Words about War for Boys: Representations of Soldiers and Conflict in Writing for Children before World War I

During WWI boys and young men volunteered, fought and died in unprecedented numbers. Boys’ books and magazines have been implicated in encouraging boys to enlist through the creation of a mythos that figured war as a time of youthful heroism, male comradeship, and an opportunity to display widely admired characteristics such as loyalty, courage and self-sacrifice. Examination of what boys were reading in the three decades before the war in fact suggests that the range of attitudes to battle, the military, and bureaucrats offered in boys’ fiction was more subtle and conflicted than previous accounts have supposed.