inspector that allows Tommy to play in and win the match. Another Hotspur schoolteacher hero, Jim Gibbons, teaches his students that multiplication tables, especially for some unknown reason the seven-times table, are “the difference between a savage and an educated man” but the main point of the story is that he is able to quell a native uprising by getting loyal natives to chant the “magic incantation” “SEBEN TIME SEBEN ’RE FO’TY-NINE” (Hotspur Book for Boys 36). In the earlier stories the headmaster figure is equally a hero and a mentor figure, whereas in these stories his heroism is more important than the recognition he gives to the boys. We have seen that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries headmasters were frequently heroic mentors and ordinary schoolmasters figures against whom the boys rebelled, but this is reversed in the Greyfriars stories. The master of the Famous Five’s form, Mr. Quelch, is largely characterised by his sense of justice and is most emphatically the right sort. Not the ideal master, perhaps, for that one would want a man with Mr. Quelch’s strong sense of justice and his very real, though often hidden, sympathy, combined with such athletic distinction as only a younger man than the Remove-master could be expected to possess. It is not on record that Mr. Quelch ever was much of an athlete. But he is most unmistakably a gentleman, and a man of strong character. (1917 (e) 496)

Boys’ Stories between the Wars • 141 While he is no Dr. Arnold (or Kipling’s head), Quelch is nevertheless a more impressive figure than the head, Dr. Locke, who overlooks the misdeeds of Vernon-Smith, “the Bounder,” because he is in debt to his father, who is hypnotized by another father who wants to get his son accepted into the school, and who, as we have seen, even suffers the indignity of a full-scale school mutiny: Mr. Quelch is of more importance in the stories than the Head. In many ways he might be said to be of more importance to the school. Greyfriars would not suffer if Mr. Quelch were its head. This is no disparagement to Dr. Locke. And there is no unfairness to him in saying that he is not as strong or as decided a character as the old friend upon whom he is apt to lean pretty heavily in times of trouble— the master of the Remove Form. Dr. Locke is a most lovable man. When he errs in judgment it is generally on the side of mercy. But not always; and that is due to his lack of strength. The weak man, however keen he may be on justice, seldom administers it thoroughly. (1917 (f) 14) Such complimentary authority figures certainly serve a similar function to the characters they resemble in earlier school stories: to allow rebellion and authority to coexist. However, not only does a head make a poor adversary figure because of his relative remoteness, but a master who is in continual contact with his boys cannot also provide the kind of recognition that comes only at the end of the boy’s progress or “quest” through his school years. According to Boyd, “In both Edwardian and Victorian stories boys were unmoved by the examples of their masters, perceiving them either as fools . . . or as inimical to boy culture” (105), whereas between the wars many of the masters are the heroes. In fact from Tom Brown’s Schooldays to the school fiction of the interwar years, there had always been masters who were heroes, villains, and ineffectual figures. What changes is that the figure of the mentor who recognises the heroism of the boy largely disappears. Just as the hero’s quest becomes less charged with a generational aspect, so his departure from home becomes less invested with both boyish restlessness and maturity. In the earlier fiction, fathers are nearly always weak or ineffectual figures whereas between the wars they are sometimes the heroes. In the Wizard’s “The Gun Runners,” for example, the two boy heroes are cadets on the S.S. Eagle, which is captained by one of their fathers. Again, this relationship extends to the readers, at least if we are to trust another Wizard editorial which jokingly recounts a boy’s frustration at his father reading his copy before him (1923 (b) 14). While we have disagreed with Boyd’s assumption that there is more hero worship of adults in the later stories, she is nevertheless right in observing that “fathers became much wiser and better able to assess their sons’ needs” (106). Mirroring these harmonious

142 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 father-son relationships are fathers and sons who play the roles of villains, such as the Wizard’s “The 10.45 Down” in which “Railway Ralph” and his “engine driver chum,” Dick Armstrong, foil the plot of the two dastardly crooks, Joe Grindler and his son Dan. A common story involves a boy in some way rescuing his father. Jack Hammer’s fights in the boxing ring in the Wizard’s “The Fighting Fury” save his father from being executed for a murder he never committed; another boy boxer in Adventure’s “Fighting Frank” rescues his father’s circus; the Rover Book for Boys’ “The Eye of the Moose” (Ballantine) tells how Nat Steele and his fi lm-making comrade save Nat’s father’s gold mine from bankruptcy; and the eponymous hero of Adventure’s “The Daring of Dan” has a series of adventures in America, thereby gaining a pension and cottage for his recently unjustly sacked gamekeeper father. In these and many other stories the son plays a more active or heroic role than the father, no doubt appealing to youthful fantasies. However, while these fathers might be lesser figures than their sons they are part of the romance rather than the ordinary world. The differences between these two worlds are no less but the father’s movement from the ordinary to the romance world does diminish the generational difference between them. In the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century stories the son’s departure from the paternal home sometimes involved him “going native.” However, while Orwell claims that the Tarzan story is popular in the later fiction, most of the occasions when a hero “goes native” are far more ambivalent than similar occasions in Kim, the Mowgli stories, and the Henty novels. A Johns character in one of his many non-Biggles books, Desert Night, is so suntanned that he can easily pass for an Arab (Harris) while the Wizard’s famous Wolf of Kabul regularly disguises himself as a native but disguising or passing as a native is not the same as being one. Thus in Hotspur’s Black Wolf series a wolf pack is led by a man who, wearing the head and entire skin of a wolf over himself, becomes wolfish leader of a pack that terrorises the respectable citizens of a British Columbian settlement. In The Pilot’s “The Outlawed Three,” the hero, Kid Byrne, escapes by disguising himself as a “passable imitation of Judy, the darkie cook,” and is only relieved of his acute embarrassment when his “iron-like fist” knocks out two of the villains and he escapes on one of their horses, his dress “tearing and rending and revealing cowboy’s riding boots!” (358). While “going native” sometimes emasculates a person or turns him into a villain, the movement in the opposite direction is no less fraught, “Kang—the Almost Human Ape,” in the Pilot series of the same name, being used as an unwitting accomplice by the master-crook Hinkel. However, in The Pilot’s series “The Cannibal Earl” the process of socializing the hero is depicted in largely positive terms. We are alerted to terrors of the primitive at the very start of the series when the sympathetic figure of a big-game hunter tells us that the jungle in which the baby earl and his mother will be abandoned is

Boys’ Stories between the Wars • 143 alive with villainy. Gosh, I’ve had a nightmare journey myself! Never a night but what the war-drums did not keep us awake with their deadly, monotonous, accursed beating! The M’Bela tribe seems to have got out of hand and every man of ’em is drunk with blood-lust. All sorts of queer rites and orgies are taking place . . . you know what these fiends are like when they’ve tasted human flesh. (21–22) The earl will grow up to become the chief of the tribe and when he returns to civilisation his savage habits are the source of some sympathetic amusement. But surrounded by his M’Bela tribesmen he largely plays at being a cannibal in order to terrify various white villains, at one point, for example, creating the illusion that he has a person’s head on a dish, and at the end he banishes the uncle and cousin who had attempted to take his earldom to a life with the M’Bela. The moral of the story is made clear in its fi nal sentences: The savageness that the M’Bela tribe had implanted in the nature of the boy had died a natural death. No longer would he be a cannibal earl; no longer would he look at modern civilisation through savage eyes. . . . The forests and the wilds would, perhaps, have a certain fascination for the boy for the rest of his life; but now his feet were firmly planted on the path that his inheritance had destined he should follow, and . . . when the time came for the boy to leave school and assume the more serious duties that manhood would bring, there would not be a prouder or more noble English gentleman in the House of Lords than Jack Scotton, Fifteenth Earl of Claremont. (417) The civilising of a Tarzan, Kim, or Mowgli is also a necessity but it does not reduce their earlier “native” lives to such an abysmal level, albeit one that evokes the “certain fascination” that its boy readers no doubt also felt. In the earlier stories the process of going native is complemented by the process in which the boys toughen up and acquire the manliness that allows them to face adversity and adversaries. The boys leave not just their fathers behind but also their mothers. However in the later fiction the scene in which the new boy is taunted with being a mother’s boy largely vanishes. New boys rarely make appearances at Greyfriars and on one occasion in which we meet one he is a villain who has immediately made himself at home in one of the boys’ studies. Because the eponymous thirteen-year-old hero in “Buffalo Bill’s Schooldays” has already “been an express rider . . . on the buffalo trail and fought battles with Redskins,” it is unlikely that the school he is forced to attend is going to toughen him up (382). In another story about his boyhood, “Kids of Caravan College,” Bill’s mother, Ma Cody, declares “I don’t want to lose my boy, same as I did his father, amongst wild Injuns and buffaloes and such-like. I want Bill to wear a nice clean collar, and

144 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 get a nice job in an office or something, and be a credit to his folk. And he can’t do that if he don’t get a good schooling!” (483) While schools in the earlier stories could be places of imprisonment as well as romance, we know of no instances in these earlier British stories where, as in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, they are associated with maternal authority. In “The School Amid the Snows,” the father, Sir William Drummond— “a giant of a man, deep-chested, shock-haired, with great gnarled maulers of hands which showed that he had been accustomed to plenty of hard work in his youth” and therefore the epitome of the father heroes we have just mentioned—sends his son to the romantically vigorous school of the Northland Fur Company because he has “gone soft,” not because he has been living at home but because he has been attending “one of them dude schools” where “they learn Latin and Greek and all them fancy things” (396). As in the earlier stories, schools are places where boyish spirits can be suppressed but they can also dampen manliness. Significantly, fagging, which toughens up fags as well as requiring fag masters to take on adult responsibilities, is rarely found in the stories. At Greyfriars it still exists, though it is rarely mentioned after the heroes of the Remove mount a successful rebellion against being compelled to fag for the bullies of the sixth form (1911 b). In the adventure stories, boys leave home for dangerous adventures but these are far less invested with the acquisition of the kind of manliness that fagging was supposed to institute. The return home is also invested with fewer generational aspects. The common narrative of the Victorian and Edwardian period in which the boy hero fights some villain who has wronged his mother, and thereby disposed the boy of his inheritance, is still told, though perhaps less frequently. There are stories of bad uncles and villains posing as rightful heirs but the inheritance that is restored, which is not the goal of the quest but what miraculously happens when the boy returns from his quest, is rarely invested with the kind of oedipal sentiment that we find in the earlier stories. In the Wizard’s “Jacky the Spook-Hunter,” the two sons of a widow foil the plot to rob their mother of an estate she has just inherited, but the only expression of their love for her that we read about occurs at the beginning when we find them making a sewing box for her Christmas present. When the villains are banished at the end and the estate restored, their mother is not even present. Similarly, while Henty’s boys return to become MPs, landed gentry, and military officers, the boys in the later stories, for all their prizes, tend to remain boys. The passage at the end of a Henty story which tells us what became of the boy after his adventures largely disappears in these later stories. Just as the departing boy tends neither to reject paternal authority nor acquire manliness, so he rarely returns to his mother or acquires paternal authority. Finally, one of the most striking differences between the earlier and later stories is their simulation of factual accuracy. In the earlier stories the desire for such accuracy borders almost on obsession. Just as the place outside or

