Tom Brown's Schooldays Research Articles

Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture, edited by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier

Reviewed by: Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture ed. by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier Alicia Carroll (bio) Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture, edited by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier; pp. xiii + 264. London and New York: Routledge, 2019, $160.00, $44.05 ebook. Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier's collection, Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture, aims to reverse the problem of human exceptionalism that underplays the subjectivity and agency of animals. In many cases, the collection succeeds admirably. It is at its best when exploring the ontological intimacies between animals and children, noting the power of shared qualities—smallness, muteness, or perceived passivity—to erode the animal/human binary; the book also excels at emphasizing culture, widely defined, over canonical literature in animal studies. Readers will find this topic a welcome new focus in the field with a corresponding expansion of the canon of animal studies. From the beginning, authors in the collection note the paradoxes of the animal-child relationship in foundational Victorian children's texts. Ayres writes that the tenor of nursery rhymes changed in the 1830s as animals began to instruct children in kindness as well as the carnivore's discourse in which "birds and mice were on purpose for eating" (23). Keridiana Chez's chapter, "Wanted Dead or Alive: Rabbits in Victorian Children's Literature," notes likewise that rabbits are the "sweetest pets as well as the sweetest flesh" in Victorian children's literature. She substantiates the claim that Victorian children's literature legitimizes "the most glaring discursive contradictions in our treatment of nonhuman Others" (31). In "Unruly Females on the Farm: Domestic Animal Mothers and the Dismantling of the Species Hierarchy in Nineteenth-Century Literature for Children," Stacy Hoult-Saros shows that children and farm animals are equated in being unruly and in need of adult authority. Such texts disturb hierarchical thought, prefiguring the posthuman. In "A Brotherhood of Wolves: Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales," Lindsay Katzir and Brandon Katzir argue that the wolf in Victorian Anglo-Jewish tales, often represented as a pack animal defending its communal life, responds to British stereotypes of Jewish people as lone wolves. Emphasizing cohesion, the wolf in these tales resists the threat of assimilation. This essay introduced welcome new texts to this Victorianist, along with questions of how alternative cultural animal symbolism might prompt ethical thought about advocacy for wolves and their habitat now. Animal advocacy is at the forefront of Alisa Clapp-Itnyre's contribution. Her "Advocating for the Least of These: Empowering Children and Animals in The Band of Mercy Advocate" expands our knowledge of Victorian periodical literature and children's advocacy for animals in a fascinating study of how the journal of the Band of Mercy, The Advocate (1879–83), renegotiated associations between animals and human children through their shared bodily vulnerability, muteness, and passivity. Despite the risks of this alliance, children sang, pledged, recited, and petitioned for animals. Through their public work, both animal and human bodies came to matter. Less obscure works by Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, and the Brontës, as well as Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), also appear here. Constance Fulmer demonstrates that Eliot's novels satirize Victorian culture that treats children like animals and animals like children. Her survey will be valuable to those interested in animals in Eliot. Maier, in "Neither Brutes nor Beasts: Animals, Children, and Young Persons and/in the Brontës," shows that children abuse animals as they themselves have been abused. Maier also notices slippages between the ontological categories of animal and human [End Page 318] when adults (violently) refuse kindness to children as well as to animals. She also makes the important point that the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1824) was formed some sixty years before the formation of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1884). Citing Donna Haraway, Maier notes that the relationships between both associations offer "not irrational denials of human weakness," but instead "clear-sighted recognition of the connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture" (qtd. in Maier 199). Her work, like Hoult-Saros's...

Sport History: The Basics

The Routledge series of guidebooks aims to offer “an overview of the fundamental principles of a subject area in a jargon free and undaunting format” (front matter). Sport History: The Basics is one of the latest in this series. Its author, Gerald Gems, is a respected and prolifically published scholar in the field of sport history.The extensive bibliographic materials make a significant contribution to the field. Each chapter contains content-specific materials, and, at the conclusion, there is an exhaustive bibliography surveying the historical literature well beyond the scope of the book. The only limitation of these materials comes from the lag time between completion of the manuscript and the publication date.In the opening chapter, Gems addresses the question “Why Study Sport History?” This may not be of concern to professional historians, but it is worth revisiting. Here Gems goes over familiar territory with precision and clarity. Similarly, he does an excellent job of explaining the work of the sport historian, including theory, research, and publication.From here, Gems moves on to an examination of the subfields and subtopics of sport history. On gender, he introduces materials from the ancient world, from early American history and from there moves through the growth of what he terms “feminism” in both Britain and the United States. This is followed by a brief examination of gender studies and body culture. Gems brings some clarity to these subjects while navigating the difficulties of terminology. What is surprising is the lack of any comment on subjects such as sex testing, intersex, and transgender sport experiences, gender affirmation, or related high-profile cases like that of Caster Semenya.The section on “Sport and Nationalism” has a focus on European, British, Japanese, and American nationalism, all of which include the element of imperialism. There is also a brief examination of national sports, a more problematic subject than it appears.Religion and sport, as Deion Sanders once proclaimed, go together like peanut butter and jelly. Fortunately, Gems does not go there. Rather, he begins with an examination of religion and sport in the ancient world. For European religious influences, Gems cites King James, William Bradford and the Puritans, Tom Brown's Schooldays, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. There is a relatively long (given the total length of this study) treatment of the YMCA movement worldwide. From here, Gems offers comments on Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim sport and then concludes this section looking at the rather dubious proposition of sport as religion. Before leaving the pairings, Gems offers a very interesting and clear examination of the rise of leisure and sport and catalogs the many forms of sport that have emerged in the age of leisure. These are contained under the rubric of lifestyle sports and subdivided into a number of categories, such as winter sports, aquatic sports, and aerial sports.Under the heading “Megaevents,” in Chapter 8, Gems begins with the Olympic games, ancient and modern, and concludes this section by enumerating a number of the spinoffs of the Olympics. The World Cup (football) is followed by a raft of other World Cups with varying degrees of importance, lesser cups, regional games, and championships spread across the globe.It is in the final chapter, “Sport History around the Globe,” that Gerald Gems offers a full display of his expertise and the amazing scope of this small but important volume. In this chapter, he assesses the state of the field of sport history and its literature in nations and regions of the world. The strengths and weaknesses are examined, and, overall, Gems offers a hopeful picture. Following this final section is a massive bibliography of sport history and an extremely helpful index to this volume.There are two caveats: A work of this scope will invariably exclude any number of things that another author might include, and it will, on the other hand, include any number of things another author would not include. This means that any reader or reviewer could nitpick this book to death, something that has been largely avoided here. In addition, some may object to Gems's extensive inclusion of materials of a sociological nature, although that seems unwarranted given the overlapping nature of the many subfields of sport studies.Sport History: The Basics belongs in the library of anyone who claims to practice sport history, either as a professional or an amateur. It is useful, enlightening, and indeed inspirational. All in the field should offer a round of thanks to Gerald Gems for taking on this massive task and the quality of the results he has produced.

Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood by Diane Waggoner

Reviewed by: Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood by Diane Waggoner Katherine Wakely-Mulroney (bio) Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood. By Diane Waggoner. Princeton University Press, 2020. The impact of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass on modern conceptions of childhood was visual, as well as textual. John Tenniel's iconic illustrations encapsulate the play, discovery, boredom, frustration, and fear that Carroll's works describe. However, Diane Waggoner's study argues that the author's critical role in "expanding the meaning of the child to encompass a protean subversiveness, perversity, energy, and curiosity" was dependent on another, far less familiar cache of images (20). Between 1856 and 1880, the writer known in his private life as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, created hundreds of portraits of children using the new technology of photography. These were designed for private viewership, artfully arranged in the pages of albums rather than displayed on gallery walls. As Waggoner shows, Dodgson's photographs nonetheless reflect his extensive engagement with the Victorian art world, responding to debates concerning realism, Pre-Raphaelite compositional strategies, and the work of other pioneering photographers. Waggoner's volume is a treasure trove of nineteenth-century visual culture, allowing for comparison between Dodgson's beautifully reproduced portraits and their many artistic influences. By arranging her study chronologically, Waggoner invites readers to follow the evolution of Dodgson's aesthetic against the backdrop of Victorian cultural change. More crucially, she provides a powerful sense of how Dodgson's desire to look at and capture images of children, predominantly girls, intensified over the course of his adult life. His controversial interest in producing, commissioning, and collecting sketches and photographs depicting girls in a state of partial dress, or fully nude, became particularly pronounced in his final decades, and is consequently addressed in the last chapter of Waggoner's study. If images of this nature formed the "logical endpoint for [Dodgson's] decades-long undertaking to picture children's bodies," they also provide a logical endpoint for any work that seeks to reckon honestly with the man behind the camera (185). Waggoner begins by exploring the development of Dodgson's photographic style during the 1850s and 1860s, placing his work in dialogue with that of other photographers of [End Page 440] childhood, including Julia Margaret Cameron, and highlighting his role in the elevation of photography from a technical practice to an imaginative art form. Waggoner also uses this introductory chapter to establish the important social function of photography to Dodgson's life. The ritual of taking photographs and guiding adult and child friends through the images arranged in his albums allowed Dodgson to cultivate and commemorate relationships simultaneously. The second chapter is dedicated to Dodgson's portraits of his muse, Alice Liddell, and her sisters, Lorina and Edith. Waggoner avoids spending too much time treading familiar ground here, as Dodgson's complicated relationship with Alice and her family has been the subject of considerable scrutiny and speculation. His pictures of the Liddell girls are instead considered alongside eighteenth-century child portraiture, which provided a blueprint for the author's vision of girlhood as a time of innocence, beauty, and playfulness. Dodgson moved beyond this aesthetic, Waggoner suggests, by establishing a "poetics of imperfection" that celebrated both the unique attributes of individual children and his intimate knowledge of each subject (which is strikingly apparent in his portraits of Alice) (110). Chapter 3 considers Dodgson's understudied photographs of boys. These formed a significantly smaller percentage of his output, yet offer a unique insight into varieties of Victorian masculinity and the author's own childhood. Images of Alfred Lord Tennyson's sons epitomize what Waggoner terms "girlish boyhood," emphasizing the sitters' vulnerability and need. By way of contrast, Dodgson's portraits of pupils at his alma mater Twyford, a preparatory school for boys aged eight to fourteen, emphasize their subjects' transition from boyhood to maturity. These images were taken in 1858, and Waggoner examines them alongside the discourse of masculinity codified by Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days, published the previous year, and in light of Dodgson's own tenure as a pupil at Rugby School (the setting for Hughes's...

