Juvenile Nation: Youth, Emotions and the Making of the Modern British Citizen, 1880–1914 by Stephanie Olsen (review)

In Juvenile Nation, Stephanie Olsen examines the education and emotional formation of the generation of boys who enlisted in the army at the outbreak of World War I. In so doing, she presents several distinct but related arguments. She asserts that the nineteenth-century context included a renewed emphasis on the father as a moral leader, a consensus regarding the family as the center of citizen formation, recognition of adolescence as a problematic stage in childhood development, and an attempt to export “British” ideals about childhood to the imperial populations. Utilizing periodicals that were published for youth from a variety of sacred and secular organizations (such as the Religious Tract Society, the Church of England Temperance Society, the Band of Hope, and Alfred Hammersworth’s AP publications), Olsen stresses the impact of informal education on the emotional and moral developments of British youth. Indeed, she asserts, “Many nineteenth-century educators and moralists believed that informal education had a far greater reach, and was far more efficient and effective, than formal education” (7). In addition to taking a holistic approach in examining the childhood experience, she argues that character and manliness were codes for accepted emotions and emotional norms. Importantly, Olsen’s scholarship includes the emerging professions concerned with childhood ideas. This professionalization of the understanding of childhood development had its impetus in the evangelical reform movement of the nineteenth century and the traditional discourse of Christian moral teaching. These professionals believed that exemplar children could shape not only their peers, but also the adults in their lives.

Olsen devotes the first two chapters of her monograph to an analysis and discussion of her most important sources: periodicals focused on youth and the social groups affiliated with them. She argues that the juvenile publishing industry sought to eliminate dangerous vices, which were seemingly untouched by the formal education system. Despite the secular and religious differences between the foundational ideologist of these publications and groups, they shared a common attitude towards the upbringing of boys along moral and emotional pathways. These publications and their associated youth movements encoded emotional ideals and appealed to “correct” emotional responses.

In chapters 3 and 4, Olsen examines domestic relationships and the concept of the male child as a positive role model to his peers and father. In this regard, she argues against the notion of motherhood as the sole moral compass within the home, and arrives at a definition of the domestic ideal that places the father at the center of notions of racial survival and national greatness. Indeed, informal education and youth periodicals ensured that boys understood the importance of fatherhood, and that domestic bliss was the culmination of a young man’s efforts to build a career and good character. Interestingly, Olsen asserts that, by focusing on the father as the moral center and the children as beacons of goodness, these publications cast doubt upon women’s influence on their children and husbands. The importance of male education took on new significance as the good boy was envisioned to be a fatherly example to his own father.

In an attempt to tie the concepts of masculine childhood to the empire, Olsen explores the extent to which the ideals of informal education, defined by domesticated manliness, were exported to the Raj. The focus of this analysis is the late nineteenth-century efforts of the British Religious Tract society in India and those of its agent, Dr. John Murdoch. In India, efforts to export and adapt boyhood and manly ideals of the metropole were morphed into “loyal subjecthood”—with upper caste Hindus encouraged to become manly, dynamic, and patriotic citizens serving the motherland (121). Similar to Britain, formal and informal education also meant that the concept of adolescence developed in India. While their efforts certainly did not Christianize the population, they did promote a sense of nation and citizen—much to the detriment of the British Empire...