Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire (review)

In 1890, the same year that Henry Morton Stanley's best-selling memoir In Darkest Africa thrilled the English reading public, William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, published his own account of a metaphorical journey of exploration, In Darkest England, And the Way Out. Paraphrasing Stanley's title, Booth drew the same parallels that so many English writers—from reformers like Henry Mayhew to popular novelists like Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins—found persuasive: the urban slums of industrialized England (what Mayhew called the "undiscovered country of the poor") were as foreign, and possibly as frightening, to the middle-class English observer as the exoticized terrain of colonial Africa. Depicting the lives of the poor, particularly children, in lurid terms, Booth lamented the case of a prostitute's daughter "suckled on gin," as well as the "thousands" of boys "who may be said to have sucked in a taste for strong drink with their mothers' milk." As he strove to help poor children, Booth clearly found much amiss with impoverished parents and their child-raising practices. While Booth saw a cure for urban poverty in the charitable activities, moral uplift, and militaristic regimentation of the Salvation Army, Henry Mayhew, the author of the voluminous London Labour and the London Poor, pursued a less directive but equally problematic agenda, hoping to shed light on London's impoverished citizens through an exhaustive catalogue of their activities, habits, and private lives. Mayhew's massive compendium included separate sections on "The Street Sellers of Ham Sandwiches" and "Cats' and Dogs'-Meat Dealers," on "Mud-Larks" (who scavenged articles from the muddy banks of the Thames) and "Crossing-Sweepers," as well as on such popular entertainers as "The Street Conjurer" and "The Penny-Gaff Clown."

In recent decades, literary scholars have mined the rich, provocative, and often troubling literature of Victorian social analysis and reform, uncovering striking parallels between the imperial impulse at home and abroad. Over a decade ago, Anne McClintock's influential Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest documented the extent to which such self-styled urban explorers as Mayhew and Arthur Munby chose to see the urban poor as uncivilized "primitives," metaphorical colonial subjects at the heart of industrialized England. Drawing on the critical tradition epitomized by McClintock's work, Troy Boone's Youth of Darkest England focuses more specifically on efforts to indoctrinate working-class children and adolescents in middle-class values while drawing them into the British imperial project. Thus, it makes a valuable contribution to the study of Victorian and Edwardian children's culture. Deftly analyzing the rhetoric employed by Mayhew, Booth, and Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, Boone illuminates the paradoxical dynamic by which they appeared to offer working-class youth a valued place in imperial England while also maintaining subtle class distinctions. Such reformers hoped that a sense of empire would instill pride and patriotism in the working classes, muffling the growing class consciousness that had fueled the Chartist and working men's movements. Peripheralized as they might feel within the context of British society, working-class young people could supposedly imagine themselves to be at the heart of a fur-flung constellation of colonies that paid homage to England. As Boone demonstrates, however, the proponents of class unification through a celebration of empire purveyed mixed messages that revealed their own profound ambivalence. If their often hortatory writings appeared to elide class differences in the service of empire, they also employed rhetorical tropes that undermined solidarity and equality between classes. Since much of Boone's book focuses on unpacking the rhetoric of empire, he is especially attentive to two analogies that permeate the diverse literature of reform. As he argues, such "social imperialist texts" (8) tend to portray the poor as children or adolescents not yet capable of governing or taking full responsibility for themselves; in addition, they repeatedly represent "the middle classes...