Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950: The Age of Adolescence (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950: The Age of Adolescence Gabrielle Owen (bio) Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950: The Age of Adolescence. By Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson. New York: Routledge, 2010. Juvenile Literature and British Society is a detailed survey of popular literature [End Page 348] published for young people in Britain over one hundred years. Ferrall and Jackson’s book boldly argues that British society from 1850 to 1950 might be called “the age of adolescence,” because during this period adolescence was understood as a time of adventure and romantic idealism rather than the time of “storm and stress” usually attributed to the late nineteenth century and G. Stanley Hall. One problem with this cultural claim is that it is based entirely on Ferrall and Jackson’s reading of juvenile literature from this period. One has to wonder whether the romantic idealism found in juvenile fiction might more accurately be said to represent what writers and publishers hoped for young people or perhaps expected young readers to enjoy, rather than a reflection of historical phenomena or widespread understandings of youth. While certainly ideas about youth can be found in fiction, the relationship between fictional works and the culture in which they are produced is perhaps much more complex than this argument allows. However, Ferrall and Jackson’s book makes a unique contribution to the field of children’s literature in its observation that much of the juvenile fiction published over this time span contains very positive depictions of young people, a fact that has been overlooked by scholars searching for historical representations of the negative, turbulent developmental stage we find depicted in some of today’s popular psychology. The book is thematically organized, divided into six chapters in addition to the introduction and a short conclusion. Chapter 1 deals with themes of sexuality and sacrifice in boy’s fiction before the First World War, arguing that these books represent boys “as sexually mature in a quite ordinary and by no means alarming fashion” (22). While the chapter does discuss cultural anxieties about sexual vice—mainly masturbation and same-sex affections—even offering strongly homoerotic passages from Tom Brown’s School Days, it emphasizes the ideals of sacrifice and devotion to nation and empire in school stories and adventure novels. “The adolescent,” Ferrall and Jackson write, “was a less complicated and certainly less troubled figure than he would become” (38). Historical claims like this one crop up frequently in Juvenile Literature and British Society, equating fictional depictions with perceptions of social reality. Chapter 2 is framed loosely around notions of romance in boys’ stories from the same period, arguing that this literature reconciled “rebellion with authority and individual desire with social convention” (41). This chapter describes a range of novels, though the connections between the array of authors and texts are not always made clear. The third and fourth chapters cover themes of sexuality, romance, sacrifice, and independence in prewar girls’ stories. These chapters entertain a complexity of argument that seems to be missing from the first two, and they situate juvenile fiction within both a broader literary history and the field of literary and feminist criticism. Chapter 4, in particular, complicates “the angel in the house” and “the New Woman” as they are conceived of in Victorian literary [End Page 349] criticism, arguing that these notions “have come to represent much more singular concepts of femininity than they represented when they were first used in the nineteenth century” (114; emphasis in original). Likewise, Ferrall and Jackson’s readings of girls’ stories reveal that themes of sacrifice and independence are frequently linked together: for example, a girl’s refusal of her first marriage proposal is depicted as itself a sacrifice, as well as requiring additional sacrifice if she is to support herself and her dependent siblings or parents. Reading girls’ stories in relation to existing genres of boys’ stories makes clear their common emphasis on principled, romantic idealism as the distinguishing characteristic of youth. The final two chapters deal, respectively, with boys’ and girls’ stories from the period between the world wars. While the contemporary literary works of Hemingway and Pound adopt a modernist...