Boys’ Stories between the Wars • 145 within the adult world is also a microcosm of the adult world, so the romances are generic combinations of a fantasy world traditionally associated with childhood and the realism of adult fiction. In contrast, one of Orwell’s main objections to the stories between the wars is their avoidance of reality, particularly in Richards’ stories where as for class-friction, trade unionism, strikes, slumps, unemployment, Fascism and civil war—not a mention. Somewhere or other in the thirty years’ issue of the two papers you might perhaps fi nd the word ‘Socialism’, but you would have to look a long time for it. If the Russian Revolution is anywhere referred to, it will be indirectly, in the word ‘Bolshy’ (meaning a person of violent, disagreeable habits). Hitler and the Nazis are just beginning to make their appearance, in the sort of reference I quoted above. The war-crisis of September 1938 made just enough impression to produce a story in which Mr Vernon-Smith, the Bounder’s millionaire father, cashed in on the general panic by buying up country houses in order to sell them to ‘crisis scuttlers’. But that is probably as near to noticing the European situation as the Gem and Magnet will come, until the war actually starts. (102) In the pre-war stories there are mocking references to suffragettes in the Magnet (the cover of one of the Magnet issues features an angular, middle-aged, and unattractive suffragette throwing a stone at a window), a Blake story is set in the Congo, and a story about the Titanic is published only a few months after it sank (Blake swims away from a piece of flotsam from the ship because it can’t support both his and Tinker’s weight), while during the war there are stories about boys enlisting, aiding the war effort, and attacking German masters, although the editor tells his readers that there will not be any actual war stories (Jenkins (a) 52), and the editor of the Skipper tells us in the first year of the war that a “pro-German” reader from whom he had been receiving hate mail had also posted him a box of bees (Hodder). However, an early and not entirely unsympathetic reference to socialism in a pre-war Gem story was omitted when the story was republished in the 1930s, confirming Orwell’s suspicion (Jenkins (b) 5). While it was the Magnet editor’s decision to not have any references to socialism (on the grounds that the movement was too popular), Richards wanted to keep the boy socialist Skimpole for comic effect (Cadogan 88). Similarly, a Johns story set during the First World War could later be adapted to the Second World War, so apparently irrelevant was its historical setting (Harris). In Biggles Air Commodore it is not entirely clear who the enemy are, though Dyaks are most likely, whether they are being controlled by white men, and what their motivations are; they are a manufactured enemy with little geographical and no cultural specificity. Biggles Goes to War is set in the fictional country of Maltovia. In fairness to Johns, the technical descriptions of flying are quite accurate, as we would

146 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 expect from an ex-pilot and the editor of an adult flying magazine. However, his attempt to reproduce slang descends into footnotes telling us that “wog” is “R.A.F. slang for natives, normally Arabs” (1965: 123), and what “clueless” and “around the bend” mean (1948: 14). Something of this escape from reality is mirrored by Richards’ own life. “When I’m at the typewriter I’m only 16 years old,” he tells us in his autobiography (169), but when he was not at his typewriter he spent large tracts of time travelling and gambling. Richards never married and his description of a friendship with an American woman is oddly defensive (77). As he grew older he became quite reclusive and his The Autobiography of Frank Richards, where, as Charles Hamilton, he weirdly refers to himself in the third person as “Frank,” suggests that his imaginary life as Frank Richards eventually consumed his actual life as Charles Hamilton. Of course there is no reason why such a life should necessarily affect the reality of the stories, but it is possible that the almost daydream-like process of spending large parts of the day typing at great speed and making virtually no revisions may have affected the content of the stories. Jeffrey Richards defends Richards against such charges, citing Frye’s description of romance as a “golden age” that is the deliberate antithesis of realism (274, 277). However, one of the striking aspects of the nineteenthand early-twentieth-century story was, as we have seen, its attempt, albeit not always successful, to marry the fantasy aspects of romance with realism. The realism of these stories was implicitly pedagogical, an attempt to teach boys how to become men. Thus while we have argued that in the romance aspects of the stories after the Great War (which includes the ordinary as well as adventure worlds) there is a diminution of both youthful revolt and adult responsibility, this relative lack of realism situates the stories more within the realm of children’s rather than adult fiction. The fictional adolescent between the wars was less youthful than his predecessor but even less mature.

Chapter Six Girls’ Stories between the Wars

If much of the popular girls’ fiction between the wars is remarkably like the boys’ fiction, this is hardly surprising given that most of the magazine serials and some of the books were written by the same authors. One of the most famous girls’ schools, Cliff House, was invented by Frank Richards, and features a character, Bessie Bunter, who is almost indistinguishable, apart from her pigtails, from Billy Bunter, Owl of the Remove. Richards began the Cliff House series in 1909, in response to letters from girl readers of Magnet, and in 1919 the series was moved to its own magazine, School Friend, advertised as “The Only Schoolgirls’ Paper in the World.” Richards wrote the stories under the pseudonym Hilda Richards, and later writers such as Horace Phillips, R. S. Kirkman, L. E. Ransome, and John Wheway also used female pseudonyms when they contributed further episodes to the series. The impression was given of a magazine written by women for girls, but in fact it was really little more than a perfunctory translation of a boys’ magazine. At the other end of the spectrum, Biggles also had its counterpart in Worrals, W. E. Johns’ series about a WAAF pilot. Unlikely as Biggles’ career as a flight Commander at the age of eighteen might be, even more unlikely are Joan Worralson’s exploits as a WAAF pilot, which involve shooting down enemy planes, using a nail fi le to saw through a prison door, numerous car chases, several thefts of fuel or various vehicles, and numerous rescues of her sidekick Frecks from perilous situations such as torture in a printing press. Women were not, after all, even allowed to pilot planes until 1939, being generally restricted to supporting roles on the ground, such as serving as radar reporters. Even after 1939, women only piloted planes as part of the Air Transport Auxiliary, transporting planes as civilians to where they were needed by the RAF, so as to release front line pilots for active service. There was, as the WAAF Association website cites an Air Member for the Personnel stating, “no flying section in the WAAF.” There is some effort to address this in the first 147

148 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 Worrals book, when Worrals’ friend Bill Ashton allows her to pilot a Reliant fighter and try out the guns and is reprimanded for this by the commanding officer. However, an emergency requires Worrals to take up the controls of the Reliant once again, this time with the approval of the commanding officer, and it is on this flight that she is so successful in shooting down enemy planes and foiling enemy spies that no questions are ever raised again about her status as a pilot in active service. Unlike Biggles, Worrals directs her romantic feelings quite appropriately at fellow pilot Bill Ashton rather than at an enemy spy. But the romance is far from steamy and critics have questioned whether in fact it can be read as a romance at all. As Mary Cadogan has pointed out, in the only scene in which any romantic sentiment is actually expressed between the two of them, when Ashton confesses that Worrals means “an awful lot” to him, she laughs this off as “sob-stuff” and assures him that he, too, will “laugh at this nonsense in the morning.” Nevertheless, there is enough feeling between the two of them for us to be sure Worrals is heterosexual, even if she has no time for this “sobstuff” in the moments of crisis that prompt Ashton to speak out. But in order for the relationship to be sustained throughout the series, without curtailing Worrals’ career through an actual marriage, it has to be kept at a very low pitch, the equivalent of Bob Cherry’s ongoing interest in Phyllis Howell in the Greyfriars stories, or Babs Redfern’s interest in Jack Tolhurst, the boy who is allowed to wheel her bicycle “as far as the gates of Cliff House School.” The detective story also had its equivalent for girls, with the “Sylvia Silence—girl detective” series beginning its run in the first issue of The Schoolgirls’ Weekly, one of many magazines that followed the success of School Friend in the 1920s. Like the other girl detectives that came afterwards, Sylvia Silence was the creation of a male writer, John W. Bobin, writing under a female pseudonym, “Catherine Greenhalgh.” In 1930, a short serial in Schoolgirls’ Own followed the adventures of “Lila Lisle,” a schoolgirl detective, and in 1933 John W. Bobin began serialising the adventures of “Valerie Drew,” now writing under the name of “Adelaide Ascott.”1 But it was school stories that dominated the short fiction published in the girls’ annuals and girls’ periodicals of the 1920s and 1930s, and even the mystery and adventure serials tended to feature schoolgirl heroines. As the titles suggest, most girls’ magazines specifically targeted a schoolgirl audience; in addition to School Friend, which ran from 1919–1929, and its successor Schoolgirls’ Weekly, which ran from 1929–1939, the same period also saw the publication of School-Days from 1928–1929, Schoolgirl from 1929–1940, and Schoolgirls’ Own from 1921–1936. While the magazine serials were to a great extent written and produced by men, the 1920s and 1930s was the age in which the girls’ boarding-school novel was at its most popular, and this was a genre that was created for girls by women. For Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig, authors of You’re a Brick, Angela! A New Look at Girls’ Fiction from 1839–1975, the school story proper begins with Angela Brazil’s The Fortunes of Philippa (1906); schools in earlier

Girls’ Stories between the Wars • 149 stories they dismiss as “cheerless places, savouring less of school than of Sunday School,” described in books that “themselves were oppressive—with their gilt-edged paper and finely etched chapter headings” (111). The characterisation of Victorian girls’ fiction in this book is its weakest point, using examples from 1818 to 1899, and from fiction for young children to young ladies, to illustrate a single, simplistic idea of “laced-up little girls” indoctrinated into “counting their blessings, doing their duty and maintaining the established structure of society” (17). It is in contrast with this caricature of the Victorian girl that the schoolgirl heroines of the novels by Angela Brazil, Elsie Oxenham, Dorita Fairlie-Bruce, May Wynne, and Ethel Talbot are presented as so refreshing a change. Certainly there are no “laced-up little girls” in these books: as the heroine of Evelyn Smith’s Phyllida in Form III declares, “There isn’t time to bother with waists” (77). Writers like Mary Cadogan, author also of Chin Up, Chest Out, Jemima! which focuses exclusively on the school story, and Rosemary Auchmuty, author of the school-story study A World of Girls, emphasise the feminist potential of a genre in which, as Auchmuty writes, “authority figures as well as colleagues and comrades are female . . . the action is carried on by girls and women . . . Women’s emotional and social energies are directed towards other women, and women’s friendships are seen as positive . . . and sufficient unto themselves” (7). The title of Auchmuty’s study comes, of course, from Meade’s 1886 novel A World of Girls, and many of the elements of Meade’s early version of the girl’s school story—the rebellious heroine, the midnight feast, and, in particular, the dramatic rescue—recur in the school fiction of the 1920s and ’30s. The school fiction of this period can be seen in some respects as a revival of the romance elements of some of the earliest girls’ school fiction, after the more serious, realist novels such as Vaizey’s Tom and Some Other Girls that were published around the turn of the century. But it borrows too from the boys’ school story. Indeed, the heroines often compare themselves with boys, often with reference to school stories. The heroine of Marchant’s By Honour Bound argues that girls have a sense of honour equal to boys, and goes on to prove her sense of honour superior to her brother’s, but does have to take a feminine approach when snubbed by another girl, only remarking, “If I were a boy I might fight her, of course” (47). The fight scene is the one key element that is not brought into the girls’ story genre from the boys’ story. Yet the significance of the elements that are borrowed, such as the debate about cribbing, the notion of “honour” and the prohibition on “sneaking,” and the central importance of games, is often radically altered in the girls’ stories written after the First World War. This shift in meaning happens as a consequence of the same development that takes place in the girls’ school stories, as in the boys’ school stories, away from an understanding of the school years as a period in between childhood and adulthood, towards a representation of the school years as a period of extended childhood. Where the heroine

