Almost immediately after Treasure Island appeared, Robert Louis Stevenson's friend W. E. Henley praised it in the Saturday Review. Calling it a work "touched with genius," "a masterpiece of narrative," and one "rich in excellent characterization," he concludes: "It is the work of one who knows all there is to be known about 'Robinson Crusoe'." Stevenson himself had long acknowledged his debt to Defoe, noting at one point that the parrot in his novel "once belonged to Robinson Crusoe" and offering this reflection at length:
It is the grown people who make the nursery stories; all the children do, is jealously to preserve the text. One out of a dozen reasons why Robinson Crusoe should be so popular with youth, is that it hits their level in this matter to a nicety; Crusoe was always at makeshifts and had, in so many words, to play at a great variety of professions; and then the book is all about tools, and there is nothing that delights a child so much.
Central to the popularity of Crusoe is play: the use of tools, the world of things behind the novel. A good part of that world emerged from the Lockean landscape of impressions and particulars. But that world takes on new textures in an age of industry. The mechanics of guns and charts, of locomotive engines and explosives, of cigarettes and canned goods, all fed into a later fascination with the Crusoe-hero's mastery of the mass of material things before him. Nineteenth-century characters from the works of Captain Marryat to those of H. Rider Haggard all had this streak of ingenuity. And for the twentieth century, this fascination with dexterity continued to embrace the resourceful soldiers of wartime and the almost magical abilities of the American television character MacGyver.
Stevenson set Treasure Island in the eighteenth century, in part to evoke a swashbuckling, pre-industrial time of adventure, but in part, too, to relocate what was for his own time the growing focus of adventure. Throughout the Victorian age, the boy's imaginative geography was moving from the island to the continent. Empire had displaced exploration as the motive of the ocean voyage. Encounters with non-Europeans took on new detail in Africa, India, or Asia. Adventure heroes appeared less and less to animate a Crusoe-like experience of independence and more and more to exemplify public and military service. The individual engagement of a Crusoe and a Friday gave way to the commanders' control of tribes. The history of boys' books lives along the axes of the island and the continent, and their different locales inform, as well, the presentations of the school, the body, and the family.
What does it mean to be a boy? Aesop's fable of the runaway horse reminds us that boyhood needs to be reined in, and the traditions of classical, medieval, and early modern instruction iterate advice to sons: behave well, keep clean, speak clearly, mind your studies. By the eighteenth century, these patterns of advice had taken on a new flavor. For not only did boys have to act as social, moral beings: they needed a style.
The famous letters of Lord Chesterfield to his illegitimate son-written in the 1730s and 1740s and published, posthumously, as an advice book by his widow-illustrate this shift in focus. Awkwardness, bashfulness, ineptitude: such are the social vices of the child, and Chesterfield advises a behavior keyed to ease with both the word and the body. After a catalogue of all the bad forms of behavior, he summarizes: "From this account of what you should not do, you may easily judge what you should do: and a due attention to the manners of people of fashion, and who have seen the world, will make it habitual and familiar to you." Manners make the man (to evoke an old axiom), though here the manners extend to expression. "There is, likewise, an awkwardness of expression and words most carefully to be avoided; such as false English, bad pronunciation, old sayings, and common proverbs; which are so many proofs of having kept bad and low company." Chesterfield advises verbal ease, a mark of breeding and accomplishment. His claims grow not just out of fatherly concern. They reflect what was happening in the history of the English language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the first time in Britain, speech became equated with social status (not just regional origin). Education in the public schools and universities was education in verbal performance. Public style became verbal style. Reading Chesterfield's advice, we can see something of this social history of English-a new concern with accent, a proof of being well-read, an attention to the niceties of grammar. Propriety was coming into being as a social concept, the word having originally meant verb agreement or grammatical concord. When Samuel Johnson, in his great Dictionary of 1755, wrote how the low and vulgar "forget propriety" in language, what he actually meant was that they speak ungrammatically. By the end of the eighteenth century, propriety had come to connote social as well as linguistic correctness. Laurence Sterne writes, in A Sentimental Journey (1762), of what he calls propriété, a kind of Gallic flair for the appropriate. By 1782, Fanny Burney could remark on "such propriety of mind as can only result from the union of good sense and virtue."
