But in part because attendance at boarding schools was less usual for well-to-do girls than it was for their brothers, the girls’-school story for younger readers was less prominent in the late nineteenth century than the girls’-college novel for adolescents, a form that gained energy from the anxieties surrounding women’s higher education as a phenomenon that some observers considered likely to jeopardize marriageability and even fertility. As a genre, then, the girls’-school story is primarily a twentieth-century form, with works such as Angela Brazil’s first published book, A Terrible Tomboy (1905), serving as early examples. Both school and college novels from this period often assert that far from being rendered unfeminine by learning, girls can retain or improve their domestic virtues through education; series following the heroine through school, such as Pauline Lester’s Marjorie Dean novels (1917–1926), may present marriage as the saga’s final installment.
Typical boys’-school stories focus less on the schools’ homelike qualities (although these qualities are present) than on how pupils achieve citizenship, a point that critic Jenny Holt (2008) emphasizes. While American tales such as Owen Johnson’s Lawrenceville Stories (1909–1922) don’t always follow this pattern, the classic British school story shows its hero confronting bullies or false accusations of wrongdoing, thereby gaining the manly qualities that he will need in the wider world. Manliness in this genre is a process, and even in the sunniest tales, that a given boy will develop it is by no means certain. As a genre, boys’-school stories acknowledge that masculinity embraces many possible roles, some of them undesirable.
This tension between good and bad manhood helped make the nineteenth-century school story foundational for boys’ literature more generally; works as apparently distant from this form as Jack London’s dog story The Call of the Wild (1903), Robert A. Heinlein’s science fiction adventure Space Cadet (1948), and Sabaa Tahir’s young adult fantasy An Ember in the Ashes (2015), among many others, owe something to its conventions. As this list suggests, American writers may have been particularly ready to assign to other genres some of the developmental preoccupations characteristic of the school story in Britain. Here we might point especially to the American entrepreneurial novel for children, best exemplified by the work of Horatio Alger, Jr. In novels such as Ragged Dick (1867–1868), the street serves the same function as the academy in British boys’-school stories: both provide opportunities for young protagonists to demonstrate manliness, overcome hostile figures, and “graduate” to adult status. Similarly, Mark Decker (2017) argues that classic American “bad boy” fictions, notably Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy (1870) and Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer sequence (1876–1896), showcase the boys’ development of the traits needed for success in the managerial classes; although school plays a relatively minor part here, boys nonetheless face challenges that enable them to hone qualities prized by the national culture, just as Tom Brown does at Rugby. For boys positioned outside the mainstream by geographical location (Tom Sawyer), early acculturation (Kipling’s Kim), or social class (Ragged Dick), school and larger world are one.
Genres: Adventure, Victorian and Otherwise
Thus, although the word “school” is rarely mentioned in works such as Kipling’s Captains Courageous (1897), the pattern laid down in adventures of this sort is closely allied to that traced by the school novel: the boy protagonist finds himself in a new environment (in Kipling’s novel, the cod fisheries of the Outer Banks), where he must accept the guidance of more experienced hands and pit himself against challenges, emerging as a man. Soyoun Kim and I have argued that nineteenth-century juvenile sea stories and school stories are closely allied; tellingly, sea stories often begin at schools, while school stories may make multiple references to voyaging (Kim and Nelson 2018). Other forms of adventure, among them the robinsonnade or castaway tale, share features with domestic fiction, since the central question in adventures such as Frederick Marryat’s Masterman Ready (1841) is how family and national values may survive in an alien setting. In the nineteenth century, both sea stories and robinsonnades frequently advanced an imperialist ethos, which helps to explain these forms’ affinities with other developmental, morally didactic fiction: if home and school were the principal venues for planting the seeds of virtue and strong character, empire was where the shoots were to thrive.
Yet not all adventures focus on protagonists’ development or readers’ moral improvement. Often, the central issue is not how the hero reaches maturity but how a goal external to the self is gained, be it succeeding in a military campaign, surviving against difficult odds, finding treasure, exploring new terrain, or surmounting some other challenge. The immediate ancestor of many Victorian adventure stories is the travelogue designed to acquaint readers with a distant land. As Shih-Wen Chen has noted, novels such as William Dalton’s The Wolf Boy of China (1857), an unusual instance of a mid nineteenth-century British work with a mixed-race hero who “seems to have inherited the positive traits of both” his bloodlines, combine thrilling plots with a fact-heavy approach to setting: Chen writes that “Dalton guides readers through China as if it was a large museum exhibition” (2013, pp. 40, 34).
Once drama began to dominate over informational value, stories of imperial adventure often reached a dual (and implicitly masculine) audience of children and adults. When Treasure Island was initially serialized in the children’s magazine Young Folks, for instance, young readers were unenthusiastic; published as a novel targeting a wider age range, it sold tens of thousands of copies. Among its adult readers was H. Rider Haggard, who, on a bet with his brother, produced his own best seller, King Solomon’s Mines (1885), the first of a string of works by this author that were as likely to be read by men as by boys. American adventure stories often made their own address to prospective builders of empire; writing as “Oliver Optic” (among other pseudonyms), the prolific William Taylor Adams penned such series as All Over the World and Young America Abroad, in addition to series dealing with adventures in the army and navy and series involving travel by yacht, steamer, and train. Meanwhile, British penny dreadfuls and their American equivalent, dime novels, catered primarily to working-class boys seeking sensation rather than uplift. Edward Lytton Wheeler’s popular Deadwood Dick series (1877–1897) is representative; it features a handsome young outlaw “notorious […] for his coolness, courage and audacity” (p. 25), as the series opener, Deadwood Dick, the Prince of the Road, puts it.
While many adventure stories targeted adolescent and adult male readers, younger children and girls also had their adventure fiction. Some of this fiction employed fantastic protagonists: a sentient goat in the case of Frances Trego Montgomery’s Billy Whiskers series (1902–1920, subsequently continued by other authors), dolls in Florence Kate Upton’s Golliwogg series (1895–1909, told in verse), a cat in Bessie Rayner Parkes’s The History of Our Cat, Aspasia (1856), and so on. As Marilynn Olson (2000) and Monica Flegel (2016) have separately argued, nonhuman protagonists expanded the possibilities for transgressive content. Much as Deadwood Dick is irresistible to women and Haggard’s heroes traverse sexualized African landscapes, the Golliwogg and his doll friend Sarah Jane enjoy what Olson calls a “rather grown-up relation” (p. 84), and Flegel argues that cat and dog adventures “offered opportunities for authors to educate children about romantic love and sexual relations” (p. 121).
If one method of tailoring adventure to girls or younger children was to marry it to fantasy, another was to set it in the past. History was an approved part of schoolgirls’ curriculum; thus historical fiction could be presented as educational in ways that Treasure Island or Haggard’s works – to say nothing of the Deadwood Dick series – could not. While historical fiction for boys, such as the writings of G.A. Henty, often focuses on military campaigns or (as in Howard Pyle’s 1883 The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood) on masculine derring-do of a paramilitary sort, nineteenth-century historical fiction for girls is typically more interested in family and religion, extending the preoccupations of the Victorian domestic novel into the past. Yonge, for instance, a committed Tractarian, wrote many novels with medieval or Reformation settings, while the first two published works by her acolyte Christabel Coleridge, the miniature book Giftie the Changeling (1868) and the full-length Lady Betty (1869), take place respectively in the reign of Henry VIII and in the eighteenth century but reflect equally mid-Victorian