Troy Boone - Youth of Darkest England - Working-Class Children at The Heart of Victorian Empire (Children's Literature and Culture) (2004)

Youth of
Darkest
England
Youth of
Darkest
England
Working-Class Children at the
Heart of Victorian Empire
TROY BOONE
Routledge
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Chapter 4 first appeared in a different form as “Remaking ‘Lawless Lads and Licentious
Girls’: The Salvation Army and the Regeneration of Empire” in John C. Hawley,
Historicizing Christian Encounters with the Other, 1998, Macmillan Press Ltd. Reprinted
by permission of the publisher.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter in-
vented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Boone, Troy, 1963–
Youth of darkest England : working-class children at the heart of Victorian empire /
by Troy Boone.
p. cm. — (Children's literature and culture ; 34)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 209 ) and index.
ISBN 0-415-97262-0 (hb : alk. paper)
1. Children's literature, English—History and criticism. 2. Children—Books and
reading—English-speaking countries—History—19th century. 3. American
literature—19th century—History and criticism. 4. English literature—19th century—
History and criticism. 5. Children's literature, American—History and criticism.
6. Working class in literature. 7. Imperialism in literature. I. Title. II. Series.
PR990.B66 2005
820.9'3523'09034—dc22 2004019682
ISBN 0-203-99721-2 Master e-book ISBN

For my parents
Contents
Series Editor’s Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xi
List of Illustrations xv
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Henry Mayhew’s Children of the Streets 19
Chapter 2 Class, Violence, and Mid-Victorian Penny Fiction:

“Murder Made Familiar”? 43
Chapter 3 Improving Penny Fiction:

The “Ticklish Work” of Treasure Island 65
Chapter 4 Remaking Lawless Lads and Licentious Girls:

The Salvation Army and the Regeneration of Empire 85
Chapter 5 The Boy Scouts and the Working Classes 107
Chapter 6 Patriot Games:

Football and the First World War 133
Notes 163
Bibliography 209
Index 225
vii
Series Editor’s Foreword
Dedicated to furthering original research in children’s literature and culture,

the Children’s Literature and Culture series includes monographs on individual
authors and illustrators, historical examinations of different periods, literary
analyses of genres, and comparative studies on literature and the mass media.
The series is international in scope and is intended to encourage innovative
research in children’s literature with a focus on interdisciplinary methodology.
Children’s literature and culture are understood in the broadest sense of
the term children to encompass the period of childhood up through adoles-
cence. Owing to the fact that the notion of childhood has changed so much
since the origination of children’s literature, this Routledge series is particu-
larly concerned with transformations in children’s culture and how they have
affected the representation and socialization of children. While the emphasis
of the series is on children’s literature, all types of studies that deal with
children’s radio, film, television, and art are included in an endeavor to grasp
the aesthetics and values of children’s culture. Not only have there been
momentous changes in children’s culture in the last fifty years, but there
have been radical shifts in the scholarship that deals with these changes. In
this regard, the goal of the Children’s Literature and Culture series is to en-
hance research in this field and, at the same time, point to new directions that
bring together the best scholarly work throughout the world.
JACK ZIPES
ix
Acknowledgments
I’ve spent a number of years occupied with “darkest England,” and I’m grateful
to the bright people who have made those years enlightening and more light-
hearted ones than my topic might suggest.
This book was written in two different, but very congenial, academic
environments. In the Department of Literature at the University of California,
Santa Cruz, Earl Jackson, Jr., and Richard Terdiman offered uncompromising
support of this project and the career of its author. Among the numerous
outstanding graduate students with whom I had the pleasure of working at
Santa Cruz, Stuart Christie and Michael Doylen deserve particular thanks for
their dedicated interest in my work. The advocacy of Julie Brower and espe-
cially Patty Lease practically enabled me to continue my career as a scholar
and teacher, and without them I might not be writing this now. Finally, I am
grateful to and for the many exceptionally talented undergraduates whom I
taught at Santa Cruz—too many to name individually, but all remembered
with the greatest fondness. I must give special acknowledgment to the students
in the various instantiations of my senior seminar “Vision and Power: Urban
Spectatorship,” who engaged so intelligently with materials and arguments
that found their way into this book; and to Stefanie Wright, who was the first
person to advise me to make a book about the Victorian working classes
focus specifically on youth.
I am very fortunate in my colleagues in the Department of English at the
University of Pittsburgh, who could not be more intellectually generous or
professionally supportive. I must thank several people in particular, first of
all Valerie Krips, who deserves a medal for her tireless efforts on behalf of
me and this book, for reading the manuscript (much of it more than once),
and for her mentoring of a junior colleague. I have also benefitted much from
the attention of Eric Clarke, Nancy Glazener, and Kathryn Flannery: their
lynx-eyed reading of chapters has made the book better, and their sage pro-
fessional advice has made my life easier at many points. The students in two
of my graduate seminars at Pitt—“Young Britain: Nation, Class, and Youth”
and “Imperialism and Modernity”—were wonderful interlocutors as this book
xi
xii Acknowledgments
was nearing completion, and they made a project some years in the works
seem fresh to me again.
A number of other individuals have aided in the production of this book.
Research in London was greatly enabled by Catherine Goodfellow of the
Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood and by the staff members in the De-
partment of Documents, the Photograph Archive, and the Department of Art
at the Imperial War Museum. Jack Zipes read the manuscript while on re-
search leave in Rome, an instance of accommodating graciousness that I did
not expect but appreciate very much. From first to last (which was as short a
time as an author could wish), the editors involved in publishing the book—
Matthew Byrnie, Richard Tressider, Lynn Goeller, and Nina Sadd—were the
exemplars of calm efficiency; I’m sure the anxieties of an author publishing
his or her first book must be trying to a seasoned editorial professional, but
they never let on.
I also gratefully acknowledge the following institutional sources that
have granted permissions or given money. Chapter 4 is a considerably revised
and expanded version of “Remaking ‘Lawless Lads and Licentious Girls’:
The Salvation Army and the Regeneration of Empire,” which was published
in John C. Hawley, ed., Historicizing Christian Encounters with the Other
(Macmillan Press, 1998), reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
The “Salvation Army Social Campaign” lithograph is reproduced with the
permission of the Salvation Army. The photograph of the 16th North Poplar
(Bow Church) Wolf Cub Pack, 1916, is reproduced by permission of The
Scout Association (U.K.) licence no. 0304. Various sources of funding at the
University of Pittsburgh supported my work on this book. Research in London
was funded by a John G. Bowman Faculty Grant from the Nationality Rooms
and Intercultural Exchange Programs, a Hewlett International Grant from
the University Center for International Studies, and a grant from the Depart-
ment of English. A third-term research grant released me from teaching for a
semester’s worth of writing. The Richard D. and Mary Jane Edwards En-
dowed Publication Fund offset costs associated with reproducing the illus-
trations in the book.
My greatest debts are to those people whose kindnesses to me antedate
the start of this project. Whatever is good in the pages that follow is largely to
the credit of Morris Eaves and J. W. Johnson, who did all they could to teach
me how to write a book. Of course, they and all the other friends named in
these acknowledgments are not in the least responsible for any of my blun-
ders. Ron and Helen Lougheed have cheered me on all the way and knew the
precise psychological moment when to mention a trip to Las Vegas. Pamela
Lougheed’s contributions to this book are countless: beyond the tremendous
intellectual, editorial, and critical talents she has brought to, and the energy
she has expended on, its pages, she has always, over the years during which
Acknowledgments xiii
the book was written (and then some), known what to do when the universal
thump was passed round. I cannot expect to acknowledge properly the many
gifts from and sacrifices made by my parents, Bob and Brenda Boone, al-
though I dedicate this book to them with respect and love.
List of Illustrations
Figure 1 “Photographic Saloon, East End of London.” From Henry Mayhew,

London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 3 (1861).
Figure 2 “Street Orderlies.” From Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the
London Poor, vol. 2 (1861).
Figure 3 “The London Scavenger.” From Henry Mayhew, London Labour
and the London Poor, vol. 2 (1861).
Figure 4 “The London Dustman. Dust Hoi! Dust Hoi!” From Henry Mayhew,
London Labour and the London Poor, vol 2 (1861).
Figure 5 “Useful Sunday Literature for the Masses; or, Murder Made Fa-
miliar.” From Punch, vol. 17 (1849).
Figure 6 “Salvation Army Social Campaign” lithograph. From William
Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890). Courtesy of the
Salvation Army.
Figure 7 “Flattening Oneself.” From Robert Baden-Powell, Sketches in
Mafeking and East Africa (1907).
Figure 8 Cover of the first edition of Scouting for Boys (1908).
Figure 9 Howling practice. Photograph of 16th North Poplar (Bow Church)
Wolf Cub Pack, 1916. Reproduced by permission of The Scout Asso-
ciation (UK) licence no. 0304. British Scout Association, London.
Figure 10 “How the Wearing of a Hat Shows Character.” From Robert Baden-
Powell, Scouting for Boys, 7th ed. (1915).
Figure 11 “Practise Observation.” From Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for
Boys, 7th ed. (1915).
Figure 12 “Lord Kitchener Says . . . ENLIST TO-DAY.” Recruiting poster,
Great Britain, 1915. (Negative Number Q33108) Courtesy of the Im-
perial War Museum, London.
Figure 13 “[Kitchener] ‘Wants You.’” Recruiting poster, Great Britain, 1914.
(Negative Number Q48378A) Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum,
London.
Figure 14 “Which? Man You Are Wanted!” Recruiting poster, Australia, 1914.
(Negative Number Q79868) Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum,
London.
xv
xvi List of Illustrations
Figure 15 “Step into Your Place.” Recruiting poster, Great Britain, 1915.
(Negative Number Q33089) Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum,
London.
Figure 16 “Join the Brave Throng That Goes Marching Along.” Recruiting
poster, Great Britain, 1915. (Negative Number Q33106) Courtesy of
the Imperial War Museum, London.
Figure 17 Australian soldiers in Chateau Wood, Third Battle of Ypres, 1917.
(Negative Number E(1914) 1220) Photograph courtesy of the Imperial
War Museum, London.
Figure 18 Aerial photograph of the trench system, taken on 15 July 1915
before the Battle of Loos. (Negative Number Q60546) Photograph cour-
tesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.
Introduction
This book examines the representation of English working-class children

and adolescents, the youthful inhabitants of the poor urban neighborhoods
that a number of writers dubbed “darkest England,” in Victorian and
Edwardian imperialist literature.1 In particular, I focus on imperialist
writings that undertook an ideological project with broad appeal among the
middle classes2: in order to increase the security of the British Empire—
and to eradicate the urban class conflict that troubled its symbolic “heart,”
England—many writers in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the
early decades of the twentieth argued for the desirability of integrating work-
ing-class youth into the British imperial enterprise. By examining this
ideological project, Youth of Darkest England seeks, in part, to contribute an
account of the interrelation between imperialist discourses on nation and
metropolitan discourses on class: this book shows that the production of a
new working-class youth identity is at the center of attempts to unify the
nation in Victorian and Edwardian England. Youth of Darkest England argues
that this project to enlist working-class youth in imperial activities relies on
a strategic contradiction: what initially seems a unifying proposition (we are
all members of the same nation and empire, regardless of class) operates in
concert with two rhetorical tactics that seek to reinforce the existing class
divisions. The first of these rhetorical tactics involves asserting a parallel
between the working classes and youth. This parallel has powerful conserva-
tive implications; depicting the working classes in juvenile terms is often a
justification for paternalistic control of the poor by the middle classes. This
tactic has to do not only with the construction of working-class people but
also with the construction of youth. It is deeply involved in the central
Victorian and Edwardian project of offering supposedly new destinies for
young people particularly the children of the poor. The representation of
middle-class “pedagogical” relations with a working-class population
imagined as juvenile is buttressed by the second rhetorical tactic common in
the writings I examine: a consistent representation of the middle classes in
terms of visionary subjectivity and the working classes in terms of an in-
creasingly mechanized physicality. In Western culture, this separation be-
tween vision and body has frequently been invoked in order to distinguish
between greater and lesser qualification for social power—for instance, in
1
2 Youth of Darkest England
discourses on gender and race, as well as in discourses on youth, and class. I

argue that the very intransigence of these two representational tactics reveals
the insufficiency of imperialism as a force capable of uniting the classes in
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English culture. Among my
overarching goals of this book is to offer a critique of the now-commonplace
view that imperialism achieved hegemonic status in late-Victorian and
Edwardian England. In spite of the tremendous national resources devoted to
maintaining and extending imperial projects during this period, and in spite
of the fact that certain working-class people did, at home and abroad, con-
tribute to that effort, my book argues for the political importance of examin-
ing the reception, as well as the production, of dominant discourses, the
instances where they proved ineffective, and the resistance to them on the
part of working-class populations, manifested partly as a refusal to accept
opportunities for nationalist identification.
Early in Benjamin Disraeli’s 1845 novel Sybil, and in response to the
wealthy Charles Egremont’s facile observation that “our Queen reigns over
the greatest nation that ever existed,” the young radical Stephen Morley fa-
mously declares that she in fact reigns over “Two nations; between whom
there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s
habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or
inhabitants of different planets . . . THE RICH AND THE POOR.”3 If we are
to believe Disraeli, within twenty years this fracture had been healed, and
England was one nation, united by imperialism. Describing the Second Re-
form Act of 1867, which for the first time granted the vote to large numbers
of working-class men, Disraeli declared in his “Crystal Palace” speech of 24
June 1872:
That Act was founded on a confidence that the great body of the people of
this country were “Conservative.” When I say “Conservative,” I use the
word in its purest and loftiest sense. I mean that the people of England,
and especially the working classes of England, are proud of belonging to
a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness—that they are proud of
belonging to an Imperial country, and are resolved to maintain, if they
can, their empire . . . and I am not misled for a moment by wild expres-
sions and eccentric conduct which may occur in the metropolis of this
country. There are people who may be, or who at least affect to be, work-
ing men, and who, no doubt, have a certain influence with a certain por-
tion of the metropolitan working classes, who talk Jacobinism. . . .
I say with confidence that the great body of the working class of
England utterly repudiate such sentiments. They have no sympathy with
them. They are English to the core. They repudiate cosmopolitan prin-
ciples. They adhere to national principles.4
Introduction 3
Not all of Disraeli’s contemporaries were so sanguine—many among

the middle classes considered the Second Reform Act a disaster. It gave the
vote to working-class men whom they believed to be, at worst, a group prone
to revolutionary violence (“Jacobinism”) and criminality or, at best, a de-
graded group in need of regulation by their “betters.” In either case, according
to many middle-class commentators, it gave the vote to a population unquali-
fied to act as the electoral majority controlling the political future of Britain.5
In the final decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twen-
tieth, later generations of imperialists frequently voiced their concern that
the England Disraeli described in 1872—a nation in which all classes were
unified by their support of imperialism—was merely an ideal, and one that
was still very far from being realized. For example, in 1895 Cecil Rhodes, in
England on a brief visit from Africa, makes the following observation re-
garding English class relations and imperialism:
I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the
unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for
“bread,” “bread,” “bread,” and on my way home I pondered over the scene
and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism. . . .
My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the
40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war,
we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus popula-
tion, to provide new markets for the goods produced by them in the factories
and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question.
If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists. 6
Rhodes appears to treat the incorporation of the working classes into

the British imperial enterprise in more pragmatic terms than does Disraeli.
Whereas Disraeli speaks of working-class pride in “their empire,” Rhodes
argues that class conflict can be avoided if middle-class imperialists (“we
colonial statesmen”) manage the empire so as to relieve poverty via emigra-
tion and stimulation of the domestic economy.7 Yet, in their different ways,
Disraeli and Rhodes exemplify one of the most prominent fantasies of Victo-
rian and Edwardian writings on class and empire: the belief that imperialism,
both as an ideological formation and as a practical enterprise, can be the
means of transforming England from a country riven by class conflict into a
unified nation.
In this book, I examine the attempt on the part of a range of imperialist
writers to construct what Benedict Anderson has famously called the “imag-
ined community” of a nation that, “regardless of the actual inequality and
exploitation that may prevail,” is “conceived as a deep, horizontal comrade-
ship.”8 Youth of Darkest England offers a genealogy of this fantasy by focusing
on texts for and about young people: Henry Mayhew’s anthropological

studies of working-class youth; mid-Victorian penny fictions; canonic
juvenile novels by Robert Louis Stevenson and G. A. Henty, among others;
Boy Scout handbooks; Salvation Army social reform proposals; writings
about athleticism and First World War recruiting materials. The fantasy
voiced by Disraeli and Rhodes is entertained by a wide range of imperialist
thinkers and, thus, is more than one book can comprehensively treat.
However, my focus on texts that entertain this fantasy by imagining the inte-
gration of working-class youth into the British imperial enterprise is not merely
a matter of expediency. This focus reflects the importance of youth in the
calculations of nationalist and imperialist thinkers—in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century England, and more generally—who have often privileged
the ideological incorporation of boys and girls over the incorporation of the
adult citizenry. Victorian and Edwardian imperialists target working-class
youth for reasons having to do with the demographic realities of nineteenth-
century England and with the dominant cultural construction of childhood in
the period. The focus on youth was itself a response to easily observable
facts regarding the population of Victorian England, which was in many ways
a very young country. As Pamela Horn has noted, “throughout the Victorian
years about one person in three was under the age of fifteen.”9 Thus, in “an
era of competitive nationhood,” as Hugh Cunningham points out, “children
were an asset which was neglected at peril.”10
Identifying working-class youth as the neglected asset was similarly
based on pragmatic considerations. It should go without saying that the
working classes constituted a demographic majority in Victorian and
Edwardian England—as they by necessity do in all industrial-capitalist coun-
tries—and, in an “era of competitive nationhood,” demographic size matters.
The late-Victorian and Edwardian periods were in fact characterized by con-
cerns that the expanding British Empire would necessitate expanded military
protection from imperial rivals, particularly Russia (in the nineteenth cen-
tury) and Germany (in the twentieth). The need to enlist working-class young
people in the project of expanding and protecting the empire struck many
among the middle classes as a vital point of national policy. As Bentley B.
Gilbert remarks, by “the first years of the twentieth century . . . the rather
casual public interest in the health of schoolchildren suddenly became a wide-
spread fear over the apparent physical deterioration of the British working
class,” such that a “healthy working-class child was precious in a way he had
not been before.” 11 Finally, youth experts schooled in Lockean and
Wordsworthian constructions of childhood often considered working-class
young people to be as yet innocent of the political animosities and social
vices that supposedly characterized their working-class elders.12 As Seth
Koven argues, the “British Working Man was, many feared, already irrevo-
cably degraded by slum life. Boys were made of more malleable material,
Introduction 5
and could be guided to realize a higher self.”13 For many writers in the period,
that “higher self” is synonymous with self-identification as a loyal citizen of
the English nation and the British Empire.
This incorporative fantasy is best defined as “social imperialism”: an
ideological project attempting, as Bernard Semmel puts it, “to draw all
classes together in defence of the nation and empire and . . . to prove to the
least well-to-do class that its interests were inseparable from those of the
nation”14—and thus, implicitly, to obscure the fact that the interests of these
classes, under capitalism, could not be more divergent. The social-imperialist
fantasy regarding working-class youth prominently brings together discourses
on English national identity and discourses on British imperial identity.
Thomas Richards argues that, in imperialist writing, the “usual recourse . . . is
to make national identity look like the template for imperial identity” so as to
lend to “the Empire a sense of symbolic unity that it so often lacked in prac-
tice.”15 This is, of course, a central characteristic of imperialist discourse:
exporting Englishness from the metropolis to the colonies is seen as a means
of unifying the “mother country,” white settlers, and non-white natives. For
instance, Cecil Rhodes (with characteristically manic ambition) argues “for
the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule, for the recov-
ery of the United States, for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one
Empire,” since “the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the
human race.”16 However, where English class relations are concerned, the
primary recourse taken by imperialist writers is precisely the opposite of the
one that Rhodes here exemplifies and that Thomas Richards summarizes.
Rhodes’s comments on the rally in the East End testify to an awareness that
English national identity could hardly be less unified, and what Rhodes (like
Disraeli) seeks, in effect, is to make imperial identity (pride in “belonging to
an Imperial country,” as Disraeli puts it, rather than to, say, a socialist group
or a trades union) into a template for national identity so as to lend England
the symbolic unity it lacks due to class difference.
The ultimate goal of this operation is what I will call hegemonic imperi-
alism. It is a commonplace of postcolonial theory that maintenance of
colonial domination largely operated through the ideological process that
Richards describes. As Abdul R. JanMohamed argues, such domination
depends less on “direct and continuous bureaucratic control and military
coercion” than on the establishment of hegemonic colonialism, whereby
the colonized subject accepts “a version of the colonizers’ entire system
of values, attitudes, morality, institutions.”17 Hegemonic imperialism is
a metropolitan variant of hegemonic colonialism, a variant that is di-
rected at the urban poor rather than at colonized natives, and that seeks
to render imperialist sentiment hegemonic among all classes by teaching
the working classes to accept middle-class “values, attitudes, morality,
institutions.”
Although Youth of Darkest England examines the attempt to establish

hegemonic imperialism among working-class youth, my book is also meant
to question whether imperialist ideology achieved hegemonic status among
this group. The extent to which, particularly between the Boer War and the
First World War, the English working classes resisted or succumbed to jin-
goism has become a controversial debate in studies of British imperialism,
with many scholars choosing to accept Charles F. G. Masterman’s 1901
claim that the working classes were so thoroughly invested in “the pride in
magnitude of Empire” that the “‘Condition of the People’ problem, once so
insistent, ceases therefore to trouble the public mind.”18 This version of the
story often relies on a well-worn conception of the working classes as
easily manipulated by propaganda. And this version of the story is contra-
dicted by the fact that imperialism hardly rendered works on the “‘Condition
of the People’ problem” obsolete, as the texts discussed in my book (includ-
ing, ironically, Masterman’s The Heart of the Empire) surely indicate. In-
deed, Masterman himself felt the need, eight years after he wrote the passage
quoted above, to publish a book titled The Condition of England (1909), in
which he states that the “‘Condition of the People’ problem now occupies the
dominant position” in public discourse.19 Moreover, if it were the case—as
Disraeli (in 1872) and Masterman (in 1901) claim in self-congratulatory
mode—that the working classes had already been transformed into whole-
hearted imperialists, one must wonder why so many writers in the intervening
years, and the decade after Masterman’s text, needed to spend so much time,
energy, and ink attempting to make working-class young people embrace
imperialism.
Instead of seeing this attempt as a never-finished ideological construc-
tion project, it has become fairly common to assume that the goals of social
imperialists such as Disraeli and Rhodes were achieved by means of a net-
work of organizations (such as the Boy Scouts, which Robert Baden-Powell
founded with explicitly social-imperialist intentions) operating in conjunc-
tion with textual practices (such as the heavily pro-imperialist tone of much
children’s literature in the period). For example, John M. MacKenzie argues
that “the working class as a whole received a considerable infusion of middle-
class values,” particularly imperialist values, from the Boy Scout organiza-
tion, and the ease with which young readers were supposedly manipulated
by what they read is implicit in MacKenzie’s description of juvenile litera-
ture: “Long after . . . intellectual thought had moved on, the same
complacent . . . sense of national and racial superiority . . . continued to be
the principal characteristics of children’s literature” and, presumably, of
the attitudes held by the children who read it.20 Received wisdom tells us
that the conjunction of such forces as Scouting and juvenile literature
constituted a veritable blitz of imperialist messages, which determined that
Introduction 7
working-class children, and the adults they became, were united with the
middle classes in their patriotic, indeed jingoistic, support of British imperial-
ism, at least until the First World War. Thus, even as erudite a scholar as
Edward W. Said can claim that “there was scarcely any dissent, any departure,
any demurral from” the central tenets of imperialism, namely the belief that
“subject races should be ruled” and “that one race deserves and has consis-
tently earned the right to be considered the race whose main mission is to
expand beyond its own domain.”21 Moreover, Said remarks:
It is perhaps embarrassing that sectors of the metropolitan cultures that

have since become vanguards in the social contests of our time were un-
complaining members of this imperial consensus. With few exceptions,
the women’s as well as the working-class movement was pro-empire. And,
while one must always be at great pains to show that different imagina-
tions, sensibilities, ideas, and philosophies were at work, and that each
work of literature or art is special, there was virtual unity of purpose on
this score: the empire must be maintained, and it was maintained.22
Although the final sentence of this passage would seem to admit that
some metropolitan individuals and groups, including working-class ones, held
different views regarding imperialism, Said never actually takes the “great
pains” to show that such was the case. Instead, he rests quite comfortably
with the notion that English men, women, and (presumably) children were
almost uniformly pro-imperialist (“uncomplaining members of this imperial
consensus”), and the qualifications that Said offers are so minute as to be
hardly qualifications at all (“scarcely any dissent,” “few exceptions,” “virtual
unity”).
There are two major interpretive problems with such claims that impe-
rialism achieved hegemonic status in Victorian and Edwardian England. The
first problem has to do with the historical interpretation of texts. By assum-
ing that social imperialists (and the texts they wrote) achieved their desired
goal, the critic posits an equivalence between the intent of the author and
the effect on the audience, flattens out the history of a text’s reception,
and fails to register any audience resistance to the author’s intent. This book
is primarily about the middle-class fantasy of hegemonic imperialism and its
textual manifestations, and it is extremely difficult to determine precisely
what effect those texts had on working-class Victorian and Edwardian chil-
dren, who have left few written records of their responses. Nevertheless, I
have tried to include enough examples of resistant practices (for instance,
penny fictions written for working-class children by working-class adults,
working-class expressions of disdain for the imperialist social reform
schemes of the Salvation Army, and the recollections of poor children who
quit the Boy Scouts) to demonstrate that, as Laura Chrisman usefully observes,
“metropolitan dissent was theoretically possible and actually practised. The

metropolis needs to be disaggregated, seen not as a homogeneous unit but”
as “composed of different and competing interest groups, institutions, and
classes, whose ideological relationship to imperialism was not determined
solely on the basis of their spatial residence.”23 The middle-class writers ex-
amined in Youth of Darkest England attempt to transform the metropolis such
that it was a “homogeneous unit” in which the competing interests of differ-
ent classes would be overcome when their “ideological relationship to impe-
rialism was . . . determined” by their identification as members of an imperial
nation (or, their “spatial residence” in England). However, to mistake the
attempt for its accomplishment is to misrecognize what is, this book will
argue, a bid for hegemony that failed.
This misrecognition involves a second major problem, which has to do
with the interpretation of class politics. To assume that hegemonic imperial-
ism actually did unite the classes in Victorian and Edwardian England is to
obscure the connections between capitalism and imperialism and, thus, the
competing interests that define and differentiate the classes in the capitalist-
imperialist culture of the period. As a result, critics often wind up reproducing
precisely the discourse on the working classes that dominates the writings of
social imperialists. However unintentional this discursive reproduction might
be, it is unnerving to observe the extent to which Said’s claim that working-
class people were primarily “uncomplaining members of this imperial con-
sensus” echoes Disraeli’s claim that with the exception of a few Jacobites the
working classes “especially” are “proud of belonging to an Imperial country,
and are resolved to maintain . . . their empire.” Class difference needs to be
more thoroughly inserted into discussions of imperialist ideology in England,
and those discussions need to consider more fully and seriously how work-
ing-class political interests as (or more) often than not contradicted those of
the middle classes, with their long-standing investment in capitalist and im-
perialist enterprises. In pursuing this line of inquiry, I seek to offer a literary-
critical complement to the work of a number of historians—such as Henry
Pelling, Richard Price, Robert J. Scally, Hugh Cunningham, and Gareth
Stedman Jones—who argue that, although working-class individuals no doubt
held the full range of pro- and anti-imperialist opinions, the predominant
political feature of working-class culture in the period is a disengagement
from imperialist rhetoric and an increasing attention to domestic political
matters.24 Indeed, if the goal of social-imperialist discourse is to transform
the working classes into a pro-imperialist group, then the very raison d’etre
of this discourse presupposes that the working classes are not primarily pro-
imperialist.
That is, rather than bringing about the hegemony they so desire, social-
imperialist texts reveal, even as they try to obscure, the class-based conflict
Introduction 9
that fractures English society in the period of high imperialism. Such texts
display what Gail Ching-Liang Low claims is a prominent feature of imperi-
alist children’s literature: “in trying to secure the child that is outside the
book,” such works “give their strongest indication of the insecurity and in-
stabilities which characterise the contradictory demands of imperial identi-
ties.”25 Perhaps the most contradictory such demand is the one that asks
working-class people to identify with the middle classes and as imperial sub-
jects, while the social and economic realities of Victorian and Edwardian
England everywhere confirmed the massive disparity between (on the one
hand) the benefits that accrued to middle-class imperialists and (on the other
hand) the privations that typified the lives of the working poor. Moreover,
social-imperialist texts actively seek to maintain this contradiction. At the
manifest level, the works I study in this book posit that domestic class con-
flict could be eradicated if the working classes could be transformed into full
citizens of the English nation, and could be led to view themselves as impe-
rial subjects. At a more subtle level, however, these works reinscribe an es-
sentialist notion of class difference. This contradiction does not signal
rhetorical failure or logical confusion but is the strategic necessity of the
middle-class social-imperialist project: to eradicate class conflict—which
caused the middle classes such insecurity and instability—while maintaining
the unequal class relations necessary for the continuation of capitalist impe-
rialism. This strategic contradiction operates through two representational
tactics that have great power in social-imperialist discourse: first, a represen-
tation of the poor as juvenile; and, second, a representation of the middle
classes in terms of vision and the working classes in terms of the body.
As Harry Hendrick argues, Victorian and Edwardian texts commonly
equate working-class city dwellers with adolescents:
In many respects the urban working class appeared to share some of the
characteristics of young people: they were indisciplined, disordered,
volatile, emotional, and liable to be subverted through undesirable influ-
ences, not least of which was their own collective personality. It seemed
that while both the crowd and adolescents had within them potential for
good, they also had a destructive or anarchic potential.26
In social-imperialist texts, such representations of the working classes

as juvenile are not merely rhetorical flights of fancy; rather, these represen-
tations enjamb with social-reform policy throughout the period, from the
notorious Poor Law Amendment Act of 1835—which (among other provi-
sions) forced the needy into workhouses where they would be subject to pa-
ternalistic middle-class supervision—to the writings that, for three decades
following the 1867 and 1884 Reform Acts, debated the wisdom of granting
the vote to a supposedly undisciplined class. For instance, Helen Hester