150 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 of a Victorian or Edwardian school story for girls was typically in her late teens, often attending school for a year or two after having been educated at home, the heroine of the school story between the wars is typically thirteen or fourteen years of age, and is most often depicted in her first year of what will be a five-year school career. As in the early boys’ school stories, much is made of the difficult period of adjustment to school society but, unlike in the Victorian stories, this does not involve growing up, nor does it involve either romance or real sacrifice, but simply an accommodation to an increasingly rigid “schoolgirls’ code.” Brazil, who wrote almost exclusively about schoolgirls of thirteen or fourteen, has her heroine Joan express the appeal of this age in her book Joan’s Best Chum: “Those magic years of ‘thirteen’ and ‘fourteen’ are a sort of high-water mark, when we have our fling undisturbed by too many restrictions or responsibilities . . . and need not trouble our hearts as yet about future careers” (qtd. in Tinkler 86). Whereas many of the Victorian and Edwardian school stories end with a marriage, or with the heroine leaving school to take up a career, the school stories between the wars rarely even take the heroine beyond the fourth form.2 Often, they end with the school prize-giving, in which the heroine’s hard work and honest approach to her schoolwork finally pays off. In the Victorian or Edwardian novel, the hard-working heroine typically looks to a future beyond her school years that gives meaning to her school ambitions: Phil, of A Clever Daughter, strives to succeed at school so as to train as a doctor and one day give her mother and younger siblings a home with her on Harley Street; Tom in Tom and Some Other Girls is already planning, while still a school prefect, “to be Principal of Newnham one of these fine days, and run it on my own lines.” Marchant’s adventure romance, No Ordinary Girl, begins rather than ends with the award of the school prize, a posting as a teacher at a school in Panama. Honours in these stories represent possibilities for the future. In the school stories of the 1920s and ’30s, however, they represent the happy ending to the school year that has passed. The special award invented for Patty, the heroine of Brazil’s The Nicest Girl in the School, for “whichever girl shall be judged by her companions to have been the most kind, the most thoughtful and generous” might be exceptional, but in its meaninglessness beyond its celebration of Patty’s success as a fourth-form schoolgirl it represents the school-story prize in its purest form. The instructions given to the illustrators of schoolgirl stories for the Amalgamated Press magazines to play down the appearance of buttocks and breasts (and, when depicting girls in swimming costumes, to place them in water up to their armpits) must have been easy to comply with, in the age of the gymslip. Whereas the Victorian schoolgirl often arrived overdressed in clothes too sophisticated for her years, the girl in a gym-slip is clearly marked as a child whose field of play is the hockey pitch, not the real world. In the Victorian school story, of course, sports have a serious role to play in preparing the schoolboy for future fields of endeavour, and in school stories like Tom and

Girls’ Stories between the Wars • 151 Some Other Girls, sports are important symbolically, representing the right for girls to an education modelled on the public schools for boys. In Marchant’s essentially Victorian Di the Dauntless, the heroine Di has missed out on such an education, having been educated instead by governesses in deepest Morocco, yet Di knows she can appeal to the influence of her governess’s education in their hour of greatest danger and rouses the weakening governess to action with the cry, “play up, old dear, play up for all you are worth” (223). In the school story between the wars, however, sport figures as the opposite of growing up. When for instance Pixie, in Oxenham’s The Abbey Girls in Town (1925), insists, “Growing up is fun, you know,” the schoolgirl heroine Jen responds: “Is it?” Jen sounded doubtful. “I’m not keen on it, Pixie. I want to go on playing cricket.” (qtd. in Cadogan 1989: 95)3 Likewise, the slang which would make a passage of a school story instantly recognisable out of context as belonging to the genre undergoes a similar shift in significance. When the heroines of an Brazil school story greet the school train with a cry of “O jubilate!” the slang no longer serves the purpose we have argued it served in the Victorian and Edwardian boys’ stories of distinguishing boys from children, with its elements appropriated from various adult discourses. Rather, in the girls’ stories the slang simply marks them as schoolgirls, and emphasises their equal access to the schoolboys’ world with its private language, codes, and conventions. Most of the slang could in fact have come straight out of the boys’ magazines, with anything favourable described as “ripping” or “jolly,” and anything unfavourable as “beastly” or “a sell.” The unusual inventiveness of the girls’ slang in the Brazil novels makes them particularly vulnerable to parody now, but does contribute to her presentation of girls as active agents in the invention of a school culture; it also makes very apparent the element of play that this use of language involves. While the slang was expected, we were surprised by how frequently the girls’ school stories of the period use the terms of romantic friendship familiar from the Victorian boys’ fiction. In Brazil’s A Pair of Schoolgirls, for instance, we are told of this pair of friends that “as they travelled backwards and forwards by train together they were necessarily thrown much in each other’s company, and they earned the nicknames of ‘David’ and ‘Jonathan’ in the form” (71). Other books describe friends as “husband and wife,” often simply to describe friendships that, like the friendship in A Pair of Schoolgirls, involve little more than being “thrown together” by circumstances. In one of the earliest school stories, Mary Gellie’s The New Girl: Or, the Rivals of 1879, the new girl of the title is informed on her arrival that it is customary to form husband-and-wife pairs. She is duly allotted a “wife” of her own, and “passively submitted to the hundreds of kisses which Bessie showered upon her every morning” (29). Despite the excessive display of affection, however, this

152 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 is an unwelcome friendship which even to Bessie seems undertaken primarily for form’s sake, and for the heroine Rose it is a relatively insignificant distraction from the interest she takes in her “rival” and, eventually, closer friend, Bertha. In the girls’ stories of the 1920s and ’30s, the pairing up of schoolgirl friends, even the reference to David-and-Jonathan friendships, tends to be more a matter of form rather than intense feeling. Friendship rarely has any demonstrable effect on a heroine’s character, though a rival may reform from a bad character into a good one under the influence of the heroine’s good example, typically when the heroine rescues her rival from mortal danger. As Auchmuty discusses in some depth, the possibility of more intense relationships is raised in a number of school stories, but typically, in the stories of the 1920s and ’30s, as a problem that requires firm handling. Although she does make a connection between the increasing emphasis on heterosexual romance in the later series books, particularly in those by Elsie Oxenham, with a new consciousness about lesbianism following the Well on Loneliness trial in 1928, she suggests that the disapproval expressed for intensely emotional friendships in books of the 1920s and ’30s is better understood in relation to what she terms the “crush discourse” of the period. The schoolgirl crush had received some attention from the late-nineteenth-century sexologists; Havelock Ellis suggested it should be understood as a “rudimentary kind of homosexual relationship” in the first volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Sexual Inversion (1897). But Auchmuty draws a distinction between the discourse of the sexologists, and the anti-crush sentiments expressed in pedagogical literature and in the school stories themselves. The concern with the “crush” or the “rave” was not, Auchmuty argues, “due to any sexual element” (143); rather the concern is “to discourage excess and exhibitionism” (144). While not understood in sexual terms, the schoolgirl crush does seem to have been regarded as a peculiarly feminine affliction. Both Auchmuty and Cadogan emphasise the importance of the school story for the celebration of female worlds and female friendships, but they are female worlds increasingly hostile to any display of “femininity,” including the sentimentality that is seen as responsible for the “crush.” Tom, from Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School stories, calls the crush “sloppy girlishness” (Brent-Dyer 1955: 46) having come to school already warned by her father to resist the “silly fashion of schoolgirl sentimentality” (Brent-Dyer 1951: 33). Generally (and increasingly as the girls’ school story genre hardens into formula) a masculine nickname suggests a girl is likely to be the right sort of heroine, keen on sports, “anti-soppist” in sentiment, and sure not to sneak on her less honourable peers. It is typically the most feminine schoolgirls who are guilty of having crushes, or encouraging crushes in others. Adelicia, for instance, from Brent-Dyer’s 1927 novel, A Head Girl’s Difficulties, has been brought up by her “silly, affected” mother to “think of little else but clothes and amusements” (166); her influence results in a “wave of sentimentality . . . threatening to engulf the greater part of the school” (169). Enid Blyton, whose school stories of the 1940s distill the genre into its most formulaic essence, is particularly scathing of the feminine,

Girls’ Stories between the Wars • 153 un-sporty schoolgirl; silliest of all her characters is Alison O’Sullivan in Claudine at St Clares and Fifth Formers at St Clares, a pretty and affected girl constantly having crushes on her teachers. The best expression of the anti-crush sentiment typical of these stories is in the “Anti-Soppist League” founded by Dimsie, in Dorita Fairlie-Bruce’s Dimsie Moves Up. Founded in order to resist a fashionable sentimentality amongst the third formers at the school, the rules include no kissing, no giving flowers to teachers or seniors, and no sleeping with any senior’s hairbrush under your pillow. It is interesting that the “soppism” that is to be resisted is expected to be focused on seniors and teachers, rather than to develop between close friends, although a certain tension develops between the anti-soppism plot and the plot following the ups and downs of Dimsie’s friendships. In the final book following Dimsie’s school career, with the predictable title Dimsie Head Girl, Dimsie and Jean reconcile at the end of the novel after something of an estrangement. When Dimsie shakes herself free of their embrace, saying, “Do at least try to remember we are Anti-Soppists!” (232), this is only ostensibly anti-soppy and in fact refers to a shared nostalgia for their early school days together. If a certain amount of sentiment might be appropriate to the last page of the last book of Dimsie’s school career, however, “soppism” is more typically represented as a fashion that can be resisted, and as an expression of an unwelcome femininity, in a genre which celebrates the traditions and conventions of public school and the school story itself. The fashionable aspects of the crush, in contrast with the conservativeness of the anti-crush sentiment, is particularly evident in A Head-Girl’s Difficulties, when Adelicia is quite mercilessly humiliated by her peers in their efforts to stamp out the sentimentality she has encouraged. Vivien replies to her complaints, “You quite obviously know that the feeling of the school is against any sentimental rubbish whatsoever . . . Yet you, a new girl, have the impertinence to come here to St Peter’s, and try to corrupt our juniors! . . . And then, when we try to defend the traditions of St Peter’s, which are old and decent traditions, you call us ‘beasts’. (249–50) While the schoolgirl crush is represented as a fashion that can be resisted, it is at the same time represented as typical of a particular age, or developmental stage. In Dimsie Moves Up, Dimsie’s friend Mabs explains that her mother had told her, “it’s a sort of complaint girls get, like measles. She thinks they all go through it in time” (24), and the headmistress of Dimsie’s school elsewhere comments about the sentimentality rife in the third form, “They’re at that very trying stage” (21). At thirteen to fourteen (and indeed into the late teens), the ideal is evidently for a sporty tomboyishness,4 but there is a recognisable risk of this masculine ideal being tainted by the sentimentality this age group is seen as peculiarly susceptible to, an anxiety less about the girls’ sexuality, than about their unwelcome femininity. The tendency to focus the stand-alone stories (as opposed to the series novels) on the fourth-former, then, does not seem to be because the girl of this age