Introduction

Introduction David Russell, Karin Westman, and Naomi Wood The essays for this issue of The Lion and Unicorn explore degrees of agency in texts for young audiences, mapping responses to climate, bullying, and ideologies of gender, race, and imperialism across three centuries. Roxanne Harde's "'Plus, you children': Growing Ecocitizens in Three American Children's Novels" uses an ecocritical approach to explore the ways three very different YA novels, in sometimes surprising ways, promote environmental consciousness in young readers. Harde argues that Chabon's Summerland, L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, and Lore's I Am Number Four can all be read from an ecocritical point of view. All three novels, using migration as a trope, ultimately illustrate the importance of the connectedness among all of humanity and the necessity of responding to natural world to effect survival. Indeed, Harde maintains that much of YA fiction reveals an ecocritical ethos. Its heroes are forced to be attentive to the environment, to realize the mutual interaction between human and nonhuman nature, and to recognize the necessity for assuming responsibility for saving the world. Focusing on three novels that are not typically regarded from an ecocritical point of view, Harde "discusses the various antagonists who want to steal life, considers the protagonists as ecocitizens, and concludes with a discussion of how these novels gesture toward social and environmental responsibility." In all three novels, we witness migrations to new lands, migrations that require attentiveness to survival, but also to integrating with the new environment, working with it, for the protagonists' survival depends on the continued survival of the new-found land. Ultimately, the message is that "growing up can mean growing into connection with the global ecosystem." Through an insightful comparison of the three novels, Harde illustrates how they all "appeal to children's imaginations with a nonoppressive, socially and environmentally responsible vision, and ask them to consider ties between environmental contamination, sexism, and racism, between toxic inequities and threats to the larger body of life upon which everything depends." [End Page v] School bullying is now acknowledged as a serious social problem that can have lifelong adverse effects on victims. Yet anyone who is familiar with tradition of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century school story knows this was not always the case. Katharine Kittredge, in her essay, "'Perversity shews itself so early': Changing Perceptions of Bullying from Late Eighteenth Century to Victorian Children's Literature," traces these shifting social attitudes toward adolescent bullying as portrayed through early children's books. Kittredge points out the rationale for the acquiescence (if not outright encouragement) of bullying was to prepare boys for the rigors of manhood. Additionally, she points out, the bullying, if it intended to encourage good behavior, reinforced the class prejudices prevalent in Britain at the time. However, Kittredge also notes, "from our more gender-informed perspective, we may doubt the health and sustainability of many of the hyper-masculine traits that were promoted." In this insightful and thorough study, Kittredge closely examines some nineteen school stories from the period 1770–1810, and another thirteen texts between 1810 and 1840, specifically assessing the attitudes toward bullying found in those books. Among her findings is the notion that bullying encourages children to do better work—presumably to avoid future bullying. And, in the case of lower-class students (the most frequent targets of bullying), it teaches them to cope with the inevitable struggles they will face in life. She also discovers that many of these working-class victims eventually earn the richest rewards in life—that is, in terms of power and riches. Kittredge traces the development of the portrayal of bullying and the bully through the end of the nineteenth century, when attitudes began to shift toward our modern condemnation of the bully. She sees Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays as the pivotal text in this regard, and it was in the Victorian era that the bully became an unattractive figure and no longer the hero of the story (although Kittredge cautions that current social reality suggests that we may not have entirely abandoned all the abhorrent attitudes of the past). During the postwar era in American history, the average age of...

Muscular Christianity and value-centred sport: the legacy of Tom Brown in Canada†

This article was written for a conference organized by John MacAloon at the University of Chicago in 2005 in anticipation of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes. In reflecting upon the Hughes' tradition in Canada, I argue that there was a left tradition in ‘muscular Christianity’, that it was middle-class reformers and socialists as well as upper-class conservatives who took the ideals romanticized by Tom Brown's Schooldays and ran with them in municipal playgrounds, the amateur sport movement, the Young Men's Christian Associations (YMCAs), church sports associations and university sport clubs. With the disappearance of the socialist sports tradition in the 1950s, the followers of Hughes and the tradition of ‘sport for good’ have become the most progressive voice in the pan-Canadian debates about the purpose of sport and the nature and extent of state funding, championing educational sport and sport for development and peace in disadvantaged communities in Canada and abroad while cringing at the ugliness and instrumental violence of the spectacles staged by the capitalist cartels and the uncritical pursuit of the podium by the leadership of the Canadian sport system.

Team Work? Using Sporting Fiction as an Historical Archive and Source of Developing Theoretical Approaches to Sport History

This article seeks to explore some theoretical and methodological issues that have arisen in a wider study into sport, gender and sexuality. The study aims to bring together, in creative ways, different academic traditions of history, literature and gender studies through a common medium – the novel. My foundational assumption is that knowledge may be both generated and uncovered through fictional representations such as Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), This Sporting Life (1960) and Fever Pitch ([1992] 2000). The questions the article poses are: what are the epistemological implications of reading sporting histories through fictional representations? How might we theorise about the lived reality of historical actors through a reading of sport novels? How can fictional texts be read alongside more traditional archival material? I argue that the novel allows access to theoretical thinking that enables an examination of human conditions such as the need for fantasy, intuition and myth, which other archival material might not reveal, thus enriching our understanding of the past.