Colvill, after reading in 1914 of “a messenger boys’ strike,” turns this event
into an opportunity to depict radical agitation for working-class enfran-
chizement as childish:
Long ago it occurred to me that most of the arguments in support of the

extension of the franchise to the dregs of the population could equally be
advanced in favour of bestowing it on boys and girls. Are they not human?
Are they not citizens? Have they not rights, grievances? Why should they
be the only class unrepresented? . . . I have been expecting the children to
organise passive, or more probably active resistances to their many op-
pressions. Breaking windows in the cause of liberty will, I am sure, be a
task most congenial to them.27
Lest the now-obscure Colvill be seen as a lone eccentric, John Stuart

Mill—a much more sophisticated, as well as a more politically liberal,
writer—uses the same parallel between the working classes and youth in his
Principles of Political Economy (1848) in order to offer an argument in seem-
ing opposition to “the patriarchal or paternal system of government”:
It is on a far other basis that the well-being and well-doing of the labouring
people must henceforth rest. The poor have come out of leading-strings,
and cannot any longer be governed or treated like children. To their own
qualities must now be commended the care of their destiny. . . . Whatever
advice, exhortation, or guidance is held out to the labouring classes, must
henceforth be tendered to them as equals, and accepted by them with their
eyes open. The prospect of the future depends on the degree in which they
can be made rational beings.28
Although Mill claims that the poor “cannot any longer be governed or
treated like children” and instead now must be understood to participate in
political life “as equals,” his metaphors tactically undermine this apparently
progressive argument—which would, particularly in 1848, be seen to iden-
tify him with the most committed working-class radicalism. First, the state-
ment that the working classes have “come out of leading-strings” implies
that at some time previously it was appropriate to view this group as infantile.
Second, coming out of leading-strings does not constitute entering adult-
hood: leading-strings were used to guide children when they were just begin-
ning to walk, and, thus, if the working classes have “come out of
leading-strings” this group is actually still childlike. Later in his text, Mill
asserts, “Children below a certain age cannot judge or act for themselves; up
to a considerably greater age they are inevitably more or less disqualified for
doing so.”29 According to Mill’s metaphor, the working classes just out of
leading-strings would, at best, be comparable to the latter stage of childhood—
Introduction 11
that is, “more or less disqualified” to “judge or act for themselves.” Thus,
finally, the childlike status of the working classes is confirmed by the final
sentence in the quote about leading-strings: now that the working classes are
no longer comparable to a bunch of crawling infants but, rather, resemble a
mass of promising little toddlers, this class should be made into a group of
“rational beings.” Although Mill does not state that this education of the
working classes is the responsibility of middle-class “superiors,” such a peda-
gogical relation between the classes is, as we will see, a chief emphasis of
social-reform texts throughout the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Indeed,
in spite of his seeming opposition to a “patriarchal or paternal system of
government” whereby the “rich should be in loco parentis to the poor, guid-
ing and restraining them like children,”30 earlier in his text Mill describes the
“improvement in the habits and requirements of the mass of unskilled day-
labourers” as a process of educating the least rational and most unintellectual
individuals: “the aim of all intellectual training for the mass of the people
should be to cultivate common sense. . . . Whatever, in the intellectual de-
partment, can be superadded to this, is chiefly ornamental.”31 And, according
to Mill, one of the chief means of achieving this “improvement” is one ea-
gerly recommended by social imperialists such as Rhodes and many of the
youth experts discussed in Youth of Darkest England: “a great national mea-
sure of colonization. I mean, a grant of public money, sufficient to remove at
once, and establish in the colonies, a considerable fraction of the youthful
agricultural population.”32
The strategic contradiction at the heart of social-imperialist discourse—
seeking to eradicate class conflict so as to achieve hegemonic imperialism,
while maintaining the unequal class relations necessary for the continuation
of capitalist imperialism—also operates through a second, equally potent,
representational tactic: a depiction of the middle classes in terms of vision
and the working classes in terms of the body. Both the privileging of vision
in Victorian and Edwardian culture and a profound attention to the body in
the period have been noted before.33 The invention of a whole range of
technologies for and practices of seeing (photography being only the most
obvious) constituted, as Jonathan Crary claims, a new form of subjectivity
based on the visual in the nineteenth century,34 a fact to which John Ruskin
gives only the most grandiloquent testimony in his famous statement that
“Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think
for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion,—all in
one.”35 In the chapters that follow, I will be concerned with the ways in which
a highly privileged and abstracted concept of vision is rhetorically tied to
power, in particular the power that the middle classes seek to obtain over the
urban poor. The association of vision and power is as old as the ancients, of
course. In Western culture, the ability to see things is frequently understood
to be synonymous with subjectivity, intellect, and the metaphysical. So-

cial-imperialist writers frequently embroider on this association in order to
depict themselves and their like-minded middle-class contemporaries as,
relative to the working classes, “metaphysical” beings both in the strictest
sense of the term—as possessing an intellectual subjectivity that places them
above those who live a mere bodily existence—and in the loftier sense of the
term—as possessing a “visionary” capacity for perceiving that which is with-
held from lesser humans. (This latter, more aggrandizing, self-definition is
especially prominent in, say, the works of a theologically minded social im-
perialist such as William Booth, although it certainly characterizes the global
schemes of more secular writers such as Cecil Rhodes.) Regenia Gagnier has
briefly noted how depictions of class difference in terms of this separation
between vision and the body are legion in Victorian writings:
In a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the separate worlds of mind and body,

the upper classes (Homo cogitans) are represented by their eyes (see the
large, dark, and meaningful eyes of George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver and
Dorothea Brooke), indicators of intelligence and the emotions, and the
lower by their bodies, which were increasingly degraded under industrial-
ization but in their “natural” setting sufficed to represent the essential
worker.36
The particular usefulness of this representation to social-imperialist

writers has everything to do with the fact that the union of vision and power
was profoundly associated with nineteenth-century discourses on urbanity
and imperialism, the twin foci of social imperialism. As many scholars—
particularly those following up on Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Pun-
ish—have argued, the attempt to control large urban populations of
working-class individuals involves a privileging of visionary power: for in-
stance, as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White put it, the “‘labouring’ and ‘dan-
gerous’ classes would be transformed, it was implied, once they became
visible. On the one hand, there would be surveillance by policing; on the
other, the inculcation of politeness through the benign gaze of the bour-
geoisie.”37 Moreover, as Mary Louise Pratt has convincingly demonstrated,
the notion of visionary power is synonymous with the mythologized under-
standing of imperialist discovery and conquest. Imperialist travel writing
privileges the moment that Pratt calls the “monarch-of-all-I-survey scene,”
in which what the visionary explorer “sees is all there is, and . . . the land-
scape was intended to be viewed from where he has emerged upon it.”38
In social-imperialist texts of the later nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, the object of this surveillance is a working-class population con-
stituted as profoundly embodied. Given the extent to which such texts focus
on youth culture, the separation of power along the lines of vision and body
Introduction 13
might seem politically innocent, as such metaphors are a common way of

making generational distinctions: young people are frequently thought of in
terms of growing bodies (especially in a culture as obsessed with athleticism
as Victorian and Edwardian England), just as their elders are often presumed
to have seen more of the world, and thus to be more knowing subjects. How-
ever, the metaphors of vision and body are deeply implicated in essentialist
notions of class difference. As any reader of Marx knows, the laborer’s rela-
tive powerlessness under industrial capitalism has to do with the necessary
expenditure of his or her limited bodily vitality. In addition, it is no accident
that we describe the activity that defines one as a capitalist using a visual
metaphor, “speculation” (from Latin speculari, to observe). Even such a quo-
tidian trope corresponds to the privileging of vision over body. As Elaine
Scarry glosses Marx’s Capital 1 (1867), “In fact, it is when a person has a
relation to the system of production that allows him to survive without risk-
ing his own embodied psyche, will, and consciousness in that survival . . . that
he is a capitalist.”39
Moreover, in Victorian culture, such metaphoric uses of vision and body
commonly imply a working-class population that is both physical and dis-
individualized, and, therefore, incapable of the vision that determines sub-
jectivity—including political subjectivity as the citizen of a modern
democratic nation. Mary Poovey offers an eloquent description of how, in
early nineteenth-century Britain, the construction of “the image of the social
body . . . was used in two quite different ways: it referred either to the poor
in isolation from the rest of the population or to British (or English) society
as an organic whole.”40 This ambiguity is crucial, Poovey argues, in that “it
allowed social analysts to treat one segment of the population [the poor] as a
special problem” and simultaneously to “gesture toward the mutual interests
that (theoretically) united all parts of the social whole”: the “phrase social
body therefore promised full membership in a whole (and held out the image
of that whole) to a part identified as needing both discipline and care.”41 In
this way, according to Poovey,
the very division of work that enabled the nation to prosper under a liberal
government also kept the poor man from becoming a self-governing
individual. . . . The fact that these inequities seemed to be an inevitable
aspect of national progress, paradoxically, seemed to draw the working
poor into the emergent community of the nation at the same time that it
set them apart.42
In the texts that I examine in Youth of Darkest England, imperialist goals

constitute the “mutual interests” that can supposedly unite the “social whole,”
specifically through the incorporation of working-class youth into the Brit-
ish imperial enterprise and thus through the establishment of hegemonic im-
perialism in England. The isolation of the poor “as a special problem,” such
that “full membership” as citizens of the imperial nation is withheld from
them, is accomplished not only by a representation of the poor as childlike,
but also by a depiction of them as utterly embodied, and, therefore, as essen-
tially different from the middle classes that possess the vision necessary for
one to be a “social analyst” capable of solving the “special problem” of the
poor by providing them with “discipline and care.” In turn, assertions that the
middle classes are justified in thus “helping” the poor are buttressed by a
representation of the latter group in terms of mere physicality rather than
intellectual or “visionary” subjectivity and thus the inability to engage in a
self-help that, in Victorian terms, would imply self-determination. The so-
cial-imperialist discourse I discuss extends the reformist works that Poovey
studies in that this discourse “imagines working men . . . as simultaneously
more material (in the sense of being embodied, not imaginative, crea-
tures) and more amenable to aggregation (in the sense of being less indi-
vidualized or particularized).”43 The last two chapters of Youth of Darkest
England address the early twentieth-century apotheosis of this de-
individualizing discourse: the representation of the working-class body as a
machine, which corresponds not only to the increasing mechanization of in-
dustrial production but also to the development of technological warfare as
the by-product of imperial aggrandizement.
For many readers, even this abbreviated discussion of the delineation of
power in terms of vision and the body will likely bring to mind the works of
Michel Foucault, especially Discipline and Punish. Among the most fre-
quently criticized aspects both of Foucault’s work and of new historicist
criticism, the literary scholarship that has employed that work most promi-
nently, is the tendency to argue (or imply) that such power relations are
totalized in society—what Frank Lentricchia, in an unfortunately shrill com-
mentary on Stephen Greenblatt, derides as “Foucauldian tone: the feeling,
usually just evoked, almost never argued through, that all social life is orga-
nized and controlled down to its oddest and smallest details.”44 The chapters
that follow do not argue (nor attempt to evoke the feeling) that the observa-
tional power which middle-class social imperialists sought to wield over
working-class bodies ever amounted to any such totalizing social control of
the latter by the former. The chapters that follow do confirm that, in the pe-
riod I study, a wide range of middle-class writers desired to institute a disci-
plinary, class-based society operating through, as Foucault puts it, “a
mechanism that coerces by means of observation” and “an apparatus in which
the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, and in
which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are ap-
plied clearly visible.”45 Similarly, for these writers, the desired effect of such
disciplinary observation is a “policy of the body, a certain way of rendering
Introduction 15
the group of men docile and useful” such that the working-class “body is
reduced as a ‘political’ force at the least cost and maximized as a useful
force.”46 For instance (as we will see in Chapter 5), Robert Baden-Powell, in
founding the Boy Scouts, certainly seeks to institutionalize a power relation
in which all working-class boys (not a few here and there) would be subject
to the bodily regulation that constitutes Scouting, under the observation of
middle-class Scout leaders. Moreover, the larger goal of Baden-Powell and
the other social-imperialist writers studied in this book is to “discipline” or
“coerce” by ideological means—put simply, to render working-class young
people not only useful to, but also supporters of the British Empire. This
ideological operation thus seeks to cause the disciplined individual to inter-
nalize the operations of discipline, in a manner similar to that described by
Foucault in “Panopticism” (perhaps the chapter of Discipline and Punish
that most seems to invite the objections of a critic such as Lentricchia): “He
who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it . . . inscribes in
himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles”—
the observer and the observed—and thus “becomes the principle of his own
subjection.”47 However—and to reinforce a point already made above with
regard to hegemonic imperialism—this book will not seek to demonstrate
that any such internalization was achieved and will, instead, seek to warn
against mistaking authorial intention for social effect.48 On the contrary, I
attempt to provide as much evidence as possible for active resistance, on
the part of working-class young people, to the designs of middle-class
social imperialists. Thus, we will encounter, in Chapter 5, young Robert
Roberts, and his friend Syd, who quickly abandoned their Boy Scout troop
due to their explicit dislike of the Scoutmaster’s disciplinary attention to the
working-class body.
Of course, one need not look far in Victorian and Edwardian history to
find instances where working-class bodies were placed under a rigorous
middle-class surveillance (the factory, the elementary schoolroom) or, indeed,
for instances of pro-imperialism on the part of working-class individuals;
such instances have been the subject of many histories. As a literary scholar,
my concern is rather with the analysis of particular textual representations—
rhetorical or discursive practices, if one prefers—that are deeply involved in
the politics of imperial England but that are not identical to it. At the same
time, although “social reality”—defined as distinct from “textual representa-
tion”—is not my primary focus in this book, I certainly do not argue that the
two never met, that the representations I analyze have no relation to life as it
was lived in the time and place I study—a charge (the precise opposite of
Lentricchia’s complaint) that has also been levelled at new historicist critics,
and, indeed, at many who make use of post-structuralist theory. For instance,
Vincent P. Pecora objects that much new historicist analysis suggests that,
since everything is always already “representation,” representation is where

all the “real” action has been all along. What, for many historians, would
be more “basic” categories such as material want and material struggle
thus lose their privileged position, as these too are merely culturally con-
structed sign systems.49
In general, Youth of Darkest England shares with works broadly desig-

nated “new historicist” a desire to show how textual representation is involved
in a social and political context. Yet, Lentricchia and Pecora’s complaints
suggest that such a goal forces critics to make an either/or choice: equating
representation and social reality or privileging the former and leaving the
latter to trouble the historians. Instead, I accord with Brook Thomas’s view
that, “despite examples of art helping to shape various social practices, it is
as misguided to make exaggerated claims about its formative power as it
is completely to deny it.”50 Intentionally occupying this middle ground
might seem to choose easy comfort over the more exciting agon of polemics,
but I find a qualified analysis of the relation of texts to their social, political,
and historical contexts more valuable than arguments which posit that (as
Brook Thomas describes them) “literature’s important connection with
history is not that it registers historical complexity but that it influences
people by fixing community opinion.”51 Youth of Darkest England treats
textual representations that sought to do such influencing and fixing not as
evidence that this cultural work was accomplished, but as evidence that at-
tempting such work signifies a particular historical complexity: the continual
generation of projects attempting, over seventy-odd years, to incorporate a
working-class majority in the British imperial enterprise gives the lie to the
notion that this enterprise was cherished by the majority of the English in the
period.
To summarize briefly, the argument of this book: Middle-class social
imperialists attempt to resolve class conflict, and create a unified English
nation, by instituting hegemonic imperialism—in particular, by incorporating
working-class youth into the imperial enterprise; in turn, the discourse pro-
duced by these imperialists seeks to undermine what could be the radical
implication of this national unification—equality of the middle classes and
the working classes—by representing the working classes as childlike, as
essentially embodied, and, thus, as deprived of the vision that determines
political subjectivity for the middle classes. I should note that the chapters
that follow, although they all center on matters of class and youth, will not
address each of these foci in equal detail, and I hope that my argument will
be demonstrated by a cumulative preponderance of evidence. For instance,
the first two chapters are primarily concerned with how the representational
tactics described above—the depiction of the working classes as juvenile
and embodied and the association of the middle classes with vision and
Introduction 17
power—affect mid-century notions of the role class mobility (or lack thereof)
plays in the constitution of the English nation. These chapters touch on the
issue of imperialism more briefly than do the remaining ones, as I considered
it necessary to address how these representational tactics dominate under-
standings of domestic class relations and of national identity before turning
(in Chapters 3–6) to the ways in which these tactics inform debates about
imperialism that characterize the period from the 1880s until the First World
War.
The argument sketched above is pursued as follows. The first chapter
argues that Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor—the
most influential topography of the urban space later called “darkest
England”—presents the contradictory discourse on nationalism and class
that dominates imperialist writings in the latter half of the nineteenth cen-
tury: Mayhew’s text exemplifies the widespread desire for an English nation
not divided by class conflict, and, yet, seeks to retain a notion of class
difference that would fix a juvenile and embodied urban poor under middle-
class visual regulation. The second and third chapters reveal the relation of
this discourse to the penny fiction that, in the nineteenth century, was perhaps
the primary form of literature read by (or aimed at) working-class young
people. In Chapter 2, I argue that middle-class critical hostility to the mid-
century “penny bloods” has everything to do with the fact that such works
advocate, as the means for their young working-class readers to participate
in the life of the nation, a sustained agitation that refuses the regulatory fixing
of the working-class body in space. Chapter 3 demonstrates how criticism of
such penny fictions in turn spurred the late-Victorian proliferation of “im-
proving” penny magazines marketed as antidotes to them. Through a reading
of the most famous product of the improving magazines, Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Treasure Island, I show how such fictions treat working-class
political agitation as a problem to be eradicated by dispersing middle-class
values in the form of imperialist sentiment.
Chapters 4–6 address in greatest detail how the discourses on nation
and class, vision and the body—which are articulated, resisted, and reconsti-
tuted in Mayhew’s work and in the mid- and late-century penny fictions—
impinge on representations of imperialism at the turn of the century. Focusing
on the Salvation Army reform scheme advertised in William Booth’s In
Darkest England and the Way Out, Chapter 4 argues that this scheme not
only attempts to make imperialist sentiment hegemonic among all classes in
England, but also adheres to degeneration theory—which posits an inher-
ently flawed working-class culture that causes an inherently flawed working-
class character—and, thus, retains an essentialist notion of a juvenile
working-class population in need of regeneration by middle-class visionaries.
Chapter 5 argues that the literature of what is now the best-known imperialist
youth organization, the Boy Scouts, is profoundly contradictory, celebrating

the ideal of an integral nation and simultaneously recycling essentialist no-
tions of class difference. My arguments in Chapters 4 and 5 operate not only
through the tracing of these dominant discourses about the poor, but also
through investigations into working-class social and political history, with
the result that I analyze both imperialist visions and the way they played to
different audiences. For instance, Chapter 4 reveals that the Salvationist
scheme had some popularity among upwardly mobile lower-middle-class
people, but met primarily with hostility among the very poor, the target of
Booth’s scheme; Chapter 5 concludes with critiques of the Boy Scout
organization from socialist educators and from some of the many working-
class boys who refused to join or quickly abandoned their troops.
The final chapter of my book addresses what did, in Edwardian repre-
sentations of class difference, become a particularly influential aspect of
Scouting discourse: a depiction of the working-class body as a machine
requiring continued middle-class maintenance, a depiction that can be taken
as the apotheosis of the differentiation of the classes along the lines of
vision and the body. Examining the association of athleticism and war in
Edwardian educational treatises, adventure fiction, and First World War re-
cruiting materials, Chapter 6 argues that such works represent the middle
classes as possessing a vision (both ocular and metaphysical) that enables
them to imagine the proper distribution of a working-class soldiery repre-
sented as a mechanized corps. This chapter in turn analyzes interwar
critiques—in modernist fiction, journalistic exposé, and reminiscences by
ordinary soldiers—of this representation of class. My readings of these works
and the critiques of them reinforce the central findings of Youth of Darkest
England: my analyses reveal (first) that even the most optimistic
assimilationist fantasies in fact expose the suppositional national identity on
which imperialism depends to be a most unstable construction and (second)
that class difference, repeatedly inscribed in imperialist imaginings of youth,
has been the point of fracture in imperialist discourse.
1
Henry Mayhew’s Children of the Streets
The representation of class and youth is at the heart of the urban exploration
narrative, a form of sociological journalism that proliferated in the latter half
of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. The Victorian
exemplar of this genre, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London
Poor (1861–1862), seeks to offer exhaustive information regarding the work-
ing classes, as transmitted from the pen of “the traveller in the undiscovered
country of the poor”1 to middle-class readers who can construe themselves
as armchair ethnographers studying an exotic culture existing within the
imperial metropolis itself. Mayhew further advertises the ethnographic nov-
elty of his project thus: “It surely may be considered curious” because it
supplies “information concerning a large body of persons, of whom the pub-
lic had less knowledge than of the most distant tribes of the earth” (LL 1:xv).
Mayhew here anticipates a metaphorical parallel that will become common
in the latter half of the nineteenth century—a parallel between the urban
“savages” of “darkest England” and the non-white “savages” of “darkest
Africa.” This parallel is (as we will see in Chapter 4) most explicitly articu-
lated in William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), the
title of which sensationalizes Booth’s topic (urban poverty) by borrowing
from Henry Morton Stanley’s bestseller of the same year, In Darkest Africa.
In Mayhew, this racialist parallel reveals a problem of both national and
imperial importance. According to Mayhew, the chief characteristic of the
London poor is their uncontrolled wandering, a mobility not subject to the
self-regulation that characterizes middle-class men and women who navi-
gate the city space. For Mayhew, this unregulated mobility disqualifies the
working classes from full and normative civic participation, as citizens of the
English nation, in the life of the imperial metropolis. And because London is
the heart of the British Empire, it is but a short discursive leap for Mayhew to
compare the London poor to more “distant tribes” similarly subject to British
rule without the privilege of citizenship.
Crucially, for the argument of Youth of Darkest England, Mayhew (like
William Booth at the end of the century, as we will see in Chapter 4) does
not elaborate on this racialist parallel. Instead, Mayhew emphasizes, through-
out his work, that the unregulated wandering of the poor is not an essential
defect but, rather, the cultural effect of bad parenting, lack of education,
19
and similarly negative influences associated with the development of the

young. Mayhew consequently argues that the wanderlust of the poor can be
eradicated by means of middle-class instruction and regulation. He thereby
introduces the line of argument that others will take up after him and develop
at greater length—that the London poor can, by means of middle-class in-
struction and regulation, be incorporated into the British imperial enterprise.
This focus on the need to educate the working classes would seem to imply
an anti-essentialist, developmental narrative, the inevitable climax of which
should bring the working classes, after suitable training, full status as citizens
of the English nation and equality with the middle classes. However, Mayhew
steers clear of this implication. Instead, he reinforces the essential difference
between the classes by using two subtle representational tactics that domi-
nate later projects to incorporate the working classes into the British imperial
enterprise. First, by insistently focusing on working-class youth, Mayhew
implies not only that a nation’s children are its future (a platitude that is still
with us), but also that, figuratively, the poor constitute a juvenile group in
continual need of education and regulation by a middle-class population stand-
ing in loco parentis (another platitude that is still with us). Second, by repre-
senting the working classes in terms of essential embodiment and the middle
classes in terms of well-regulated vision, Mayhew suggests that the transfor-
mation of working-class wandering into a circumscribed mobility useful to
nation and empire in fact requires the continual subjection of the poor to
middle-class regulators who observe, train, and distribute working-class bodies
in metropolitan and imperial spaces.
On the first page of London Labour, Mayhew asserts that wandering is the
defining characteristic not of the members of an imperial nation, but of
peoples fit for colonization. “Of the thousand millions of human beings that
are said to constitute the population of the entire globe,” Mayhew states
as an introduction to his text, “there are—socially, morally, and perhaps
even physically considered—but two distinct and broadly marked races,
viz., the wanderers and the settlers—the vagabond and the citizen—the no-
madic and the civilized tribes” (LL 1:1). Mayhew, thus, initially represents
the working classes as a racially distinct nation of wanderers (“the undiscov-
ered country of the poor” [1:xv]) and suggests that middle-class inter-
vention to rescue the poor from their degradation is the domestic and
class-based version of “the white man’s burden”—the imperial nation’s re-
sponsibility to civilize the colonized native. The implication is that the urban
poor can, perhaps, be civilized but are hardly capable of taking part in the
expansion and administration of the British Empire. However, Mayhew’s text
Henry Mayhew’s Children of the Streets 21
quickly deemphasizes this racialist parallel in order to suggest that the work-
ing classes are not essentially excluded from the life of the imperial nation
but, rather, constitute an “outcast” group that needs to be incorporated into it.
What thus seems in London Labour an equation of class with race is, in fact,
a subtle means of implying their similarity in order to then reinforce their
difference.
The problem, according to Mayhew, is that the urban poor exist within
but are not productive members of both nation and empire: “it would appear,
that not only are all races divisible into wanderers and settlers, but that each
civilized or settled tribe has generally some wandering horde intermingled
with, and in a measure preying upon, it” (LL 1:1). Mayhew here retains the
racialist metaphor, yet within a mere three paragraphs, the poor have been
transformed from a “distinct” race whose difference from the civilized English
is “broadly marked” into a “division” of, or a group “intermingled” within,
an English race that includes both uncivilized wanderers and civilized set-
tlers. Although he shies away from the language of essential racial differ-
ence, Mayhew’s parallelisms (“the wanderers and the settlers—the vagabond
and the citizen—the nomadic and the civilized tribes” [LL 1:1]) neverthe-
less reaffirm that working-class people who are wanderers, vagabonds, and
nomads cannot be settlers, citizens, civilized. Mobility is, of course, neces-
sary in order to perform the geographical and cultural exchanges that char-
acterize the work of an imperial nation; but without the self-regulation
according to laws and cultural standards implied by the term “citizen,” such
mobility becomes mere nomadism, which contributes nothing to the work of
an empire in which settlers found colonies supposedly in order to spread
civilization.2
In addition, according to Mayhew, the disqualification of the wandering
poor from English citizenship represents not merely a lost resource but also
a danger to the nation. Mayhew warns, “The public have but to read the
following plain unvarnished account . . . and then to say whether they think
it safe—even if it be thought fit—to allow men, women, and children to con-
tinue in such a state” (LL 1:6). Predictably, the “dangerous classes”—on whose
“predatory” activities London Labour reports at great length—primarily
threaten the civilized, settled, middle-class citizenry: the London poor are
“purely vagabond, doing nothing whatsoever for their living, but moving from
place to place preying upon the earnings of the more industrious portion of
the community” (LL 1:2). By means of another racialist comparison, Mayhew
indicates that the unregulated mobility of the London poor endangers not
only domestic peace but also national security:
we, like the Kafirs, Fellahs, and Finns, are surrounded by wandering
hordes—the “Sonquas” and the “Fingoes” of this country—paupers, beg-
gars, and outcasts, possessing nothing but what they acquire by depredation
from the industrious, provident, and civilized portion of the community.