154 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 is particularly idealised. The period in the girl’s life might be a “high-water mark” of freedom from responsibility, but the girl herself is typically represented as having faults which greater maturity (and sensible schooling) will resolve. Dorothy, the heroine of Brazil’s A Pair of Schoolgirls, is an example of a character who is interesting largely because of her flaws. Particularly interesting is the way in which her aunt, Miss Sherbourne, accounts for these flaws in terms of the developmental stage Dorothy has reached: Miss Sherbourne was not blind, and saw only too clearly that the girl was passing through a selfish phase. “I’ve seen it often enough in others of her age,” she thought. “They are so sweet while they are little children, and then suddenly they lose all their pretty, childish ways, and become brusque and pert and uncompromising. I suppose they are struggling after their own individualities and independence, but it makes them ruthless to others. At present Dorothy is rather inclined to rebel against authority, and to assert herself in many directions. She needs most careful leading and management.” (100) In A Pair of Schoolgirls, the reader’s perspective is often doubled, with the point of view of Dorothy frequently supplemented, as it is here, by the point of view of her aunt. The reader, while sympathizing with Dorothy, recognizes that the aunt’s point of view is wiser and more accurate, and of course it is the aunt’s views which are borne out by events. In this story, even the dramatic rescues which are a common plot motif in the school story of the period are undertaken by adults, rescuing the children who get into trouble because of their immaturity. When Dorothy and her friends go caving, we are warned to mistrust the adventurous spirit which, after all, characterizes the adolescent heroes and heroines of the stories of the preceding generation: All the four young people were excited at the prospect of exploring a littleknown cavern without the assistance of a guide. They felt like a band of pioneers in a fresh country, or the discoverers of a new continent. None of them in the least realized the risk of the proceeding, and no older person was there to preach wisdom. (186) In an L.T. Meade book, they would be likely to find treasure, or some desperate character requiring all their courage and resourcefulness to rescue; Dorothy and her friends merely get themselves stuck, and require the assistance of their parents and adult friends to get out. Later in the story, the perfect situation seems to be set up for Dorothy to rescue Alison, when Alison slips into a weir after she and Dorothy have gone walking unaccompanied. The plot calls for some such dramatic rescue, in order to reconcile Alison’s mother to the friendship she seems so strangely to discourage (the canny reader may have guessed that some inheritance issue is at stake, and that Alison’s mother was

Girls’ Stories between the Wars • 155 the mysterious lady who denied a connection with Dorothy as a foundling babe). But instead, a passing farmer comes to the rescue, and Alison’s mother simply repents of her wrongdoing at the thought of Alison’s near-demise.5 Though usefully indicative of the dependency of the typical schoolgirl heroine on adult figures, the rescues in A Pair of Schoolgirls are admittedly unusual, as they do not involve schoolgirl heroism. Far more frequently, the schoolgirl heroine rescues another schoolgirl, usually a rival character and often one whose actions have caused trouble for the heroine. In another Brazil novel, The Nicest Girl in the School, Patty endangers her own life to help her cousin Muriel out of danger, even though Muriel has not only snubbed her since Patty’s arrival at the school, but has allowed Patty to be suspected of using the crib that she had resorted to herself. Certainly Patty proves herself as brave and self-sacrificing as any Victorian heroine. Muriel, however, like Dorothy and her friends in A Pair of Schoolgirls, has got into trouble through her lack of adult knowledge, compounded in this case by her disobeying adult instruction. When Patty realizes the trouble Muriel is in, she thinks, “I expect that was the reason Miss Lincoln would not let us go far along the beach this afternoon” (228). Disobedience is not always represented as wrong. Indeed Patty must disobey the instruction not to go to the end of the beach in order to rescue Muriel. Clearly in this case, and in many other examples like this, a higher principle comes into play. The same story, however, also includes a brief subplot about Enid’s rebellion against the unpopular teacher Miss Rowe. From letting loose grasshoppers and banging doors, Enid’s naughtiness escalates until, setting off firecrackers, she accidentally injures both herself and Miss Rowe. In the sanatorium, she learns that Miss Rowe had hoped to go to Girton College, but a fall in family fortunes had led her to sacrifice her college aspirations to become a teacher, so she could support her younger brother in his own schooling. It is a story strangely familiar from our reading of Victorian novels, except a Victorian girls’ story would be far more likely to take the point of view of the young, self-sacrificing teacher. Her awakening to the financial reality that requires her to make the difficult decision to give up college would be followed by her arduous journey to the school, followed by the trial of teaching such unmanageable children, before eventually she would be rescued from the school either through her own approach to a distant, or distanced, relation, or through marriage. In The Nicest Girl in the School, Enid’s discovery of Miss Rowe’s story is enough to sort everything out. Miss Rowe doesn’t get to escape from her career, but Enid decides “I’m going to like her immensely,” and with the class more manageable, the students find that Miss Rowe is “far pleasanter than she used to be . . . She’s really quite pretty.” That Enid was wrong to behave as she did to Miss Rowe is made clear to the reader by the fact that Patty won’t take part in the rebellions that Enid organizes. The kinds of tricks Enid plays, though—the grasshopper let loose, and even the firecrackers exploding—become increasingly popular motifs of

156 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 the school story in the 1930s and afterwards, and there is less and less judgment of this kind of naughtiness. Veronica Marlow’s 1937 novel, That Eventful Term, for instance, opens with the heroine Barrie setting off a fire alarm, one of several pranks she indulges in over the course of the book. There is no suggestion at all that there is anything wrong in her actions, even when she fails to speak out and even lies to avoid getting into trouble. The short school stories in magazines and annuals are similarly full of pranks: girls smuggle white mice into classrooms, put hairbrushes in each other’s beds, fi ll chocolates with salt-peter. These pranks, like the slang, are a borrowed convention from the Victorian boys’ story, in which the hero’s naughtiness in the early chapters of the book established his independence from adult control. In these stories, it was the boys’ maturity that needed to be stressed. In the girls’ stories, in contrast, the pranks claim an extended status for the girls as children, with the same license as boys to have fun. The contrast between Tom Brown’s wars waged against Flashman, fishing out of bounds, and exploring the rooftops of the school, and the mice and hairbrushes of these girls’ stories, reflects this change in the misbehaviour’s significance. While naughtiness is either excused or represented as a positive quality, there is no excuse for the girl who “sneaks” or otherwise breaks the schoolgirl code. This schoolgirl code can be seen as a version of the morality worked out in the schoolboy stories of the Victorian period, which develop the concept of “honour” as a fierce integrity that often means choosing principles over rules and reputation. “Honour” is a word that comes up again and again in the girls’ school stories of the period, often even giving the book its title, as in By Honour Bound, by Bessie Marchant, On Honour: A School and Home Story, by Ellinor Davenport Adams (1904), The Honour of the School, by May Wynne (1930), For the Honour of the House, by Winifred Darch (1927), to name only a few. Yet as the term is used more and more frequently, it is also used increasingly loosely, often simply referring to an adherence to schoolgirl rules and conventions, rather than to the principled integrity of the Victorian period. While the schoolgirl code developed out of the Victorian morality that saw principles placed above rules, in the schoolgirl fiction of the 1920s and ’30s the code itself has become little more than a set of rules to be followed. The absolute prohibition on sneaking, for instance, leads in some stories to months of suffering due to false accusations and misunderstandings which could have easily been straightened out in minutes. In Talbot’s 1924 story, The Best of All Schools, for instance, Peter (Petronel) and Nan are very nearly expelled from the school their sisters are sacrificing so much to send them to, because of a series of coincidences that make them appear to have stolen a violin, and yet they are unable to clear the matter up without revealing that another schoolgirl, Rosalie, had, like them, been out of bounds. In this story, as in so many other stories of the period, an adult has to be brought in to provide the information required to sort everything out. In Winifred Darch’s short story, “The Plate Lifter,” the heroine Carol is about to be suspended

Girls’ Stories between the Wars • 157 from school for having in her possession a prank plate-lifting device that she has in fact confiscated from the true culprits. She is saved just in time by the intervention of another schoolteacher, who has discovered the truth. It is difficult for the reader not to sympathise with her exasperated headmistresss when she asks Carol, “Why sacrifice yourself so absurdly?” It is of course an absurd sacrifice that would not have been out of place in a Victorian boys’ school story (except for the silliness of the plate-lifter detail), but the Victorian culprit who was protected would typically have to endure his own narrative progress through trials and moral growth till he reached a point at which either his punishment outweighed the original fault, or he was ready to confess and be redeemed. The culprits in “The Plate-lifter” in contrast are still found out, just as they would have been if it had been Carol, not another schoolteacher, who informed on them. The girls who keep the code are rewarded with popularity. In Christine Chaundler’s short story, “Three White Mice,” a shy and previously overlooked girl, Betty, helps two of her wilder classmates who have smuggled mice into the dormitory, by concealing a biscuit that they have stolen, hiding it in her stockings when it looked like they might be found out. Instead, it is Betty who is caught with the stolen biscuit, but, obedient to the code, she takes the blame herself rather than tell the teachers about the mice. The story is brought to an easy resolution when the two classmates confess to the teachers; they are allowed to keep their mice, and Betty is not only “the heroine of the hour” but, we are assured, retains her new popularity for the rest of her time at the school. This is a very different kind of “honour” to that shown by Tom Brown, when he faces taunting and violence from the other boys in order to pray alongside George Arthur. It is very different too to the kind of honour represented by Priscilla Peel’s refusal to spend money decorating her college room, or join in the students’ auction. Priscilla Peel’s sense of propriety is considered by the more popular girls to be “contrary to the spirit of the place”: “just the sort of girl who ought to be suppressed . . . [or] . . . bare, ugly rooms will be the rage; poverty will be the height of fashion, and it will be considered wrong even to go in for the recognized college recreations” (96–97). There is no code of school or college conventions that Tom or Priscilla could have consulted to resolve their dilemmas; in fact, as far as there were unspoken conventions, Tom and Priscilla were obliged to break them, in order to follow principles they themselves had to decide how to put into practice. Another feature of the 1920s and ’30s girls’ school story can also be understood in terms of the move away from the Victorian juvenile fiction’s emphasis on principles, and that is the frequency with which the plots involve the discovery of an aristocratic background, or inherited wealth and property. Auchmuty reads the frequency with which Oxenham’s heroines become heiresses and marry noblemen as a personal obsession. Though unsympathetic herself to the snobbery that seems to underlie the fantasy, she suggests wealth and class could be understood “as devices to endow her heroines with power and influence,”

158 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 and even as indicative of “the weight of feminine powerlessness the author must have been labouring under to have had to rely, in the twentieth century, on such external factors” (89). Oxenham’s “obsession” with wealth and class may have been an exaggerated one, but books by many other authors of the period provide happy endings that might similarly lay them open to the charge of snobbery: in May Wynne’s 1923 story, The Best of Chums, for instance, it is no surprise when Avice Tregerren and her older brother are found to be the rightful heirs of the local Tregerren Castle. We had wondered if the emphasis on parentage was connected to the greater dependence of the schoolgirl on her parents or on other adult figures. Yet in quite a few stories, the inheritance of a fortune, or restoration of the family connection, is brought about by the schoolgirl on behalf of another character: for instance, Phyllida in The School on the Cliff rescues a baby who turns out to be the lost grandson of the owner of the estate on which Phyllida’s school is situated; Phyllida is thus responsible for preserving the ancestral line of the Tremorwen family. This focus on wealth and class, and with lines of inheritance, is often accompanied by an assertion of democratic principles. One of the most interesting examples is Brazil’s 1915 novel, For the Sake of the School. The heroine of this story, the romantic and cultured Ulyth, “for the sake of the school” unhappily undertakes a friendship with a new girl from New Zealand, whose colonial manners and nasal accent make her unpopular with the other girls. Ulyth’s reward is to discover, at the end of the novel, that she has befriended the grand-daughter of Lord Glyncraig. “Why was it such a dead secret?” Ulyth asks. “Don’t you know what an enormous difference it would have made to your position in the school?” (261) Rona responds, “I’m a democrat at heart, and I think people ought to be valued on their own merits entirely.” (264) Yet the novel has been concerned from the outset with re-educating Rona, a re-education she requires because her father was unable to keep a governess for her up-country and she was consequently looked after by “Mrs Barker, our cowman’s wife” (33), and “her own merits” are finally recognised with an aristocratic title. It might seem simply hypocritical of authors like Brazil to claim a belief in democracy while bestowing aristocratic titles on their favoured heroines, particularly if we consider the snobbery that led Brazil to drop her connection with her poorer cousins, and change the pronunciation of her name to put the stress on the first syllable, or that led Elinor Brent-Dyer to change her name from Gladys Dyer. But Auchmuty’s recognition of class as an external factor is helpful in distinguishing its function in these books from its function in the books of the late Victorian period. Perhaps Rona’s claim to be a democrat at heart does represent a genuine belief, that Angela Brazil seems to have shared with other writers in the school story genre of the period, that class is a matter of purely external rewards that ideally should be bestowed on girls deserving of them, but in reality should not affect how people are valued. In Bessie Marchant’s By Honour Bound, a scholarship girl forming a new friendship feels obliged to mention the scholarship in case her

