Manliness and the Boys' Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855-1940, and: Victorian Boys' School Stories in Books and Periodicals (review)

Rosemary T. Van Arsdel reminded us in VPR 36:2 how important periodicals are in understanding a culture ("John North, the Waterloo Directory, and an RSVP History Lesson"). She credited John North with advancing scholarly respect for periodicals as an important tool for researching the very fabric of a society, if for no other reason than their ubiquity: "Evidence," said North, "suggests that newspapers and periodicals were more than tenfold and perhaps as much as one hundredfold as numerous and as important as books ("Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers," 11). When RSVP got its start back in 1969, few scholars used even the standard periodicals – the Macmillans and Saturday Reviews and Edinburghs – as anything more than a source for the first publication of certain important essays by the likes of Mill and Carlyle and Ruskin. Over the last 35 years it has become clear that to understand the impact of certain people, certain ideas, certain conditions of a time, place, and people, periodicals study is invaluable, even irreplaceable.

Kelly Boyd's book is an excellent example of how to use periodicals to identify an important set of cultural characteristics; in this case, the shifting nature of ideal manliness in English boys' culture from 1855 to 1940. Manliness and the Boys' Story Paper examines a group of important boys' periodicals over the 85-year period, touches on salient characteristics of the magazines' readers (and some apparent assumptions of the magazines' creators), and focuses on what the papers reveal about cultural expectations of what it takes to be a manly man. Boyd focuses on what she calls "non-elite responses to cultural constructions of masculinity" (3), mainly responses by working-class boys to the ideals presented in the magazines that they read in mass quantities. She examines the changes in the masculine ideal over that period. And she contextualizes masculinity with some related concepts: imperialism, racism, femininity, Englishness, heroism. She also provides a brief summary of the important aspects of a workingclass boy's life during the period, including education, work, leisure, and home and family life.

Boyd focuses on the fiction in the boys' magazines with the widest circulation to generalize on the attributes of the ideal Englishman; the fiction, she points out, is crammed full of descriptions of both the ideal Englishman and his opposite, the man who falls short (generally either a villain or a foreigner). She concludes that the ideal changed from the Victorian (1855–1890) to the Pre-War (1890–1920) to the Inter-War (1918– 1940) periods. In fact, boys' magazine fiction in each of these periods described a distinct ideal man, significantly different from the ideals of the other two periods. In the first period, the manly man was upper or uppermiddle class (and definitely not someone who worked himself out of poverty through self-help), physically courageous, and skillful in physically challenging pursuits (hunting, fighting, exploring, etc.). He possessed "an arrogant belief in [his] own superiority, and a moral rectitude about the way the world was shaped" (68). He differed from the ideal of the pre1860 period by shedding the gentleness of the Muscular Christian and assuming the hard edge of the fierce English Winner. In his dealings with Natives (usually brown or black Others from "lesser" societies), his goal was conquest, not conversion. In his dealings with women, he treated them pretty much as equals, although they may occasionally have needed rescuing from a Fate Worse Than Death. When he was successful in his Adventure, he was always rewarded with riches – a manly man was ultimately a wealthy and influential man. He was a natural leader of lesser men...