(LL 1:2)
This passage might seem merely to repeat the privileging of settled cul-
tures over nomadic groups parasitically attached to them: the agrarian Kafirs
of South Africa “have their Bushmen . . . these are called Fingoes—a word
signifying wanderers, beggars, or outcasts” (LL 1:1); the Fellahs, farming
peasants of Egypt, are distinct from “the Arabian Bedouins,” a “wild and
predatory tribe who sought the desert” (LL 1:1); the “Lappes seem to have
borne a somewhat similar relation to the Finns,” who “cultivated the soil like
the industrious Fellahs” (LL 1:1); and even as stereotypically degraded a
group as the Hottentots have their “Bushmen and Sonquas . . . the term
‘sonqua’ meaning literally pauper” (LL 1:1). However, by comparing the
middle-class English to Kafirs, Fellahs, and Hottentots—all groups subject
to colonial rule by the mid-Victorian period—Mayhew offers the sinister
suggestion that the outcast status of the urban poor, and the resulting lack of
national unity, could render England itself vulnerable to colonization by a
more powerful imperial force. Similarly, although the Finnish are European,
the word “Finn” bears the trace of colonial conquest, being the name used by
Teutonic nations to refer to people calling themselves “Suomi.”
In contrast to the introductory statement of the problem—which relies
on an attention-grabbing parallel between the English working classes and
colonized natives—the bulk of the succeeding three volumes of London
Labour seeks to demonstrate that the mobile, but unregulated, working classes
exist outside national life not due to any essential difference from the
English middle classes, but due to ignorance on the part of the poor. Accord-
ing to imperialist logic, racial difference is a greater disqualification from
citizenship than miseducation (skin color cannot be changed, but ignorance
can be rectified). Accordingly, Mayhew replaces racial difference with edu-
cational lack to suggest the solution to the problem he exposes: middle-class
education and regulation of the poor will enable the incorporation of the
latter group into the life of the nation and empire. The supposed fact that
working-class disengagement from national and imperial affairs is the result
of ignorance is revealed by the often-amusing answers Mayhew receives to
the (unrecorded) questions, regarding politics and geography, that he asks
his interviewees. For instance, Mayhew reports on his interview with a
mudlark (a Thames-side scavenger), “London was England, and England,
he said, was in London, but he couldn’t tell in what part. . . . Such was the
amount of intelligence manifested by this unfortunate child” (LL 2:156). In
other answers that Mayhew cites, such ignorance of national affairs is shown
to be anything but harmless. An older interviewee, a crippled street-seller of
birds, displays the same ignorance as the mudlark, with the addition of a
defiant, unpatriotic apathy: “it’s nothing to me who’s king or who’s queen. It

can never have anything to do with me. It don’t take my attention” (LL 2:67).
In an 1850 contribution to the Morning Chronicle (which was not included in
London Labour), Mayhew quotes another answer, from a sailor describing
his colleagues, that goes beyond mere apathy to assert an articulate resis-
tance that threatens the military security of the empire: “All the men were
dissatisfied. They didn’t care one jot for their country. Fight against America
if a war broke out! Not they. Would I? No. They don’t impose on sailors in
America.”3
Mayhew’s emphasis on educational lack, and thus on the implicit im-
provability (rather than essential degradation) of the working classes, goes
far to explain his prominent interest in working-class children, the usual sub-
jects of education. His analysis of costermonger boys (hawkers of fruit and
vegetables) typifies Mayhew’s claims:
It is idle to imagine that these lads . . . will not educate themselves in vice,
if we neglect to train them to virtue. . . . If they are not taught by others,
they will form their own characters—developing habits of dissipation,
and educing all the grossest passions of their natures. (LL 1:35–36; em-
phasis mine).
Which “others” should undertake this education of poor children is an

important issue in London Labour. That this role cannot be filled by working-
class parents is emphatic in the text. According to Mayhew, the “class bred to
the streets” are
the natives of the streets—the tribe indigenous to the paving-stones—

imbibing the habits and morals of the gutters almost with their mothers’
milk. To expect that children thus nursed in the lap of the kennel, should
when men not bear the impress of the circumstances amid which they
have been reared, is to expect to find costermongers heroes instead of
ordinary human beings. We might as well blame the various races on the
face of the earth for those several geographical peculiarities of taste, which
constitute their national characteristics. (LL 1:320)
Such moments confirm Christopher Herbert’s claim that Mayhew—

unlike later degeneration theorists such as William Booth, whose work I dis-
cuss in Chapter 4—does not represent the poor in terms of “a low-grade
racial stock biologically predestined for a ‘wandering’ existence.”4 Such a
representation, as Youth of Darkest England is meant to demonstrate, does
not serve the interests of Victorian and Edwardian reformers who seek to
institute hegemonic imperialism and lead different classes to identify with
one another in terms of a shared national and racial heritage. Mayhew’s
racialist comparisons in the passage quoted above have quite different impli-
cations from those in the ethnographic flight of fancy with which London
Labour begins. The very phrase “We might as well” calls attention to the fact
that working-class English children are not equivalent to “various [other]
races,” except insofar as neither group can be blamed for not having been
educated otherwise than it was. That the parents of London street children
are utterly blameworthy is, however, made perfectly clear by the unsubtle
parallelism whereby the working-class mother’s breast, lap, and milk equal
(respectively) a “gutter,” a “kennel,” and degraded “habits and morals.”
Employing still another natural metaphor, Mayhew argues for the im-
portance of middle-class intervention to reverse the effects of such a delete-
rious upbringing:
even as the seed of the apple returns, unless grafted, to its original crab, so
does the child, without training, go back to its parent stock—the vaga-
bond savage. For the bred and born street-seller, who inherits a barrow as
some do coronets, to be other than he is—it has here been repeatedly
enunciated—is no fault of his but of ours, who could and yet will not
move to make him otherwise. (LL 1:320)
The gardening metaphor clearly implies that the tendency of the London
poor to vagabondage, however “natural” and thus (at least in the case of
children) blameless, should be averted by “grafting” middle-class values onto
the working-class child: Mayhew thus anticipates one of the central goals of
hegemonic imperialism, which is the subject of subsequent chapters. More-
over, the fact that the coster children “partake of the natural evil of human
nature is not their fault but ours,—who would be like them if we had not been
taught by others better than ourselves to controul the bad and cherish the
good principles of our hearts” (LL 1:213). Mayhew here asserts that the moral
education that the middle-class “we” has received should be provided to
working-class children, and the “gardener” on whom London Labour calls to
perform this work is the collective “we” constituted by Mayhew and his
middle-class readers.
If “culpability cannot be imputed to them [poor children] at the com-
mencement of their course of life” because they “have been either untaught,
mistaught, maltreated, neglected, regularly trained to vice, or fairly turned
into the streets to shift for themselves,” then the “censure . . . is attributable
to parents, or those who should fill the place of parents—the State, or society”
(LL 1:468). It could perhaps go without saying that in Victorian Britain—and
certainly before the Second Reform Act (1867), which for the first time in-
cluded many working-class men in the electorate—”the State, or society” is
an exclusively middle-class entity, although Mayhew says so quite clearly in
the preface to London Labour:
My earnest hope is that the book may serve to give the rich a more inti-
mate knowledge . . . of the poor—that it may teach those who are beyond
temptation to look with charity on the frailties of their less fortunate breth-
ren—and cause those who are in “high places,” and those of whom much
is expected, to bestir themselves to improve the condition of a class of
people whose misery, ignorance, and vice, amidst all the immense wealth
and great knowledge of “the first city in the world,” is, to say the very
least, a national disgrace to us. (LL 1:xvi)
If “the State, or society”—here constituted by “the rich” and “those

who are in ‘high places’” politically—are “beyond temptation,” it is only
because when young they have “been taught by others better than” them—
presumably middle-class parents or the educators who stand in their place—
”to controul the bad and cherish the good principles of our hearts.” That is,
Mayhew calls for the middle classes as a whole to occupy the same relation
to the poor that middle-class parents or teachers do to their children or stu-
dents.
Given his condemnation of working-class parents, it may seem that
Mayhew only argues for the educability of working-class children. But one
of the most consistent features of London Labour is the way in which it
figuratively represents the entire working-class population, adults and chil-
dren, as juvenile. Praising Old Sarah, a blind street musician, Mayhew notes
that her “love of truth, and the extreme simplicity of her nature, were almost
childlike” (LL 3:159). Additionally, a crossing-sweeper,
although a middle-aged man, had all the appearance of a boy . . . his man-
ners and habits were as simple in their character as those of a child; and he
spoke of his father’s being angry with him for not getting up before, as if
he were a little boy talking of his nurse. (LL 2:488–89)
In turn, Mayhew describes his interview with a fourteen-year-old cross-

ing-sweeper thus: “each time she was asked a question she frowned, like a
baby in its sleep, while thinking of the answer” (LL 2:506). Mayhew is gen-
erally quite scrupulous in reporting the age of his interviewees, but his meta-
phors regress each age to a younger stage: the elderly working class (Old
Sarah) is “almost childlike”; the middle-aged working class (the male cross-
ing-sweeper) is like “a child” or a “little boy”; and the adolescent working
class (the female crossing-sweeper) is “like a baby.” In a more grittily realis-
tic vein, London Labour often notes that the children of the poor experience
the same privations as their working-class elders—that, as a parent who
“couldn’t live if it wasn’t for the labour of our children” tells Mayhew, “it
makes ’em—poor little things!—old people long afore they are growed up”
(LL 2:314). Thus, in a particularly poignant scene, Mayhew interviews a “little
watercress girl” who
although only eight years of age, had entirely lost all childish ways, and
was, indeed, in thoughts and manner, a woman. There was something
cruelly pathetic in hearing this infant, so young that her features had
scarcely formed themselves, talking of the bitterest struggles of life, with
the calm earnestness of one who had endured them all. I did not know
how to talk with her. At first I treated her as a child, speaking on childish
subjects . . . I asked her about her toys and her games with her compan-
ions; but the look of amazement that answered me soon put an end to any
attempt at fun on my part. (LL 1:151)
Although the spectacle of the prematurely aged working-class child

might seem to contradict the notion that Mayhew’s text represents the poor,
as a group, in juvenile terms, what is “cruelly pathetic” about the watercress
girl is the precocity of her ways, thoughts, and manner—just as, conversely,
what is admirable about Old Sarah is her childlike nature.5 Moreover, the
depiction of the watercress girl is consistent with the procedure, described
above, whereby working-class people of various ages are represented as
maturing along a scale that never develops beyond mature-but-juvenile: if
the fourteen-year-old female crossing sweeper is “like a baby,” it follows
that an eight-year-old watercress girl should resemble a recently born “infant”
whose “features had scarcely formed themselves.”
In this way, throughout London Labour Mayhew represents the work-
ing classes, both children and adults, as juvenile in relation to the middle
classes. As was the case with his use of racialist metaphors, Mayhew’s repre-
sentation of the working classes as juvenile can seem contradictory. Thus, he
takes philanthropists to task6 for their “overweening disposition to play the
part of ped-agogues (I use the word in its literal sense) to the poor,” which
“proceeds rather from a love of power than from a sincere regard for the
people” (LL 2:264). Refusing to play at being a “pedagogue” for the poor in
the literal sense—trainer (from Latin agōgus) of boys (from Latin pæd)—
does not, however, prevent the middle classes from taking, relative to a
working-class population represented as juvenile, a pedagogical role in the
more figurative and generalized sense—guiding the poor in the attainment of
middle-class values. Even if there “is but one way of benefiting the poor,
viz., by developing their powers of self-reliance, and certainly not in treating
them like children” (LL 2:264), Mayhew has already gone to great lengths to
show that the poor who exist only by preying on the middle classes have
undeveloped “powers of self-reliance.” This apparently contradictory
passage concludes with the unambiguously paternalistic observation, “Let
the rich become the advisers and assistants of the poor, giving them the ben-
efit of their superior education . . . but leaving the people to act for them-
selves” (LL 2:264). Although the italicized phrase reinforces the dearly held
middle-class belief in self-help (and this group’s horror of the charity that
supposedly turns the poor into habitual beggars), the self-effacing descrip-
tion of the middle classes as “assistants of the poor” hardly covers over the
power differential implied in noting that the poor need middle-class
“advisers.”
Throughout London Labour, Mayhew employs a representational tactic that

reinforces this power differential between the poor and their “advisers”: the
middle-class subject is depicted in terms of vision and the working classes,
the object of this vision, are depicted in terms of embodiment. Mayhew
employs this representational tactic for an ideologically potent purpose—to
define the limit beyond which the liberalism of his text will not pass.
That is, although Mayhew resists depictions of the poor as essentially differ-
ent from the middle classes, and although his shift from racialist discourse to
metaphors of educational lack suggests the desirability of incorporating the
working classes into national and imperial enterprises, the text does not al-
low itself to imagine the implied conclusion to this developmental narra-
tive—the point at which the poor, no longer requiring the regulatory guidance
of their “betters,” would achieve independence from and equality to the pa-
rental class in relation to which they previously stood as juveniles. London
Labour goes to great lengths to represent the middle classes as possessing a
well-regulated visual power that is definitive of full political subjectivity and
that is wielded over a physically embodied working-class population
unendowed with either that power or the subjectivity it implies.
Mayhew perhaps most strikingly indicates that the middle classes
possess a visual power that the poor lack by noting the former group’s ability
and the latter group’s failure properly to observe London. Ironically, the
London poor actually know little about the very streets with which they are
so thoroughly identified throughout Mayhew’s text. Summarizing his inter-
view with the watercress girl, Mayhew laments, “All her knowledge seemed
to begin and end with watercresses, and what they fetched. She knew no
more of London than that part she had seen on her rounds” (LL 1:151). And
this defect applies to the “street-folk” more generally: “Among other classes
of street-sellers I have had to remark the little observation they extended to
the changes all around, such as the extension of street-traffic to miles and
miles of suburbs” (LL 2:65). In a discussion of such changes in “street-
traffic”—omnibus conveyance, specifically—Mayhew notes that the typical
middle-class “dweller in the Strand” sees more of omnibus conveyance than
the watercress girl, although less than Mayhew himself: the typical middle-
class person “can only form a partial notion of the magnitude of this mode of
transit, for he has but a partial view if it; he sees, as it were, only one of its
details” (LL 3:336). This remark is then followed by ten pages of the details
that Mayhew has observed—details regarding the dozens of principal omni-
bus routes, number of omnibuses travelling the London streets, number of
passengers the average omnibus carries, average distance travelled by an
omnibus, the history of the first omnibus proprietor and his competitors, and,
of course, numerous interviews with omnibus drivers, conductors, and time-
keepers. In this way, Mayhew constructs a scale by which to measure a
Londoner’s visual power as urban observer, a scale in which the poor street-
sellers see and know little of the city in which they live; the middle-class
Londoner with a fashionable address has a “partial view,” and the author of
London Labour possesses voluminous knowledge. The logic of Mayhew’s
massive classificatory enterprise presumes that the dweller in the Strand, or
any other middle-class reader, can gain knowledge similar to Mayhew’s by
following, as an armchair explorer of the city, his writings. This possibility is
of course denied to many street-sellers as a result of their poverty, if not
illiteracy.7
Mayhew’s depiction of the working classes as deprived of visual power,
like his depiction of them as a juvenile group, moves freely between figura-
tive and literal expression. Although, as Mayhew observes, the “blind—the
cripple—the maimed—the very old—the very young—all have generally
adopted a street-life, because they could do nothing else” (LL 1:322–23), it is
nevertheless striking how frequently the representatives of the working classes
on whom he chooses to focus are either literally deprived of vision, disabled
such that their physical embodiment is spectacularly evident, or both.
Moreover, even when describing healthy working-class interviewees, Mayhew
is obsessively attentive to their eyes, which he almost uniformly figures as
indicating a lack of visual acuity: one of his earliest interviewees has “a heavy
cast of countenance, his light blue eyes having little expression” (LL 1:22), a
street-seller of tape and cotton has “gray glassy eyes” (LL 1:386), a
costermonger lad’s “two heavy lead-coloured eyes stared unmeaningly at”
Mayhew (LL 1:39), an Irish laborer’s “two small eyes stared . . . without the
least expression even of consciousness” (LL 1:111). Mayhew usually
accompanies contrasting examples of sharp-sighted laborers with a moralistic
qualifier, such that visual acuity in the wandering poor appears to be both
unusual and, where it exists, a sign of duplicitous or predatory tendencies.
Thus, a girl “with bright sparkling eyes” turns out to be unremarkable—
“unless, indeed, it were in the possession of the quality of cunning” (LL 1:477–
78). Similarly, sewer-hunters are—in exact contrast to Mayhew—“not a class
competent to describe what they saw” in the underground labyrinth, “how-
ever keen-eyed” they may be in the hunt for “silver spoons” (LL 2:394) lost
down the drains of middle-class houses.
Indeed, Mayhew notes, one sewerman’s eyes “have assumed a peering

kind of look, that is quite rat-like in its furtiveness” (LL 3:20). Christopher
Herbert argues that comparison of the wandering poor who inhabit the urban
“underworld” to swarming sewer rats, which is a common trope in Mayhew’s
work, reinforces a link between the working classes and “animal nature”8—
or, to put it another way, between the poor and the drives of the body rather
than the operation of intellect, which Mayhew associates with the middle
classes. Thus Mayhew remarks at the beginning of London Labour, “a more
ample extension of the organs subservient to sensation and the animal
faculties . . . is adapted to the wandering tribes; whereas . . . a greater ex-
pansion of the brain, and consequently of the intellectual faculties—is espe-
cially adapted to the civilized races or settlers” (LL 1:1). Such “intellectual
faculties” as define the “civilized” middle classes, in Mayhew’s text (as in
Western culture much more generally), are often figured in terms of vision.
Thus, the “costermongers, like all wandering tribes, have generally no fore-
sight” (LL 1:56), and, among the failings of the wandering poor, Mayhew
often mentions their “inability to perceive consequences ever so slightly re-
moved from immediate apprehension” (LL 1:2): “Is it possible,” he asks,
“that men who are as much creatures of the present as the beasts of the
field—instinctless animals—should have the least faculty of pre-vision?”
(LL 1:101). As such animalistic tropes suggest, the unregulated wandering of
the poor not only testifies to their lack of the intellectual and visionary pow-
ers that define middle-class subjects such as Mayhew and his readers; such
wandering also renders the poor thoroughly embodied entities. “Mind, heart,
soul, are all absorbed in the belly” in “the struggle to live—aye! and to live
merely” (LL 1:43), Mayhew remarks with a Carlylean flourish. In the same
vein, he later describes improving the lot of the costermongers as a mat-
ter of filling “the empty bellies of their brains” (LL 1:321). Indeed, in con-
siderations of street entertainers (under the headings “The Street-Artists”
and “Street-Exhibitors”), Mayhew observes the labors of a “Writer without
Hands” (LL 3:213) and a “Blind Reader” (LL 3:154). These grotesque street
spectacles none too subtly distinguish the poor, in terms of their embodi-
ment and blindness, from the middle-class writer and readers of London
Labour.
An important qualification is necessary here. Mayhew is no Grad-
grindian utilitarian, seeing the working classes only as so many “hands” to
be assigned their proper places in the nation’s manufactory. The multiplicity
of references to working-class embodiment and defects of vision, over the
course of some fifteen hundred pages, do, however, constitute a theory of
class difference in which unregulated mobility involves a physical embodi-
ment that is de facto a disqualification from political subjectivity defined in
terms of vision.9 Describing the impact of London Labour, Mayhew’s friend
Charles Mackay, subeditor of the Morning Chronicle, uses terms that suggest
the overall project of the book is the formulation of precisely such a theory of
class difference:
It was, in one sense, as if a mighty microscope were applied to the festers,

social sores, and diseases of humanity; and in another, as if some unparal-
leled photographic apparatus was brought to portray fresh from the life
the very minds, rather than the bodies, of the people.10
Described as a microscope and a camera, Mayhew’s writings are com-

pared to (indeed, being “mighty” and “unparalleled,” they seem to exceed
the abilities of) what were, in the nineteenth century, the most powerful tech-
nologies for the refinement of middle-class vision. Although the final clause
claims that Mayhew pictures working-class minds rather than focusing on
their bodies, the photographic imagery itself deflates this fantastical notion:
a camera can, of course, only record the existence of physical bodies. More-
over, although the microscope is an instrument that seemingly enables one to
see the invisible, Mackay explicitly states that Mayhew’s microscopic vision
reveals “festers,” “sores,” and “diseases”—images that contradict his asser-
tion that the “minds” and not the “bodies” of the people are being studied. It
is perhaps needless to add that these physical manifestations are not identi-
fied with the middle classes but with the outcast poor.
Indeed, what appears to be the most progressive feature of London
Labour—the interview structure that allows the poor to represent them-
selves—in fact enables Mayhew to reinforce the veracity of his own depiction
of working-class embodiment and lack of vision by presenting this depiction
as one offered by his interviewees themselves. In a particularly striking en-
counter, a street-photographer who supports himself by selling inferior por-
traits to East Enders declares of his customers, “People won’t use their eyes”
(LL 3:207):
If the eyes in a portrait are not seen, and they complain, we take a pin and
dot them; and that brings the eye out, and they like it. . . . The fact is,
people don’t know their own faces. Half of ’em have never looked in a
glass half a dozen times in their life, and directly they see a pair of eyes
and a nose, they fancy they are their own. (LL 3:208–209)
Significantly, while they are having their photographs taken—a lengthy

process in the mid-nineteenth century—the working poor must be immo-
bile. The scene in the East End “photographic saloon” represented in Figure
1 not only freezes in time the moment at which the portrait is taken, but
arrests several members of the urban poor in their wandering: in addition to
the woman and child, the photographer’s assistant is (from the perspective of
F igur
iguree 1 “Photographic Saloon, East End of London.” From Henry Mayhew, London Labour
the viewer of the illustration) himself contained within the white square that
will form the background in the photograph, and two onlookers (who, inci-
dentally, are placed such that they cannot see what is obviously the object of
their interest, the shooting of the picture) are trapped within door and win-
dow frames. Not only does the depiction of events in the illustration seem to
achieve the goal of Mayhew’s text (the fixing of the wandering poor), but the
photographer’s own description of his trade testifies to his customers’ lack of
vision, renders them an undifferentiated, embodied mass, and reveals their
inability to see themselves as individuals. Indeed, the occasional sharp-sighted
customers who complain about the infidelity with which they are represented
are metaphorically blinded—their eyes are dotted with a pin or brought out,
“and they like it.”
Mayhew later suggests that he uses a technology of representation
metaphorically parallel to that employed by the East End “photographic man”:
London Labour “stands alone as a photograph of life as actually spent by the
lower classes of the Metropolis,” one that can provide “all possible infor-
mation that can prove interesting to the moralist, the philanthropist, and the
statist, as well as to the general public” (LL 4:v). To be sure, Mayhew dis-
tinguishes his writing from the street vendor’s photographs by insisting that
London Labour constitutes a technology of representation that is more
thorough, accurate, and valuable due to the superior vision that he and his
readers share. The difference is ironically suggested by one of the street-
photographer’s more amusing dodges: “People seem to think the camera will
do anything. We actually persuade them that it will mesmerise them. After
their portrait is taken, we ask them if they would like to be mesmerised by
the camera, and the charge is only 2d ” (LL 3:209). As anyone who has read
the entirety of London Labour and the London Poor can testify, Mayhew’s
writing—whatever else it may be—is not what one would call mesmerizing.
It should not pass unnoticed that the photographer’s statements also tes-
tify to a lack of working-class consciousness among the visionless, embod-
ied mass that he and Mayhew, in their different ways, depict.11 Here, as so
often in London Labour, the victims of the various cheats perpetrated by the
working classes are themselves working-class people. Like the photogra-
pher, a vendor of eyeglasses whose “spectacles are sold principally to work-
ing men” boasts:
I’ve persuaded them in spite of their eyes that they wanted glasses. I knew
a man who used to brag that he could talk people blind, and then they
bought! . . . I think perhaps I sold as many because people thought they
looked better, or more knowing in them. (LL 1:444)
By selling his reportage to middle-class readers, Mayhew seeks to ex-