There's a Deathless Myth on the Close Tonight: Re-assessing Rugby's Place in the History of Sport

Rugby School has traditionally been credited with an important place in the development of modern organised games. The most famous names in this attribution have been William Webb Ellis, the pupil who ‘invented’ rugby football, and Dr. Thomas Arnold, the headmaster who gained global recognition through the publication of Tom Brown's Schooldays. Not surprisingly, academic historians have debunked the significance of both of these men, since it is demonstrable that Webb Ellis did nothing of significance and that Arnold had little interest in games. But the significance of the school in this respect is in some ways even greater in reality – though quite different – from that in the popular myths. ‘The Close’ in the mid-nineteenth century was a recreational and moral laboratory in the making of games. The boys there not only invented new rules, skills and customs but took them rapidly to other schools, universities and cities. Moreover, such Rugbeans as Richard Sykes, William Arnold, Herbert Castens and Tom Wills took the practices of the Close to five continents, instituting a global sporting revolution which would have occurred whether ‘organised games’ became an approved necessity of education or not. This account uses some important previously uncited sources, especially the various minutes and journals produced by the boys at Rugby.

Run, swim, throw, cheat: The future of drugs in sport

Modern sport as we know it originated in 19th Century England, codifying competition while emphasizing fair play within a strong moral creed, at least as defined by 19th Century upperand upper-middle-class Englishmen1. Its bible is the semi-mythical description of sport at Rugby School described in Tom Brown's Schooldays. This book so inspired the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin that he founded the modern Olympic Games in 1896. We await the London version in 2012 with anticipation.

The Irish Schoolboy Novel

The Irish Schoolboy Novel Ciaran O'Neill (bio) Some men never recover from education. Oliver St. John Gogarty1 In his 1965 autobiography, Vive Moi! Seán O'Faoláin recalled a Sunday morning ritual from his childhood in Cork City. His father, a member of the local Royal Irish Constabulary, would lead Seán and his brothers to Wellington Barracks, where they would join the loyal citizens of Edwardian Cork in saluting the church parade of the local British Army regiment. O'Faoláin remembered a connection he once had made, listening faithfully to "God Save the King" at his father's knee: When the drums rolled and the brass shook the air I could hear the sabre clash, the hoofbeats, the rifle fire of all the adventure books I had read—Mainly Henty's: The Dash for Khartoum, With Kitchener in the Soudan, One of the Twenty-eighth, Under Drake's Flag.2 [End Page 147] O'Faoláin was not alone among Irish writers in his exposure to G.A. Henty's many empire adventure stories.3 Generations of Irish boys and girls had by then sat enthralled, reading of the exploits of well-mannered wanderers fresh from public schools, as they colonize and civilize out among the farthest reaches of the British Empire. These adventure stories were the lineal descendants of the "schoolboy novel," a genre that owes its existence to the phenomenal popularity of an 1857 novel by Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays, based on life at the famous English public school in Rugby. The passing of progressive legislation in the 1870s, the Forster Education Act of 1870 in Britain, and the Intermediate Education Act of 1878 in Ireland helped create over one million new places in schools across Britain and Ireland.4 An increasingly literate youth audience, in turn, was targeted by cheap periodicals, such as The Boy's Own Paper (1879–1967). By the close of the nineteenth century, this genre was firmly established and its formula had altered to reflect the expansionist rhetoric of British society, allowing offshoots based on young adulthood and imperial adventure, such as those contained in the Henty novels of Seán O'Faoláin's youth. For Irish nationalists of the revival period, such as Padraic Pearse and Douglas Hyde, the consumption of these distilled tales of imperial power by Irish youths was at best corrupting and at worst invidious and anti-Irish. Ireland has its own set of much neglected schoolboy novels. Aside from James Joyce's seminal work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), few have received any critical attention, due in many cases to small print runs. This article is an attempt to rescue the Irish schoolboy novel from its relative obscurity. Although the quality of some of the novels may well be debatable, they nevertheless provide us with a rare and valuable glimpse at the reality of school life for Irish boys in the nineteenth century. The Irish form of this popular genre experienced three main phases from its birth in 1895 to its decline (along with that of the English schoolboy novel) in the 1930s. The earliest of the schoolboy novels, written while Ireland [End Page 148] was united with Britain, all reveal a distinct British cultural influence, the infamous "West Briton" tendency.5 In contrast, those written in the first decade of the Irish Free State mark the emergence of Cúchulainn as an important icon of heroic boyhood that provided an apparently ultra-Irish alternative to Tom Brown and his public school politesse. Finally, toward the end of what is considered the heyday of the schoolboy novel, a more critical and radical form emerged in the 1930s, hugely influenced by Joyce's A Portrait and best understood in relation to the Bildungsroman tradition in Ireland. All schoolboy novels are essentially novels of youth, of childhood, and of personal growth—providing authors with something of an ideological clean slate on which to forge a new national identity. As the Irish novels were published in a period often referred to as the "birth" of modern Ireland, it is possible to see them as a forgotten record of...

