The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood by Lucy Andrew

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood by Lucy Andrew Ashley Johnson (bio) The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood. By Lucy Andrew. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Lucy Andrew’s thorough research in The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature rivals even Sherlock Holmes’s detective work as she dives deep into the milieu of boys’ detective fiction in Britain from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. The volume offers archival exploration of an impressive number of periodicals, articles, and short stories by multiple authors featuring a range of boy detectives and their adult counterparts, filling a hole in the field of detective and children’s fiction in her analysis of a genre that is “mostly forgotten today and largely unexplored by critics—despite their widespread influence and popularity at the time of their publication,” and her discussion of boys’ detective fiction is an effective and detailed entry point into the subgenre (2). [End Page 224] Andrew traces the transformation of the boy detective in story papers aimed at working class boys in Britain, offering clues as to why the character morphed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her search begins with an analysis of the “penny dreadful” tradition and chapters 1 and 2 address middle-class worries about the detrimental effects of crime literature on adolescent boys. Using serials and newspaper articles, Andrew explains that middle class adults felt that the criminal protagonists in penny stories led to criminal activity in working class boys. To combat this, the boy detective was revised from a criminal protagonist to the likes of Ernest Keen, a moral alternative to the criminal heroes found in early penny dreadfuls. As one of the earliest British texts specifically aimed at children, The Boy Detective attempted to “steer boy readers away from the path of juvenile delinquency and towards an acceptance of middle-class behavioural codes and values” (23). Thus, the aim here was to police boyhood. However, Ernest Keen was too independent and successful for adult readers; thus, the boy detective character disappears from popular reading and, when he returns around thirty years later, morphs into an assistant to adults. Andrew picks up the boy detective’s trail in chapter 3 with an analysis of the Harmsworth Brothers’ story papers of the 1890s which featured detective Sexton Blake, with his Chinese assistant We-wee, and detective Nelson Lee, with his assistant Nipper. Pertinent in this chapter is an analysis of the ways that the detective stories address anxieties about adolescent misbehavior and how they serve as colonizing works with the goal of preparing boys to be useful for the preservation of the British nation. With the future of the nation in the hands of the youth, boys’ detective fiction morphed again into a more diversified genre at the beginning of the twentieth century. The genre flipped the detective/assistant hierarchy and readers saw the introduction of the boy assistant as savior, as well as a rise in stories featuring an independent, professional boy detective. Here, society’s emphasis was on preparing boys to be defenders. However, Andrew explains that these revisions did not provide adequate role models. Thus, in 1908, Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement rose to fill the gap which constructed “a new boy detective model that encapsulates the core values of scouting, such as active citizenship, patriotism and teamwork” (94). This shift created a place for the boy detective in children’s fiction and he would continue to serve in his role as amateur child detective. With the arrival of World War I, society shifted from thinking about boyhood as preparation for manhood to boyhood as a time for boys to be boys, making room for the schoolboy detective. In chapter 5 Andrew explains that educational and legislative reform helped this mutation of the detective story because society became focused on improving child welfare and implementing the school as a “safe haven,” separating childhood from adulthood. Here, Andrew offers example after example of boy detectives who fulfill the role of schoolboy detective and learn from their experiences [End Page...