Sensational Schoolboys: Mrs. Henry Wood's The Orville College Boys

One of the most successful books of the nineteenth century, both as a novel and in its adaptation as a stage play, was Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne. In an era when fictional heroines were as good as they were beautiful and their exemplary home lives customarily portrayed as the norm, Mrs. Wood rattled all kinds of domestic skeletons--patriarchal authority, repressed sexuality, divorce, desertion--while at the same time managing to affirm an essentially orthodox moral perspective.

East Lynne begins conventionally enough: Its heroine, Lady Isabel Vane, is the beautiful and helpless daughter of a dissolute aristocrat ruined by having too much easy money. Left destitute at his death, she marries Archibald Carlyle, the wealthy middle-class lawyer who has bought her family home. But now the narrative becomes far from conventional, for Lady Isabel, unfitted by training to endure the "death in life" of so many powerless dependent women and convinced that her husband loves another, yields to illicit passion and runs away with another man, only to return later, disguised as a governess, to expiate her sin in caring for her children. She is forced to watch another woman occupy her place as wife and to endure the death of her little son while unable to reveal that she is his mother. The novel thus taps into many of the most pressing anxieties of the society of its time--issues of class, money, power, and the place of women in a male hierarchy. Published in 1861, by the end of the century, it had sold almost half a million copies in Britain alone (Mitchell vii), had brought fame (perhaps even notoriety) to its author, and had established the "Sensation Novel" as a new literary genre.

The subsequent copious literary output of Ellen Price Wood--a widowed semi-invalid writing to support her home and children--is amazing in itself. It consisted mostly of novels (more than thirty of them), magazine articles, and hundreds of short stories for the popular adult market; but there are also a few works clearly intended for younger readers--the small number suggesting that the genre proved less profitable. There are a couple of short stories, an adventure novel about running away to sea, published in 1864, and a novel for adolescent boys, set in a boys' boarding school. This was a setting not normally accessible to female view, though the author was brought up in the environs of Worcester Cathedral and would certainly have been familiar, at least from a distance, with the cathedral choir school and its students; and as Sally Mitchell has observed, Mrs. Wood was survived by three sons and was clearly in a position to observe "boys' slang and silliness" (Personal communication 2). Published in 1871, ten years after East Lynne, and obviously written for a much more restricted audience, The Orville College Boys nevertheless shares many of the techniques and attitudes of the sensation novels for which Wood became so famous--her own inimitable concoction of excitement and conventionality, subversiveness and propriety.

Wood opens William Allair. . . with the declaration, "I like writing for boys . . . ," and this certainly seems to have been true of The Orville College Boys. As narrator, Wood adopts the earnest, even preaching, tone familiar to readers of East Lynne, often stepping out of the story to speak directly to her juvenile readers--"Oh my boys! Examine your conscience carefully . . . "--just as she speaks to the adult readers of East Lynne: "Oh reader, believe me! Lady--wife--mother! should you ever be tempted to abandon your home, so will you awake!" But there are flashes of sparkle and humor that demonstrate an amused appreciation of her juvenile audience. For example, one of the boys, overcome with guilt at his own bad behavior, unloads presents onto his sick master's bed--the adventure novel, sour oranges, and sticky sweets he would have enjoyed himself when ill in...