Boundary Issues

Boundary Issues Richard Flynn The boundaries between "children's literature" and "adult literature" have shifted historically and have alternated between the rigid and the permeable depending on the political and cultural climate. Some adults feel so strongly the need to police this literary border that they attempt to erect a fence across its entire length. Just this past semester, one of my graduate students, who is an elementary school teacher, reported her colleagues' disapproval that I was teaching The Golden Compass in my class. According to her, they said, "Tell your professor he shouldn't be teaching that book. The man who wrote that isn't a Christian." This prompted another student in the class to inform me that during the furor surrounding the film adaptation's release, the book had been quietly removed from her school's library, even though no parent had challenged it. Pullman's trilogy is, of course, critical of this kind of misguided use of power and authority. Amelia Rutledge argues convincingly that the "elegance and richness" of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is reflected in the nuanced ways in which the texts "maintain a tension between . . . [a] young person's drive toward agency and their need for guidance." While the positive forms of nurture provided by surrogates contrasts with "the inadequacies of biological parents" and institutions, ultimately Pullman insists that children cannot go it entirely alone—they are in need of mature guidance. But unlike the censorious authorities my students confronted, the nurturing surrogates in Lyra and Will's world "serve to guide, not repress" their development of agency. It almost goes without saying that Eric Tribunella's discussion of Chris Kent's pornographic adult retellings of Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days and Ballantyne's The Coral Island tests the boundaries between children's literature and adult literature. Kent's books are explicitly erotic parodies of their Victorian precursors, but it seems that their appeal is often a nostalgic one. For adult readers the retellings evoke an idealized or even a utopian re-imagining of a youth during which same-sex desire and sexual activity among boys are celebrated rather than condemned. In the context of hysteria about pedophilia invoked [End Page 117] during a ten-year battle in the United Kingdom to lower the age of consent for homosexual sex to sixteen, the same as the age of consent for heterosexual sex, Kent's novels reinvent "a preferred past, pleasure in childhood agency, a hybridity of childhood and adulthood," and in this they resemble much children's literature. Amy Pattee argues that David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy is a queer utopian novel by virtue of its appropriation of the "'wish-fulfillment' narratives" of the romance novel genre, the themes of GLBTQ-themed young adult literature, and gay pornography to "describe and normalize . . . same-sex relationships." Paradoxically, the novel makes visible the ideology of compulsory heterosexuality in large part because that ideology is absent from the novel's utopian world. Examining two mid-twentieth-century novels about American girls traveling to Europe, Claudia Mills demonstrates the tension between two versions of American condescension to foreigners. The naïvely superior American girl in Betsy and the Great World (1952), who thinks of herself as an ambassador from a democratic and classless culture, assumes American perfection so thoroughly "that it never needs to be openly stated." In contrast to Betsy Ray, Jill Brown in My Heart's in the Highland (1958) is overtly an Ugly American, who learns to temper her snobbishness and cultural insensitivity. Both novels reflect the anxieties of a nation fresh from victory in World War II as it negotiates the world stage in the early years of the Cold War. When Tison Pugh and David Wallace sent us the postscript to their article from the Fall 2006 issue of the Quarterly—"Heteronormative Heroism and Queering the School Story in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series"—in light of Rowling's post-series outing of Dumbledore, we decided to invite responses from Potter scholars Karin Westman and Catherine Tosenberger. The forum, edited by Associate Editor Kenneth Kidd, ultimately raises questions similar to those raised by the articles...

Sport, gender and society in a transatlantic Victorian perspective*

Following the America Civil War (1861–1865) organized sport became a major vehicle for defining and acting out gender roles. This was especially so with regard to the middle class – a considerably broader category than was the case in Great Britain, the nation from which Americans derived many of their sporting practices. Much of what Americans read also was either of English origin or patterned after that country's journals and books. Tom Brown's Schooldays sold more copies than any book except Little Dorrit in 1858, and as late as 1893 David Copperfield, Jane Eyre and Charles Kingsley's Hypatia were among the 25 novels most frequently circulated by major American libraries. Many British authors who had visited the United States were of the opinion that the reason that American men paid their women ‘exaggerated chivalry’ was to compensate for the fact that ‘the female was not granted equality’ in a nation that boasted of being egalitarian. This lack of equality deeply troubled leaders of the American ‘woman's rights movement’, no one more than the resolute Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who in 1850 declared ‘the girl should have all the freedom of the boy, in romping, swimming, climbing and playing ball’. Following an 1859 cricket match with a visiting English team Harper's Weekly asserted that ‘the importance of athletic exercises is only beginning to be understood’. By the 1890s, however, male athletes were well on their way to making America the world's leading sporting nation. Their penchant for professional coaches evoked criticisms from English sportsmen as well as American college presidents. American females also benefited from the growing interest in athletic sports, although with few exceptions their participation was meagre compared to that available to males. Tennis, golf, and bicycling, sports that were deemed most appropriate for ‘the ladies’, were imported from England, as was field hockey, a vigorous game that was played mostly at private women's colleges and in settings that drew upon these contexts. Netball (derived from basketball) was one of the few contributions that the United States made to women's sports in Britain. Whereas athletic sports for males became a very public affair, with the exception of tennis, golf, and in certain instances swimming and ice skating, athletic sports for middle-class American females remained substantially, but not exclusively, a cloistered affair until the 1970s.

Tom Brown goes global: The ‘Brown’ ethic in colonial and post-colonial India

Tom Brown's Schooldays unknowingly serves to explicate how and why the ‘games ethic’, bred consciously in the public schools of Victorian Britain, travelled continents to be appropriated and subverted for purposes of confrontation against the colonial state. The appropriation of Tom Brown and his cult of the ‘games ethic’ helps explain to a large extent the birth narrative of masculine sports in colonial India. Nagendra Prasad Sarbadhikary is acknowledged as the ‘father of Indian soccer’ for his pioneering role in introducing soccer as a teenager. Adopting/appropriating a ‘Brown ethic’, this Indian Tom Brown attempted to free sport of all caste prejudices in the 1880s. Further examples of the reconfiguration of the ‘games ethic’ and the principles of muscular Christianity are examined to consider how sport emerged as the mirror wherein an Indian identity started to reassess itself as part of a nationalist enterprise during the colonial period.