pand their knowledge and thus refine their vision of the poor—unlike the
working-class vendor of spectacles, who in effect peddles blindness to work-
ers with good eyesight. If Mayhew implies the desirability of a better-
educated working-class population that can be incorporated into the life of
the nation and empire, he nevertheless also implies that visual power and
authoritative representation lie with the middle-class writer and reader.
In London Labour, the middle-class observer of the metropolis is repre-

sented not only by the implied reader of the text, but also, most obviously, by
Mayhew himself. Mayhew depicts himself as possessing the qualification
that distinguishes the middle-class urban observer from the wandering poor:
a considerable visual power, and an ability to move through the metropolis
that is controlled by a well-regulated itinerary that always locates him in a
particular place. It is tempting to see in London Labour, as Christopher
Herbert does, a self-representation of its author as himself a wanderer who
seems “increasingly to reflect an awareness that in his own professional work
he too was expressly a scavenger,” a sort of sociological Henry Jekyll or
Dorian Gray who goes “out at night to haunt the world of criminality—and
who finds at last that his identity has been permanently compromised by this
experiment.”12 Yet, London Labour repeatedly insists that Mayhew is not
merely wandering the metropolis but executing a regimented inquiry that
proceeds in proper fashion from one strategic location to another. Mayhew’s
operations represent what Jonathan Crary calls the “techniques of the ob-
server,” the optical activities that simultaneously enabled “a freeing up of
vision” and instituted “a plurality of means to recode the activity of the eye,
to regiment it.”13 However ambitious Mayhew’s goal to comprehend the en-
tire metropolis, London Labour reveals Mayhew to be an observer as defined
by Crary: a powerful visual subject who nevertheless “sees within a pre-
scribed set of possibilities . . . and limitations” by actively “observing rules,
codes, regulations, and practices.”14 Possessing neither the absolute efficacy
of the panoptic gaze analyzed by Michel Foucault nor the freedom of the
lounging flâneur as described by Walter Benjamin,15 Mayhew aspires instead
to regulate his own movements within the city by means of his project, the
attempt to catalog every possible detail relating to the restless street people
he observes.
Mayhew’s text does at times seem, as Christopher Herbert declares,
“extravagant, anarchic . . . a victim of anomic boundlessness in research.”16
The macroscopic disorder of the work, of course, results in part from the fact
that London Labour is comprised of cobbled-together weekly installments
(themselves often revised versions of daily newspaper columns), which no
doubt did not seem “next to unreadable”17 when consumed in small bits. At
the microscopic level of textual organization, however, Mayhew insistently
makes certain we know where he is and where he is going next. For instance,
in the study of London street-traffic discussed above, Mayhew concludes the
report on omnibus conveyance thus: “I have now described the earnings and
conditions of the drivers and conductors of the London omnibuses, and I
proceed, in due order, to treat of the Metropolitan Hackney-coach and
Cabmen” (LL 3:347). Moreover, although Mayhew clearly represents him-
self as having spent much more time than the average middle-class subject in
walking the London streets, this ability to navigate the metropolis is depen-
dent on Mayhew’s possession of a proper domestic location within the city.
Thus, the conclusion of the third volume of London Labour—the last for
which Mayhew was primarily responsible—includes a significant, if brief,
mention of his home life, in a speech he delivers to a group of ex-convict
interviewees: “I have had many of you in my house with my wife and chil-
dren, and to your honour and credit be it said, you never wronged me of the
smallest article, and, moreover, I never heard a coarse word escape your lips”
(LL 3:430). However physically mobile Mayhew appears, his mobility is
constrained by his settled location as a metropolitan subject: he possesses a
proper middle-class home life that he presumably departs from and returns
to each day (indeed, the presence of ex-convict interviewees in his home,

rather than being an alarming image, comfortingly associates Mayhew’s
researches on street-life with the domestic security of wife and children). In
this way, London Labour confirms Michel de Certeau’s definition of the ur-
ban “subject of will and power” as requiring a strategic location that—“iso-
lated from an ‘environment’” and “circumscribed as proper”—can “thus
serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from” that
subject and its location.18 Mayhew’s actions as an urban observer depend
upon his ability to distinguish himself from, and retain representational power
over, the vagabonds, convicts, and similar groups whom he observes. This
ability and power are enabled by the very fact of the circumscriptions
Mayhew places on his own mobility, such as the discipline imposed by his
classificatory obsessions and the middle-class respectability signified by his
domestic life.
Mayhew’s mention of his home life serves as a self-empowering contrast
to his insistence on the street people’s rejection of domesticity. As he asserts
at the very beginning of his text (and as he often reminds the reader), “Home
has few attractions to a man whose life is a street-life” (LL 1:11). Moreover,
Mayhew represents the wanderlust of the poor as an inability to tolerate any
circumscriptions on their roving, not merely domestic ones:
The innate “love of a roving life” . . . appears to be accompanied

by . . . hatred of the least restraint or controul—an innate aversion to ev-
ery species of law or government, whether political, moral, or
domestic . . . an incapability of continuous labour, or remaining long in
the same place occupied with the same object, or attending to the same
subject. (LL 1:214)
By refusing all “law or government,” the roving street-person gives up

all claim to citizenship and to the possibility of becoming (as Certeau puts it)
a “subject of will and power.” Mayhew reinforces the difference between the
work of the circumscribed observer who composes London Labour and the
unproductive, because unregulated, wanderings of the people he observes.
Unlike Mayhew—who could hardly be described as incapable of “attending
to the same subject”—street “boys hate any continuous work,” and so “strong
is this objection to continuity that they . . . must be perpetually on the move”
(LL 1:36). Similarly, after
a girl has once grown accustomed to a street-life, it is almost impossible

to wean her from it. The muscular irritability begotten by continued wan-
dering makes her unable to rest for any time in one place, and she soon, if
put to any settled occupation, gets to crave for the severe exercise she
formerly enjoyed. (LL 1:44)
Here Mayhew reiterates the juvenile origins of such wandering ten-

dencies and the blameworthiness of working-class parents (“wean” implies
that such tendencies begin in childhood and, indeed, are sucked in with
mothers’ milk), as well as the remorseless embodiment of the working classes
(what is a matter of desire is discussed in physiological terms, as “muscular
irritability”). Moreover, he unsubtly indicates that—were such boys and girls
to be reclaimed, by means of middle-class intervention, for participation in
the life of the imperial nation—the appropriate form of such participation is
that for which their class status apparently destines them: a “settled occupa-
tion” made up of “continuous work.”
Although London Labour is long on “objective” reportage and short on
reformist suggestion, Mayhew treats in some detail a scheme to discipline
the unregulated mobility of the poor: the “street-orderly” system established
by Charles Cochrane, the president of the National Philanthropic Associa-
tion.19 Mayhew quotes from a report of the association—which report de-
scribes the work of the street-orderlies, a body of organized scavengers—as
follows:
they have merely, after each morning’s sweeping and removal of dirt, to
keep a vigilant look-out over the surface of street allotted to them; and to
remove with the hand-brush and dust-pan, from any particular spot, what-
ever dirt or rubbish may fall upon it, at the moment of its deposit. Thus are
the streets under their care kept constantly clean. (LL 2:260)
On the one hand, the report implies that this labor is far less onerous
than the various (and often quite vile) forms of unregulated scavenging (the
collection of dog-droppings and the hunting for valuables in sewers, for ex-
ample) that Mayhew describes at such scatological length in the second vol-
ume of London Labour: the street-orderlies “have merely” to sweep up small
amounts of dirt. On the other hand, the disciplinary alternative to the unregu-
lated mobility of the scavenging poor could hardly be clearer: confinement
to a particular spot, instead of wandering the parks or sewers. Moreover,
although the report suggests that such limitation of mobility confers a degree
of visual power on even the working-class citydweller, the “vigilant look-
out” that the street-orderly thus maintains is directed not only at the dirt of
the streets but at the as yet undisciplined wanderers among his or her own
class.20 According to the report, the street-orderly
is also the watchman of house-property and shop-goods . . . the experienced

observer and detector of pickpockets; the ever ready, though unpaid, aux-
iliary to the police constable … If strangers are at fault as to the localities
of London . . . the orderly, in a civil and respectful manner, directs them
on their way. If habitual or professional mendicants are importunate or
troublesome, the street-orderly warns them off; or hands them to the care
of the policeman. (LL 2:260)
Evidently, then, the service the laborer can perform in the imperial na-
tion is that of the “watchman” protecting the property of the wealthy, the
cheerful guide to tourists in whose tracks he or she cannot follow, the unofficial
police-constable who identifies with middle-class interests so thoroughly
(“ever ready, though unpaid”) as to aid in the incarceration of his or her class
equals. Finally, such visible location in a tightly circumscribed bit of the
metropolis, although it might seem to offer the street-orderly a degree of the
legitimate visual power possessed by the police, is, in fact, a means of polic-
ing the street-orderlies themselves, who seem always on the verge of suc-
cumbing to the dislike of continuous labor that is, according to Mayhew,
“innate” in the wandering poor. As Mayhew approvingly notes in his com-
ments on the report, the “street-orderlies are confined to their beats as strictly
as are policeman [sic], and as they soon become known to the inhabitants, it
is a means of checking any disposition to loiter, or to shirk the work” (LL
2:261) on the part of the street-orderlies themselves.21
In this way, conferring a degree (even a minimal one) of metropolitan
subjectivity on the working classes is a means of increasing the disciplinary
regulation of them, a fact that is rendered with particular clarity in the illus-
tration that accompanies the discussion of the street-orderly system (Figure
2). This illustration depicts the street-orderlies as a regimented line of soldier-
F igur
iguree 2 “Street Orderlies.” From Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol.
2 (1861).
scavengers—holding brooms as the weapons with which they wage their war
on dirt, and being inspected by a middle-class officer. In addition, the organi-
zation of the illustration in terms of Renaissance perspective identifies the
street-orderlies with, and fixes them within, the street architecture.22 The
buildings and lamp posts radiate from the vanishing point as do the two sets
of street-orderlies (the flank on the left, standing at attention, and the three
figures on the right, busily at work collecting rubbish), all of whom are con-
tained by the location in which they labor. This visual depiction is quite dif-
ferent from the bulk of the hundred-odd illustrations that appear in London
Labour, of which the picture of the London scavenger (Figure 3) is typical.
F igur
iguree 3 “The London Scavenger.” From Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London
Poor, vol. 2 (1861).
Here, as in most of the engravings in the book, the working-class body is

attached to the streets it wanders but is not fixed in an urban location ren-
dered in any detail. More often than not, in the illustrations to London
Labour, the London poor appear to be isolated bodies floating in white space,
only tenuously attached to the spot by a few black lines, while—as in the
picture of the dustman (Figure 4)—the location in question, always about to
be abandoned by the wandering poor, seems merely a hazy background on
the verge of dissolving.
F igur
iguree 4 “The London Dustman. Dust Hoi! Dust Hoi!” From Henry Mayhew, London Labour
Although, page by page, London Labour focuses on England’s domestic

front, Mayhew’s text confirms one of the larger arguments of Youth of Dark-
est England: in the later nineteenth century and the early twentieth, such
representations of the English working classes, and especially the children of
the poor, are usually bound up with imperialist discourse. It might seem strange
that, for a book of its length published when it was, London Labour seldom
mentions the British Empire. Imperialist discourse is present, however, in
the martial ordering of the street-orderlies as a means of regulating suppos-
edly disorderly working-class young people. This depiction anticipates later,
explicitly imperialist, plots for the militarist training of working-class youth—
such as the Salvation Army social reform scheme and the Boy Scout orga-
nization, on which I focus in Chapters 4 and 5, respectively. However,
even though it seems exclusively concerned with domestic politics, London
Labour (like the social-imperialist texts on which later chapters of Youth of
Darkest England focus) does in fact recommend using the colonies as a par-
tial solution to the problem of the unregulated mobility of the working
classes. Among the “indirect modes of remedying low wages” and, thus,
alleviating poverty in London, Mayhew mentions “Emigration; as a means
of draining off the surplus labourers” (LL 2:255). Although Eileen Yeo com-
ments that Mayhew was dubious of “facile pronouncements about over-popu-
lation and repugnant nostrums like emigration,”23 in a number of places
London Labour subtly suggests that emigration to the colonies would work a
positive transformation of working-class mobility. Whereas the vagrant “wan-
ders through the country without an object, or, indeed, a destination” (LL
3:370), emigration supplies a colonialist objective as well as a colonial des-
tination, and, thus, transforms the wandering vagrant into an emigrant travel-
ler whose movements are often organized by the state and benefit, rather
than endanger, England and the empire. Mayhew notes that the “vagrant dis-
positions and tastes of lads, and, it may be, now and then somewhat of a
reckless spirit of adventure, which in our days has far fewer fields than it
once had, is another cause why a street-life is embraced” (LL 1:470). Linking
vagrancy with the “spirit of adventure” rhetorically suggests that the lurking
street child of middle-class fear or disgust could be transformed into the
plucky lad of boys’ adventure fiction. Moreover, Mayhew includes numer-
ous statements in which working-class interviewees themselves assert their
desire to be “drained off” into the colonies—statements that, like the one
from the photographic man, are allowed to stand without comment from
Mayhew. A “young woman 20 years of age” (LL 3:402) informs him, “I
would like best to go to Australia, where no-body would know me. I’m sure
I could behave myself there” (LL 3:403). Significantly, this observation, which
concludes the woman’s interview, appears under the heading “Routes of
the Vagrants.” Although the section is nominally concerned with the peram-
bulations of vagrants within England, the positioning of the young woman’s
comment about emigration suggests that, in this case, the best route for a
vagrant to take is one that leads to Australia. Indeed, Mayhew’s interviewees
suggest that emigration is desirable even in the form of penal transportation.
As another vagrant observes, “I should like to have a look at some foreign
land. Old England has nothing new in it now for me. . . . if I were transported
I should be better off than I am now” (LL 3:381-82).24
It should be clear by now that Mayhew represents any such positive
redistribution of working-class bodies as one that must be regulated by middle-
class supervision. Mayhew’s basic definition of working and middle classes
in terms of body and vision, which is so prominent in London Labour, is
employed in various forms, and with various ideological inflections, in later
imperialist writings on the working classes. To anticipate briefly the argu-
ments of succeeding chapters of my book, William Booth’s In Darkest En-
gland and the Way Out (1890) imagines the emigration of “surplus labor” as
entirely under the surveillant control of the visionary William Booth—and
the panoptic structure of the Salvation Army scheme might in part explain
why even middle-class readers critiqued it as the fantasy of an egomaniac.
By contrast, Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for In-
struction in Good Citizenship (1908) imagines the organization of working-
class boys in much more egalitarian terms—the very subtitle of
Baden-Powell’s handbook presumes that such boys will become citizens,
even if they need to be told how to be good ones. This rhetorical difference
between Booth’s and Baden-Powell’s schemes might, in part, explain why,
in contrast to the suspicion Booth inspired, middle-class readers found the
Boy Scout organization so attractive and lionized its founder. Mayhew’s text
exists between the two extremes. Like Booth’s, it finds desirable the rigorous
organization of the working classes into units employed in the service of
empire and under the supervision of the middle classes; yet, with its concep-
tion of a middle-class subject whose observational powers are necessarily
circumscribed, London Labour refuses to indulge in the fantasy of middle-
class possession of absolute visual power.25 Thus, in one of his early letters to
the Morning Chronicle, Mayhew describes his view of London from the gal-
lery at the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral with traditional aesthetic terminology
to value positively the fact that he does not possess, as his elevated position
might imply, the panoptic ability to survey the metropolis: “as the vast city
lay there beneath me, half hid in mist and with only glimpses of its greatness
visible, it had a much more sublime and ideal effect from the very inability to
grasp the whole of its literal reality.”26
Predictably, however, London Labour is much less ambivalent when it
addresses the possibility—implicit throughout Mayhew’s developmental nar-
rative—that the English working classes might come to possess even the
circumscribed visual power that the middle-class subject enjoys and might
appropriate this power in order to observe their “betters.” This possibility is

represented in what is perhaps the strangest of the encounters related in Lon-
don Labour, Mayhew’s interview with a maker of eyes for dolls. In this pas-
sage, the dolls are figuratively equated with the working classes, as the
doll’s-eye maker uses the language of “surplus labor” to describe the seasonal
nature of his trade:
After the Christmas holidays up to March we have generally little to do,

but from that time eyes begin to look up a bit . . . Where we make one pair
of eyes for home consumption, we make ten for exportation; a great many
eyes go abroad. Yes, I suppose we should be soon over-populated with
dolls if a great number of them were not to emigrate every year. The an-
nual increase of dolls goes on at an alarming rate. (LL 3:232)
Moreover, as the craftsman notes, many members of the working classes

are literally like the dolls—they (interestingly, for the purpose of deceiving
their employers) have products of his labor placed in their heads: “I also
make human eyes. . . . False eyes are a great charity to servants. If they lose
an eye no one will engage them” (LL 3:232–33). The dolls’ eyes are destined
for bodies that figuratively represent, or literally belong to, members of the
working classes: dolls (a “surplus” population reduced by emigration) and
domestic servants (in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the largest field of
employment for working-class women and a large one for working-class
men).27 When the doll’s-eye maker displays his wares to Mayhew, the text
offers its sole representation of what happens when the middle-class indi-
vidual becomes the object of scrutiny by a disembodied working-class vision:
Here the man took the lids off a couple of boxes, about as big as bin-
nacles, that stood on the table: they each contained 190 different eyes, and
so like nature, that the effect produced upon a person unaccustomed to the
sight was most peculiar, and far from pleasant. The whole of the 380 op-
tics all seemed to be staring directly at the spectator, and occasioned a
feeling somewhat similar to the bewilderment one experiences on sud-
denly becoming an object of general notice; as if the eyes, indeed, of a
whole lecture-room were crammed into a few square inches, and all turned
full upon you. (LL 3:232)
Mayhew the urban observer suddenly becomes an object consumed

by the eyes of a different class: “most peculiar, and far from pleasant.” Al-
though this reversal of the normative class-based distribution of vision and
body is unnerving to Mayhew, the threat posed by this reversal is defused on
several fronts in this eerie passage. First, of course, the eyes that are “so like
nature” are, in fact, artificial and represent no real visual power. Second,
whatever visual power they might figuratively represent is undermined by

the fact that they are, like the ideal working-class population imagined in
London Labour, immobile, fixed in boxes, “crammed into a few square inches.”
Finally, the comparison of those boxes to a “lecture-room” reasserts the ju-
venile position of the poor relative to the middle classes: as any teacher can
surely confirm, having the undivided attention of one’s students reinforces,
rather than detracts from, one’s authority. The momentary apparition of a
powerful working-class vision evaporates, and such power is shown to be
specious—just as the eyes are finally destined for bodies that will be the
servants of middle-class adults and the playthings of middle-class children.
2
Class, Violence, and
Mid-Victorian Penny Fiction
“Murder Made Familiar”?
When François Benjamin Courvoisier confessed, in 1840, to slitting the throat

of his employer Lord William Russell, the murderous valet helped to energize
what has become a long-lasting controversy about class, violence, and the
effects of popular culture, particularly on young people. Critics condemned,
as inciting working-class violence such as Courvoisier’s, texts by William
Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton—the “Newgate novels” that
represented the exciting careers of criminal heroes for consumption by middle-
class readers and, as in Courvoisier’s case, servants who raided their employ-
ers’ libraries. Courvoisier’s crime was inspired, the valet asserted, by his
reading of Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839).1 At least since the 1728 pro-
duction of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, critics had worried that crime
literature influenced criminal behavior; throughout the 1840s, many among
the middle classes—who saw themselves as continually threatened by
working-class political agitation—found persuasive the argument that fic-
tional violence incites real violence. By naming a novel as an accessory to a
real crime, Courvoisier seemed to confirm this argument and gave to discus-
sion about the effects of popular representations of violence an urgency that
it retains in the twenty-first century.2 When Ainsworth’s novel was first pub-
lished, the London Examiner had given it a brief, unfavorable, but not par-
ticularly hostile review.3 Seven days after Courvoisier was sentenced to death,
a front-page editorial in the same paper reminded readers that “he ascribes
his crimes to the perusal of that detestable book, Jack Sheppard.”4 As if to
exculpate itself for not properly warning the public earlier, the Examiner
editorial implies that Ainsworth’s text was previously masquerading as a mere
bad novel and had finally been unmasked as a seditious work: “certainly it is
a publication calculated to familiarise the mind with cruelties, and to serve as
the cut-throat’s manual . . . in which character we now expect to see it adver-
tised.”5
However, the Victorian working classes did not have to settle for raiding
libraries to obtain books they could not afford to buy. The “street people”
whom Mayhew depicts as objects to be regulated by the middle classes had
43
their own literature and their own literate practices, both of which were often
in tension with common notions about the way to manage the working
classes—such as Mayhew’s interest in fixing the mobile poor in urban spaces
subject to middle-class supervision. With increased diligence after the
Courvoisier trial, middle-class critics also condemned the “penny bloods”
that proliferated at mid-century. A generic hybrid of the criminal biography
and the gothic, and popular among working-class readers in the 1840s, the
penny bloods were, due to the class of their audience, seen as even more
dangerous than the Newgate novels.6 By taking advantage of cheap machine-
manufactured paper, speedy rotary steam presses, and a battery of prolific
hack writers, publishers of penny bloods such as Edward Lloyd and G. W. M.
Reynolds instituted a new product (quickly produced novels at an affordable
price) designed for a new market (an increasingly literate working class).7 To
create and maintain demand for their product, Lloyd and his competitors
shrewdly integrated new publishing techniques and proven generic materi-
als. The remarkable success of Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836–
1837) had demonstrated the profitability of continually maintaining reader
interest through serial publication, which, from the first, was the standard of
the penny blood industry. In turn, authors of penny bloods plundered gothic
fiction and the Newgate Calendar for tales of horror and crime, narrative
forms that are especially productive of the suspense that keeps readers buy-
ing. Lurid narratives published serially, the penny bloods were doubly mar-
ketable. Due to their topics and the class of their readers, the penny bloods
were also, according to their opponents, doubly worrisome.
This concern about the reading tastes of the poor is strikingly revealed
in an 1849 Punch cartoon, “Useful Sunday Literature for the Masses; or,
Murder Made Familiar” (Figure 5). The working-class family in their tene-
ment home is clearly not the target audience for Ainsworth’s or Bulwer-
Lytton’s three-volume Newgate novels, nor would they probably—like
Courvoisier, the nobleman’s valet—have had illicit access to such reading.
Yet, they eagerly peruse similar materials via an imaginary penny publica-
tion, The Murder Monger, the gruesome lead story of which enthralls the
family while their Bible lies thrown aside. The illustration implies that such
violent narratives cause consumers, particularly youthful ones, to act vio-
lently, as represented by the dismembered doll on the floor. Moreover, al-
though the story in the paper apparently involves violence between
working-class people (the “wretched murderer,” overdressed but with a tell-
tale “coarse vulgar” appearance, kills his own offspring), the illustration in-
dicates that children who are trained by The Murder Monger may well grow
up to perpetrate violence no longer on their toys and not only on their class
equals but also on middle-class persons. Thus, hanging over the fireplace,
are pictures of the family idols, Courvoisier and James Greenacre—the latter
a worker who was executed in 1837 for murdering, like Courvoisier, his class
Class, Violence, and Mid-Victorian Penny Fiction 45
F igur
iguree 5 “Useful Sunday Literature for the Masses; or, Murder Made Familiar.” From Punch,
vol. 17 (1840).
superior.8 Finally, the cartoon represents the consumption of such penny lit-
erature about violence in terms of the delivery and reception of stories for
young people: parent reading to engrossed children.
So far as I know, penny bloods have never been examined as juvenile
literature (seldom enough as literature).9 However, the fact that working-class
young people constituted a large part of the target audience for penny bloods
is clear from Edward Lloyd’s market-research techniques. According to one
of his hack writers, the Chartist Thomas Frost, Lloyd’s manager had the
following strategy for determining if a given potboiler would sell: “we

sometimes . . . place the manuscript in the hands of an illiterate person—a
servant or machine-boy, for instance. If they pronounce favourably upon it,
we think it will do.”10 (By “illiterate” Frost clearly means “semi-literate.”)
The penny bloods are thus deeply involved in middle-class concerns, articu-
lated with great urgency from the mid-nineteenth century on, regarding the
dangers of working-class literacy and the education of poor urban children.
The next two sections of this chapter will examine these concerns and their
intersection with middle-class fears about class violence, particularly in the
context of Chartist agitation, with which the apparition of the penny bloods
is contemporary. Through a reading of the best-known penny blood, the anony-
mous novel Varney, the Vampyre (1840–1842), the final sections of this chapter
investigate what this representative example of the genre actually tells its
readers—as opposed to the education (“Murder Made Familiar”) that middle-
class critics claimed the penny bloods were offering to working-class young
people. In terms of both its content and form, Varney seeks to forge agreement,
among working-class readers, regarding the value of sustained but moderate
political agitation: the novel repeatedly raises the reader’s interest in violence
and then directs that interest to other matters in order to assert that power is
gained specifically by not carrying out the bloodshed of which one is capable.
Moreover, with its often radical shifts between heterogeneous materials,
Varney operates according to a logic of readerly agitation that parallels the
logic of political agitation advocated by Chartist leaders. This logic of readerly
and political agitation implicitly opposes the representation, in Mayhew’s
London Labour and the London Poor, of the working classes as a thoroughly
embodied group, deprived of intellectual vision, whose mobility must be eradi-
cated by fixing them in spaces under middle-class supervision. The representa-
tion of violence in Varney—raising the audience’s interest in such matters
and then directing it to other narratives—demands a mobility of imagination,
the ability to respond to continually shifting plots involving the novel’s char-
acters; similarly, Chartist discourse requires its audience to envision new
plots for the working-class English. Both Varney and Chartist discourse reject
the notion of an immobilized and embodied working class (the ideal repre-
sented by the street-orderlies in London Labour, for instance) and instead
encourage continual agitation based on working-class intellectual mobility
as the means for this group to envision their attainment of citizenship within
the English nation.
Whereas we are likely to consider universal literacy among children (not to

mention adults) an unambiguous benefit to society, middle-class Victorians
by no means saw such a development as uncontroversial. Even liberal writers

