?A School-Boy's Story?: Writing the Victorian Public Schoolboy Subject

Abstract

consensus exists among educational historians and literary critics that two mid-Victorian literary works, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D. D. (1844) and Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), were crucial in promoting Thomas Arnold and his Rugby schoolboy subjects as exemplary Victorian icons, and the Arnoldian ideal as a powerful, classspecific Victorian ideology. 1 These critics, however, largely ignore the first literary writings that helped formulate these notions: occasional works written and edited primarily by Rugby schoolboys and published in the Rugby Magazine (1835–37) and the Rugby Miscellany (1845–46). 2 In the pages that follow, I focus on these fascinating texts, which helped synthesize what would later be defined as a specifically Victorian schoolboy subject. They did so, I argue, by distinguishing between what their authors saw as the collective identificatory bond among Rugby schoolboy peers and the dangerous solipsism they associated with particular Romantic poets. Because Rugby schoolboy essays, poems, and stories illuminate the reception of Arnoldian pedagogy by its immediate target audience—the boys themselves—analyzing these writings helps fill a void within a century of critical work on pedagogy at Arnold’s Rugby and, by extension, Victorian public school pedagogy more generally. Agreeing on the importance of Arnold’s Rugby as a pedagogical ideal, critics have often differed greatly on the effects that Arnold’s own pedagogy had at Rugby and on the influence that the Arnoldian system had elsewhere. Following Stanley, educational historians such as David Newsome and J. R. de S. Honey have argued that Arnold’s rethinking of the exclusively grammatical emphasis of the nineteenth-century public school classical curriculum; his reemphasis of the pastoral bonds between masters and boys, especially through the reinvigoration of the tradition of the headmaster performing the school’s weekly chapel A