In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 5 “whAt our Boys Are reAding” Lydia Sigourney, Francis Forrester, and Boyhood Literacy Is it to be expected that we can read about a . . . man, and at the same time be uninfluenced by him? It were impossible. —William Alcott Great harm . . . is done to boys . . . by the nervous excitement of reading. —William Graham Sumner The librarian and the trustees often talked to the boys found with such trash kindly and pleasantly, telling them of the dangers of reading the stuff. —The Library Journal In his semiautobiographical novel The Story of a Bad Boy, Thomas Bailey Aldrich describes a moment when the young protagonist, Tom Bailey, discovers a trunk of books in the family home: “I subsequently unearthed another motley collection of novels and romances, embracing the adventures of Baron Trenck, Jack Sheppard, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Charlotte Temple—all of which I fed upon like a bookworm” (39). For scholars familiar with Susanna Rowson’s sentimental novel Charlotte Temple (1794), the fact that the hero of a quintessential boys’ story (and an inspiration for Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer) would mention this book in the same breath as these adventure narratives—let alone “feed upon it”—might come as a surprise, going against what we expect a boy to have read and enjoyed. When critics talk about boys and literacy, they often focus on fiction by men and overlook stories by women as well as nonliterary texts. Aldrich mentions that Bailey reads history, a genre of particular interest to many authors and educators, who believed that historical narratives had an “ennobling” effect on boys. 80 “What Our Boys Are Reading” Reading has long been talked about in studies of nineteenth-century culture and of children’s literature as a way to discipline adult and child readers in general or women and girls in particular, but it has received less attention as a source for ideas about disciplining boys.1 In a recent volume, for example, Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau helpfully looks at female readers and fiction but gives little time to boys’ reading as theorized throughout novels, short stories, book reviews, essay collections, children’s periodicals, and conduct manuals. Like many critics, she argues that boys’ novels create and reinforce affirming notions of male authority and privilege, yet she overlooks vigorous debates about the possible negative effects that numerous kinds of reading could have on a boy’s subjectivity. While literary critics tend to study the reception of novels, nineteenth-century theorists of reading were interested in travel, science, biography, and especially history, and they argued at length about which would be best or worst when it came to molding the masculinity of boy readers.2 Though I explore theories of disciplinary literacy that appear in educational periodicals, advice materials, and boys’ novels such as Francis Forrester’s novel Dick Duncan (1860), the first section of this chapter returns to the writings of Lydia Sigourney, an extremely popular poet and author of advice manuals, exemplary memoirs, and children’s literature who spent a great deal of time writing for boys and thinking about their pedagogy, aspects of her career that have been almost completely ignored.3 An important theorist of antebellum domesticity , Sigourney conceives of the boy not as a figure who stands in opposition to the domestic and its virtues but as a critical part of a home-centered value system that endorses masculine self-sacrifice and social obligation. Reading Sigourney’s work on boyhood literacy helps us to complicate our use of the boy as a foil against which we can discuss the girl, and it allows us to see boys as carefully defined products of domestic theory, an act of definition in which nineteenth-century women like Sigourney play a prominent role. This chapter looks at two writers—one male and one female—but does not argue that men endorsed a kind of reading that Sigourney and other women rejected. Numerous positions were articulated in debates about literacy, and though many males favored what I call “heroic imitation”—an approach to reading in which boys consume narratives about historical figures and replay their typically masculinist attitudes or actions—others were either critical of this model or endorsed it only in a very limited way. I have selected Sigourney and Forrester because both confront the idea of heroic imitation and examine the reading of history, and both practice an oppositional way of responding to a number of popular antebellum literary and cultural fictions about boys. As...

Share