Girls’ Stories between the Wars • 159 friend “might think our social positions were equal”; Dorothy’s response is clearly the approved one: “That was quite unnecessary where I am concerned, I can assure you” (30). The school environment created, as Angela Brazil recalled in her autobiography, “a commonwealth where all were entitled to equal chances,” and she remembers as a schoolgirl herself insisting on valuing in a schoolgirl “the school aspect of her,” without consideration of “what a girl was at home” (50). But in the fiction of the Victorian period, there is not the same separation, even in the school stories, between “what a girl was at home” and “the school aspect of her.” Class is not an external factor, the way it is represented in the girls’ fiction between the wars, but is an intrinsic aspect of a girl’s character. Augusta Pembroke, for instance, the heroine of Ellinor Davenport Adams’ A Queen among Girls, is distinguished by her “stately air” and when, as Head of the School, she gives the end of year speech, “her colour rose, her eyes grew bright, and her voice rang out clear and full; while there was something attractive in the natural dignity of the simple gesture which she seemed to claim, as she turned towards her nearest schoolfellows, their loyal assent to the poet’s praise of Westholme College” (15). It is not surprising she is known as “Augusta, Queen and Empress” amongst her friends, nor that when honour requires it she would give up all these honours and her hopes for the future to defend her younger brother against her uncle’s unfair judgement. Outside school bounds, class comes even more crucially into play, as we have seen with the many novels which insist on the middle-class status of heroines in the workforce. The heroines of novels like The A.B.C. Girl, The Romance of a Shop, The Independence of Claire, and, indeed, A Queen among Girls take their positions as waitresses, governesses, teachers, or even photographers because of a loss of family fortunes or connections, yet there is no schoolgirl equality between them and the lower-class girls they typically work alongside. These heroines are called on to play roles of astonishing heroism and self-sacrifice, and invariably exercise a tremendous influence in the workforce, because they enter it as ladies, and this class status is recognised by everyone despite their actual situation. The heroines themselves, more conscious of their circumstances than how ladylike they still appear to others, nevertheless determine to hold on to their own sense of their class status, and the behaviour appropriate to it: “I shall always be a lady,” thinks Rose in The A.B.C. Girl. For Rose, being a lady is a moral standard. This concept of class as a quality intrinsic to the individual, rather than dependent on social circumstances, is apparent too in the emphasis in so many of the Victorian novels—almost every one of them—on the heroine’s artistic sensibility. Meade’s Priscilla Peel, for instance, has neither good connections nor wealth, and The Sweet Girl Graduate concludes with Priscilla’s position little changed: there is no marriage to rescue her into the middle class, no inheritance or discovery of aristocratic relations. There is nothing in fact to make her a lady, except her own intrinsic nobility, expressed through a

160 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 spiritualised sensuality. It is this spiritualised sensuality that is indicated by her response to the chrysanthemums in Miss Heath’s room, which fi lled her eyes with “a luminous light” and made “her heart swell with a kind of wonder” and by her later response to the work of art shown to her by Geoffrey Hammond. The distinction insisted on in A Sweet Girl Graduate between Priscilla’s intrinsic nobility and the shallowness that leads girls such as Rosalind to seek invitations to society events and spend more money than she can afford on expensive jewellery, is reminiscent too of the distinction made in Catalina, Art Student between Catalina’s artistic love of beauty, and her mother’s acquisition of expensive clothes and ornate furniture as part of the trappings of class, important in the same way that it matters to have a servant answering the door, and the right guest list for the afternoon tea party. In the Victorian novels, class, like honour, is a matter of principle, even morality, rather than the external factor it has become by the 1920s. It is in the period between the wars that class distinctions increasingly affect the marketing and the content of girls’ periodicals. In the Victorian period, while the readership of magazines like The Girl’s Own Paper and Atalanta was predominantly middle-class, a very real effort was made to include a working-class readership. Charles Peters, the editor of The Girl’s Own Paper, announced his intention to cater not only to young ladies but also to “girls of a less high position,” with articles on economical cooking and plain needlework (Drotner 115). In the “Answers to Correspondents” section in an 1880 issue, a reader was advised that she could fi nd “honesty and nobility even in the kitchen,” even while other articles offering career guidance were recommending girls consider nursing, teaching, writing fiction, book-binding, or, in one article, piano-tuning—which would involve starting out by buying “an old grand” for four to five pounds (Drotner 152–53). By the 1920s, however, working-class girls were catered to with magazines designed specifically for them. In 1919, as the School Friend was being introduced for “the girl at school, the girl whose tastes have not previously been catered for,” another new magazine, Peg’s Paper, was advertised as edited by “a worker like you” who would “know what girls like” and “give you a paper you’ll enjoy.” Other “millgirl” papers such as Peg’s Paper soon followed, almost identical in scope and title: Polly’s Paper ran from 1919–1924, Poppy’s Paper from 1924–1934, Betty’s Paper from 1922–1941, and Pam’s Paper from 1923–1927; other magazines directed at working girls include Girls’ Weekly (1912–1922), Girls’ Favourite (1922–1927), and Girls’ World (1927) (Tinckler 46). These magazines are very different from the schoolgirl magazines like The Schoolgirls’ Own. Despite catering to readers of a similar age, where the schoolgirl magazines are clearly children’s magazines with their stories of games, pranks, and schoolgirl society, and their give-away novelty toys, the working girls’ magazines in contrast feature articles offering beauty advice, courting etiquette, and the “golden rules” for a happy engagement. Advice columns in Girls’ World and Girls’ Weekly concerned themselves with “love trouble, business worries, home frets,” while readers of Girls’ World

Girls’ Stories between the Wars • 161 could write in to have their “Love Knots Untied” (Tinckler 52). Again this suggests a collapse of the space that had been allowed for adolescence between childhood and adulthood before the war. The differentiation between periodicals suggests that this is not simply a matter of childhood being extended further towards adulthood, and an earlier assumption of adult roles. Rather, the teenaged years have a different significance according to class, with girls of the middle class remaining children, while girls of the working class have entered both the workforce and the marriage market.

Mysteries and Adventures If the schoolgirl was represented very much as a child in the fiction of the 1920s and ’30s, the heroine of genres such as the mystery and the adventure story might be expected to show more maturity. The most well-known adventure writer for girls of this period is the popular and prolific Marchant, often referred to as the girls’ Henty, and published by Henty’s publishers, Blackie and Son. According to Bratton, of all the writers of adventure stories for girls between 1900 and 1930, “the only outstanding example is Bessie Marchant.” Other writers, she argues, were unable to successfully coordinate the adventure genre with the romance ending conventional to girls’ fiction. Marchant’s success as an adventure writer, Bratton claims, was a result of her adhering strictly to the boys’ adventure story genre, simply substituting girl heroines for boy heroes and resisting the usual happy ending with a marriage. The similarities between Henty’s work and Marchant’s are certainly striking. Like Henty’s boy heroes, Marchant’s heroines find themselves in perilous situations requiring English pluck and team spirit, in far-flung locations including Montenegro, Uruguay, Canada, and New Mexico, to name just a few. Where the school stories of the period are often subtitled “A School Story for Girls” and adventure stories subtitled “An Adventure Story,” the subtitles for Marchant’s stories tend to emphasise the location: The Youngest Sister is subtitled “A Tale of Manitoba;” The Heroine of the Ranch, “A Tale of Adventure in Tierra del Fuego”; The Girl Captives, “A Story of the Indian Frontier,” and so on. Although Bratton sees Marchant’s success as a result of her dropping the Victorian romance ending which, as Bratton sees it, locked the heroine in a “permanent place of subordination,” the comparison with Henty does suggest that Marchant’s writing might have more in common with Victorian fiction than the adventure fiction of the twentieth century. Marchant’s literary career was only just getting started when Henty died in 1902, although in the years between 1894 and 1902 she had already published twenty-six novels. Most of Marchant’s 150 novels were written in the 1910s, ’20s and ’30s. Yet Marchant’s birth date of 1862 does place her in the same generation of writers such as Meade, born in 1852, and Vaizey, born in 1857, an earlier

162 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 generation than that of the other prominent writers for girls in the 1920s and ’30s such as Oxenham, born in 1880, Fairlie-Bruce, born in 1885, or Brent-Dyer, born in 1894. Dating the end of the “new girl” ideal to the start of the First World War, Mitchell observes that Meade died in 1914, Mary Bramston in 1912, Hesba Stretton in 1911, and Vaizey in 1917. Living as she did almost into her eighties, Bessie Marchant continued to create heroines fitting the ideal of the Victorian adolescent or Edwardian new girl, well into the twentieth century. The heroine of a Marchant novel is typically in her late teens, like the hero of a Henty novel, and is just as competent, courageous, and energetic. “Dauntless,” the adjective applied to the heroine of Marchant’s 1926 novel, Di the Dauntless, could equally well apply to any of her other heroines: their dauntlessness in the face of the perils she presents them with is their most striking, and most consistent, characteristic. Diana Delford is one of several siblings in an English family living in the Moroccan desert where they make a living selling the silk grown for them by the native people. When an air pilot crashes his plane near their homestead, Di is as quick to recognise the commercial opportunities that a regular flight route would open up, as she is to recognise, and provide, the assistance the pilot will need to get his plane back into operation. This commercial acumen is presented, as part of a very Henty-like colonial project. We are told Mr Delford was trying to graft English ways on Moroccan natives, and it took more than a little doing. In some things he had succeeded beyond his expectations. Di set out to succeed still further. She always made it her business to go one better than her father when it was possible. (83) We realise the air pilot will make a good match for Di early on in the novel, when he not only admires Di’s colonising spirit, but feels himself “very much the same about things. He had just that desire to plant the spirit of the land in which he was born, in this lawless wilderness of Morocco” (46–47). Most of the Marchant novels we have read do not, as Bratton suggests, resist a romantic conclusion, but the marriage takes place, as Mitchell observes of the late Victorian and Edwardian fiction, “just beyond the last page of [the] books” and as such can be seen as the equivalent of the marriages that equally often end a Henty novel. The focus of a Marchant novel is never on romance, but always on the thrilling adventures of the heroine. Often a character who will eventually become a suitor for our heroine appears early on in the plot, and may assist the heroine or, as is more likely, require assistance from her. Even more important in many of the novels is the heroine’s father, whose business responsibilities are typically shared by the heroine. Di shares the work of overseeing the Moroccan silk farmers, taking over completely when her father is away and making decisions, such as to plant up a grove of almond trees on her own initiative;

