Abstract
Before discussing the discourses on manliness in the boys’ story paper it seems wise to say a few words about the audience for whom they were intended. Readers were expected to be boys on the brink of youth, generally in their last years of formal schooling and first years of work. This was a sizable group from the mid-nineteenth century onwards as the overall population continued to rise and mortality declined. Census figures reveal that by 1861 there were over one million male youths between the ages of 10 and 14 and almost as many between 15 and 19 in England and Wales alone. Thus the target audience for the new story paper was between 5 and 10 per cent of the population and this percentage continued until after the second world war. It was a lucrative market and an impressionable one as by mid-century boys’ lives were becoming ever more compartmentalized. The contours of all classes of boys’ lives were being reshaped with changing ideas about education, work, apprenticeship and leisure.1
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Notes
John R. Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770–Present (New York: Academic Press, 1974), ch.4.
Frank Musgrove, Youth and the Social Order (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), ch.2
Springhall, Coming of Age, 38; Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, 15.
D. L. Lemahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communications and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 8.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), ch.4.
John Chandos, Boys Together: English Public Schools, 1800–1864 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984);
John R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe: The Development of the Victorian Public School (London: Millington, 1977);
Barbara English, ‘The Education of the Landed Elite in England, c.1815–c.1870’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 23 (1991), 15–32;
Christine Heward, Making a Man of Him: Parents and their Sons’ Education at an English Public School, 1929–1950 (London: Routledge, 1988).
Colin Shrosbree, Public Schools and Private Education: The Clarendon Commission, 1861–64, and the Public Schools Acts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).
J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (London: Frank Cass, 2000 [1981]).
Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 91–118.
Donald Leinster-Mackay, The Rise of the English Prep School (London: Falmer, 1984);
R. D. Pearce, ‘The Prep School and Imperialism: The Example of Orwell’s St Cyprian’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 23 (1991), 42–53.
Jeffrey Richards, Happiest Days: The Public School in English Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).
Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (London: Cape, 1962);
Steve Humphries, Joanna Mack and Robert Perks, A Century of Childhood (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1988);
Lionel Rose, The Erosion of Childhood: Child Oppression in Britain, 1860–1918 (London: Routledge, 1991);
Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Children since the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991);
Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995);
Harry Hendrick, Children, Childhood and English Society, 1880–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), are just a few of the books which have dealt with this topic.
James Walvin, A Child’s World: A Social History of English Childhood, 1800–1914 (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1982), 61–72;
Springhall, Coming of Age, 65–89; Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society. Volume II: From the Eighteenth Century to the Children Act 1948 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 387–413
focus on the earlier period; Geoffrey Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, 1851–1878 (London: Panther, 1973 [1971]), 129–36;
Elizabeth Roberts, ‘The Family’, in John Benson, ed., The Working Class in England, 1875–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 1–35;
F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900 (London: Fontana, 1988), 131;
Michael J. Childs, Labour’s Apprentices: Working-Class Lads in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 78–9;
Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram, 1996), 170–1.
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (4 vols; New York: Dover, 1968), 3: 370.
Edward Jacobs, ‘Bloods in the Street: London Street Culture, ‘Industrial Literacy’, and the Emergence of Mass Culture in Victorian England’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 18 (1995), 321–47, explores this in depth.
W. B. Stephens, Education, Literacy and Society, 1830–70: The Geography of Diversity in Provincial England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 18–19.
Thomas Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working-Class Culture, 1780–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
John R. Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: A History of Myth and Ritual in Family Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 109–29 and Leonore Davidoff
Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink, and Katherine Holden, The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830–1960 (London: Longman, 1999), 116–23 and 215–20.
Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 148–58.
Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), 149.
Pamela Horn, The Victorian Town Child (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), 2; Davin, Growing Up Poor, ch.4.
Ross, Love and Toil, 158–62; Hopkins, Childhood Transformed: Working-Class Children in Nineteenth-Century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 264–90.
David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London: Europa, 1981), 94–105.
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the Working Class (London: Yale University Press, 2001), 146–86.
Childs, Labour’s Apprentices, ch.4; David Fowler, The First Teenagers: The Lifestyle of Young Wage-Earners in Interwar Britain (London: Woburn, 1994), 25–7.
Harry Hendrick, Images of Youth: Age, Class, and the Male Youth Problem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), treats this in depth.
John Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society: British Youth Movements, 1883–1940 (London: Croom Helm, 1977).
Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973 [1971]), 160–1. The demise of print culture is eloquently discussed in Rose, Intellectual Life.
John R. Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770–present (London: Academic Press, 1974);
Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth, 1889–1939 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981)
S. J. Curtis, History of Education in Great Britain (London: University Tutorial Press, 1967).
Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education, 1780–1880 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1960);
Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education: Education and the Labour Movement. On rural education, see Pamela Horn, Education in Rural England, 1800–1914 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1978).
Frederick E. Johnson, The Right Start: A Book for British Parents (London: Methuen, 1923).
John R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 289; Musgrove, Youth and Social Order, 180–5.
Andrew Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-Class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900–1939 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992).
J. H. Engledow and William Farr, The Reading and Other Interests of School Children in Saint Pancras (London: Passmore Edwards Research Series, No. 2, 1933), 12.
A. J. Jenkinson, What Do Boys and Girls Read? (London: Methuen, 1940), ch.4.
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© 2003 Kelly Boyd
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Boyd, K. (2003). Boys’ Lives: Boys’ Education, Work And Leisure, 1855–1940. In: Manliness and the Boys’ Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855–1940. Studies in Gender History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597181_2
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