Lord Chesterfield's advice fits into an emerging world of social habit as linguistic style-a union of good sense and virtue, spoken well. To be a boy in this age is, increasingly, to be well-spoken. If we turn to the emerging genre of the school story, we can see how this facility with words becomes the key to social mastery. Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays is perhaps the best known of these kinds of stories. Set at Rugby school during the days of Dr. Thomas Arnold in the 1830s, the novel (first published in 1857 and continuously in print thereafter) tells the story of a young boy growing up in rural southwestern England who, by dint of chance, hard work, and connections, eventually finds himself at Rugby. From his first day at the school, lessons in verbal style are everywhere.
Tom by this time began to be conscious of his new social position and dignities, and to luxuriate in the realized ambition of being a public-school boy at last, with a vested right of spoiling two seven-and-sixers in half a year. "You see," said his friend, as they strolled up towards the school-gates, in explanation of his conduct, "a great deal depends on how a fellow cuts up at first. If he's got nothing odd about him, and answers straightforward, and holds his head up, he gets on. Now you'll do very well as to rig, all but that cap. You see I'm doing the handsome thing by you, because my father knows yours; besides, I want to please the old lady...."
There's nothing for candour like a lower-school boy, and East was a genuine specimen-frank, hearty, and good-natured, well satisfied with himself and his position, and chock full of life and spirits. (p. 1836)
The key to institutional success is how one "cuts up": behaves, cuts a figure, acts and speaks (the idiom seems to have emerged from school and sporting slang in the mid-nineteenth century). Answer straightforward: how you speak is how you are. The ideals of the public-school boy are ideals that match social and verbal life.
But this exchange, like so many in the school-story tradition, is itself a lesson in a verbal idiom. Part of the initiation for the new student lies in learning coded language. Schools all have their slang, and what books such as Tom Brown's Schooldays do is educate the reader as they educate their hero. Reading such books becomes a process of socialization. Just as young Tom enters a new and unexpected world, so, too, the reader enters it. We are all Tom Brown, learning the ropes at Rugby. The young boy's fantasy of public-school life lives in mastery of the argot of playing field and common room.
Such mastery takes us back to the world of Crusoe-or at least the Stevensonian imagination of Crusoe. Nothing delights a child so much as tools. But nothing delights a boy so much as new words for those tools-or, for that matter, words themselves as tools. If Crusoe plays at a variety of professions, then the schoolboy plays, too, at a range of roles: the scholar, the athlete, the lover. Tom Brown is a kind of Crusoe of the school, and he finds there the tools of getting by.
Over the door were a row of hat-pegs, and on each side bookcases with cupboards at the bottom; shelves and cupboards being filled indiscriminately with school-books, a cup or two, a mousetrap, and candlesticks, leather straps, a fustian bag, and some curious-looking articles, which puzzled Tom not a little, until his friend explained that they were climbing irons, and showed their use. A cricket bat and small fishing-rod stood up in one corner. (pp. 1837-38)
School stands here like some ship of the imagination, filled, as Crusoe's was, with the necessities of life. The list of things here compares with Defoe's lists of things-catalogues of particulars, objects whose functions in the world need to be understood. These are the items that enable Tom and his companions to play at a variety of professions: the cricketer, the fisherman, the mountain climber.
If school is a ship, it is also an island. East gives Tom the lay of the land: "And all this part where we are is the little side ground, right up to the trees, and on the other side of the trees is the big side ground, where the great matches are played. And there's the island in the furthest corner; you'll know that well enough next half, when there's island fagging. I say, it's horrid cold, let's have a run across" (p. 1839). Old Rugby really had an island, but the landscape is more metaphorical than mapped out. The bad weather leads not to retreat but to running; all is sport here, all performance, all panache. It is as if the public school is now an island imperium, and East its tour guide. "East was evidently putting his best foot foremost, and Tom, who was mighty proud of his running, and not a little anxious to show his friend that although a new boy he was no milksop, laid himself down to work in his very best style. Right across the close they went, each doing all he knew, and there wasn't a yard between them when they pulled up at the island moat" (pp. 1839-40). All friendships ultimately take us back to Crusoe and his Friday: the one old, the other young; the one a teacher, the other the pupil. And in a way, this episode returns us to that island world, where putting your best foot forward leaves a print on history.
If school life is progress across islands, it is, too, control of a continent. Nowhere do verbal skill and bodily performance, tools and techniques, come together better than in sports. Rugby football was that school's enduring legacy. But, as the novel makes clear, what is more important than the game is narrating the game. More vivid than experience is the verbal recounting of experience, and this is the lesson of the boy's world. Nowhere is this clearer than in sports reporting. And so, in the midst of Tom Brown's story, we move from the past to the present tense of life.