Girls’ Stories between the Wars • 163 Juanita, one of the two heroines of No Ordinary Girl, has sole responsibility for managing her stepfather’s extensive estates, as he is frail in both body and mind; when her father is injured, the heroine of Juliette, the Mail Carrier, takes over his contract to deliver the mail, requiring skill with a revolver as she faces bears and wolves. Many of the stories involve the heroine rescuing her father from a perilous situation. In Di the Dauntless, the adventure begins when Di saddles an ass and sets out to find her father when he fails to return home from a journey. She finds him in bad condition, weak and delirious, and for two days Di patiently nurses him back to health until a gang of insurgent natives arrive on the scene. Determined to keep the insurgents from discovering her father’s presence, Di would rather give herself up to them, telling herself, “I would give my own life if only he might be spared, poor darling Daddy!” (188). Mitchell has observed how many girls’ novels of the turn of the century involve the heroine’s rescuing men, often the men who become their suitors, and she also comments on how often these books and girls’ magazines feature men as invalids. Marchant’s novels return to both these tropes obsessively. Mitchell gives the example of Marchant’s Juliette, the Mail Carrier, in which Juliette rescues the same man so often that she jokes, “I seem fated to have to drag you about, as if you were a bale of goods from a clothing store” (Mitchell 116). In Helen of the Black Mountain, Marchant constructs an even more elaborate plot to maximise the number of rescues and amount of nursing her heroine must undertake. Helen’s brother Basil is an interesting character, taking the place of the ineffective sister in a typical late Victorian novel, arriving “so worn with his trouble as to forget the airs and affectations which had become a sort of second nature to him” (50). Where Helen’s thoughts are always how to protect her father from trouble or anxiety, Basil has come straight home “to see if Father will help me out” (50). Her father, however, is away, and Helen soon learns that he has been kidnapped, apparently by “Black Rangers,” while Basil himself is on the run from police he is equally sure will hunt him down. Helen leaves Basil in hiding while she goes to rescue her father, only to discover when she gets her father home that in the dark, and because of his extensive bindings, she has rescued the wrong man. She now finds herself nursing both Basil, and this new fugitive, an Englishman, Peter Suworin, until eventually Basil is captured when he is mistaken by the kidnappers for Peter. Meanwhile, Helen’s father is still missing, and the rest of the novel is taken up with the nursing of Peter, the rescue of Helen’s father, and the mystery of Basil’s disappearance. Helen’s father is eventually discovered lying feeble and on the point of death in a desolate hut, while Basil is only discovered “thin and white” with “no flesh at all” on his bones after spending weeks locked up in a dungeon (292–93). By the end of the novel, Peter is the only one of the three men restored to full health, and even he followed up his recovery by getting incapacitated again by a sprained ankle just when the rescue of Helen’s father was taking place, so that Helen had to interrupt her

164 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 rescue of her father in order to assist Peter off the ground (and out of some vines he was tangled up in). The dramatic rescue of Di’s governess in Di, the Dauntless is particularly interesting for the details that position Marchant’s work so precisely between the Victorian period and the period between the wars, even as she wrote into the 1930s. Having successfully drawn the insurgent natives away from her father’s trail by getting captured in his stead, Di must now escape for her life, while taking responsibility too for the escape of her governess, urging her on, as we have seen, with an appeal to her good sportsmanship. So Victorian a moment, this also looks forward to the role rescues play in the school fiction of the 1930s, in which girls who have so far shown aptitude only for hockey or letting off fi recrackers prove themselves heroines by taking what is represented as an equivalently sporting approach in the face of rising tides or dormitory fi res. Yet although the setting is more exotic, and the situation more far-fetched, the escape and rescue that takes place in Di, the Dauntless is represented with greater psychological and political realism. This is not the schoolgirl adventure of a typical girls’ story of its period. Real heroism is called for, from a heroine who understands exactly the danger she faces and makes decisions based on her knowledge of local politics. Real sacrifice is also called for, again and again in this story. Not long after Di has turned to the discourse of the playing field for inspiration, she fi nds further inspiration in the Bible: In the mind of Di there flashed some words of Holy Writ. “He that loveth his life shall lose it,” and a conviction came to her that only by sacrifice could she hope to be saved. (243) These are lines that would seem less out of place in a Victorian novel than a novel of 1926. And yet, this is not the religious idea of being saved that the Biblical phrase ought properly to refer to, and would refer to in a Victorian novel. It is Di’s life, not her soul, that the reader will see saved as a result of the act of sacrifice she makes in this crisis. The impression may be given that Marchant was more typical than in fact she was and that the adventure story was more central a genre than it was in the period between the wars by sometimes misleading titles and illustrations. For instance, a 1935 girls’ annual has the title Girls’ Adventure Book and a cover illustration that could have served to illustrate Di, the Dauntless, with its jodhpurred heroine racing across the page on a camel as a number of Arabs waving alarming-looking weapons appear in the distance galloping after her. And yet, nine of the twelve stories in the book are school stories, with the opening of “Jean Sees It Through” conveying the typical register: “Well, I’m bothered if I know what to do,” sighed Jean Desmond, tennis captain of Belmont School.

Girls’ Stories between the Wars • 165 “What’s the trouble now?” asked Betty Simmonds, the Head Girl, and also Jean’s friend. “Can I help?” “N-no,” hesitated Jean, “I’m afraid not. As a matter of fact, I’m in a mess about the team for the match against Chase School. We must beat them, otherwise we shall spoil our record.” (n.p.) Of the three stories in the annual that take place out of school, one involves the rescue of some rival motor-boaters from a sandbar, one involves three girls taking a car out for a drive and getting into various motoring scrapes, and the third involves a disastrous attempt at dressmaking. The only real adventure in the annual in fact livens up one of the less realistic school stories, Josephine Elder’s “The Singing Stranger.” On a Wednesday on which there was no prep, the heroine of this story foils the burglary, from a renowned singer, of “a small Scotty puppy” (n.p.). The illustration to this story shows the worried-looking schoolgirl racing down a street, her glasses and school hat staying neatly in place as she reaches out to grasp the elbow of a cap-wearing ruffian, looking annoyed and apparently ready to shove her aside to make his escape. In the background looms the comforting figure of a policeman, without whose presence it is hard to see how the heroine’s brave chase could be very effective. In all the adventures that take place in this collection, from the recovery of the stolen puppy to the attempt to make a dress, it is adults who actually come to the rescue and help the girl heroines out of every scrape. While 1930s anthologies of adventure stories are full of school stories, school stories of the same period are often as full of dramatic rescues and crime prevention as they are of hockey matches and accusations of cribbing. Where Marchant obsessively portrays her heroines rescuing their fathers or the young men they will eventually marry, the rescues in the school stories are variously of the heroine’s best friend, an admired older girl, a younger schoolmate, a rival, or often even of a character only remotely connected to the school story, such as a local child, an elderly woman, or an animal. The plot significance likewise varies: the rival is humbled and remorseful, the elderly woman donates a scholarship to the school, a friendship is confirmed, an alibi established, or an appearance out of bounds set up to have plot ramifications further along. The blurring of the adventure story and the school story genres in this period can be seen in the list of titles by some of the most popular girls’ writers, such as Dorothea Moore and Violet Methley. Along with Septima, Schoolgirl, Fen’s First Term, The Only Day-Girl, and The New Girl, Dorothea Moore was also writing novels such as Smuggler’s Way, Adventurers Two—A Story of the Vendean Rising, and Darry the Dauntless, in which the heroine Darenth is kidnapped due to her identity being mixed up with that of Princess Daryll of Zerniov. Many of Moore’s school stories have titles like An Adventurous Schoolgirl or A Plucky Schoolgirl, that indicate they will include similar adventures to those found in her other stories. Violet Methley’s works are a similar mix of school and adventure stories, with titles like Held to Ransom,

166 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 Smuggling Days, and Derry Down-Under: A Story of Adventure in Australia, alongside Schoolgirl Mollie and The Sandilands Girls: or, Nathalie at School. In fact, Marchant herself wrote school stories as well as adventure stories. In her case, however, the genres are quite distinct. The adventure stories seem clearly written for an older readership, with their more complex plots, much longer word-length, older and more independent heroines, and often a romance element. The school stories, on the other hand, while not as banal as Evelyn Smith’s Binkie of IIIB or Veronica Marlowe’s That Eventful Term, read much more as children’s literature, with a heroine like Dorothy in By Honour Bound determined to act as honourably as a boy while vying for a scholarship, playing “fast and furious” at hockey, and dealing with the usual false accusation of cheating. Where we saw Juliette the mail carrier dressing for work in “a thick pilot coat” and Helen of the Black Mountain searching out “a dark, stout, riding skirt” for her journey, By Honour Bound begins with Dorothy shopping for school clothes in a department store and rejecting all the dresses on display as “too grown-up and elaborate for a schoolgirl.” Girls’ fiction generally is becoming indistinguishable from children’s literature, and the category of young adult fiction into which we have placed the juvenile fiction of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods does not really come into its own again until the 1960s. A girls’ story like Darry the Dauntless: A Schoolgirl’s Adventures has little to distinguish it in terms of genre from M. E. Atkinson’s Mystery Manor, subtitled “A Novel for Boys and Girls.” The cover illustrations clearly depict children, rather than young men or women, even when a heroine has, as in the case Aline Fellowes of Jessie Leckie Herbertson’s A New Girl at Maltby, “just passed her sixteenth birthday.” Adventure stories for children typically involved a combination of boy and girl characters, and, as the titles of such novels as M. E. Atkinson’s August Adventure, Kitty Barnes’ Easter Holiday, or Elizabeth Yates’ High Holiday indicate, take place in the holidays from their more ordinary lives at school. These are some of the better stories to have been published in a period which Alec Ellis, in his 1968 study, A History of Children’s Reading and Literature, introduced with the chapter title “Mediocrity and Escapism” and which Lionel McColvin, writing in the 1932 Library Association Record, saw as being overwhelmed by “an ocean of terrible trash” (Ellis 160). In the 1940s, Enid Blyton began producing her school stories and adventure stories in which the representation of teenagers as children became increasingly strained. British comedy company The Comic Strip play this up in their Enid Blyton parodies Five Go Mad In Dorset and Five Go Mad On Mescalin, squeezing adult actors into the children’s holiday clothes of the 1950s, and loading the dialogue with sexual innuendo. The 1930s, however, also saw, along with the “ocean of trash,” the publication of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series. The ages of the children in these stories are not always easy to identify, except for Roger’s age, clearly identified as only seven in the first book of the series. The other children seem to be preadolescent or in their early teens. Their independence and competence provide

Girls’ Stories between the Wars • 167 a significant part of the books’ appeal, and yet they are very much children, whose adventures take place in a childhood world that blends reality and imagination. The adults who keep an eye on them from the sidelines come into the stories as the “natives” of the world the children are “colonising,” and their presence makes the delicate oscillation between reality and imagination particularly apparent, when the language of the children’s imaginary game describes actions that cannot properly be accommodated (“the female native kissed all the Swallows goodbye” (198)). Swallows and Amazons is a classic of the genre because it depicts with such sureness a childhood world within, but apart from, the world of adults. The nostalgia the children feel as their holiday comes to an end—“we want to stay for ever,” said Roger—is a nostalgia that seems to belong in these novels to childhood itself. In the 1930s, the end of childhood means the end of adventure, rather than the entry into adventure it represented earlier.