Muscular Christianity and value-centred sport: The Legacy of Tom Brown in Canada

Tom Brown's Schooldays was always well known in Canada, almost from the first edition. The ideas about sport as education for citizenship and social responsibility it dramatized, often referred to as ‘muscular Christianity’, were widely diffused within Canadian society. This paper argues that muscular Christian values influenced a broad spectrum of Canadian movements for progressive social change, and contributed to the development of many important institutions of youth recreation and socialization, including amateur sport. Whereas muscular Christianity is often associated with right-wing political ideas and fundamentalist Christian churches today, in Canada it was linked through the social gospel to the left. The influence of muscular Christianity is still exerted in Canadian amateur sport, particularly through the turn to ‘values-centred sport’ that followed Ben Johnson's disqualification for steroids from the Seoul Olympics.

Crosswriting the School Story

Crosswriting the School Story Kenneth Kidd (bio) Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys, by Beverly Lyon Clark. New York: Garland, 1996. Forget Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1857). Better yet, remember it differently, as the hypercanonical school story that, although still underappreciated, "warped not just the earlier but also the later history of the genre" (12). That larger history is Clark's subject, and she pursues an interesting line of inquiry that sets her project quite apart from earlier studies such as Isabel Quigly's The Heirs of Tom Brown and P. W. Musgrave's From Brown to Bunter. Noting the traditional inattention to both girls' stories and gender itself, Clark explores less canonical "crossgendered" school stories, written for boys by women and for girls by men. Authors of such stories, she argues, are doubly removed by age and gender from the conventions of the genre and are more likely to stray from them. Although crossgendering takes center stage, Clark also shows how school stories are written along and across generational, national, religious, class, and racial lines. Divided into three major sections, Clark's investigation of authorial identification and remove is quite engaging, as much a contribution to gender studies and literary historiography as a reassessment of this misunderstood genre. The introduction situates Hughes's Tom Brown as both a "watershed" (11) and an unfortunate primal scene. What Huck Finn is to the American boy book, Tom Brown is to the British boys' school story, and although Clark doesn't quite make this claim, I suspect that critical accounts of the school story also tend to imitate Tom Brown itself, just as early scholarship on Huck Finn echoes as much as analyzes Twain's literary strategies. In any case, the five chapters in part 1 defamiliarize the Hughes legacy by examining crossgendered school stories predating Tom Brown penned by British and American writers alike, among them Richard Johnson, Charles Lamb, Jacob Abbott, Dorothy Kilner, Maria Edgeworth, Emily J. May, and Mary Martha Sherwood. [End Page 215] At the same time, Clark shows that overcanonization can be a form of scholarly neglect. Clark alternates chapters that survey a posse of writers with chapters devoted to a few representative figures. She draws from an impressive range of texts, and her local readings are as fascinating as her larger revisionist claims. I found chapter 3 particularly instructive, a reading of Dorothy Kilner's First Going to School; or, The Story of Tom Brown, and His Sisters (1804); this was the first tale of Tom Brown, at once playful and didactic. Only "precariously a school story," Kilner's novel is less preoccupied with gender-bending than with animal-human "interface" (53). Young Tom is likened to a "stuck pig," a "little lamb," and a horse. Tom's father composes animal fables starring the family's calf, sow, and rabbits, and at the book's end, cousin Peter describes a prank featuring a sow and her pigs cross-dressed as a headmaster and his boys. Clark links this "cross-species crossdressing" (55) with the aims and anxieties of education and other civilizing projects. In the fourth chapter Clark elaborates on one of her central emphases, the trope of "talebearing"—telling and not telling tales—in both crossgendered fiction and crossgendered commentary like her own. Typically, talebearing has taken a critical back seat to those other master tropes of schoolboy fiction, insurrection and fagging. She discovers that some women writers are less likely to condemn tattling than their male counterparts, "calling into question the cosmetic unities of subsequent male authors" and even hinting "at the deviousness of all authors who tell tales about telling tales" (84). As she remarks in the introduction, school stories foreground both peer codes of loyalty and the teacher-student struggle, offering a useful glimpse into "the intersections of literature and pedagogy and the politics of schooling" (10). The five chapters in part 2 attend to tales that appeared during the "heyday of the canonical story" but are hardly Tom Brown clones. In this cluster Clark outlines how women writers in particular revised the school story by crossing gender with race and ethnicity (chapters 6 and...

