Farming for Boys: Boyology and the Professionalization of Boy Work

I take my title and cue from a story that was serialized in Our Young Folks: An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls from 1865 to 1866.

Once upon a time, there was an old farm in New Jersey, near Trenton and perilously close to "the great railroad which runs between New York and Philadelphia" (60). The farm was over-seen by the industrious but ignorant Philip Spangler, a woefully inept manager with little interest in farm technology. On rainy days he took refuge in the local tavern, holding forth on matters political but not agricultural. He found "farming an affair of muscle only," and hence wasted no time reading or attending farming fairs. "The fact was," we learn, "he had been badly educated, and he could not shake off the habits of his early life. He had been taught that hard work was the chief end of man" (64). This penchant for labor was his tragic flaw; he could not see himself as management. Hence his boys would not "split a single stick of wood," having been "brought up in the same neglectful way, just rubbing along from day to day, never getting ahead" (62).

Enter Uncle Benny, a "distant relative" around seventy years old, who comes to live with the Spanglers. Unlike Mr. Spangler, he is well traveled and educated, and "uncommonly" handy with tools (65). He understands both farm administration and the needs of boys:

The very tones of Uncle Benny's voice, his lessons of instruction upon every-day topics, his little kindly gifts, his confidences, his commendations, and sometimes his reproofs, were all important agencies in the education of these neglected boys. He lent them books and papers to read, taught them lessons of morality, and was constantly directing them to look upward, to aspire, not only as men, but as immortal beings.

(332)

Uncle Benny believes that "too many boys on a farm were merely allowed to grow up" (97), and takes a paternal but also professional interest in the "neglected" boys. He teaches them new attitudes toward work and leisure, which they in turn share with the bewildered Mr. Spangler. And they all farm happily ever after.

Such is the transformation staged in eleven exciting installments of Farming for Boys, a serial that ran in Our Young Folks from January 1865 (the magazine's first issue) to April 1866. Our Young Folks was the second successful American children's periodical, preceded only by Youth's Companion(Darling 210). Like the more prestigious St. Nicholas, with which it merged in 1874, Our Young Folks featured some of the greatest literary talents of the postwar period, including Thomas Bailey Aldrich, James Russell Lowell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bayard Taylor, Lydia Maria Child, Louisa May Alcott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. But we know nothing of the author of Farming for Boys, only that he or she (presumably he) also composed Ten Acres Enough. The subtitle of Farming spells out its agri-pedagogical agenda: "What They Have Done, and What Others May Do in the Cultivation of Farm and Garden,-How to Begin, How to Proceed, and What to Aim At." The serial offers a scheme for the cultivation of what James Kincaid dubs "the child botanical" (90-91), who is also the boy savage.

That cultivation is overseen by Uncle Benny, who teaches the boys that "it was impossible to earn genuine manhood except by steadily and industriously serving out their boyhood" (485)-a sentence best served under his watchful eye. Farming for Boys is one of the earliest American texts to insist upon the need for professional boy supervision. It is at once cautionary tale, conversion narrative, and child-rearing manifesto; the anonymity of its author implies universality and realism. The relationship between it and popular boys' books of the period resembles that between women's conduct manuals and domestic fiction, as detailed by Nancy Armstrong. In both cases, the fiction and nonfiction instance and chronicle the formation of gender- and class-specific subjectivities. Like domestic life, New England farm life became an "autonomous text" when its administrative personnel understood...