Conclusion Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. (T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet” 145)

The same might be said of three of the most iconic adolescent characters of the post-war period, Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye, Jim Stark of Rebel Without a Cause, and Esther Greenwood of The Bell Jar. Significantly, these are all American, though just as central to British culture. The Catcher in the Rye opens with Holden thrown out of his expensive private school, but if he ends up on the streets this is only a temporary situation and even he concedes that his parents are “nice and all” (1). Yet Holden has known tragedy, with the death of his adored younger brother, Allie, three years earlier of leukaemia. Holden says that he feels sorry for his parents but “especially my mother, because she still isn’t over my brother Allie,” (139) implying that his father, younger sister, and older brother are “over” his death. We might doubt this, and clearly Holden himself is not “over” it, yet his problems, whatever they are, seem to be occasioned rather than caused by Allie’s death. There is an even greater gap between the anguish of Jim, shown in an early scene of Rebel Without a Cause in juvenile detention, rocking back and forth with his head in his hands and slamming his fist into the police officer’s desk, and the only reason given to explain it: the fact that his father, mother, and grandmother all argue a lot. As Jim’s father helplessly points 169

170 • Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 out, he buys him everything he wants—a bicycle, a car—and shows him love and affection. Nevertheless the fi lm studio felt that the parents were central to the plot, arguing against cuts suggested by the British Board of Film Censorship, on the grounds that “If we don’t show the weakness of the parents we have no motivation for the unhappiness and loneliness of the adolescents” (Biltereyst, 181). As for Esther, she herself is puzzled by her own unhappiness at a time when, having won a prestigious internship on a magazine, she recognises that “I was supposed to be having the time of my life. I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me all over America . . . everybody would think I must be having a real whirl” (2). There are a number of reasons given for her nervous breakdown which could almost be said to be overdetermined, but one of the precipitating factors is her discovery that her boyfriend Buddy is not a virgin. Upset by the sexual double standard this reveals, since it has always been assumed between them that she will remain pure for their marriage, she is determined to liberate herself by entering the New York dating scene, though “dating” is far too demure a word for what she encounters. While this provides further good reasons for her to be unhappy, nevertheless her unhappiness preceded any of these problems and not one of them seems adequate to explain it. Yet there is an “objective correlative” for the problems of each of these characters—adolescence. It is not just the death of Allie that has caused Holden’s crisis. Allie died when he was eleven, still very much a child, and Holden thirteen, on or over the cusp of puberty. Holden’s kid sister Phoebe challenges him to find one thing he likes and all he can answer, apart from Allie, is “just chewing the fat and horsing” around with her (155). But he also likes other children and so we can assume that he has projected onto Allie the innocence that at thirteen he was in the process of losing. Holden wants to be the catcher in the rye who saves all the kids from falling over the cliff but he also wants to be caught or to catch himself. His old teacher, Mr. Antolini, a failed mentor figure, warns him that he is “riding” for a “special kind of fall, a horrible kind” but he has already fallen, in the biblical sense, into adolescence, what he dismisses at one point as “a phase” (13). Judy, the girlfriend character in Rebel without a Cause, has a similarly tender relationship with her little brother. Her relationship with her parents is more strained, her father rebuffing her attempts to kiss him when, as he sees it, “you’re getting too old for that kind of stuff.” Judy and Jim are shown at their happiest playing a game of mothers and fathers with their friend Plato, at once revisiting the most iconic of childhood games and looking forward to adulthood. Adolescence, in contrast, is represented as a time of unhappiness. As Judy’s mother says, “it’s just the age where nothing fits.” Every single kid shown in this fi lm is either pulled into juvenile detention or part of a youth gang, spending their time fighting with knives or playing “chicken” in their cars because they do not know what else to do with themselves.

Conclusion • 171 In Rebel Without a Cause, the sexuality of the characters could be said to be one of the positive things they have going for them but in The Bell Jar, much like Catcher in the Rye, sexuality represents a fall from childhood innocence, beginning with the shock revelation about Buddy, and certainly very much a fall from grace. However, Esther’s cynicism and negativity extends to embrace chemistry, Modernist literature, technicolour movies, and career women, to list just a few of the things she finds to focus her disenchantment on. Her greatest disenchantment, though, is with herself. A supposed success story, who feels she should be steering New York like her own private car, she finds “I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself ” (2). Holden, Jim, and Esther might be quite different from the adolescent characters of nineteenth-century juvenile fiction, but they are very much the sons and daughter of the Romantic child since puberty is the most obvious indicator of the end of childhood. And yet the Fall is also a felix culpa. Despite their negativity, these characters are the heroes of their stories and essentially we are on their side. More importantly, they are not only sympathetic but are represented as essentially right in their disenchantment with society. Something is rotten in the state of America during the 1950s, whether it be the general existential malaise that Holden calls “phoneyness,” the kinds of fathers who are either too henpecked or too distant that we fi nd in Rebel Without a Cause, or the sexism and double standards that Esther encounters. These three narratives are often thought of as precursors to what would happen during the 1960s. For all their condemnation of America these characters have not yet found a cause, a means of political action. But during the 1960s such rebels would fi nd causes. While mainstream society recoiled at the sexual permissiveness and social irresponsibility of the youth or counterculture, at the fact that it was both too grown up and not grown up enough, the young people who identified with Holden, Jim, and Esther found that their parents’ generation was both sexually repressed and lacking in social conscience—that is, both too grown up and not grown up enough. Depending on one’s point of view, therefore, adolescence is both the worst and best of times. However, while a historian such as Savage traces such ambivalence back to the late nineteenth century, it is our contention that for roughly a century there was, despite undoubted fears about juvenile delinquency or hooliganism, little that was ambivalent about adolescence. The adolescent was not someone who stood for everything that was wrong with society, notably sexual permissiveness and an absence of moral codes, nor, alternatively, a figure who challenged social mores, notably sexually repressiveness and political complacency. Instead the adolescent was someone who stood for an imperial nation’s confidence in itself, in its ability to reconcile desire with authority. The adolescent has been a central figure for at least 150 years but one who has nevertheless changed radically.

Notes

Introduction 1. Beetham and Drotner contrast the circulation figure of two hundred thousand for The Boy’s Own Paper in 1879, shortly after it was fi rst published, with the figure of two hundred fi fty thousand soon reached by The Girl’s Own Paper, fi rst published in 1880. These figures match the figure of six hundred thousand estimated readers of The Boy’s Own Paper in 1879 given by Dunae, since the readership is estimated as approximately three times that of the paper’s circulation. The figure of 1.4 million is not reached until ten years later. Presumably The Girl’s Own Paper saw a similar expansion in its readership; Drotner notes that “by the late 1880s, the two weeklies were deemed by far the most popular magazines for adolescents” (115). 2. Carpenter maintains that Boys of England would have been read by more than two million children a week, though he does not indicate how he arrives at that number. Chapter 1 1. The third novel, or rather novella, Forrest Reid’s The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys (1905) is about a romantic friendship between two schoolboys, though it is not strictly a school story, nor would it have been read by schoolboys. Rather it is a Uranian story about a fifteen-year-old boy who falls in love with another schoolboy, the image of the boyish Greek god with whom in his dreams he has played in a garden. There is a strong sacrificial theme to the novella—the beloved dies when he saves his companion from being run over by a carriage—and their relationship is described in the most mystical of terms, the narrator imagining, for example, a “Platonic ladder” on whose lowest rung lies “material beauty” and “Higher fair souls;

173

174 • Notes fair virtues higher still; and highest of all the pure idea of Beauty itself, invisible to the eye of sense, but lying bright and clear before the vision of the mind, a glorious sight, to be viewed by those alone who have cleansed their souls of earthly passions” (46).

Chapter 2 1. We are grateful to Saskia Voorendt for pointing out this editorial. 2. We use the term “native” even though it has many contradictory associations, some racist. However, alternatives such as “colonized” and “indigenous” will not do, since many of the non-European peoples in the stories are neither. We use the term “native” in one of the neutral ways it was used during the late nineteenth century to mean simply someone of non-European descent living in their country of origin.

Chapter 6 1. The 1930s, of course, also saw the invention of the most famous girl detective of the period, Nancy Drew, whose adventures were written up mostly by female authors under the pseudonym of Carolyn Keene, but according to the instructions of fiction syndicate owner Edward Stratemeyer. This and other American series such as the Judy Bolton mysteries, the Dana Girls mysteries, and career series such as the Cherry Ames Nurse series and the Vickie Barr Stewardess series sold well in the United Kingdom, as well as in America, and paved the way for the publication by United Kingdom–based World Distributor Series of such books as the Sally Baxter: Girl Reporter stories, or Shirley Flight Air Hostess, in the 1960s. But these career novels have no resemblance to the Victorian and Edwardian novels about girls at work, with the focus no longer on sacrifice and independence, but on glamour and romance. 2. There is a major exception to this tendency, since three of the “Big Four” school story authors, Elsie Oxenham, Dorita Fairlie-Bruce, and Elinor Brent-Dyer, wrote extended series of novels about the same schools, following the school careers of a small range of featured particular heroines. Each of these writers took at least one of her heroines into adulthood, but, as Rosemary Auchmuty observes, “the men are peripheral and paper-thin and the children merely picturesque dolls until they, the girls at least, are old enough to form friendships of their own.” These daughters—often twins, and triplets in one case—can then become the heroines of their own school stories. (The other member of the “Big Four” is Angela Brazil.)

Notes • 175 3. Cadogan nicely glosses “growing up” as Oxenham’s euphemism for becoming sexually involved with a man. 4. In “Poor Miss Robinson” it is the ideal which is referred to when girls of fourteen are said to be “at the sporting and slangy and altogether delightful age”—it is “even” at this age that they “have an honest vein of romance” (in The Golden Book For Girls). 5. Earlier in the story, Dorothy has proved herself so helpless that she has to be rescued, again by an adult, when she gets lost taking a short cut from the train station to her own home!

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Index

Adams, Elinor Davenport, A Queen Among Girls 82, 87, 110, 112, 159 Adventure 129, 137, 139, 142 Alcott, Louisa May 78 Alger, William, “The Friendships of Women” 85 Altick, Richard D. 6n “The Angel in the House” as an idea 114–119; the poem 115, 116–8 Appleyard, J.A. 40–1 Ariés, Philippe 1 Arnold, Guy 21, 23, 34n, 48, 55n Arnold, Thomas 4, 10 Atalanta 115, 160 Atkinson, M.E. 166 Auchmuty, Rosemary, 149, 152 Austen, Jane 101, 109 Avery, Gillian 46n Baden-Powell, Robert 35–6, 7, 46, 103 Baines, Talbot 18 Ballantyne, R.M., 53; Martin Rattler 19, 45–6; The Coral Island 21, 22, 42, 44, 51; The Gorilla Hunters 22, 45, 56; Ungava 66 Bamford, T.W. 4 Barnes, Kitty 166 Barrie, J.M. 47, 49 Bayley, John 22. beastliness 15–18, 21 Beetham, Margaret 6n The Bell Jar 169–171 Benson, E.F. 30 Benson, W.E. 17 Bernhardt, Sarah 11 Best, Geoffrey 37n Bilston, Sarah 70–72

Bittel, Helen 104 Blyton, Enid 152–2, 166 Bond, Brian 35n, 36n Bourdieu, Pierre 51–2 Boyd, Kelly 134, 135n, 137 Boys of England 7 Boy’s Journal 135 The Boys Own Paper 5, 6, 9, 15, 29, 36, 37, 50, 128–9 Bradby, G.F. 16–17, 59 Bradbury, Malcolm 6n Bratlinger, Patrick 50 Bratton, J.S. 9, 18n, 53, 161 Brazil, Angela 148, 149; For the Sake of the School 158; Joan’s Best Chum 150; The Nicest Girl in the School 150, 155–6; A Pair of Schoolgirls 151, 154–5 Brent-Dyer, Elinor 152 Brightwell, Gavin 130n Bristow, Joseph 5n, 9n, 26n, 43n Brooke, Rupert 3, 33 Brown, Lucy 6n Buchan, John 21 Buchan, Robert 17 Burroughs, Edgar Rice 46 Buss, Frances Mary 12, 114 Butts, Dennis 53n Cadogan, Mary 129n, 130n, 145n, 149, 151n Cadogan, Mary and Craig, Patricia 148–9 Carpenter, Kevin 8n, 9n, 9n, 9n, 39n, 42n Carpenter, Edward 28–9 The Catcher in the Rye 169–171 Chandos, John 3

