Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950: The Age of Adolescence by Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson (review)

Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 surveys British novels for and about adolescents from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, in order to correct some mistakes the authors identify in Granville Stanley Hall’s definition of adolescence as a predominately outlaw age. They argue instead that adolescence is represented positively in a wide range of works from the time, especially the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century school novel.

The first chapter, “Sexuality and Sacrifice in Boys’ Stories before the War,” explores the ways in which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century boys’ stories negotiate the tricky terrain of sexuality. Ferrall and Jackson explore the consequences of the rejection of muscular Christianity in the latter half of the nineteenth century, pointing out the ways in which the emergence of the manliness cult of the 1870s and 1880s affected late nineteenth-century boys’ school novels. The religious didacticism of earlier boys’ stories was often reinscribed in other discourses: “the shift from Evangelical to imperialist discourses observed by many historians simply displaces Christian anxiety towards sexuality into the pseudo-scientific discourses of degenerationism and social Darwinism” (21). The book’s many examples show the danger of adolescent masturbation to be, if not grossly exaggerated, then at least cheerfully managed in many boys’ school novels. In Pelham Grenville Wodehouse’s parodic Mike and Psmith (1909), for instance, cricket is described as a “great safety valve” for avoiding the dangers of masturbation (qtd. in Ferrall and Jackson 21). The authors’ argument about the management of sexuality through these books is benignly Foucauldian; according to them, boys’ stories before the war were for the most part non-neurotic. They make the case that the repressed was never that repressed: “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” (31). Their points about the sacrificial ideology of empire taught on the playing fields of Eton are not new, but they do suggest that the sacrificial ideology of the pre-war school story was less repressive and perverse than it would become after the war.

Chapter 2, on boys’ romances, argues that romance is a favourite genre for the portrayal of early twentieth-century adolescence, reconciling youthful desire with adult reality. In a thoughtful discussion of Robinsonades, the authors claim that they “read like survival manuals, the school stories as sociology, the adventure stories as geography” (43). Moving from Tom Brown to Peter Pan to Tarzan, this chapter is entertaining but scattershot as it makes a case for the essential conservatism of the boys’ romance. The novels the authors consider most exemplary inevitably bring adolescent rebelliousness back into the fold; as heroes from boys’ fictions progress on to colonial exploits, they discover a general or sea captain who becomes their role model: “Thus the fantasy of an alternative parent, for all the ways in which it registers discontent, is also a mystification and celebration of authority” (59). Making connections between youthful imperialist adventures and the romance of the boys’ school, chapter 2 concludes with an interesting discussion ofJoseph Conrad, situating him firmly at the ambivalent end of the boys’ adventure tradition—not entirely cynical about heroism, but rewriting its contours.

Chapter 3, “Sexuality and Romance in Girls’ Stories,” argues that the locus of anxiety around boys is their behaviour, while for girls it is their knowledge. The chapter covers ground that Sarah Bilston, in The Awkward Age in Women’s Popular Fiction, 18501900: Girls and the Transition to Womanhood (2004), and Sally Mitchell, in The New Girl-Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915 (1995), have previously and ably covered. It is more convincing in its claims for...