Empire Boys: Defining Masculinity at the Fin de Siècle
Boyhood and the Mass Market Media
According to the 1861 census, over forty-five percent of the population of England and Wales was under the age of twenty-five years (Springhall 230), a considerable market for a specialized brand of literature. The differentiation of the boy as a specific demographic within the school system also alienated him from his female peers (for whom a separate style of literature developed). The impact of consumer targeting was significant considering the age group of the market. Kimberly Reynolds stresses the impact of reading on children: “[the juvenile periodicals] provided the most widely available opportunity for experimenting with language…reading is part of the process of acquiring language.” More specifically, it was the language of imperialism that the Victorian boy acquired through his leisure reading.
Because of the young age and gender-polarization of its readers, Brett’s imperialist periodicals were necessarily responsible for developing standards of masculinity. The social classes, united by the publisher under the elite banner of imperialism, required the proper role models to lead their fictional adventures. These characters embodied a new masculinity that glorified action and violence and that was redesigned to be more meaningful than it was in the penny dreadfuls. Bristow describes these changes as follows: “Violence had to be taken away from the recently named hooligan and restyled for the respectable boy. It was an aesthetics of a new kind of militaristic masculinity, one hardly tempered by the cultured refinements of sweetness and light” (47). Young aristocratic gentlemen, ever ready for a fair fight, replaced the criminal-hero; they were a dialectical combination of the gritty and the respectable. These figures were key influences in the “tradition of didacticism” (Reynolds 52) inherent in juvenile fiction, having a measurable influence on character development and social awareness. Brett’s papers provided the locale in which “young readers [were] moulded into proper men who could take their place in the imperial project” (Boyd 49). - next