of the period often viewed the education of working-class young people as a
potential danger to the nation. Indeed, Henry Mayhew partly attributes his
bête noir, the propensity to wandering that supposedly characterizes London
street-children, to a literacy unregulated by middle-class values: among the
“causes from which the vagabondism of the young indirectly proceeds
are . . . Bad books, which act like bad companions in depraving the taste, and
teaching the youth to consider that approvable which to all rightly constituted
minds is morally loathsome.”11 Mayhew identifies the Newgate novels as the
“Bad books” in question: his example is “Mr. Ainsworth’s ‘Rookwood’” (LL
3:378), the 1824 romance featuring the highwayman Dick Turpin and the
predecessor to Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard. Mayhew clearly sees such “Bad
books” as leading not only to vagrant mobility but, in turn, to crime: “What
wonder, then, that . . . these poor lads should be . . . fired with the basest
motives and purposes, gathered from books which distort highway robbery
into an act of noble enterprise, and dignify murder as justifiable homicide?”
(LL 3:370). As if in confirmation of this speculation, Mayhew’s later work
The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life, co-authored with
John Binny in 1862, reports on the comments of juvenile ex-convicts thus:
“Numbers avowed that they had been induced to resort to an abandoned course
of life from reading the lives of notorious thieves, and novels about highway
robbers.”12
With the literary characters Jack Sheppard and Dick Turpin as their ex-
emplars, the young readers of crime fiction whom Mayhew and his contem-
poraries view with such anxiety seem to confirm—indeed, revel in—dominant
middle-class notions regarding the criminal tendencies of the “dangerous
classes.” As I will demonstrate below, the reading practices involved in this
working-class youth culture are aligned with the sophisticated political dis-
courses involved in adult working-class radicalism at mid-century, especially
Chartism. But Mayhew does not acknowledge this alignment. In a manner
still typical of arguments that seek to blame juvenile crime on popular cul-
ture, Mayhew represents children as passive receptors who merely react to
fictional violence by imitating it. In his comments on “Bad books,” Mayhew
piles up instances of the passive voice—a poor lad is “fired with the basest
motives” and “induced to resort” to crime—to show that a novel such as
Rookwood causes boys to steal. By contrast, the information provided by
Mayhew’s youthful interviewees reveals that their interaction with popular
culture often involves a high degree of agency, the intentional forging of
cohesion among a group mutually identified in terms of generation and class.
As Mayhew writes, without noting the contradiction, those “who could not
read themselves, said that ‘Jack Sheppard’ was read out to them at the lodging-
houses.”13 Those youths who can read take artistic control over the literature
they enjoy: they not only read Jack Sheppard (or read it aloud to friends) but
also retell it and thus act as authorial figures who can rewrite, to suit them-
selves, the works of middle-class literary men such as William Harrison
Ainsworth and Lord Lytton. As a boy in a workhouse claims, “I’ve read ‘Jack
Sheppard’ through, in three volumes; and I used to tell stories out of that
sometimes” (LL 3:391).14 In such statements one can also hear Mayhew’s
interviewees expressing what Dick Hebdige defines as a central characteristic
of youth subcultures, “a fundamental tension between those in power and
those condemned to subordinate positions and second-class lives.”15 Forced
by their poverty and youthful vulnerability to congregate in cheap lodging
houses, the children Mayhew interviews revel in recreational practices that
rhyme, unsurprisingly, with their outcast social status.16 However, the primary
burden of texts by Mayhew and his like-minded contemporaries is the elabo-
ration of a sociological argument proving that popular culture causes crime
and violence. Thus in “Thieves and Swindlers,” his contribution to the fourth
volume of London Labour, John Binny employs the Mayhewesque tactic
whereby middle-class presuppositions are apparently confirmed by quoting
working-class interviewees. In this case, a young man “about sixteen years
of age” comments on how dramatizations of Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard affect
working-class young people:
A young man . . . who had in former years been a playmate . . . requested

me to go to one of the theatres with him, when Jack Sheppard was again
performed. We were both remarkably pleased with the play, and soon af-
ter determined to try our hand at housebreaking. (LL 4:347)
Like the Newgate novel, the penny bloods of Edward Lloyd and G. W.
M. Reynolds figure in Mayhew’s examination of working-class literacy and
its dangers. A newsvendor informs Mayhew, “I sell Lloyd’s and Reynolds’s
pennies—fairish, both of them” (LL 1:291), and an interviewee “who was in
the habit of reading to” costermongers declares that “Reynolds is the most
popular man among them” (LL 1:25). The fact that, in addition to Lloyd, the
most popular producer of penny bloods was Reynolds—a prominent
socialist—was hardly likely to seem salubrious to Mayhew or his readers.17
Indeed, the moral outrage visited on the penny bloods has much to do with
the fact that they were not only considered a source of isolated acts of crime
and violence but were associated with political radicalism and, thus, were
regarded as a threat to the middle classes as a whole. At their most nakedly
reactionary, middle-class writers such as Mayhew and his collaborators worry
that working-class literacy itself leads to radicalism and a destablization of
normative class relations. In “Prostitution in London,” his contribution to the
fourth volume of London Labour, Bracebridge Hemyng interviews a prostitute
who addresses to him the following speech: “Birth is the result of accident. It
is the merest chance in the world whether you’re born a countess or a
washerwoman. . . . You look rather surprised at my talking so well. . . . It’s

what old Robert Owen would call the spread of education” (LL 4:256).
Hemyng glosses the woman’s speech thus: “her arguments, though based
upon fallacy, were exceedingly clever and well put. So much for the spread
of education amongst the masses. Who knows to what it will lead?” (LL
4:256). Moreover, the bond between cheap crime literature and revolutionary
attitudes and events is implied in a number of places in London Labour, for
instance when street-vendors of newspapers inform Mayhew regarding which
sensations sell the most papers: “Courvoisier . . . sold wery well” (LL 1:223),
one vendor reports, and another notes that “Curviseer (Courvoisier) was tidy
[sold well]. . . . The French Revolution—the last one [i.e., 1848]—was cer-
tainly a fairish go” (LL 1:231). Finally, the penny blood and radicalism are
explicitly associated in a virulent 1846 editorial for Knight’s Penny Maga-
zine—an organ of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge—in
which Charles Knight claimed that the discontinuance of his magazine was
due to competition from the penny bloods, as represented by Varney, the
Vampyre: or, The Feast of Blood. According to Knight, these texts “have got
some considerable hold upon the less informed of the working people,” who
are reading “such things as . . . ‘The Feast of Blood.’” Knight claims that the
bloods have accomplished “revolutions in popular literature” that, he fears,
might have parallels in the political realm: the penny bloods “hold out false
hopes and extravagant expectations to the great mass of the working classes”
and “array the rich against the poor and the poor against the rich.”18
Unlike twentieth-century outbursts regarding the links between youth culture

and violence—which typically proceed as pseudo-Platonic arguments that
certain fictions are simply not good for the republic—the objections of Knight,
Hemyng, and Mayhew quite explicitly refer to class conflict. The notion that
the penny blood inspires working-class violence is, in the 1840s and 1850s,
closely related to concerns that radical agitation, particularly Chartism, en-
dangered the property, and perhaps the lives, of the middle classes. The critics
of penny bloods register the fear that the working classes were gaining greater
power, and the awareness that this development depended, in large measure,
upon the increase of working-class literacy and subcultural practices that
enabled political agitation and operated in defiance of desires, such as those
articulated throughout London Labour, to eradicate the street-culture of the
urban poor. Such fear was, from a middle-class perspective, warranted by the
riots in Bristol, Nottingham, and Derby in 1831, those in Birmingham and
Wales in 1839, and especially the Chartist agitations of 1837–1848.19 In this
period, fear of working-class riots and violence was neither universal nor
isolated; where that fear manifested itself, however, it was in large part fueled
by the notion that, while Chartists were seeking (in Knight’s words) to
“array . . . the poor against the rich,” the “dangerous classes” were excitedly
reading penny bloods and Lord William Russell was being shaved by a fan of
Jack Sheppard.
Comments associating Chartism with working-class violence are legion
in middle-class writings on the poor, and Mayhew is again a useful index of
how commonplace this association was in the 1840s and 1850s. Although
Chartist agitation was famously divided between a “moral force” contingent
committed to reform by means of political persuasion and a “physical force”
contingent advocating, if necessary, the destruction of property,20 writers such
as Mayhew represent the working classes as endorsing a Chartist movement
evacuated of such political complexities. Mayhew quotes a scavenger as say-
ing, “I cares nothing about politics neither; but I’m a chartist” (LL 2:225). It
would appear that, for the bulk of Mayhew’s interviewees, “Chartism” equals,
simply, “violence.” Asserting that costermongers “are nearly all Chartists,”
Mayhew claims that their “ignorance, and their being impulsive, makes them
a dangerous class. . . . Some of them, I learned, could not understand why
Chartist leaders exhorted them to peace and quietness, when they might as
well fight it out with the police at once” (LL 1:20). Characteristically conflating
the adult and juvenile working class, Mayhew describes child street-sellers
in almost identical terms: “Of politics such children can know nothing. If
they are anything, they are Chartists in feeling, and are in general honest
haters of the police and of most constituted authorities” (LL 1:475). Finally,
even when discussing those workers well-known for their informed and liter-
ate engagement with politics, such as weavers, Mayhew elides the politics of
Chartism so as to associate it with violence. In an 1849 Morning Chronicle
letter, Mayhew sets out to interview Spitalfields silk-weavers “who advocate
the principles of the People’s Charter” and are thus “workmen who were
known to entertain violent political opinions.”21 Such representations imply
that the ultimate goal of Chartist agitation is to render more effective the
depredations of a working-class population already prone to violence: hav-
ing been “assured that in case of a political riot every ‘coster’ would seize his
policeman” (LL 1:20), Mayhew is “quite satisfied . . . that there are thou-
sands in this great metropolis ready to rush forth, on the least evidence of a
rising of the people, to commit the most savage and revolting excesses” (LL
2:5). In the late 1840s and early 1850s, the phrases “political riot” and “ris-
ing of the people” would most immediately bring to mind Chartist agitation,
as Mayhew makes clear elsewhere in London Labour: “At the period of any
social commotion, they [vagrants] are sure to be drawn towards the scene of
excitement in a vast concourse,” such as during “the Chartist agitation, in the
June quarter of the year 1848” (LL 3:373).22
Representations, such as Mayhew’s, of the working classes as prone to

commit violence flourish in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and
middle-class writers frequently capitalize on gothic metaphor to describe in
vampiric terms the danger that the “dangerous class” supposedly poses.23
Reflecting in “Model Prisons” (1850) on his visit to a London prison “of the
exemplary or model kind” (probably either Millbank Penitentiary or the
Middlesex House of Correction at Coldbath Fields), Thomas Carlyle describes
a Chartist prisoner thus:
From an inner upper room or gallery, we looked down into a range of

private courts, where certain Chartist Notabilities were undergoing their
term. Chartist Notability First struck me very much: I had seen him about
a year before, by involuntary accident and much to my disgust, magnetising
a silly young person; and had noted well the unlovely voracious look of
him, his thick oily skin, his heavy dull-burning eyes, his greedy mouth,
the dusky potent insatiable animalism that looked out of every feature of
him: a fellow adequate to animal-magnetise most things, I did suppose—
and here was the post I now found him arrived at.24
Carlyle’s emphasis on the Chartist’s orality (“unlovely voracious look,”

“greedy mouth”) and his ability to “animal-magnetise” the “silly young per-
son” are suggestive of the vampire’s cravings and the modus operandi by
which the bloodsucker conventionally satisfies them: the vampire’s ability to
hypnotise its victim is a generic norm, from John Polidori’s The Vampyre
(1819) to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and beyond. So, too, is the vampire’s
satanic associations. Carlyle describes the prisoners as
base-natured beings, on whom in the course of a maleficent subterranean

life of London Scoundrelism, the Genius of Darkness (called Satan, Devil,
and other names) had now visibly impressed his seal, and had marked
them out as soldiers of Chaos and of him,—appointed to serve in his Regi-
ments, First of the line, Second ditto, and so on in their order.25
Although in “Model Prisons” Carlyle never explicitly calls the prisoners

(Chartist or otherwise) vampiric, his favorite term for working-class
criminality—“Scoundrelism”—had already been linked with vampirism in
his The French Revolution (1837), where he condemns the “Treason, delu-
sion, vampyrism, scoundrelism” of the Terror.26 And Carlyle frequently links
Chartism and the French Revolution, as in this typical comment in Past and
Present (1843): “Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms, Revolts
of Three Days? The times, if we will consider them, are really unexampled.”27
Indeed, the “dangerous classes” were commonly depicted not merely as preda-
tory (as in London Labour) but as bloodthirsty. For instance, in 1876 Cesare
Lombroso uses more explicitly vampiric metaphors than Carlyle indulges in

to describe the desires that motivate the criminal poor: “love of orgies, and
the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish
life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood.”28
The wide circulation of such more or less explicit metaphorical associations
of the working classes with the thirst for blood, satanic evil, and the like goes
far to explain why the best-known penny blood should be a vampire narra-
tive. Moreover, as we will see, Varney, the Vampyre represents the title
character’s sanguine appetites in a manner that repeatedly raises the reader’s
interest in bloodshed only to direct that interest towards an analysis of vio-
lence in consonance with the “moral force” component of Chartist agitation.
Mayhew’s and Carlyle’s representations of the Chartists as bloodthirsty
creatures eager for violence is, unsurprisingly, a strategic misrepresentation:
the Chartist organization is, in fact, the most obvious example of how nine-
teenth-century political agitators benefitted by discouraging violence. It is
an historical commonplace that the effectiveness of Chartism dissipated after
the Chartist riots of 1848, that in the preceding decade the movement at-
tained its considerable respectability and popular appeal because leaders like
William Lovett, while maintaining a “physical force” contingent, officially
endorsed only “moral force.” Throughout the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, writers on radicalism had often argued that—in order to retain popular
support, especially among middle-class sympathizers—political agitators must
retain the threat of violence but continually defer its execution, must balance
public excitement with exemplary coolness. For example, in “Liberty of the
Press” (1825) James Mill, although he did not dismiss the need for workers
to apply “physical force to their rulers,” insisted that reformers could more
effectively sustain resistance by using “threats so likely to be followed by
performance, as may frighten their rulers into compliance.”29 Similarly, in
the penny blood Wat Tyler (1841), Pierce Egan, Jr. (a well-known supporter
of radical reform), criticizes rioters who with “discretion and coolness . . .
might have tumbled the monarchy into the dust, and from the grossest state
of slavery and despotism, have sprung into an enlightened and popular form
of government.”30 The “moral force” of such a politically suspenseful “cool-
ness” is at the heart of the penny blood Varney, the Vampyre.
The Salisbury Square publishing house of Edward Lloyd first issued Varney,
the Vampyre in 109 weekly “penny parts” between 1840 and 1842, and Lloyd
subsequently published the novel in book form in 1847 and in an abridged
version in 1853. The appearance of the novel thus coincides with the decade
in which both working-class agitation and the critical condemnation of penny
bloods received the greatest attention in the press. The reading of Varney, the
Vampyre that follows will detail how the penny blood enables working-class
readers, including youthful readers, to enter debates about violence and class
typically identified with Chartist radicalism.31 Varney addresses its reader-
ship by representing sustained but moderate agitation as the means of obtain-
ing full status as citizens of the English nation. Varney repeatedly raises the
reader’s interest in violence in order to undermine fascination with it and to
direct the reader’s interest toward other possibilities. This novel suggests how
its working-class readers can be mobilized to envision different political nar-
ratives for themselves and, thus, to gain power—which, in this novel, is at-
tained specifically by not carrying out the bloodshed of which one is capable.
Of course, to argue that the penny blood caused specific effects in the
political world risks reproducing the interpretive fallacies of Hemyng,
Mayhew, Knight, and other proponents of the mimetic theory of represented
violence. Nevertheless, it is important to investigate how popular culture can
shape attitudes about violence. It is at least worth crediting middle-class critics’
observation that the bloods had a powerful relation to their social context,
that (in Knight’s words) “revolutions in popular literature” can inform the
revolutionary hopes and expectations of the working classes. Moreover, my
argument—that penny bloods such as Varney take advantage of historical
coincidences (cheaper means of literary production and increased working-
class literacy) in order to foster the political education of the working classes—
is meant to oppose the view, common at least since Jürgen Habermas glibly
defined the “public sphere” as the property of the “moral” bourgeois, that the
supposedly “low” quality of a text such as Varney disqualifies it (and, by
association, its “low” reader) from powerfully affecting political life. Thus
Habermas, writing on Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, asserts that the “mass press
was . . . designed predominantly to give the masses in general access to the
public sphere” but that
the early penny press . . . paid for the maximization of its sales with the
depoliticization of its content—by eliminating political news and political
editorials on such moral topics as intemperance and gambling . . . reading
is made easy at the same time that its field of spontaneity in general is
restricted by serving up the material as a ready-made convenience, pat-
terned and predigested.32
Rather, my analysis of Varney benefits from the work of Leo Bersani

and Ulysse Dutoit, who in The Forms of Violence provocatively refute the
claim that repeated depictions of violence incite imitation of it. Bersani and
Dutoit identify how the humanist critical tradition has attempted to erect a
myth of non-violence by denigrating texts that repeatedly represent blood-
shed and by privileging those that instead contain it in climactic scenes. Thus,
the humanist tradition (and its chief enterprise, canon formation) discour-
ages regular examination of violence and instead institutes a fascination with
its most dramatic manifestations—a fascination that, Bersani and Dutoit argue,
enables destructive imitation. Their thesis has considerable bearing on nine-
teenth-century realist novels, in which shocking acts of violence (Julien Sorel’s
shooting of Madame de Rênal, the sinister hints that Becky Sharp has poi-
soned Jos Sedley) erupt only at the most significant moments of plot develop-
ment. Bersani and Dutoit’s analysis suggests that realist works such as
Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir (1830) and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–
1848) present striking images of violence for prolonged spectatorship in the
belief that the reader cannot become callously inured to such isolated horrors
and cannot become fascinated by or moved to imitate them. Part of the literary
prestige of such works involves the fact that they facilitate a belief in our
unimpaired ability to interpret and master the violence we read about. By
contrast, Bersani and Dutoit argue that texts replete with depictions of vio-
lence expose such mastery as an illusion: such texts force us to process the
frantic intersection of narrative and body, they reveal the fragmentary process
of creation and consumption, and they “prevent the reading of violence from
becoming a fascinated identification with acts of violence.”33 Bersani and
Dutoit persuasively demonstrate how a variety of texts—late Assyrian
sculptures, with their ubiquitous battle and hunting scenes, Sadean pornog-
raphy, Alain Resnais’s film Night and Fog (1955)—offer “a potential correc-
tive” to a fascination with violence by forcing us “to see, even to enjoy,
examples of the violence in which human history inescapably implicates us.”34
Modern popular culture has provided many forms—from penny bloods to
dime novels to slasher films—that offer a similarly profitable economy of
violence: they propose no pacifist myth, acknowledge that we have an interest
in deadly conflict, and discourage fixation on bodily harm.35
In keeping with the refusal to fixate on violence, Varney, the Vampyre;
or, The Feast of Blood. A Romance of Exciting Interest is a title that promises
much it does not deliver. From the first page on, there is sufficient represen-
tation of violence—duels, armed robberies, mobs on the rampage, and such,
in addition to vampire attacks—to identify the text as a penny blood. Yet, in
order to maintain their interest for 109 installments, the author cannot allow
readers to become satiated by feasting on any single scene of violence. Even
more hyperbolic than Varney’s subtitle, an 1841 advertisement for the first
issue of the Sunday Chronicle proudly announced that the paper would offer
“Tales of the most Absorbing Interest, and which absolutely rivet the atten-
tion of the reader with a species of galvanic force. These Tales are replete
with MYSTERY, HORROR, LOVE & SEDUCTION!”36 This promotion
seems to invite the objections of critics like Hemyng and Mayhew—and to
confirm Carlyle’s notion that a “silly young person” of the working classes is
easy to “animal-magnetise.” Yet the economics of the genre determine that
the serials which this paper will feature, like Edward Lloyd’s publications,
must not “rivet the attention” of working-class readers. That is, penny bloods
accumulate interest only by denying what Bersani and Dutoit call an “es-
thetic calm” and by instead inviting us to enjoy a kind of “esthetic ‘vio-
lence’”—which they describe, significantly, as “the agitations of multiple
contacts producing multiple forms.”37 The Oxford English Dictionary notes
that “agitation” had two principal meanings in the nineteenth century: the
older meaning—“mental disturbance or perturbation” (the psychic commotion
to which Bersani and Dutoit refer) “showing itself usually by physical excite-
ment”—and a newer signification—“public excitement” maintained by keep-
ing “a political or other object constantly before public attention, by appeals,
discussion, etc.” As Victorian radicals debate how to sustain working-class
political agitation, Varney succeeds by continually raising and then redirect-
ing its audience’s interest in violence and thereby keeping readers in a state
of mental agitation. Thus, even if their anxiety that such a text might oppose
middle-class power was well-founded, Victorian critics missed the mark when
they claimed that the penny blood simply asked its reader to imitate physical
violence. Varney rejects the association of the working classes with mere
bodily mobility and lack of vision. Instead, Varney asks its readers to endorse
working-class intellectual mobility and controlled agitation—whether of read-
ers, political radicals, or both—as the means of envisioning an alternative,
and more powerful, working-class role within the English nation.
Much of the action in the first half of Varney is familiar to readers of
vampire narratives: the first chapter concludes with Varney “at his hideous
repast,”38 attacking the heroine, Flora Bannerworth. In succeeding install-
ments, Flora’s relatives and admirers—her brothers Henry and George and
her lover Charles, led by their older advisors Dr. Chillingworth and Admiral
Bell—struggle to untangle the mystery of vampirism and to protect the hero-
ine. However, it might come as a surprise that the first ninety-two chapters
are as much about mob violence as they are about vampire attacks. In fact,
the novel provides, for its working-class readers, an extended criticism of pre-
cisely the sort of “popular violence” (VV 194) that middle-class critics of the
penny blood associated with those readers. Again and again, the novel’s omni-
scient narrator recounts the actions of villagers intent on destroying the vam-
pire. Although the townspeople start “no political riot,” the narrator contends
that those who “have their passions inflamed”—whether as a result of super-
stition or as a result of the more political “consequence of differing in opin-
ion”—will neither gain knowledge nor resolve conflicts but will remain
fascinated by violence itself (VV 216). This examination of the mob diagnoses
an extreme case of agitation: the excessive mental disturbance of the villagers
(their inflamed passions) renders them mentally immobile and incapable of
effective social action. The villagers “no longer thought of anything, save the
searching after the vampyre, and the destruction of the property” (VV 229).
Moreover, the narrator proposes a scale by which readers can measure, at one
extreme, too much agitation (the fascination of the villagers) and, at the other
extreme, too little agitation (a “perfect calm” [VV 406] that the novel insists
is impossible and undesirable, both for the novel’s heroes and for readers, who
desire suspense). The novel asks readers to endorse the mean between these
extremes: “coolness” (VV 332), moderate agitation, and just enough action
to confer power on protagonists and give pleasure to readers of penny bloods.
Varney directs readers away from excessive agitation and fascination
with violence by demonizing the mob as itself vampiric and by exposing its
powerlessness, when fixated on violence, as a lack of both intellectual and
physical mobility that disqualifies members of the mob from English citizen-
ship. Viciously “hunted by those who thirsted for his blood” (VV 375), even
Varney describes the mob in vampiric terms—as “an evil spirit” (VV 310)
whose “taste” for destruction “has caused the appetite for more” (VV 373).
Vampirism here is not (as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula) the foreign aristocratic
force that assaults the English middle classes. Vampirism is instead the po-
litically undead condition of laborers who have adopted an ineffective means
of agitation. The depiction of the mob in Varney incorporates stereotypes—
promoted by writers such as Carlyle and Lombroso—about the monstrous
“dangerous classes.” Yet, the novel seeks to revise that representation by
obliging the working classes that consume penny bloods to ridicule the mob
and to maintain a critical distance from the violence it perpetrates. That is,
the novel posits the very act of reading as a form of intellectual mobility that
can in turn enable social and economic mobility. This desirable mobility, the
novel implies, is prohibited by the fictional villagers’ fascination with the
violence they have perpetrated: as a result, they “all seemed transfixed to the
spot” (VV 364).
Moreover, their fascination with violence disqualifies them from self-
government, the right that, according to radical reformers, Englishness should
confer on all members of the nation, including Varney’s working-class readers:
soldiers arrive to put down the rioters, and the narrator laments that “it was a
strange and startling thing to see that country town under military surveillance”
(VV 215). Mob violence thus is not, as the naval hero Admiral Bell says in
Varney, “a proper English mode of fighting” (VV 191). As one soldier quips,
“These people . . . are ignorant in the extreme. One would think we had got
into the country of vampires, instead of a civilised community” (VV 234). As
suggested by the soldier’s disdainful comparison of Eastern Europe (in the
1840s as now, associated in the popular imagination with “the country of
vampires”) to England (“a civilised community”), the novel often plunders
imperialist discourse for platitudes about national and racial difference in
order to mark mob violence as culturally other and as undesirable. At one
point, the narrator declares that a “species of savage ferocity now appeared
to have seized upon the crowd” (VV 203), and later the townspeople behave
“like so many wild Indians, dancing round their roasting victims, or some
demons at an infernal feast” (VV 231). Similarly, in “Prostitution in London,”
Bracebridge Hemyng notes: “I was told of a disturbance that took place in
one of the night-houses in Panton Street, not more than a year ago, which for
brutality and savage ferocity I should think could not be equalled by a scalp-
ing party of North American Red Indians” (LL 4:252–53). Varney borrows
from such middle-class descriptions of the poor by incorporating notions
about the degradation of the “savage” working classes in the heart of empire.
Yet, through its use of this metaphor, Varney asks its readers to distinguish
working-class agitation from mob violence, which is undesirable because it
invites middle-class cultural “colonization” of the poor. Reflecting on the
“melancholy fact” that such violence—and the resulting martial law—can
occur “even in a civilised country like this, with a generally well-educated
population” (VV 204), the narrator seeks to achieve a similar consensus of
opinion among civilized working-class readers—who are educated, if not
more formally, by penny bloods—and positions them as superior to such
“savagery.” Unlike London Labour, Varney insists that such superiority—
and thus qualification for citizenship in the English nation—is the result not
of middle-class regulation of the working-class body but, rather, of working-
class self-regulation by means of intellectual mobility.
In order to help its readers achieve this intellectual mobility, the narra-
tor must not allow them to become fascinated by the violence advertised in
Varney’s subtitle, The Feast of Blood. The techniques with which the narrator
undermines such fascination are especially evident in the novel’s most
shocking depiction of mob violence, the staking of a corpse at the local inn.
The narrator prefaces this moment of “perfect horror” (VV 221), which be-
gins the twenty-eighth installment, by forewarning the audience, at the end
of the twenty-seventh, that what will follow is “a scene of confusion, the
results of which we almost sicken at detailing” (VV 216). This elliptical ap-
petizer both promises that the horror novel will not disappoint generic ex-
pectations and implies that readers, who will of course be intrigued by this
anticipation of the succeeding episode, should also (like the narrator) find
themselves “sickened” by it and thus avoid the “confusion” shown by the
villagers. The treatment of this scene is a model of how the formal logic of
the penny blood, its commercial requirements, and its intended cultural impact
intersect. By prefacing the moment of violence with pages of hesitation, the
writer produces a maximum of suspense, a maximum of copy (a pressing
concern for an author paid at one penny or less per line), and a maximum of
instruction regarding the interpretation of the succeeding scene of violence.
The narrator thus manages both the generic requirement for violence and the
political desire to discourage fascination with it.
Having brought us to the room at the inn, the narrator nearly deprives us
of our penny’s worth of sensation:
We cannot, for we revolt at the office, describe particularly the dreadful

