Romancing the Purse and Sexualizing the Schoolboy in The Fortunate Blue-coat Boy (1770)

Abstract

Romancing the Purse and Sexualizing the Schoolboy in The Fortunate Blue-coat Boy (1770) Chantel Lavoie (bio) "What can any modest virtuous Lady see in a Blue-coat Boy, to be so very fond of him at first sight? I am really afraid, Ben, that you will be ruined." Orphanotrophian The Fortunate Blue-coat Boy: or, Memoirs of the Life and Happy Adventures of Ben Templeman by the anonymous Orphanotrophian, is a little-known novel about an adolescent who wins the heart of a twenty-fiveyear-old widow when he sings a solo part at chapel on the first Sunday before Lent, performing among his fellow pupils at Christ's Hospital charity school in London.1 The lady, intrigued by his voice and his person, seeks out his acquaintance, "which she imagined very easy to be done, [End Page 115] and without any damage to her reputation, as Ben was but a boy, and so much beneath her in circumstances" (45–6). At this meeting she presents him with money to match the silver crown already sent to him by her in appreciation of his singing—gifts that set the tone for the rest of their relationship. Regardless of his youth and his lowly circumstances, plans are soon underway for the lady to settle her hand on Ben and make him the master of her considerable fortune. To an extent, the two-volume novel echoes and conflates Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews in that young Ben is socially raised up through his attractiveness to a besotted older member of the opposite sex and, like Pamela, marries into that wealth. And yet, although the novel certainly contains uneasy tensions regarding the desire for sexual favours from a young male in exchange for the wealth of an older woman, this is not a tale about virtue or chastity, the threat to one by the loss of the other. Nor is it, as one might anticipate from the set-up and the light tone throughout, a satire. Rather, the serious moral of the story is that love is currency, exchanged for the real object of a worthy hero's quest: money. Concomitant with and indeed dependent on attaining this quest is the hero's capacity to demonstrate gratitude. The plot of The Fortunate Blue-coat Boy is easily summed up, as very little happens in the book once the widow sets her sights on Ben. They have a supper together, she cannot stop thinking about him, and, although at first "perplexed between pride on one side [about Ben's lowly status] and a violent passion on the other" (56), she succumbs to her desires for him by sending a letter proposing marriage. The suitability of the match is reinforced by the fact that the bride—whose name, we eventually learn, is Hannah Williams—although wealthy, is of illegitimate birth. Her "natural" father is a duke, Sir George ___, who does not immediately concede to his daughter's wishes but then acquiesces while acknowledging that he did not advise her well in her first marriage to an unkind and parsimonious old man. Here we might read the word trade for advise. Once the school governors release Ben, he and the lady wed in relative secrecy. The remaining two-volume narrative revolves around purchases made for Ben's wardrobe, gifts to school retainers and other boys in Ben's school house, digressions involving a foolish mathematics master, tradesmen who attempt to cheat their customers, and conversations by lesser characters at inns and in taverns as the newlyweds travel to the lady's estate in Kent. [End Page 116] While the pseudonymous author asserts that his narrative is based on true events, the book is also a fantasy about growing up.2 Ben's departure from the venerable Blue-coat School, Christ's Hospital, sets off one boy from the many; here the rest of the pupils stand as foils—in effect, boys—among whom Ben Templeman becomes a man. Ben's age when he leaves the school prematurely in order to take up his fortunate position is "between seventeen and eighteen," and he has "arrived to the first order"; that...