Kipling's Stalky and Co. : Resituating the Empire and the "Empire Boy"

KIPLING'S STALKY AND CO.: RESITUATING THE EMPIRE AND THE "EMPIRE BOY" DON RANDALL Queen's University To contextualize this writing, I should say mat my recent scholarship focuses on a figure I call "die empire boy," which becomes prominent in British fictions in the latter half of die nineteenth century. My basic thesis is that this figure recasts as "adolescence" die doubts, anxieties, incertitudes, and ambivalencies that begin, in this period, to trouble British imperial subjectivity and ideology. Critique of "die empire boy" enables, most notably, a revaluation of "die process of identification in die negotiations ofcultural politics" (Bhabha 233). Imperial subjectivity, die subjectivity constituted by the British imperial project and die crosscultural confrontations that project necessarily entails, does not, in Kipling's fictions of the "boy," manifest its deep and dependable "embeddedness" in die culture of die British "homeland." It is, on die contrary, a highly contingent formation upon the limen that emerges between the cultures of die imperial "home" and die colonial "outland." Kipling's "boy" — his Mowgli, Stalky, or Kim — situates himself on die in-betweens of cultures in confrontation; the figure occupies a space of undecidability, which Kipling writes, very tellingly, as "adolescence." This "empire boy" is a "hybrid sign" (Bhabha 207), forged in die press of cultures in agonistic confrontation, an imperial figure allowing for (partial) acknowledgment and controlled, delimited representation of "transculturation" in die "contact zone" of die empire (Pratt 6).1 Yet, when viewed in die light of Anne McClintock's recent Imperial Leather, die figure also reveals die lineaments of die fetish; it portrays desire marked by die crisis and contradiction diat must find their place in imperial imaginings. Hybrid and fetishized, a site of divided cultural investments and identifications, Kipling's "boy" offers very ambivalent service to die discourse of late nineteendi-century British imperialism. To orient, more specifically, die work of diis paper, I'll begin with a critical proposition: in "The Contents and Discontents of Kipling's Victorian Review 24.2 (Winter 1998) 164Victorian Review Imperialism," Benita Parry asserts that "Kipling's writings moved empire from the margins of English fiction to its center without interrogating the official metropolitan culture" (51). I intend to challenge Parry's assertion using the school stories of Stalky and Co., which began to appear in die late 189Os and were first published in book form in 1899, and which recount the antics of a trio of schoolboys, Stalky, MTurk, and Beetle, at die United Services College in Devonshire, England — a real historical locale fictionally rendered. G11 argue, first that Kipling's empire, as presented in Stalky &. Co., is not divided between a stable, metropolitan center and a changeful periphery, but is rather one great, intimately interconnected assembly, a relatively seamless whole. Kipling's envisioning of empire, I will subsequently argue, reflects — indeed heralds — a new "emergent global logic" (Wegner 132) of modern European imperialism, a breaking down of center/periphery ideology in favor of a more continuously applied, globalized view. Finally, I will suggest that Kipling's perspective upon imperial globalization troubles conventional imperial inscriptions of borders and barriers between races and cultures — the very borders and barriers that serve as cornerstones of racist and Eurocentric imperial ideology. As Isabel Quigly affirms, Stalky and Co. "is the only school story . . . in which life at school is shown as directly parallel with life in the Empire; ... no book went as far as Stalky &. Co. in making exact comparisons" (116). Here, I think, is a principal innovation that sets Stalky & Co. apart from its predecessors, such as Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857). The organizing socio-cultural referent of Hughes's novel is "the whole empire on which the sun never sets," and his beloved Browns are the indispensable protectors of "that empire's stability" (5).2 Yet Hughes's seminal school story serves to establish the public school as an insular, class-specific "little world," one that must be understood, first and foremost, on its own terms. On one hand, it is the structural specificity of the Rugby public-school world diat enables it to serve the empire: school experience inscribes attitudes, values, codes of conduct that ostensibly, can be transported to the distant...

Shades of the Prison House: Discipline and Surveillance in Tom Brown's Schooldays

ARTICLES SHADES OF THE PRISON HOUSE: DISCIPLINE AND SURVEILLANCE IN TOM BROWN'S SCHOOLDAYS ROBERT DINGLEY The University ofNew England The delight widi which ... he regarded even the unsightliness of the great Birrningharn Railway, when it was brought to Rugby, was very characteristic of him. — "I rejoice to see it", he said, as he stood on one of the arches, and watched the train pass on through the distant hedgerows, — "I rejoice to see it, and think that feudality is gone for ever". (Stanley, Life ofArnold, 507n.) When Tom Brown first leaves his Berkshire home to begin his schooldays at Rugby, he travels up by coach, and Hughes lavishes several pages of nostalgic evocation on the details of his journey — on "the music of the rattling harness", on "the cheery toot of the guard's horn", even on the bitterly cold weather, which is relished as a test of "silent endurance, so dear to every Englishman" (76; Part One, Ch. 4). Some eight years later, his schooldays ended, Tom leaves Rugby for the last time: by midday, we are curtly informed, he "was in the train, and away for London" (367; Part Two, Ch. 8). Hughes makes no direct comment on the crucial shift that has taken place in transport and communication during the relatively brief course of Tom's school career, but the way in which that career is framed by two such starkly contrasted journeys is one among many textual hints that the book's preoccupation with historical change extends far beyond the transformation of a single school by a uniquely gifted headmaster. Thomas Arnold's educational reforms of the 1830s are Victorian Review 22.1 (Summer 1996) Victorian Review construed by Hughes both as symptomatic of, and as partly responsible for, a more general adaptation in the structure of English life. In common with other mid-nineteenth century novelists — the most obvious examples are Thackeray in Vanity Fair and George Eliot in Middlemarch — he seeks to locate in the comparatively recent past the origins of the distinctive present inhabited by himself and his readers. All three writers, indeed, select a pivotal, partly symbolic and partly instrumental, event — the Battle of Waterloo, the coming of railways and reform to a country town, the arrival of Arnold at an ancient foundation — in which it is possible to locate the tentative establishment of a new order, or in which, at least, a momentum for change becomes demonstrably irreversible. And, in the case of Tom Brown's Schooldays, the nature of that change seems clearly defined. When Tom first enters Rugby, Arnold has been there only a short time and has already made himself deeply unpopular by insisting on the abolition of cherished and time-honored traditions. The school he has set out to reform appears (both to its inmates and to Hughes's readers) to be regulated largely through displays of violence, and the nature and extent of that violence to be dependent on the personal qualities of the senior pupils rather than on the authority of the more or less invisible teaching staff. The regular replacement of each sixth form by its successor means that no stability or continuity can be assured from year to year, and there is always, consequently, a potential for anarchy — for what Hughes calls "nogovernment " (167; Part One, Ch. 8) — in which corruption and cruelty go unchecked. The systematic torture of small boys by larger ones — tossing in blankets, scorching before the fires in Hall — is presented in Hughes's narrative as aberrant and is carefully ascribed to the influence of individual sadists like Flashman, but it is also visibly part of a nexus of customary practice which has developed over centuries and it is not readily isolable (either in narrative or in ethical terms) from a culture where beatings, fist-fights, and football matches during which little boys can be knocked unconscious by big ones, receive not only institutional sanction but fulsome endorsement At one revealing point, indeed, it is even suggested that bullying itself forms part of the educational curriculum: in his valedictory address to School House, the exemplary old Brooke concedes that "there's a deal of bullying going on" but...