outrage which was committed upon the corpse; suffice it that two or three,
maddened by drink, and incited by the others, plunged the hedge-stake
through the body, and there left it, a sickening and a horrible spectacle to
any one who might cast his eyes upon it. (VV 220)
Generic expectations demand that these nervous disclaimers will not

quite “suffice” as a depiction of the scene of horror, so the narrator provides
the shocking details but contains them in a single sentence: “With such vio-
lence had the frightful and inhuman deed been committed, that the bottom of
the coffin was perforated by the stake, so that the corpse was actually nailed
to its last earthly tenement” (VV 220). As if aware that the chilling effective-
ness of the passage threatens to fascinate the reader, the narrator repeatedly
insists on didactic interpretation: “we regret that even then, when civilisation
and popular education had by no means made such rapid strides as in our
times they have, such a proposition should be entertained for a moment” (VV
219) by the mob that commits the staking. The narrator quickly leads the
reader away from even these meditations: “But we have done with these
horrible surmises; the dreadful deed has been committed, and wild, ungovern-
able superstition has had, for a time, its sway over the ignorant and debased”
(VV 220). This double movement—quivering hesitation when approaching
violence and revolted flight from it—both maintains suspense and installs,
around the act of violence, an agitation that mobilizes the reader’s attention
and enables the narrator to direct it to other ends, such as the didactic inter-
pretation of the violence represented. This narrative technique allows the
narrator to emphasize the contrasting ideal: models of action based on the
promise of violence left unfulfilled.
According to such models, the “coolness” of individuals who acknowl-
edge their agitation and control it enables them to attain economic and social
power.39 Early in the novel, the protagonist, “Poor Henry Bannerworth,” ap-
peared “to be in a complete state of mental prostration” (VV 24); Henry only
becomes an effective hero by regulating the agitation that afflicts him and
thereby demonstrating his power. Although he is prepared to kill the vampire
in a duel, Henry “shrank with horror from seeing even such a creature as
Varney sacrificed at the shrine of popular resentment” by the mob (VV 191).
Endowed with an appropriate balance of agitation and restraint, Henry can
forcefully revise his personal and family histories—he rescues the
Bannerworths from their poverty and their persecution by Varney and restores
them to their place in middle-class society. Throughout Varney, various such
heroes thus qualify themselves to act in the novel’s intersecting plots (vam-
pire narrative and Henry’s bildungsroman) by demonstrating this ability to
regulate their agitation. In this way, Henry’s advisor, Dr. Chillingworth, con-
fesses that, as a medical student, his experiments in the resuscitation of corpses
“inflamed” his imagination and caused a youthful excess of agitation—the

opposite of Henry’s “mental prostration,” but just as ineffective. As
Chillingworth recounts, “I was quite in a state of mania . . . so infatuated was
I upon the subject, that no fond lover ever looked with more nervous anxiety
for the arrival of the chosen object of his heart, than I did for that dead body”
(VV 328–29). Chillingworth’s Frankensteinian enthusiasm is simultaneously
a sickly inflammation, an effeminate nervousness, and a necrophilic infatua-
tion. Once older and wiser, Chillingworth always “waited the course of events
with great coolness” (VV 332). By learning to regulate himself—by chilling
his inflamed desires, one might say—he proves his worth.
The story of Henry’s progress from financial embarrassment back to
gentility is (like that of many romance heroes) legitimated by a class status
he originally possessed. The protagonist who works to repossess his family’s
country estate might seem an odd character to offer as a point of identifica-
tion for working-class readers. The novel nonetheless implies that cool re-
straint confers power on the enterprising subject regardless of class. Henry
frequently and subtly elides the differences between middle-class, lower-
middle-class, and working-class identities in a manner designed to make him
sympathetic to readers of all three groups. Having lost the ancestral home, he
asserts that going into trade is a “course of honourable industry” (VV 27) and
simultaneously feels little shame at the poverty that affects his family. Simi-
larly, when Admiral Bell asserts that “Poverty is no crime, but, like being
born a Frenchman, it’s a d––d misfortune” (VV 141), he exculpates Henry
and rejects common middle-class notions about the “dangerous classes” by
divorcing poverty from crime.
Even the admiral’s reactionary Francophobia reinforces his more radi-
cal implication—that the English poor are not inherently degraded but, like
all subjects of their nation, are free to envision other narratives for them-
selves and to bring about radical transformations in their circumstances. The
narrator suggests that the knowing reader will “scarcely refuse a smile” at
the contradictions that thus “peeped out” in the old man’s speech and will
simultaneously recognize the value of his “most liberal and best feelings”
(VV 141).
Of course, critics of penny bloods did not worry that readers would
identify with sentimental protagonists like Henry. They worried that readers
would imitate criminal heroes such as Varney the vampire himself, whose
transgressions enact a fantasy of working-class economic mobility born of
criminality. Varney begins his adventures as a model member of the predatory
classes about which Mayhew worries at such length: Varney is a highway
robber living “in poverty,” a “profligate, daring man” unaccustomed to “in-
dustry” (VV 350). When the Bannerworths encounter him, the bandit has
transformed into a baronet, and Sir Francis Varney, with his country estate, is
“not one of those sort of vampyres who have nowhere to go to but their own
coffins” (VV 106). The appeal of Varney, like that of most vampire narratives,
derives from the dangerous power of the supernatural central character; yet
this penny blood consistently undermines readerly fascination with Varney’s
career as violent bloodsucker in order to focus on how his economic power is
born of a daring that is well-regulated. Clearly, in his pursuit of wealth, Varney
is more ruthless than Henry. But in spite of his bombastic menaces (“even if
I wade through blood to my desire, I say it shall be done” [VV 151]), he is a
shrewd advocate of the power of restraint. His mansion having been burnt to
the ground by the villagers, Varney responds not with retaliation but with
restrained understatement: “In consequence of a little accident which occurred
last evening to my own residence, I am, ad interim . . . staying at a house
called Walmesley Lodge” (VV 250). Exemplary civility from the mouth of a
former highwayman, this elegant speech, punctuated with Latin, demonstrates
not only how Varney moves between different class identities but how that
mobility is facilitated by his refusal to execute the destruction of which he is
capable. Even Varney’s enemies respect this proponent of physical force re-
strained by cool discretion. Chillingworth acknowledges that this remark is
“about the coolest piece of business . . . that ever I heard of,” and Admiral
Bell responds with an admiring tribute: “It is cool, and I like it because it is
cool” (VV 251).
As the admiral suggests, Varney is the most likeable of Victorian vam-
pires. His cool agitation endows him with the power to envision and execute
plots that not only enrich him but bring about positive change in other char-
acters’ fortunes. When he awaits his appointment with the blackmailer
Mortimer, that “extremely well known and popular disease called the fidgets,
now began, indeed, to torment Sir Francis Varney” (VV 143). The fidgety
vampire is a strange literary figure; yet Varney’s nervous energy, which at
once normalizes him and propels the adventure, is crucial to the novel’s con-
struction of well-regulated agitation as a powerful means of reshaping per-
sonal and social histories. His frequent demonstrations of pleasant sociability
barely obscure the threat that he poses and that keeps characters, and readers,
on edge: “Varney was only subdued for a time, and . . . with a proper amount
of provocation, he would become again a very serious fellow” (VV 411).
However, in spite of this promise of menace, Varney never becomes particu-
larly dangerous, and the novel remains much more ambivalent about its
vampire hero than about the “savage” mob: as the epigraph to the novel
pointedly asks, “Art thou a spirit of health or goblin damned?” Although
Varney’s name supposedly “has been a terror and a desolation” (VV 349), the
“sensibility that still lingers” in his “preternatural existence” (VV 157) com-
pels him again and again to commit an unselfish act that is “as unexpected as
it was decisive” (VV 159). Indeed, because of his “strangely mixed feelings”
(VV 277) and powerful discretion, he adheres to a fairminded economics of
vampirism, whereby he repays the blood he has supposedly drawn by or-

chestrating a resolution of the financial problems that plague his victims:
he was most anxious to do them a service, as a recompense for the really

serious injury he had inflicted upon them . . . it was really and eventually
through him that they [the Bannerworths] emerged from the circumstances of
difficulty and danger in which they had been pecuniarily engaged. (VV 766)
After the first chapter has apparently indicated that Flora Bannerworth
is the victim of a vampire attack, and after a third of the immense novel has
chronicled the heroes’ campaign to rescue her from the supernatural threat,
Varney exposes the attack on Flora as a hoax intended only to frighten the
Bannerworths away from their ancestral home and the treasure hidden in it
(VV 392). As if recognizing that Varney thus resembles less a vampire novel
than a Radcliffean romance in which the supernatural is explained rationally,
the narrator corrects this generic deviation by energetically depicting, in the
second hundred chapters, Varney’s attacks on a lengthy series of young women
before, in an amazingly anti-climactic gesture, a world-weary Varney com-
mits suicide in Chapter 220. Varney’s title character thus integrates a problem-
solving sensibility (repaying the Bannerworths, and other good deeds) with
unnerving transgressions that instigate new problems. The text also defines
the transgression of social and narrative orders as productively pleasurable,
and manages our conflicting desires for the satisfying termination of plots
and for continual arousal. Peter Brooks has argued that in the nineteenth-
century novel “the monstrous” implies both the transgression of class struc-
tures and the deviance that characterizes narrative itself, which “arouses and
sustains desire, ensuring that the terminus it both delays and beckons toward
will offer what we might call a lucid repose.”40 However, Varney demands the
reader’s sustained resistance to any such “lucid repose” of narrative. By un-
dermining a fascination with violence, Varney refocuses attention on what is
admirable about its heroes, and what it endorses for its working-class readers:
the controlled agitation and the intellectual mobility that will enable them to
determine their status as subjects of the modern English nation.
Pondering the plot of Varney, the narrator pledges that “Time, and the now
rapidly accumulating incidents of our tale, will soon tear aside the veil of
mystery that now envelopes some of our dramatis personæ” (VV 150). That
is, readers should pursue the knowledge of narrative secrets in the same way
that the novel’s heroes pursue the attainment of social success—by patiently
accepting their inability to force resolutions or gain complete knowledge of
revealed plots. The novel offers explicit instructions on how to read a penny
blood and implicit instructions regarding the knowledge readers should take
from the work and apply in the political realm of nineteenth-century England.
Thus Henry admits that, “being denizens of this earth, and members of a
great social system, we must be subject occasionally to the accidents which
will disturb its efficient working” (VV 135). Although he elsewhere claims
that “our happiness is always in our own power” (VV 112), Henry’s acceptance
of “accidents” suggests that individuals cannot attain happiness by destroying
outright the “great social system” of which they are members. Violent revo-
lution might “tear aside the veil” just as well as “Time” and might reveal
systems other than that which “envelopes” the novel’s readers in mystification;
but such apocalyptic knowledge is too costly. The novel predicates human
happiness on the controlled acts of individuals who do not “quarrel with
Providence” (VV 135), who acknowledge that only “Time” and the incre-
mental effects of individual “incidents” can produce change. Although thus
circumscribing the action it promotes, the novel refuses complacent
satisfaction with either text or social context. The narrator frequently makes
such promises as the following one:
One or two circumstances cleared up, the minor ones would follow in the
same train, and they would be explained by the others; and if ever that
happy state of things were to come about, why, then there would be a
perfect calm in the town. (VV 406)
The extreme conditionality (“would be explained,” “if ever”) exposes

both final solution of mysteries and “perfect calm in the town” as illusions
that inhibit narrative pleasure and social progress. Like the “moral force”
contingent of Chartists—who insisted that political change requires not violent
revolution but controlled agitation—the novel insists that, in order to enjoy
Varney or move toward a “happy state of things” that has not yet “come
about,” individuals must remain in a continual state of suspenseful agitation
but not one of revolutionary violence.
It is important to note that, in seeking to establish a consensus among
working-class readers regarding how controlled but continuous agitation could
enable them to act as empowered subjects of the English nation, Varney does
not offer a radical redefinition of, much less reject, the concept of the “English
nation.” This fact has to do not with the “juvenile” (read “silly” or “low”)
aesthetic quality of the text,41 nor with its status as juvenile literature. As I
will argue throughout Youth of Darkest England, books for young people are
not “innocent of” but, instead, are involved, in sophisticated ways, in the
political issues that dominate the cultures for which they are written and in
which they are read. Rather, by retaining the concept “English nation” but
redefining who can claim power as a member of that nation, Varney is in
keeping with mid-Victorian working-class radicalism, as represented most

obviously by Chartism. Perhaps the most significant of the six reforms de-
manded in The People’s Charter (1838), universal male suffrage, implies no
revolutionary desire to overturn parliamentary representation—the constitu-
tive quality of the democratic liberty that defines English national subjectiv-
ity—but rather takes issue with the class-based limitations placed on who
qualifies for such representation, rights, liberty, and national subjectivity.42
As E. P. Thompson says, the penny press of Lloyd enabled “artisans and
workers” to make the “tradition of the ‘free-born Englishman’ . . . peculiarly
their own.”43 The penny blood is, like working-class radical discourse more
generally, deeply involved in nationalist discourse.44 The genre is thus similar
to other Victorian popular-culture forms (broadside ballad, dialect literature,
melodrama, music hall) that, as Patrick Joyce persuasively argues, aim to
foster “a populist political rhetoric and social identity” that draws upon both
“the loyalties of class and, to some extent, nation.”45 The penny blood is one
place among many in nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular culture where
conceptions of national identity are conserved in order to fashion more radical
resistance to other social norms—such as notions of a working-class popula-
tion prone to violence or disqualified, due to the supposed degradation of its
culture, from full citizenship in the English nation.
If both Chartism and the penny blood conserve the normative under-
standing of the “English nation,” their nationalistic impulse is quite different
from that of the late-Victorian “improving” penny fiction with which middle-
class writers and publishers sought to displace the penny blood and its
successor, the penny dreadful. As we will see in the next chapter, the improv-
ing magazines for young people promote an “English nation” united by
imperialist ambitions and devoid of class conflict—to the extent that the best-
known product of these magazines, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Is-
land, treats the restrained agitation endorsed by Varney as villainy that must
be eradicated by middle-class violence. Moreover, this improving penny fic-
tion imagines that imperialism can be rendered hegemonic among all En-
glish young people if middle-class writers take charge of the education and
regulation of working-class youth. By contrast, Varney implies that working-
class politics can be invigorated if working-class writers educate the young
members of their own class. Although we do not actually know the class of
the anonymous author (or authors) of Varney, it was commonly understood in
the nineteenth century that the writer of penny fiction was a person with
some literary education who had fallen on hard times—or even a working-
class person with literary aspirations, as is revealed in Francis Hitchman’s
1890 essay on “Penny Fiction.” As an “illustration of the social status of
some of our popular instructors”—that is, authors of penny fictions—
Hitchman relates the experience of “a lady, the wife of a well-known
physician”:
Her cook having repeatedly neglected to send up the dinner with the punc-
tuality which is desirable in a well-ordered household, she remonstrated
with some sharpness, and to her astonishment was informed that the young
person in question was so much occupied with the novel she was writing
that she had been unable to pay due attention to her duties in the kitchen.
It would be easy to multiply instances of the same state of things . . .46
Moreover, the text of Varney everywhere reveals the labor of the lowly
paid hack whose casual and irregular employment mirrors that typically ex-
perienced by the audience of the penny blood; indeed, writing for a penny (or
less) per line constitutes “piece-work,” the most invidious form of wage-
labor.47
This revelation of the writer’s and reader’s mutual status as laborers is
closely related to the management of violence that characterizes Varney and
the political education it seeks to provide, a fact that is particularly evident in
one of the many vampire attacks related in the last half of the novel, which
attack occurs in the bedroom of one Mary Smith:
She could not even shrink from the horrible being who approached her,
she was so perfectly horror-stricken with that truly horrible countenance
. . . She felt a horrible sinking feeling, as though she must sink through
the very flooring of the house . . . The shouts rang through the house . . . in
a manner that may be called distressing.
It is distressing in the midst of a large city to be awoke . . . by loud
and urgent cries of distress. (VV 566–67)
Lapsing into repetition that is excessive even for a hastily composed

penny blood, the mimetic short-circuits of this passage not only refuse to
allow the reader to become fixated on the violence occurring in Mary Smith’s
bedchamber; the passage also forces the reader to acknowledge the circum-
stances under which the text was composed and the labor that writer and
reader share.48 The apparent crudity of the penny blood forges between nar-
rator and audience a consensus about their mutual agitation and labor: like
the working-class reader, the hack who composes this sloppily repetitive pas-
sage in the busy shop of Edward Lloyd is subject to continual commotion
and must turn it to pleasurable and productive account.49 In Varney as in other
penny bloods, writing and reading only sometimes produce coherent narra-
tive and never “high art,” but no other instance of juvenile literature has ever
gone to such lengths to mobilize working-class agitation.
3
Improving Penny Fiction
The “Ticklish Work” of Treasure Island
The late-Victorian juvenile fictions dubbed the “penny dreadfuls”—which,

like the penny bloods,1 featured gothic horrors and criminal heroes—generated
a good deal of critical outrage that spurred a major transformation in the
children’s publishing industry. Middle-class concerns regarding the effects
of cheap fiction on working-class young people persisted into the Edwardian
era. Among the most salient features of children’s literature publishing in the
last three decades of the nineteenth century is the proliferation of “improving”
penny magazines that sought to displace the penny dreadful. This transfor-
mation within the juvenile penny literature industry is epitomized by the career
of Edwin J. Brett. As John Springhall says, “the dubious mantle of Edward
Lloyd’s Salisbury Square publishing house” was “inherited” by Brett,2 whose
penny dreadfuls issued by the Newsagents’ Publishing Company in Fleet
Street—the most infamous of which is The Wild Boys of London; or, The
Children of Night (1864–1866)—attracted, like Lloyd’s penny bloods, many
readers among working-class youths and much hostile criticism from middle-
class adults. In response to the hostile criticism, Brett—a genius of opportu-
nistic entrepreneurship—launched Boys of England: A Young Gentleman’s
Journal of Sport, Travel, Fun, and Instruction (1866–1899), a weekly publica-
tion designed as an antidote to the very dreadfuls that made Brett wealthy in
the first place. Boys of England, advertising its improved status in its subtitle,
was designed to assure uneasy adults that the suspense-filled serials that were
the magazine’s primary attraction are the equivalent of healthy “sport” and
uplifting “instruction,” just an unusually exciting form of “travel” literature,
or merely good clean “fun”—qualities to make all “boys of England” into
“young gentlemen.” The first issue informs juvenile readers, “Our aim is to
enthral you by wild and wonderful but healthy fiction.” Likewise, parents are
comforted with the knowledge that “a moral and healthy tone may be main-
tained in conjunction with the boldest fiction.”3 This editorial proclamation
is cut to the measure of middle-class notions, throughout the last third of the
nineteenth century, regarding the best way to encourage more salubrious
reading among working-class young people. As B. G. Johns insists in “The
Literature of the Streets” (1887), if such improved fictions “are to reach the
65
classes in direst need . . . though the whole atmosphere of the fiction must be
clean and healthy,” publishers must offer fictions “of downright amusement,
or they will not be read.” Thus, “the wildest adventure may be freely used.”4
The first section of this chapter examines the critiques of the penny
dreadfuls that prompted Brett’s careerist sea-change. Unlike criticisms of the
penny bloods, which obsessively claimed that they caused juvenile crime,
criticisms of the dreadfuls were more concerned with the failure, on the part
of this new penny literature, to educate working-class young people such
that they would, as adults, be able to take their place as full citizens of the
nation and empire. This shift is a gauge of middle-class attitudes about new
political events—namely, the passing of the Second Reform Act (1867), which
made urban working-class men an electoral majority in England and thus, in
the phrase used by many anxious middle-class writers, their “new masters.”
At the heart of this anxiety is not so much the fear (as in Mayhew’s London
Labour and the London Poor and in writings on the penny bloods) of an
England divided between middle-class citizens and criminalized working-
class outsiders but, rather, the fear of an England divided between two en-
franchised classes with different cultural values—as indicated by, among other
things, their tastes in literature. For instance, although some late-Victorian
critics still worried that working-class children who read cheap crime literature
would assault middle-class property values by robbing their employers,
writings on the penny dreadfuls more prominently suggest that such reading
could create working-class adults who might assault those property values
by exercising their electoral power in a manner that—as one such critic,
Edward G. Salmon, puts it—“supports every anti-capitalist or anti-landlord
utterance, however wild.”5
Critics of the penny dreadful recommend, as an antidote to this reading,
an improving penny fiction that would unite middle- and working-class readers
in their mutual identity as members of an imperial nation. The prominence of
adventure narratives and historical romances in the improving penny
magazines of the latter third of the nineteenth century constitutes an attempt
to render imperialist values, and respect for the grandeur of British history,
especially military history, hegemonic among English boys and girls (and,
by implication, the men and women they would become), regardless of their
class. Whereas a penny blood such as Varney, the Vampyre focuses resolutely
on class issues at home in England—although the title character gets around
a fair bit (he dies in Italy), the novel reveals little interest in the mid-century
British Empire—the late-Victorian improving penny fictions treat domestic
class conflict as a problem to be eradicated by dispersing middle-class val-
ues in the form of imperialist sentiment. The final two sections of this chapter
will examine how this strategy operates in what is now the best-known pro-
duction of the improving penny magazines—Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Improving Penny Fiction 67
Treasure Island, which was serialized (in eighteen parts running from October
1, 1881 to January 28, 1882) in Young Folks: A Boys’ and Girls’ Paper of
Instructive and Entertaining Literature.
Complaints about the penny dreadful raise doubts about the suitability of a
group of people primarily educated by them to act in the political life of the
nation—a point that critics of the penny dreadfuls make with increasing em-
phasis after the passing of the Third Reform Act (1884), which extended the
franchise to include nearly all working-class men.6 Admittedly, the mimetic
theory of represented violence—so prominent in discussions of the penny
blood’s supposed criminalizing tendencies—dies hard, and the critiques of
the penny dreadful include occasional outbursts about its ability to turn its
readers to a life of crime.7 Thus, in “Penny Fiction” (1890), Francis Hitchman
calls the penny dreadfuls “the literature of rascaldom—a literature which has
done much to people our prisons, our reformatories, and our Colonies with
scapegraces and ne’er-do-wells.”8 But writings on the penny dreadful just as
frequently pose intelligent objections to the mimetic theory of represented
violence. For instance, Thomas Wright’s “On a Possible Popular Culture”
(1881) argues:
It often happens . . . that some juvenile till-robber is found to be a reader

of penny dreadfuls. Nevertheless we cannot agree with the conclusion
usually taken for granted in these cases, that the reading and the robbery
stand in the relation of cause and effect. . . . There were robberies by errand
boys when penny dreadfuls were not, and there would still be such rob-
beries if the dreadfuls ceased to be.9
Yet, Hitchman is primarily concerned with the political education of the

recently enfranchised working classes that now constitute the electoral ma-
jority in England: “‘We must educate our masters,’ said Lord Sherbrooke
(then Mr. Lowe), in the course of the debates on the Reform Bill of 1867. The
remark fell upon fertile soil, and Mr. Forster’s Education Bill of 1870 sprang
directly out of it.”10 Hitchman here summarizes the political events informing
the criticism of the penny dreadfuls. As he indicates, the most important result
of the concern voiced by Lowe was the introduction, by the Liberal M.P.
William Edward Forster, of the Elementary Education Act that from 1870
made free schooling available, in England and Wales, to all children between
the ages of five and thirteen.11 The central complaint in the critiques of penny
dreadfuls is that the elementary education provided in the Board Schools
teaches working-class children how to read but not what to read and, thus,
has increased working-class literacy, but has not improved working-class

culture. As Edward G. Salmon claims in “What the Working Classes Read”
(1886), “the instruction imparted through the Board School has not superin-
duced any large amount of reading, except in a shape contemptible and worth-
less.”12 The result, according to many middle-class critics, was a working-class
people whose tastes were formed by penny dreadfuls and who, even if they
were unlikely to turn to crime, were unprepared to use wisely the electoral
power they now possessed. As Salmon observes in Juvenile Literature as It
Is (1888), the danger of “these poisonous sheets,” the penny dreadfuls, is that
they “are patronised chiefly by the sons of working-men,” which boys are
“the future masters of the political situation.”13
According to Wright, in 1881 the “great social problem” is “the elevation
of the masses,” and the heart of this problem is the “general lack of culture
among the great majority” of the working-class English: “He who as a boy is
found a reader of the dreadfuls, will … be found as a man in the ranks of the
non-reading or uncultured classes.”14 Wright argues that this “lack of culture”
among adult working-class people who have read dreadfuls in their youth
“involves their being uninformed or ill-informed,” which “makes them an
easier prey, than they would otherwise be, to the harpies and adventurers
who, dubbing themselves their ‘friends,’ are only their flatterers, and often
succeed in advising them to their own hurt.”15 The bad advice that Wright has
in mind is radical political agitation, which he perceives as attempting to
“flatter” the working classes by reminding them of their new electoral power.
The appeal of penny dreadfuls, with their tales of boyhood derring-do, “must
lie, not in interesting boys, but in flattering them, pandering to their weak-
nesses and want of sense,” Wright claims. He asserts that the education
provided by the dreadfuls makes working-class adults incapable “of judging
accurately of the worth or worthlessness of the innumerable social and political
schemes which they are constantly being urged to support ‘in their thou-
sands.’”16 Similarly, Salmon identifies the “newspapers which appeal to the
working classes” as able to prey on their gullibility and to offer them advice
that threatens the interests of the middle classes: the “Radical section of these
newspapers is bigoted in its democratic sentiments, and supports every anti-
capitalist or anti-landlord utterance, however wild.”17 For authors such as
Wright and Salmon, the working classes that use their state-provided education
to read penny dreadfuls in youth will in turn read radical journalism in adult-
hood, and this wholesale rejection of what the middle classes endorse as
“culture” contributes to political divisions within England that could place
the power of the middle-class minority in jeopardy. Hitchman offers the most
alarmist description of this situation, in a meditation on the insufficiencies of
Board School education:
We have cast out the unclean spirit of ignorance from the working-class
mind, and have left it empty, swept and neatly garnished with “the three
Rs.” Let us beware lest the unclean spirit returns with seven other spirits
more wicked than himself, and turn the class we have made our masters
into the agents for the overthrow of society.18
For such critics of penny dreadfuls, the ultimate goal of, in Wright’s
terms, an “elevation of the masses”—to be achieved by providing the working
classes with an alternative culture more akin to that of the middle classes—is
a unified society, but one in which social harmony depends on the working
classes remaining in their traditional place, regardless of their new voting
rights. According to Wright, giving the working classes a “higher, healthier,
simpler” culture than that found in penny dreadfuls or radical newspapers
“would make men more valuable to themselves and to society; better men,
better citizens, ay, and even better workmen.”19 The improving popular culture
that Wright desires should ensure that the new voters’ status as “citizens” in
no way changes the fact that, in the industrial nation, their essential role is to
be “workmen.”
Moreover, Wright and like-minded critics argue that this improving
popular culture should not only unite England and prevent “the overthrow of
society” by an enfranchised working-class population, which so worries
Hitchman; the improving popular culture should also supply the demands of
imperialists. Salmon argues that the
newspapers which appeal to the working classes would do real good if,
instead of picking holes in the characters of the high-born . . . they were
to devote some time to matters which exclusively concern the working
population of the country. For instance, it is rare to find a working-man’s
newspaper point out the advantages of the colonies to the people and the
best way to emigrate.20
For many critics, such appropriate adult reading (newspapers telling the
working classes “the best way to emigrate”) would be facilitated by replacing
the penny dreadfuls with children’s fictions emphasizing nationalist and im-
perialist values. Thus, Wright insists that the “evil of the . . . dreadfuls is not
that they criminalize” but that they “have for the time being superseded what
we will venture to call the natural reading for boys.”21 According to Wright,
the “natural reading for boys” is adventure fiction testifying to the greatness
of British national history and of the British Empire: “Walter Scott has sent
thousands to the histories, and Captain Marryat to narratives of voyages,
travels, and adventures.”22 Victorian critics are nearly unanimous in recom-
mending that the dreadfuls be replaced by a cheap literature focusing on
modern imperial adventure. Johns argues that, although there “may be no