189

190 • Index Chatterbox 42 Chaundler, Christine 157 Chitty, Susan 23 Chums 20, 36, 39, 52 Clarke, A.W. 29 class 2, 40, 44–5, 50, 57–8, 73, 157–161 Coke, Desmond 32, 43, 49, 61 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 127–8 The Comic Strip 166 Conan Doyle, Arthur, The Lost World 7; Sir Nigel 44, 45 Connolly, Cyril 3, 127. Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness 51, 62–3, 65, 127; Lord Jim 63–4, 68; Youth 64–5 Corbett, Mrs George 88, 90, 109 Cox, Jack 9n Craik, Dinah Mulock 85 Darch, Winifred 156 Davies, Natalie 2 Defoe, Daniel,18, 44 Demos, John 1n Detective 133 Dickens, 119 Dixon, Diana 5n Dowling, Linda 27–8 Doyle, Sir Francis 10 Drotner, Kirsten 6n, 160n Dunae, Patrick 5n, 6n, 7n, 40n. Durkheim, Emile 33–2 Education Act of 1870, 3, 5, 8 Eby, Decil D. 37n, 55n Egerton, George 119–124 Eliot, George 5 Eliot, T.S. 53 Ellis, Alec 166 Ellis, Havelock 28, 29, 152 Ellis, Peter 134 Emmett, George 8 Everett-Green, Evelyn 104; Olive Roscoe 13, 76–80; Maud Melville’s Marriage, 80, 109 Evangelism, 18–21 Faderman, Lillian 86 fagging 3, 4 Fairlie-Bruce, Dorita 153 Farrar, Frederic W. 15 Flint, Kate 104 Forster, E.M. 3 Fox, Vivian 2n

Fraser, W. Hamish 6n Fraser, Robert 57 Freud, Sigmund 25, 31 Frye, Northrop 40, 146 Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan 4n, 5, 10n, 16, 17–18n Gellie, Mary 151 The Gem 10 Gethen, H.F. 88 Gilbert, Susan and Gubar, Susan 71 Gilkes, Arthur Herman 61–2 Gillis, John R. 2n The Girls Own Paper 6, 7, 160 “The Girl of the Period” 77, 122 Girouard, Mark 5 going native 45–8, 122–4 Gotch, Thomas 11 Grand, Sarah 121–2 Graves, Rupert 29–30, 127 Green, Martin 18n Haeckel, Ernst 45 Haggard, Rider, 6, 41, 43, 44, 45; Allan Quartermain 26, 44, 45, 46, 56; Allan’s Wife 26; Ayesha 26; King Solomon’s Mines 7, 25, 226–7; She 25, 26, 27, 51 Haining, Peter 7n Hall, G. Stanley Hall 1, 21, 30–1, 70 Hannabus, Stuart 46n Harmsworth, Alfred 9 Harris, Roger 145n Hayens, Herbert 179 Hayes, Michael 6n, 36n Heddle, Ethel, Three Girls in a Flat, 82, 86, 101, 105, 109, 111, 112, 119–20; The Secret of the Turret 109–10, 113 Hemingway, Ernest 127 Henley, W.E. 37 Henty, G.A., 5, 9, 15, 23, 43, 45, 55, 59, 161; Maori and Settler 23–4, 48–9; The Tiger of Mysore 22, 47, 49; Winning His Spurs 47; With Clive in India 42 Herbertson, Jessie Leckie 166 Heywood, Colin 1n Hinrich, Derek 129n Hobson, J.A. 68 Hodder, Mark 129n, 133n, 145n Honey, J.R. de S. 6, 5, 37n honour 156, 157

Index • 191 Hotspur 129, 140 Hubert, Henri 32, 33 Hughes, Thomas 10, 16, 21, 29, 43, 45, 48, 51, 52–3, 55, 56, 58 Huizinga, Johan 53 Hutchinson, John 35 Hynes, Samuel 127n. Irving, A.M, The Girl Who Ran Away, 88 James, Henry 6 James, Louis 7n Jane Eyre 70–72 Johns, W.E. 133–5, 136, 137, 139, 142, 147–8 Jones, Susan 47n Katz, Wendy 55 Keating, Peter 6n Kett, Joseph F. 1n Kingsley, Charles 10, 18–19, 21, 24, 31, 45, 59 Kingston, W.H.G., Captain Mugford 58; The Wanderers 48; In the Rocky Mountains 48, 65–6 Kipling, Rudyard, 43, 67–8; Captains Courageous 50, 58; Kim 46, 47, 58; “The Man Who Would Be King” 66; Something of Myself 17, 21; The Mowgli Stories 21, 22, 58; The Complete Stalky & Co. 44, 45, 49, 50, 56, 57 Lang, Andrew 6, 41, 45 Latta, Nigel 1, 13 Laughton, J. K. 53n Lee, Alan J. 6n Le Queux, William 42 Levy, Amy 80–81, 82, 83, 86, 105, 108, 112, 124, 159 Linton, Eliza Lynn 77 literacy rates 6 Lloyd, Edward 7 Logan, Mawuena 35n Longfellow, “Maidenhood,” 70 Lunn, Arnold 20, 22, 48, 49, 60–1 Mack, Edward 19, 44n, 50n Mackenzie, John. M. 6, 7n, 9, 35n, 39n The Magnet 10, 129, 134, 145, 147 Marchant, Bessie 161–5, By Honour Bound 149, 158–9, 166; Di the

Dauntless 151, 162–3, 164; Juliette the Mail Carrier 163,166; Helen of the Black Mountain 163–4, 166; No Ordinary Girl 150; Margaret Todd, Mona Maclean 72–76, 85, 118–9, Marlow, Veronica 156 Marryat, Frederick 18, 53, 54, 58 Martin, Carole 6n Mauss, Marcel 32, 33 Meade, L.T., 81, 104; The A.B.C. Girl, 86, 112–3, 159; A World of Girls 72, 87, 149; Bashful Fifteen 88, 123; Catalina, Art Student, 82, 86–7, 160; Daughters of Today 86, 109, 123; Four on an Island 88, 109; Merry Girls of England 119, 122–23; Nurse Charlotte 82, 102–3, 105, 107–8, 111; Polly: A New-Fashioned Girl 123; Ruffles 88–9, 90; Sweet Girl Graduate 5, 86, 115–6, 118;159–60 Marlowe, Veronica 166 Methley, Violet 165–6 Milne, A.A. 9 Mintz, Stephen 3n Mitchell, Sally 11–12, 81–82, 88, 103–4, 113–4, 120, 124, 163 Moorcock, Michael 136n Moore, Dorothea 165 Mosse, George 34 Moss, Robert 43 Mothers, boys’relationships with 24–5; girls’ relationships with 106–8 Munich, Adrienne 69n Muscular Christianity 20–21, 57 Nandy, Ashis 46 Nelson, Claudia 11, 28 Newbolt, Sir Henry 23, 31, 36, 43–4, 53, 55 Newbolt, Peter 54n Neuman, R. P. 3n New Woman 12, 81, 119–125 Newsome, David 10, 17n, 19, 21n The Odyssey, 41 Old Boys’ Societies 3 Oliphant, Margaret 71–2 Orwell, George 7, 10, 15, 127, 130, 131, 135, 136, 138, 145 Oulton, Carolyn W. de la L. 85 Owen, Wilfred 34, 127

192 • Index penny dreadfuls 7–9 Phillpotts, Eden 20 The Pilot 142–3 Pound, Ezra 128 pranks 155–7 The Publishers’ Circular 7 Public School Commission’s Report of 1864 3 Pykett, Lynn 104 Quarterly Review 41–2 Queen Victoria 69 Quigly, Isabel 49 Ransome, Arthur 166–7 Reid, Maine 18, 53, 54 Reed, Talbot Baines 19, 21, 43, 48, 52, 59 Religious Tract Society 9 Rebel Without a Cause 169–171 Renan, Ernst 34–5 Reynolds, Kimberley 104, 113, 114–5, 118 Richards, Frank 129, 130–2, 133, 134, 135–136, 146, 147 Richards, Jeffrey, Happiest Days 2, 3n, 17n, 19–20n, 30n, 127, 129n, 130, 146; Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 35n, 40n Ricoeur, Paul 40 Roberts, Robert 129 Robson, Catherine 11 romantic friendships 27–31, 85–6, 151–3 Rosenthal, Michael 7n Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 18, 34 Rover 129 Ruskin, John 35 Samways, George Richmond 136n Savage, Jon 2, 171 Sayers, Dorothy 129 School-Days 148 School Friend 147, 148 Schoolgirls’ Own 148 The Schoolgirls’ Weekly 148 Schreiner, Olive 119–123 sexology 28–31 Sexton Blake 129, 132–3, 136 sexual perversions, cf. beastliness Showalter, Elaine 26 Skipper 129 slang 43,146,151 Smith, Steven R. 2n

Soulsby, Lucy, “Stray Thoughts for Girls,” 78 Spacks, Patricia 2 sports 3, 51–3, 150–1 Springhall, John, Coming of Age 1, 2n; “‘A Life Story for the People’?” 5, 7n, 8n Stables, Gordon, 54; For Life and Liberty 24, 40, 55; How Jack MacKenzie Won his Epaulettes 55; Jungle, Peak and Plain 22, 24; The Naval Cadet 13; On War’s Red Tide 24–5 Stearns, Peter N. 1n Stevenson, Robert Louis, 6 The Beach of Falesa 9–10; The Ebb Tide 66–7; Treasure Island 7, 57; Kidnapped 21, 44, 51, 56, 57 Stone, Lawrence 2 Strang, Herbert 36 Stretton, Hesba 80 Stronach, Alice, A Newnham Friendship 85 Sturgis, H.O. 22, 29, 31 Symington, Maggie Working to Win 82, 83–84, 102, 105–7, 109, 124 Symonds, John Addington 28, 29 Talbot, Ethel 156 Thring, Edward 5 Tinckler, 150n, 161n Tytler, Sarah, A Young Oxford Maid in the Days of the King and the Parliament 80 Union Jack 7, 133 Vachell, Horace 16, 21–2, 29, 31–2, 44, 50, 61 Vaizey, Jessie, Tom and Some Other Girls 12, 89–90, 149, 150–1; The Independence of Claire 82, 84, 101–2, 105–7, 111–2, 159 Verne, Jules 7 Warner, Philip 9n Wells, H.G. 119 White, Andrea 40n, 68 Whitman, Walt 28 Wilkinson, Rupert 44n Willard, Rachel 80 Williams, Raymond 45 Wilson, Angus 22 Wizard 129, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144

Index • 193 Wodehouse, P.G. 19, 21, 22, 33, 60 Woolf, Virginia 114 Wordsworth, William 127–8 Wullschlager, Jackie 3n, 11 Wynne, May 158 Wyss, Johan 18, 44

Yates, Elizabeth 166 Younghusband, Sir George 55 Zelizer, Viviana 3n