At the Heart of "Tom Brown's Schooldays": Thomas Arnold and Christian Friendship

At the Heart of "Tom Brown's Schooldays": Thomas Arnold and Christian Friendship

Muscular Anxiety: Degradation and Appropriation in Tom Brown's Schooldays

Muscular Anxiety: Degradation and Appropriation in Tom Brown's Schooldays

アスレティシズムの文学像に関する一考察 : 『トム・ブラウンの学校生活』(1857)をめぐって

アスレティシズムの文学像に関する一考察 : 『トム・ブラウンの学校生活』(1857)をめぐって

Notes toward a Marxist Critical Practice

Notes toward a Marxist Critical Practice Jerry Phillips (bio) and Ian Wojcik-Andrews (bio) The critical essays written for volume 18 of Children's Literature employ various psychoanalytic master narratives derived from Freud, Jung, Klein, Chodorow, and Kristeva that govern both current psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism of children's literature. Some of these theorists challenge and revise Freud's findings: feminist critics, for example, use psychoanalytic models to emphasize pre-oedipal relationships rather than oedipal confrontations as the prime mover of narrative structures. Even so, volume 18 remains curiously unconcerned with the problematic nature of the relationship between the psychoanalytic enterprise and the interpretation of children's literature. We suggest that this relationship can really be addressed only by opening a dialogue within the text between the historical condition of its production and the moment of its reception. To the extent that children's literature itself investigates the efficacy of adult values, psychoanalysis in its commitment to questioning moral conventions finds within children's literature a natural discursive ally. Psychoanalysis can tell us something about the way language embodies such forces as displacement and condensation to direct generic conventions, but it barely informs us about the historical forces that determine these conventions. Psychoanalysis is part of, but not the whole, truth. As a theory of utterance, psychoanalysis turns the literary text into a neat version of itself: the story of desire is always already in place. Whether through the notion of the "inner quest" or the notion of the alluring mother's body, psychoanalysis elides the particular context of the literary work—its inscription of its historical moment—in favor of a "universal" narrative. Yet it does not follow that the oedipal model of development or the pre-oedipal pattern of desire is a universal cultural phenomenon. In one sense, psychoanalytic and Marxist forms of criticism have similar trajectories: archaeological metaphors of uncovering and unraveling dominate [End Page 127] both their practices. Psychoanalysis works to reclaim the reality of the unconscious as it affects the textual representation of language and desire. Marxism works to reclaim the reality of the text's "political unconscious" (Jameson 1981)—that is, the gaps, fissures, and ruptures that provoke and articulate the class conflict and economic struggle that the dominant ideology of the text, its hegemonic levels of meaning, would otherwise silence. Both psychoanalysis and Marxism work toward a theory of genre. "Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact" (Jameson 106). Even so, the relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism remains problematic. Psychoanalysis is committed to universal truths of nature, whereas Marxism locates the concept of nature within the social and the political, where all meaning is ultimately produced, including that of psychoanalysis. A radical critical practice of children's literature should return psychoanalytic models to their familial and social ground: the historical and material conditions that produce children and children's literature. Children's literature arises as a discursive practice from a distinct cultural context. For instance, Jack Zipes writes of the fairy tale: "Almost all critics who have studied the emergence of the literary fairy tale in Europe agree that educated writers purposely appropriated the oral folk tale and converted it into a type of literary discourse about mores, values, and manners so that children would become civilized according to the social code of that time" (Zipes 3). Books like Robinson Crusoe , Tom Brown's Schooldays , Swallows and Amazons became classics only after being ratified by the middle classes and their literary gatekeepers—publishers, librarians, and critics. The classic is not just born; it is that locus of invested value which the text for whatever reason becomes. Concerned as it is with edification and entertainment, children's literature is a logical site for the production and circulation of social ideals. Hence its frequently Utopian character. We must recall that a child—the subject of the text and its implied reader—is also determined by the ideology of the literary marketplace. A child reader does not pre-exist; he or she arrives with and is created by the text. The position of the implied...