Armadas afloat nowadays,” nevertheless “Valour of the noblest kind still
abounds, and every year adds to the number of heroes worthy of the Victoria
Cross. Why should there not be Penny Lives of such worthies as these?”23
Similarly, Helen Bosanquet in 1901 insists that young working-class readers
of penny dreadfuls “would get far more enjoyment out of simply told tales of
travel and adventure, or even of real campaigns.”24 Finally, throughout the
1880s and 1890s, calls for a morally improving penny fiction consistently
cite the best-known imperialist children’s fictions and their authors as models:
“In such books as . . . ‘The Treasure Island’ . . . there is an unfailing store-
house of healthy amusement for the young of all ages; and half a dozen such
men as . . . Stevenson, and Henty, would suffice to keep up the supply.”25
In Boys of England, the “improving” magazine that he began in response
to such criticisms of the penny dreadfuls, Edwin J. Brett pioneered the generic
hybrid that would most profoundly influence late-Victorian penny literature.
Whereas the penny bloods and dreadfuls achieved their frissons by combining
criminal biography and gothic fiction, the improving penny magazines relied
on a mixture of public-school story and imperialist adventure tale, as revealed
by the most famous series published in Boys of England, the Jack Harkaway
narratives written by Mayhew’s collaborator Bracebridge Hemyng. The first
three of these narratives are Jack Harkaway’s Schooldays (1871), Jack
Harkaway After Schooldays (1872), and Jack Harkaway at Oxford (1872).
After this exemplary education, the title character and, later, his son (in tales
written by Brett or anonymous authors) engage in imperialist activities sup-
posedly appropriate to ex-public schoolboys and Oxford graduates, in Jack
Harkaway and his Son’s Adventures Around the World (1874), Jack Harkaway
in the Life Guards (1897), Jack Harkaway in the Transvaal (1899), and much
more in the same vein. This generic hybrid (public-school story plus imperi-
alist adventure tale) dominates the other successful improving magazines,
such as the Religious Tract Society’s Boy’s Own Paper (1879–1967),26 James
Henderson’s Young Folks (1871–1897), and Alfred Harmsworth’s Pluck
(1894–1916, 1922–1924).
In each of these magazines, action-packed imperialist adventure tales
provide excitement that is supposedly rendered unobjectionable due to the
middle-class values that dominate the complementary materials—most ob-
viously the public-school stories often published along with the adventure
tales in the same issues, as well as the abundance of moralizing about self-
help, athleticism, and so forth incorporated into the adventure tales them-
selves. Even in the absence of such complementary materials, imperialist
adventure tales would seem to be enough to mark a paper as an “improving”
one.27 Young Folks is a case in point. As G. F. McCleary (a boy reader in the
1880s) observes, this magazine “was not, like the Boys’ Own Paper . . . mainly
intended for public-school boys” and “seemed to be read mostly by young

people of what is called the ‘lower middle class’”; presumably for this reason,
the magazine included “very few references in it to cricket or football,” a
mainstay of the public-school story.28 Instead, Young Folks primarily relied
on historical adventure fiction. The prominence of the imperialist adventure
tale in these magazines implies that an interest in such matters is proper for
(the “own” in Boy’s Own Paper) children who are not divided by class—or
even necessarily gender, as indicated by the subtitle of Young Folks: A Boys’
and Girls’ Paper of Instructive and Entertaining Literature—but who are
united by nationality (Boys of England) and what are understood to be char-
acteristics valued by all members of the nation (Pluck).
The imperialist materials in the improving magazines can thus, as John
Springhall says, “provide us with a privileged insight into what can be for the
historian of popular culture, a perplexing and difficult question of intention-
ality.”29 However, advancing an argument regarding the extent to which the
intentions of publishers, editors, and writers (such as the inculcation of im-
perialist values in working-class children) were realized is very risky.30 Cer-
tainly, there is no reliable evidence that the improving magazines were
especially popular with working-class youths; in fact, there is reason to believe
that they were unpopular among this group, whose readerly habits the maga-
zines were primarily meant to reform. John Springhall notes that, by the late
1870s, Boys of England was selling 250,000 copies each week and, based on
these figures, argues as follows: “Assuming that, on average, each copy was
shared by at least two to three readers every week then, at its peak, Boys of
England would have been seen by . . . at least one in four of all 10–19 year-
old boys.”31 Even if one grants the reasonable assumption that copies were
thus shared and accepts Springhall’s calculations, it is worth remarking that
one can interpret his results in another fashion: at least three-fourths of English
boys were not reading the magazine, and this majority of non-readers must
have included a large number of working-class children (who, additionally,
might not have found stories about public-school life, the adventures of uppity
Oxford graduates, or harangues about self-help to their tastes). Indeed, as
early as 1881 Wright worried that the “penny journals of ‘pure’ literature,
sometimes started in avowed opposition to the dreadfuls . . . have hitherto
greatly failed to attract the class who read the dreadfuls.”32 Certainly, the
Religious Tract Society’s Boy’s Own Paper and Girl’s Own Paper were com-
monly viewed as publications for middle-class children and were, in part,
designed to prevent the spread of the penny dreadful into their libraries. As
Lord Salisbury (patron of the Pure Literature Society) exclaimed in an address
to an 1878 meeting of the Religious Tract Society, “It [the penny dreadful] is
creeping not only into the houses of the poor, neglected, and untaught, but
into the largest mansions; penetrating into religious families and astounding
careful parents by its frightful issues.”33 Moreover, as Diana Loxley notes, in

the editorial addresses to readers of the Boy’s Own Paper “the confirmation
came as to the class of readership at which the paper aimed (‘Don’t make
more splash than you can help so as to give the servant trouble’; ‘No poor
man is made a knight except by mistake’).”34 Finally, the major imperialist
magazine explicitly aimed at working-class children was a relative failure.
The Union Jack, founded in 1880 and edited by W. H. G. Kingston and G. A.
Henty, in an advertisement informed “Employers of Labour in Shops and
Factories” that “helping its circulation amongst their young assistants will
do much towards keeping them honest and upright, inasmuch as where the
Union Jack is read the poisonous Penny Dreadful will not be patronised.”35
The Union Jack’s rivals, Boys of England and Boy’s Own Paper, which promi-
nently featured materials tailored to a middle-class readership (public-school
stories, chat about cricket, and so forth), enjoyed astounding success (the
former ran for thirty-three years and the latter for eighty-eight36). By contrast,
the Union Jack ran for only three years, until 1883.
Now, treasure is ticklish work; I don’t like treasure voyages

on any account . . .
—Captain Smollett in Treasure Island37
Although the improving magazines themselves cannot reliably tell us that

working-class children actually read them with any regularity—much less
what these readers thought of the materials in the magazines—the new penny
fiction offers a clear index of what middle-class producers considered to be
valuable pedagogical lessons regarding the relations between imperialism
and class, lessons that are revealed with particular clarity in an exemplary
product of the improving magazines, Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Readers
of the novel have often noted that the middle-class adventurers—Squire
Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and Jim Hawkins—closely resemble the pirates led
by Long John Silver: as Joseph Bristow succinctly puts it, the former group’s
“desire to hunt down the long-lost treasure . . . rivals that of the ship’s crew,”
such that the “story is regulated by a repetitive conflict between different
classes of men.”38 Diana Loxley observes that the novel resolves this am-
biguous doubling between the middle-class adventurers and the pirates by
revealing that the former
are not really in pursuit of riches at all, but are spurred on instead by the
vision of living through the experience of adventure, to which the pros-
pect of the accumulation of wealth is secondary, if not negligible. The
unpleasant association between the adventurers and money is thus cleansed

by making the latter the source of action rather than the goal.39
In other words, the imperialist focus of Treasure Island and other stories
in the improving magazines renders them more legitimate than penny bloods
and penny dreadfuls, which insistently focus on working-class economic
mobility. Indeed, the career of Jim Hawkins, the youthful protagonist and
primary narrator of Treasure Island, encapsulates to a degree the acculturation
into imperialist values that the improving magazines attempted. According
to Silver, Jim is “a young gentleman . . . although poor born” (TI 182): Jim
represents the upwardly mobile lower-middle-class youth who identifies with
middle-class notions of respectable culture—that is, he stands in for the lowest-
class audience that, all the evidence suggests, the “improvement” offered by
improving magazines such as Young Folks reached with any regularity. More-
over, Jim expresses his enthusiasm for the treasure voyage as an interest in
precisely the sort of imperialist adventure that characterizes the improving
magazines; awaiting embarkation, he is “full of sea-dreams and the most
charming anticipations of strange islands and adventures. . . . Sometimes the
isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought; sometimes full of danger-
ous animals that hunted us” (TI 47). Of course, Skeleton Island offers none
of these typical trappings of boys’ adventure fictions—most obviously, the
encounter between European and “savage” native that is a generic norm of
such tales, from Robinson Crusoe (1719) on. The narrative of Treasure Island
thus epitomizes the goal of the improving magazines, whereby “poor born”
English youths who take pleasure in narratives of sea voyages, islands, savages,
wild beasts, and the rest of it will be prepared for avid participation in what
is, in fact, the adult enterprise of imperialism: emptying foreign lands of
their riches.
By contrast, Loxley argues that, for the pirates, the treasure hunt is “little
more than the routine exercise of business, an exercise executed through eco-
nomic necessity which will ensure a temporary financial security.”40 How-
ever, this claim does not adequately account for the political implications of
Stevenson’s representation of piracy as the attempt, on the part of a working-
class group opposed to middle-class regulations and laws, to use imperial
adventuring as a means of class mobility. First, the value of the treasure,
which Silver estimates to be “seven hundred thousand pound” (TI 194), would,
certainly, in the period when the narrative takes place (the early eighteenth
century), guarantee the small band of pirates rather more than mere “tempo-
rary financial security.” More importantly, in a crucial speech in the middle
of the novel, Silver offers his comrades a theory of piracy as a form of working-
class organization capable of subverting the middle-class control of imperi-
alist, like capitalist, enrichment:
They [pirates] lives rough, and they risk swinging, but they eat and drink
like fighting-cocks, and when a cruise is done, why, it’s hundreds of pounds
instead of hundreds of farthings in their pockets. Now, the most goes for
rum and a good fling, and to sea again in their shirts. But that’s not the
course I lay. I puts it all away … I’m fifty, mark you; once back from this
cruise, I set up gentleman in earnest. . . . And how did I begin? Before the
mast, like you! (TI 68)41
Silver here subtly delineates types of nautical work in terms of class.

Sailors “before the mast” are the seafaring equivalent of the industrial working
classes, earning mere “farthings” in return for the labor that enriches cap-
tains like Smollett and ship owners like Trelawney42—a point that Jim’s nar-
ration confirms when he comments that the “whole ship” was “creaking,
groaning, and jumping like a manufactory” (TI 81).43 According to Silver,
piracy is the only way for men before the mast to earn their worth (“pounds
instead of . . . farthings”) and, indeed, to change their class status and accu-
mulate wealth rather than merely earning wages—a process accomplished
by the simple, and perfectly respectable, act of opening a savings account.
Noting that he has “laid by” nearly three thousand pounds garnered in vari-
ous pirate cruises, Silver remarks: “That ain’t bad for a man before the mast—
all safe in bank. ’Tain’t earning now, it’s saving does it, you may lay to that”
(TI 67). Although Silver exemplifies upwardly mobile piracy, the text sug-
gests that he is not unique: Billy Bones—after Silver the most fully charac-
terized of the pirates—“had none of the appearance of a man who sailed
before the mast” (TI 12), and is, in fact, a careful saver of money. Exam-
ining what the squire calls “the black-hearted hound’s account-book,” Jim
notes that the “record lasted over nearly twenty years, the amount of the
separate entries growing larger as time went on, and at the end a grand total
had been made out after five or six wrong additions, and these words ap-
pended, ‘Bones, his pile,’” along with “a table for reducing French, English,
and Spanish moneys to a common value” (TI 43).
Silver’s personal monetary policy is bolstered by a policy regarding vio-
lence that is congruent with the one put forth in Chartist discourse and in
Varney: economic and social power—obtaining the treasure and setting up as
a “gentleman in earnest”—are to be achieved by withholding the violence of
which one is capable. Maintaining a state of continual readiness for action—
an “underground” agitation—and an intellectual mobility together define
Silver’s success at masking his subversive intentions, as Alan Sandison co-
gently notes: “his sort of freedom depends on his mobility, on his repudiation
of all fixed principle, even on a fluidity of personality which amounts to a
constant reconstruction of ‘self.’”44 The genre of pirate story demands that
violence be on the horizon, of course: as Silver announces, “I give my vote—
death. When I’m in Parlyment, and riding in my coach, I don’t want none of
these sea-lawyers in the cabin a-coming home, unlooked for … Wait is what
I say; but when the time comes, why let her rip!” (TI 71). However, in addition
to the fact that this proper time for slaughtering the middle-class adventurers
never actually comes in the novel, Silver continually seeks by argument to
restrain the other pirates from violence (“Wait is what I say”). As Silver tells
Jim at one point, “I’m all for argyment; I never seen good come out o’ threat-
ening” (TI 168). Jim often notes Silver’s “cool” restraint: on the verge of
being deposed as pirate captain, for instance, Silver “looked as cool as ever I
saw him. He was brave, and no mistake” (TI 199).
Silver’s cool restraint from the performance of violence is seamlessly
linked with the threat that he poses to class hierarchies, as articulated in his
speech about piracy enabling the man before the mast to “set up gentleman.”
Accordingly, Silver gives the following orders in response to fellow-pirate
Israel Hands’s impatience to do away with Captain Smollett, Trelawney,
Livesey, and Jim:
you’ll berth forward, and you’ll live hard, and you’ll speak soft, and you’ll
keep sober, till I give the word . . . I’ll tell you when. The last moment I
can manage; and that’s when. Here’s a first-rate seaman, Cap’n Smollett,
sails the blessed ship for us. . . . I’d have Cap’n Smollett navigate us half-
way back again before I struck. (TI 69–70)
Here Silver represents restraint from violence as necessary to bring about

the subversion of the class system that obtains aboard the Hispaniola. Al-
though Silver tells the other pirates to stay in their place before the mast
(“berth forward”), to do their work diligently (“live hard”), to defer to their
class superiors (“speak soft”), and to display unusual respectability (“keep
sober”), all this is merely a performance of working-class submission, which,
according to Silver, will enable the pirates’ transformation into men who are
enriched by the labor of middle-class others: Captain Smollett “sails the
blessed ship for us.” The pirates, thus, do pose a political threat to the middle-
class imperial enterprise: they represent an organized working-class group
following an elected leader (“I’m cap’n here by ’lection,” Silver reminds
them at one point [TI 171]) who endorses a “cool” restraint from violence as
the means of subverting the normative division of labor, such that squires,
doctors, and captains will perform the work that enriches men before the
mast, instead of the other way around. Ultimately, however, the text nullifies
the political threat to class-based social order, which threat it has raised
so provocatively. Treasure Island nullifies this threat by means of a two-fold
strategy having to do, first, with the representation of pirates other than Silver
and, second, with the depiction of violent acts in the latter half of the novel.
I’ll make this boy’s business pay . . . I’ll be the Harrison Ainsworth of the
future . . .
—Robert Louis Stevenson on Treasure Island,
in an 1888 letter to W. E. Henley45
The novel confirms that the pirates whom Silver leads actually represent no
real threat to class hierarchies by uniformly depicting them in terms of the
stereotypes of working-class incapacity that are so common in London Labour
and similar texts. The pirates, in their roving existence, behave like the em-
bodied, visionless vagrants described by Mayhew and show no signs of the
intellectual, social, and economic mobility that characterizes Silver, who
envisions a state very different from that of the nomad—to “set up gentleman
in earnest.” Even Billy Bones—who is, like Silver, a saving man—lives a
“wandering, guilty . . . life” (TI 32). Moreover, the desperados led by Silver
confirm a stereotypical notion of both pirates and workers as drunks: the
middle-class characters often remark “the drunken folly of the pirates” (TI
188). In addition, on one occasion Jim observes that, in their “wasteful spirit,
they had cooked, I suppose, three times more than we could eat; and one of
them, with an empty laugh, threw what was left into the fire” (TI 186). Like
the average working-class subject described by Mayhew, the average pirate
has no foresight, is incapable of following Silver’s advice that “it’s saving
does it,” and desires merely a “lifetime of extravagance and pleasure” (TI
196). Thus, at the conclusion of the novel, Jim notes: “All of us had an ample
share of the treasure, and used it wisely or foolishly, according to our natures”
(TI 208). Predictably, respectable Captain Smollett “retired from the sea” (TI
208), while Ben Gunn, apparently unable to resist his essentially piratical
nature, “got a thousand pounds, which he spent or lost in three weeks” (TI
208). As if in punishment for this nearly unimaginable extravagance, Ben is
forced into domestic service, “exactly as he had feared upon the island” (TI
208). Finally, the pirates, like the street-people in London Labour, are repre-
sented as childish: while rowing, the pirates are “shouting at the oars like
children” (TI 115), they examine the treasure map with “childish laughter”
(TI 177), and they often behave “more like charity school-children than blood-
guilty mutineers and pirates” (TI 182).46
Moreover, the depiction of violent acts in the latter half of the novel
undermines the radical potential represented by Long John Silver and his
plot to subvert the normative class hierarchy aboard the Hispaniola. Silver is
an exception to the representation of piratical vices detailed above: he “had
good schooling in his young days” (TI 64), he is “genteel” (TI 113), and the
“clean and pleasant-tempered landlord” (TI 53) of the Spy-Glass Inn (“a
bright . . . little place” [TI 52]) is “a man of substance” with “a banker’s

account, which has never been overdrawn” (TI 49). Silver occupies a position
within the class narrative of Treasure Island similar to that of the title charac-
ter of Varney, the Vampyre—a figure whose upward social and economic
mobility is defined by a “cool” restraint from violence, as distinguished from
the irrational destructiveness of other characters who represent a negative
example of working-class action (the wandering, drunken, wasteful, and child-
ish pirates in Treasure Island and the mob of destructive vampire-hunters in
Varney). However, whereas the earlier text allows Varney to stand as a pro-
ductive point of identification for its working-class readers, Treasure Island
conforms to the middle-class values that define the goals of the late-century
imperialist penny magazines by revealing Silver to be, finally, as incapable
of leading the pirates as they are of following him. Rather than letting “Cap’n
Smollett navigate us half-way back again before” striking, Silver is apparently
unable to restrain the desire to “let her rip” until “the time comes” and so
unleashes violence on the island, even before the treasure is discovered. The
climax of Treasure Island is not the discovery of the treasure—which is de-
scribed almost as an afterthought in Chapter 34, titled “And Last”—but rather
Silver’s turn to violence in Chapter 14, “The First Blow.” It is this turn to
violence that undermines his plot to subvert the capitalist division of labor
that defines the imperialist enterprise. Silver’s inability to withhold the vio-
lence of which he is capable, that is, resolves what Joseph Bristow calls the
“repetitive conflict between different classes of men” that provides suspense
for the preceding thirteen chapters of the novel—and Silver’s actions resolve
it in favor of the middle-class protagonists. Treasure Island thus conforms to
Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s description of the organization of violence
in canonical works of art—they seek “to isolate and to immobilize the violent
act as the most significant moment in . . . plot development,” a “privileging
of the subject of violence” that “limits the mobility of our attention and inter-
est” and encourages us “to think of violence as a subject unique in itself, a
subject easily identifiable and easily isolated . . . as a certain type of eruption
against a background of generally nonviolent human experience.”47 As Bersani
and Dutoit’s analysis suggests, this textual management of violence—pre-
cisely the opposite of what prevails in Varney—has traditionally served to
conserve rather than challenge the normative social order presented in, for
example, the canonical texts of nineteenth-century realism; in Stevenson’s
novel an aesthetic of climactic violence transforms the political threat that
Silver initially poses—a unified agitation to seize power by working-class
subjects—into the more mundane danger of a physically violent individual.
The descriptions of the two murders in “The First Blow” reveal Trea-
sure Island’s aesthetic of climactic violence and its difference from Varney’s
aesthetic, according to which readerly agitation is maintained by deflecting
attention away from representations of violence. First, the killing—appar-

ently on Silver’s orders—of Alan, a pirate who defects to the side of the
middle-class adventurers, is represented in Jim’s narration by “one horrid,
long-drawn scream” (TI 88):
The rocks of the Spy-glass re-echoed it a score of times; the whole troop
of marsh-birds rose again, darkening heaven, with a simultaneous whirr;
and long after that death yell was still ringing in my brain, silence had re-
established its empire, and only the rustle of the redescending birds and
the boom of the distant surges disturbed the languor of the afternoon. (TI
88)
In this “long-drawn” sentence, Stevenson’s prose asks us to remain fix-

ated on the “horrid” quality of this murder, which is significant not only
because it is the first in the novel but also because it reveals both Silver’s
incapacity to follow his own plan and his villainy as the proponent of working-
class organization (from Jim’s perspective, Alan is an innocent victim in that
he has renounced piracy). The signifier of the murder, the scream, is “re-
echoed” literally (it bounces off the rocky Spy-glass Hill) and figuratively
(the “simultaneous whirr” of the marsh-birds), both of which naturalized re-
echoings parallel the repeated “ringing” of the “death yell” in Jim’s “brain.”
The disturbance of the landscape rhymes with Jim’s disturbance, thus coding
the young protagonist as appropriately (or “naturally”) shocked by violence.
Moreover, this passage represents the killing of Alan as an eruption of vio-
lence against a normal background of non-violence. Although Skeleton Island
has been depicted again and again as a pestilential piece of land (“I’ll stake
my wig there’s fever here,” Doctor Livesey proclaims [TI 83]) and as one
associated with a long history of piratical violence, in this passage Hawkins
describes the island as a pastoral realm where “silence had . . . its empire,”
save for the placid “rustle” of birds and “surges” of surf. With Skeleton Island
suddenly represented as a tropical paradise of languid afternoons, the history
of violent conflicts that defines the very genre of pirate stories is strategically
forgotten in this climactic moment. As if Alan is Abel to Silver’s Cain, the
murder appears to be a first—a primordial disturbance in an Edenic realm,
capable even of “darkening heaven.”
Stevenson forces the reader, like Jim, to fixate on the violence that dis-
turbs the supposedly non-violent nature of both the island and the narrative
acts that take place on it, namely the middle-class hunt for loot and suppres-
sion of working-class revolt. This technique is particularly evident in the
more graphic depiction of Silver’s killing of Tom, who has also defected
from the pirate gang:
this brave fellow turned his back directly on the cook [Long John Silver],
and set off walking for the beach. But he was not destined to go far. With
a cry, John seized the branch of a tree, whipped the crutch out of his arm-
pit, and sent that uncouth missile hurtling through the air. It struck poor
Tom, point foremost, and with stunning violence, right between the shoul-
ders in the middle of his back. His hands flew up, he gave a sort of gasp,
and fell.
Whether he were injured much or little, none could ever tell. Like
enough, to judge from the sound, his back was broken on the spot. But he
had no time given him to recover. Silver, agile as a monkey, even without
leg or crutch, was on the top of him next moment, and had twice buried
his knife up to the hilt in that defenceless body. From my place of am-
bush, I could hear him pant aloud as he struck the blows. (TI 89)
The moral interpretation of the scene is unambiguous: “poor Tom” is a