"Hold the punt-about!" "To the goals!" are the cries, and all stray balls are impounded by the authorities....
And now that the two sides have fairly sundered, and each occupies its own ground, and we get a good look at them, what absurdity is this? ...
But now look, there is a slight move forward of the School-house wings....
But see! It has broken; the ball is driven out on the School-house side....
Then a moment's pause, while both sides look up at the spinning ball. There it flies, straight between the two posts, some five feet above the cross-bar, an unquestioned goal; and a shout of real genuine joy rings out from the School-house players-up, and a faint echo of it comes over the close from the goal-keepers under the Doctor's wall. A goal in the first hour-such a thing hasn't been done in the School-house match these five years. (pp. 1842-45)
I have extracted these excitements from a span of five pages of the novel, attending to those moments when the book itself becomes the sports announcer. Direct quotations jockey for attention with directed claims: look, see. These are imperatives to the reader, ways of getting us to feel the game in progress. Boys' lives live in the present tense. Their drama lies in every escapade told as a competition or a contest. Whether it be in the hushed tones of suspense (now he approaches the ball ... carefully takes aim) or in the exaltation of success (he shoots, he scores!), the boy's life tells itself as it is being lived.
This rhetoric of present-tense adventure draws on sports reporting, school tales, and team competition. But it also draws on new technologies. If anything made possible a life lived in the present tense, it was the telegraph. By the late 1840s, news could be transmitted almost instantaneously between distant points. Communication took on a magical quality. By the 1870s, Thomas Edison-whose life almost immediately became the subject of boys' books-was "the Wizard of Menlo Park." Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (published in 1889) reports how Hank Morgan, transported back to King Arthur's times, could awe the populace with his electrical inventions (telegraph and telephone) and make old Merlin look the fool. Even earlier in the century, the telegraph was almost beyond comprehension. Samuel F. B. Morse, the telegraph's inventor, sent the first message in 1844: "What hath God wrought?" A decade later, Hans Christian Andersen could reflect in his autobiography, The Fairy Tale of My Life, on how the telegraph made possible a new link between Europe and America. Telegraph boys were everywhere-for they were boys, taking on the magic of communication, translating the Morse code, messaging great news across the seas and continents (Thomas Edison got his start as a telegraph boy on the railroad in the 1840s). Even at the end of the nineteenth century, when the telephone had displaced the telegraph as the electrical marvel of the age, popular commentary described it in terms of boys' adventure books. The Electrical Review of 1889 wrote, of a long-distance call from New York to Boston, "It beat all to smash all the old incantations of Merlin and the magic of Munchhousen [sic], Jules Verne, or Haggard."
Electrical communication compressed the time between event and understanding, and in the mid-nineteenth century, telegraph boys throughout the world were soon clicking tales of war. Battle took on a new immediacy with the telegraph. Soon, it was possible to recount warfare in the present tense-as if it were a game of rugby-and war reporting, much like sports reporting, shaped the journalistic idiom of the age. The Crimean War of 1853-56 was the first sustained conflict in which the telegraph and the railroad made possible an immediacy of reportage. Crimea displayed massive new guns, technological advances in firepower, and social innovations (cigarettes, the legend goes, were invented when a soldier got his pipe shot out from under him and started wrapping his tobacco in the empty cartridge paper used for guns). But that war also maintained, in the face of innovation, old ideals of honor. Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" is but the most famous lesson of an ideal, if outmoded, chivalry, and in literary treatments such as this one, boys' imaginations moved from the sailor and his island to the soldier and his field. There is nothing that delights a child so much as tools, and Crimea made them new.
In enabling the development of new technologies and styles of warfare, Crimea shaped an idiom for boyhood fantasy and literary style. The war contributed to an imperial imagination for the boyish reader, an imagination sustained by successive encounters: the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the ensuing placement of the subcontinent under direct control of the British crown; the Anglo-Afghan Wars, which continued off and on from the late 1830s until 1919; the search for the headwaters of the Nile by Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke in the 1860s and 1870s; the discovery of David Livingstone by Henry Stanley in 1871; the Zulu War of 1879; the massacre of General Gordon at Khartoum in 1885 and the later retaking of the Sudan by Kitchener at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898; and the Second Boer War of 1899-1902. Central Asia, India, Africa: these were the spaces of colonial emprise and the imaginative spaces for the reader.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Children's Literature by Seth Lerer Copyright © 2008 by University of Chicago Press. Excerpted by permission.
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