“brave fellow” and Silver “uncouth” like the “missile” with which he shoots
Tom in the back. Yet, it is the excess of “stunning violence” we are meant to
fix on in identifying with Jim’s point of view. After we are given precise
details about how Silver attacks Tom with a crutch (it hits “point
foremost . . . right between the shoulders in the middle of his back”), we are
asked to ponder whether Tom “were injured much or little” and, indeed, pre-
cisely what sound a breaking back makes. Although such ghastly details sug-
gest that Tom is killed outright, Silver kills him twice over—and in a manner
that none-too-subtly indicates Silver’s excitement (“I could hear him pant”)
by the act of mutilation for its own sake. Silver is thus rendered animalistic
and atavistic (“agile as a monkey”) and is transformed into the exemplar of
Lombroso’s criminal man, with his “irresistible craving for evil for its own
sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the
corpse.”48 Jim describes Silver’s reaction to the murder he has committed:
“the monster had pulled himself together, his crutch under his arm, his hat
upon his head. Just before him Tom lay motionless upon the sward; but the
murderer minded him not a whit, cleansing his blood-stained knife the while
upon a wisp of grass” (TI 89). The word “sward”—self-consciously old-
fashioned, even for an eighteenth-century narrator such as Jim is supposed to
be—once again mystifies the island as a pastoral realm that Silver, now an
unambiguous “monster,” defaces both figuratively and literally, wiping his
knife on a delicate “wisp” of the now-tainted “sward.”49
Although the phrase “From my place of ambush” in the passage quoted
above might seem to implicate Jim in violence, he clearly means the word
“ambush” in the sense of “hidden in a bush” from which he spies on Silver:
“I crawled under cover of the nearest live-oak, and squatted there, hearken-
ing, as silent as a mouse” (TI 87). Indeed, the novel manages Jim’s own
participation in bloodshed—in what may be considered the second climax of
the novel, when he retakes the ship Hispaniola from the mutineers—in a
very different manner. In his confrontation with the coxswain, Israel Hands,
Jim is seemingly full of swaggering menace. Jim reports that “it was a boy’s
game, and I thought I could hold my own at it, against an elderly seaman
with a wounded thigh” (TI 157). And Jim uses a piratical phrase to threaten
the pirate coxswain: “‘One more step, Mr Hands,’ said I, ‘and I’ll blow your
brains out! Dead men don’t bite, you know,’ I added, with a chuckle” (TI
158). However, the scene is constructed such that only Hands is guilty of
intended violence and such that he is killed not by Jim but by his own mali-
cious action:
I was . . . smiling away, as conceited as a cock upon a wall, when, all in a

breath, back went his right hand over his shoulder. Something sang like
an arrow through the air; I felt a blow and then a sharp pang, and there I
was pinned by the shoulder to the mast. In the horrid pain and surprise of
the moment—I scarce can say it was by my own volition, and I am sure it
was without a conscious aim—both my pistols went off, and both escaped
out of my hands. They did not fall alone; with a choked cry, the coxswain
loosed his grasp upon the shrouds, and plunged head first into the water.
(TI 158)
The only acts in the scene—throwing the knife, loosing his grasp on the
sail, and plunging into the water—are performed by Hands; Jim merely “felt
a blow” and passively “was pinned.” The guns “went off,” their firing an
involuntary reaction caused by the pain and shock that Hands inflicts on Jim.
Stevenson’s prose even implies that Hands is as good as dead before the guns
go off, inasmuch as the sails to which he clings are “shrouds.” In a suggestive
parallel between this scene and Silver’s killing of Tom, Hands is also killed
twice over: “He rose once to the surface in a lather of foam and blood, and
then sank again for good. . . . he was dead enough . . . being both shot and
drowned, and was food for fish in the very place where he had designed my
slaughter” (TI 159). Yet, the text exculpates Jim of either shooting or drowning
Hands, and finally reminds us only of the latter’s malicious intent (he planned
to “slaughter” Jim). Whereas in the earlier scene we last observe Silver casu-
ally cleaning his knife, the scene aboard the Hispaniola is arranged so that
Jim does not even have a smoking gun in his hand.50
The novel prepares its readers for this distinction between piratical vio-
lence and justifiable violence against pirates long before these climactic deaths.
Although the title of Chapter 14 —”The First Blow”—suggests that it narrates
the initial eruption of violence in the text, there is an exceptional instance in
the preceding thirteen chapters, the trampling of the blind pirate Pew by Super-
visor Dance’s horse. Attempting to escape the arriving officials, Pew runs
“utterly bewildered, right under the nearest of the coming horses. . . . the four
hoofs trampled and spurned him and passed by. He fell on his side, then
gently collapsed upon his face, and moved no more” (TI 38). The killing of
Pew is not, strictly speaking, an act of violence but an accident (like the
firing of Jim’s pistols). But once Supervisor Dance learns of Pew’s identity,
the officer is pleased to claim killing the pirate as his doing: “I’m glad I trod
on Master Pew’s corns” (TI 38). Similarly, Squire Trelawney congratulates
Dance on the killing: “as for riding down that black, atrocious miscreant, I
regard it as an act of virtue, sir, like stamping on a cockroach” (TI 41). Jim’s
language even attributes this notion—Pew is a mere pest—to the horses, which
“trampled and spurned him and passed by.” Finally, unlike the description of
Silver’s killing of Tom, in this scene all the grisly details of trampling by
horse are elided, and Pew’s final collapse is “gentle.”
Treasure Island organizes its representations of violence in a manner
quite different from that which prevails in Varney, the Vampyre. Although the
serial publication of both texts demands that they maintain the suspense that
keeps readers buying, the texts meet this demand in different fashions—the
reader of Varney is expected to wonder “what on earth will happen next?”
and the reader of Treasure Island “how will it all end?” These two means of
managing suspense in turn impact the representation of violence and its rela-
tion to both class conflict and the understanding of national identity. Varney
offers repeated depictions of violence in order to establish consensus, among
its working-class readers, that sustained but moderate agitation is the best
means of changing their status within the English nation. Stevenson’s novel
isolates violence in climactic scenes that are structured so as to determine the
reader’s identification with the values of the middle-class imperialists and
against those of the working-class rebels. The politics of the two novels are,
thus, legible in their aesthetics. As suggested in the previous chapter, works
organized around episodic narratives in which our interest in violence is con-
tinually raised and then diverted, such as Varney, typically exude a lack of
concern regarding their own fragmentation—an aesthetic “failure” that oper-
ates both to discourage a fixation on violence and to forge mutual working-
class consciousness on the part of writer and reader. By contrast, works
organized around a climactic presentation of violence, such as Treasure Is-
land, emphasize the desire for the sense of organic completion that is, in
high-cultural terms, the mark of artistic mastery. Unlike the hack working at
a penny per line for Edward Lloyd, Stevenson was—even when writing for
young people—an author extremely ambitious for critical as well as financial
success. It is worth noting that Treasure Island, although only reasonably
successful when serialized in Young Folks,51 was a bestseller when published
in book form in 1883 and has, of course, attained classic status within the
canon of Victorian fiction, in addition to the canon of children’s fiction.
The political importance of such aesthetic differences is revealed, al-
though in part unwittingly, by Helen Bosanquet’s essay “Cheap Literature,”
in which she offers a suggestive comparison between penny dreadfuls and
morally improving, imperialist adventure fictions:
It is not merely the amount of unnecessary bloodshed which is objection-

able [in the penny dreadfuls]. There is far more actual killing in King
Solomon’s Mines or Treasure Island, but no one objects to it there. It must
be the want of skill and imagination [in the penny dreadfuls] which leaves
us absolutely indifferent as to who is killed or how … Perhaps it is in this
mechanical and unconvincing treatment of the horrors of violent death
that we may find some justification for the view that they [penny dreadfuls]
suggest brutalities to our London “Hooligans.”52
Bosanquet’s principal point seems to be one that is still common in dis-

cussions of popular culture and youth violence: the “mechanical” nature of
episodic depictions of violence makes them “unconvincing,” such that the
deluded consumer supposedly becomes (in current parlance) de-sensitized
to the actual “horrors of violent death” and is thus willing to perpetrate “brutal-
ities.” By endorsing Stevenson’s novel and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s
Mines (1885), Bosanquet would have us believe that their aesthetic “skill”
and their “imagination” justify the presentation of violence in those texts. On
one score, Bosanquet is, of course, quite right. Haggard’s work, like
Stevenson’s and unlike Varney, the Vampyre, is a skillfully constructed produc-
tion that orchestrates suspense by moving the reader toward spectacularly
violent climaxes, namely the bloody battle with the Kukuana tribe and the
destruction of the witch, Gagool. What is most telling about Bosanquet’s
comment, however, is the phrase “amount of unnecessary bloodshed.” Not
only does Bosanquet fail to consider that the representation of an “amount of
unnecessary bloodshed” might constitute (as in Varney) an argument that
such an amount of bloodshed is unnecessary. Her odd phrase also implies
that there is such a thing as an amount of necessary bloodshed, and, of course,
this is precisely the claim of Treasure Island and King Solomon’s Mines—in
the imperialist economy of these texts, shedding the blood of those (such as
rebellious, piratical workers and aggressive natives) who inhibit the middle-
class adventurers’ search for buried treasure, or mines full of diamonds, is
“necessary.”
Read solely in these terms, Treasure Island would seem to confirm
Margery Hourihan’s judgment that “the world of Stevenson’s classic is chilling
and repellent, a place of violence, materialism and rampant self-interest, which
admits no challenge” to the “inequitable society” that creates the industrial
“underclass” whose rebellion is put down by the “elite” adventurers.53 That
the novel does not usually strike readers in this way has everything to do with
the fact that it is both characteristic of the late-Victorian genre of juvenile
adventure fiction and a historical novel (Jim Hawkins takes up the narrator’s
pen “in the year of grace 17—” [TI 11]). The text, thus, encourages us to read
from two perspectives. On the one hand, Jim’s adventures for the most part
seem like those of any plucky late-Victorian boy character, and the convention
of retrospective narration, which is easy enough to ignore in the process of

reading, is frequently elided in Stevenson’s text. For instance, in the last para-
graph (which begins, “The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I
know . . .” [TI 208]), seven of the verbs are in the present tense, one in the
future tense, and only one in the past tense. On the other hand, the class
narrative associated with Silver’s mutiny, and the bloodshed that is (to apply
Bosanquet’s terminology) necessary to resolve it, are firmly located in the
historical past, a distancing that is accomplished specifically by Stevenson’s
use of piracy.54 Like so many other late-century imperialist fictions, Treasure
Island would have us believe that the adventurous spirit of English youth
remains unchanged, from the early eighteenth century to the late nineteenth.
But in the 1880s, piracy no longer threatened English shipping and had not
done so for a century and a half.55 The text thereby implies that what it asso-
ciates with piracy—working-class resistance and corresponding outbursts of
working-class violence—are similarly a thing of the past. Significantly, King
Solomon’s Mines, Bosanquet’s other exemplar of unobjectionable fictional
violence, takes place in the early 1880s. The narrator, Allan Quatermain,
supposedly writes his introduction as “this book is printed, and about to be
given to the world” by Cassell in 1885, and he found himself “taking up a
pen to try and write a history” of his adventure “eighteen months or so” after
it began.56 As if constituting the next installment after Treasure Island in an
imaginative history of the rise of imperialism, Haggard’s novel is devoid of
class conflict and suggests that the only threats to a late-Victorian England
united by imperialist ambition come from outside (members of the Kukuana
tribe). The instances of violence in Haggard’s novel are typically directed
against members of another race. In King Solomon’s Mines, the exclusive
emphasis on combative racial difference—whether mingled with admiration
(as in the case of the heroes’ respect for the Zulu-like Kukuana warriors whom
they fight) or driven by undiluted loathing (for the witch, Gagool)—effec-
tively renders class conflict irrelevant to the late-Victorian empire Haggard
imagines.57 In contrast to Diana Loxley’s claim that, by setting Treasure Is-
land in the mid-eighteenth century, Stevenson’s “invocation of an earlier
moment in the British colonial past” effects a “displacement of the text away
from its actual historical and ideological moment of production in the late
nineteenth century,”58 I would suggest that by rendering class conflict and
the violence associated with it antiquated, Stevenson’s novel participates in
precisely the ideological project that defines the “historical and ideological
moment” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the follow-
ing chapters of Youth of Darkest England detail more fully: the attempt to
produce, in contemporary England, a national identity that would unite English
people of all classes in their mutual support of the British imperial enter-
prise.
4
Remaking Lawless Lads
and Licentious Girls
The Salvation Army and
the Regeneration of Empire
One of the dominant fantasies of fin de siècle Britain—the incorporation of

the working classes into the British imperial project—does not only occupy
the apparently lighthearted realm of juvenile fiction. In an attempt to trans-
form this fantasy into reality, a number of turn-of-the-century organizations
attempt to institutionalize what I call hegemonic imperialism, such that English
men, women, and children of all classes identify as members of a unified
imperial nation, rather than as members of socioeconomic classes with com-
peting political interests and cultural values. This chapter examines one of
the most prominent examples of such an attempt to institutionalize hege-
monic imperialism, the Salvation Army social-reform scheme advanced in
William Booth’s bestseller In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890),1 and
how the Salvationist scheme intersects with discourses on class and empire
that circulate in a range of late-century texts, including H. Rider Haggard’s
juvenile novel She (1887). In order to address concerns about the degeneration
of the urban poor, which works such as Haggard’s identify as a major im-
pediment to the progress of the British Empire, Booth’s scheme proposes to
regenerate the poor by moving them through an interconnected series of “colo-
nies”—a city colony in which the poor are “rescued” and “saved,” a farm
colony in which they are trained to perform the work required of emigrants,
and an overseas colony in which they buttress British imperial power. As
such, the Salvation Army regeneration scheme is exemplary not only of the
attempt to institute hegemonic imperialism but also of “social imperialism,”
the notion that British imperialism can solve the domestic (or “social”) prob-
lems that have plagued England since the advent of industrial capitalism.
Thus, in Booth’s as in other texts advocating such emigration schemes, the
need to populate the supposed “empty spaces” of the empire meets up with
the need to empty out the over-populated working-class slums of England.
However, all works that attempt to establish hegemonic imperialism—in-
cluding juvenile fictions such as Haggard’s She and those published in the
85
“improving” penny magazines—are at base social-imperialist. Even if they

do not explicitly advance emigration schemes, at some level they view urban
decay and imperial expansion in terms of problem and solution, respectively,
and seek, as Bernard Semmel puts it, “to draw all classes together in defence
of the nation and empire and . . . to prove to the least well-to-do class that its
interests were inseparable from those of the nation.”2
However, in social-imperialist discourse the utopian ideal of a working-
class population thoroughly incorporated into the imperial enterprise involves
a necessary limitation on how fully working-class people can participate as
imperial subjects, a limitation that social-imperialist discourse often achieves
by engaging with late-century theories of urban degeneration, which are central
to Haggard’s and Booth’s texts. Degeneration theory employs a strategic con-
tradiction—it posits that the supposedly degenerate working classes are
capable of regeneration and, simultaneously, that they are inherently flawed
due to urban poverty. Booth adheres to degeneration theory in that, even as
he imagines that the Salvation Army can remake “lawless lads and licentious
girls” into Salvationists devoted both to the moral regeneration of fellow
working-class people and to the British imperial enterprise, Booth retains the
notion that working-class culture is essentially flawed and causes an essentially
flawed working-class character, which limits the power of even those members
of the urban poor who convert to Salvationism. In Booth’s text, degeneration
signifies an essential difference between the working and middle classes,
which difference is in turn defined in terms of vision: Booth understands the
middle-class subject to possess a visionary power that enables him or her to
observe, and engage in the paternalistic regulation of, a working-class popu-
lation defined by its inability to possess that very power.
Ready to embark on their “real African adventure,” L. Horace Holly and Leo
Vincey, the heroes of Haggard’s She, easily persuade their youthful manser-
vant Job to accompany them: “It’s time you began to see the world.”3 Although
not overly adventurous, Job phlegmatically accepts that the servant of em-
ployers given to such trekking must bear some of the burden of his nation’s
imperialist obsessions: “I don’t hold much with foreign parts, but if both you
gentlemen are going you will want somebody to look after you” (She 47). In
Africa, however, Job requires all the looking after; he is (unlike his Biblical
namesake) unable to bear suffering, and the manservant is in the end the only
white character to die as a result of the adventure. Unable to withstand the
sight of Ayesha’s concluding transformation into a withered, simian creature,
Job undergoes a less spectacular but quite disturbing decline. As Holly, the
narrator, remarks, Job’s “nerves, already shattered by all that he had seen and
Remaking Lawless Lads and Licentious Girls 87
undergone, had utterly broken down beneath this last dire sight, and he had
died of terror . . . It seemed quite natural that the poor old fellow should be
dead” (She 296). Job’s death from nervous collapse “seemed quite natural”
because Holly has already noted “his nerves . . . like those of most uneducated
people, were far from strong” (She 240). The novel thus establishes Job’s
weakness—his inability to withstand the shocks that (at least in Haggard’s
grotesque depiction of adventure) inevitably threaten imperial subjects—as
an attribute not only of this character but of the class from which he comes.
Explaining to Ayesha the Reform Act of 1884, which extended the franchise
to nearly all working-class men, Holly follows the critics of penny dreadfuls
in their worries about the effects of the 1867 Reform Act when he laments
“that real power in our country rested in the hands of the people, and that we
were in fact ruled by the votes of the lower and least educated classes of the
community” (She 255). The novel’s depiction of its only working-class char-
acter none too subtly implies that, if the uneducated “lower” classes that now
represent “real power” in Britain “naturally” suffer from such deadly nervous
failures, then the work of expanding and maintaining the British Empire is an
unsuitable job for a working-class person.4
Job’s role as bumbling provider of comic relief does not, however, render
his death merely a minor horror in the novel’s collection of frissons. Rather,
his demise gestures at a prominent sociological concern that the late-Victorian
empire would demand the participation of working-class young people who
were unfit for such service due to physical, mental, and moral weakness.
Raised in a “cottage” (She 215), a “most respectable round-faced young man,
who had been a helper in a hunting-stable” (She 19) and “a most matter-of-
fact specimen of a matter-of-fact class” (She 30), Job is seemingly well suited
to domestic service and apparently receives no complaints from his Cam-
bridge employer. In Africa, however, Job simultaneously encounters the
strangeness of a colonial environment and an uncanny version of an urban
one: as a number of scholars have suggested, Ayesha and the political realm
she rules as empress are threatening doubles for Queen Victoria and the British
Empire,5 and the underworld city of Kôr, with its incomprehensible laby-
rinths and masses of bodies, is a gothic version of London as it is imagined in
works such as Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. That
is, Job’s decline and demise suggest that the countrified, working-class
domestic (in the sense both of servant and stay-at-home Englishman) only
seems an unproblematic creature, whereas in fact the process of transforming
such an individual into an imperial subject—which requires a more worldly
experience of urban and foreign spaces—is doomed to failure.
Haggard’s “non-fiction” works more explicitly represent this unnerving
tendency of urbanity to render the poor unfit for service to the empire. In
Regeneration, his 1910 survey of Salvation Army social work, Haggard claims,
like many of his contemporaries, “so soon as its children desert the land
which bore them for the towns, these horrors [of degeneration] follow as
surely as the night follows the day.”6 Haggard’s account of Salvation Army
social work often seems as utopian in its depiction of the regeneration of the
working classes as She is pessimistic in its depiction of their degeneration.
Thus, in his voyeuristic consumption of young men who “slept quite naked”
at the Great Peter Street Shelter in Westminster, Haggard seemingly delights
in the equality of all Englishmen:
Many of them struck me as very fine fellows physically, and the reflection
crossed my mind, seeing them in puris naturalibus, that there was little
indeed to distinguish them from a crowd of males of the upper classes
engaged, let us say, in bathing. It is the clothes that make the difference to
the eye.7
Although this description seems uncharacteristically egalitarian in its

suggestion that there is no essential difference between working- and middle-
class men, it is important to note two things about Haggard’s meditation.
First, this equality exists only at the level of the physical body and not, for
instance, at the level of intellect, education, politics, and so forth: even swim-
ming, which Haggard imagines middle-class men engaged in, requires con-
scious mental activity that sleeping does not. Second, Haggard’s apparent
admission of equality between the classes is tempered by the fact that the
working-class men in question are observed both at a moment of two-fold
vulnerability (they are naked and asleep) and while they are contained by a
disciplinary middle-class institution (a Salvation Army shelter). That is, it is
difficult to imagine a middle-class observer of Haggard’s politics making a
similar statement about a group of workers at, for instance, a socialist rally.
Thus, She and Regeneration negotiate between (on the one hand) the desire
for an England in which all men are equally endowed not so much by the
franchise as by their ability to carry out the white man’s imperialist burden
and (on the other hand) the desire for an England in which traditional stability
is maintained—in spite of such unprecedented changes as the 1867 and 1884
Reform Acts—by essentialized distinctions between social classes. However
much (or little) turn-of-the-century works such as Haggard’s accept the in-
creasing power of the working classes, they remorselessly distinguish between
middle-class urban observers and the working-class people whom they
observe, between the eye that registers social differences and the unconscious
object of scrutiny, between the well-known writer who can whip out perfect
public-school Latin and homeless men who have nowhere to sleep but a Sal-
vation Army shelter—or the unfortunate manservant with shattered nerves
who must be tended to by the social superiors he is paid to serve.
The fact that such matters surface prominently in divergent texts within
Haggard’s oeuvre—in one of the wilder late-Victorian romances and in the
seemingly more stolid report on Salvation Army social work—suggests the

concerned interest that middle-class writers and readers, from the 1880s to
the early 1900s, took in the supposed degeneration of the English working
classes. In this period, such writers and readers also displayed much interest
in social-imperialist schemes that sought to regenerate the urban poor—in
large measure by removing them from the city to the countryside and remaking
them such that they would be fit for service in overseas colonies. Although
the manifestation of such schemes in public policy remained controversial
throughout the period, there is wide consensus among middle-class writers
regarding the virtues of a social-imperialist outlook—which, as Gareth
Stedman Jones notes, “stressed that poverty in London was not simply a
problem of individuals but a problem which affected the vitality and stability
of the whole Empire.”8
Particularly in the 1890s, degeneration theory—which argues that envi-
ronmental forces (namely poverty) cause the degeneration of the urban poor—
gains prestige over earlier demoralization theory—which argues that the
character of individuals is to blame for poverty, that paupers choose to be
poor and require moral training, for instance in self-help.9 However, as we
will see, Booth’s up-to-date employment of degeneration theory strategically
blurs demoralization and degeneration, character and environment, such that
the Salvation Army social-reform scheme and Haggard’s admiring account
of it signal both this shift in styles of sociological discourse and also the
power of even contrasting fashions to affirm essentialist differences between
the middle and working classes. In addition, this apparently sympathetic shift
in sociological discourse still confirms that the working-class “mass” consti-
tutes the threat to national health and that the middle-class urban observer
possesses the vision and power necessary to control this dangerous group.
“Let the reader walk through the wretched streets . . . of the eastern and south-
ern districts of London,” the Earl of Meath invites his audience in 1881, and
should “he be of average height, he will find himself a head taller than those
around him”:
he will see on all sides pale faces, stunted figures, debilitated forms, nar-
row chests, and all the outward signs of low vital power. Surely this ought
not to be . . . Cities must exist, and will continue to increase. We should
therefore turn our attention seriously to the question of how to bring health
within the reach of our poorer city populations.10
Meath’s description is deeply invested in degenerationist terminology,

representing the physical defects of the poor as a result of the city growing
up around them. Yet, Meath unequivocally identifies himself and his readers
as metropolitan subjects possessing the high “vital power” necessary to wander
around London and thus as middle-class people who are well formed, “average,”
by definition physically superior to the degenerate poor. The slumming earl

depicts the growth of London as itself a militaristic threat to the nation, as
“the constant invasions of brick and mortar.”11 The danger to the nation in-
volves not only the city streets but also the bodies of their inhabitants. In
order to halt the supposed degeneration of the working classes—particularly
working-class youths, on which group all of Meath’s social-reform texts focus
obsessively—and to begin “strengthening . . . their bodies and . . . fortifying
their nerves,”12 Meath recommends not only a number of local reforms—free
dinners so as to increase the vital power of schoolchildren, parks and play-
grounds to infuse more healthy air into narrow chests, and gymnastic train-
ing to improve figures and forms—but state-aided colonization as a means of
permanently clearing the city of the poor, its (essentially, it would seem)
dangerous denizens.
Similarly, in “The Industrial Training of Destitute Children” (1885),
Samuel Smith, M.P., insists with a flourish that England should clear out
slums by taking advantage of “our vast colonial empire” as a “wonderful
safety-valve.”13 Like Meath a self-styled youth expert, Smith focuses on peda-
gogical enterprises and emphasizes compulsory technical education for des-
titute children as a means of counteracting the problem that, although
the flower of our population emigrate . . . the residuum remains behind,

corrupting and being corrupted, like the sewage of the metropolis which
remained floating at the mouth of the Thames last summer because there
was not scour sufficient to propel it into the sea.14
As a synecdoche for the interdependence between London and overseas

colonies, Smith chooses the indivisible symbiosis of Thames River and North
Sea. He reinforces the identification of polluting working-class body with
polluted urban environment and imagines a remarkable colonialist sewage
treatment system in which middle-class education of and state-aided emigra-
tion for the “residuum” will “deodorize, so to speak, this foul humanity”15—
although not, apparently, entirely remove its essential foulness. Noting that
the cures for such ills lie in a dual focus on imperial and domestic realms,
young Winston Churchill likewise declares:
For my own part, I see little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves
and is unable to flush its sewers. The difficulty has been so far that the
people who have looked abroad have paid no attention to domestic mat-
ters, and those who are centred on domestic matters regard the Empire
merely as an encumbrance.16
Perhaps the best-known fin de siècle advertisement of a scheme to ad-

dress this dual concern—domestic class issues and the demands of a spreading
empire—William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out exemplifies
these powerful new representations. Booth, founder and first general of the
Salvation Army, sounds an up-to-date alarm that consistent poverty causes
young people among the urban poor to degenerate such that they will be-
come not useful citizens but a useless mass incapable of contributing to the
progress of the British Empire. Using language similar to Smith’s, Booth
proposes a social-reform scheme that will convert the “waste labour” of En-
gland—what he calls “a perfect quagmire of Human Sludge”—into a labor
force capable of furthering British imperial ambitions.17 At the same time,
Booth’s text constructs an essentialist division between the working classes,
who are in need of regeneration, and the middle classes, who are qualified to
oversee this process and thus to engage in the disciplinary regulation of the
working-class “residuum.”
Booth’s campaign to regenerate the urban poor relies, in the first instance,
upon an assumption that power inheres primarily in whiteness and English-
ness. Although the sensational title In Darkest England clearly capitalizes on
the publishing event of the summer of 1890, Henry Morton Stanley’s In Dark-
est Africa, Booth (like Mayhew before him) quickly moves away from com-
parisons between working-class English and colonized nonwhites; insisting
that an “analogy is as good as a suggestion” but “becomes wearisome when
it is pressed too far” (IDE 12), Booth resists clichés about the “urban savage”
and imagines an incorporative English public unified by race, nationalism,
and imperial ambitions.18 He argues that it is not “the inevitable and inexorable
destiny of thousands of Englishmen to be brutalised into worse than beasts
by the condition of their environment” (IDE 16; my emphasis) and wishes to
foster “a sense of brotherhood and a consciousness of community of interest
and of nationality on the part of the English-speaking people throughout the
world” (IDE 143). Similarly, in 1886 Booth’s friend Arnold White had pointed
out the benefits to the empire of emigration from a unified Britain by arguing
that the
Transvaal and Zulu wars, and the Bechuanaland expedition, would have
been unnecessary had Natal, the Transvaal, and the northern part of the
Cape Colony been economically reinforced by a peaceable army corps of
God-fearing, hard-working men and women from England and Scotland,
sent out by the State.19
In an era of eager schemers, writers like Booth and White stand out for
the local and global sweep of their projects—both to clean out London and to
buttress a sagging empire—by relocating the poor in overseas colonies. Thus,
White proclaims, “Distress in London is not the distress of a great city—it is

the distress of a great empire . . . the conclusion is inevitable that exceptional—
because imperial distress—can be met only by exceptional—that is, by im-
perial measures.”20
Booth seeks to answer demands, such as White’s, for a “peaceable army
corps of God-fearing, hard-working” colonists by presenting the Salvation
Army as able to save not only the lost among the English poor but also the
empire that, many late-Victorians worried, Britain might be on the verge of
losing. Moreover, although the Salvation Army scheme seeks to salvage adults
as well as children, Booth follows earlier writers such as Mayhew by focusing
prominently on working-class young people. The colonialist goals of Booth’s
scheme—creating a supply of emigrants able to bear the hardships of outback
and veldt—to some extent makes his focus on youth predictable, of course.
However, Booth’s attraction to developmental narratives involving degenerate
boys and girls reinforces, even more than does London Labour, the surveillant
power of the middle classes that stand in loco parentis relative to a working-
class population depicted in juvenile terms. Disturbed by the “disease-
breeding, manhood-destroying character of … our large cities,” Booth fears
that all working-class children, “their health sapped by their surroundings”
(IDE 24–25), will become young adults like Haggard’s character Job:
“Children thus hungered, thus housed, and thus left to grow up as best they
can without being fathered or mothered, are not, educate them as you will,
exactly the most promising material for the making of the future citizens and
rulers of the Empire” (IDE 65–66). Booth’s text maps out “the malady” (IDE
16), a Dantesque cityscape that divides the poor into “three circles, one within
the other”—the “starving . . . but honest, Poor,” those “who live by Vice,”
and “those who exist by Crime”—all three “sodden with Drink” and appar-
ently escaping the surveillance of middle-class persons except for Booth (IDE
24). His social scheme, in turn, offers as a “remedy” (IDE 16) a tripartite
structure composed of city, farm, and overseas colonies—a system that trans-
forms these devilish circles into imperial spaces that are at once familiar
(London supplies and is supplied by the kingdom that it unifies and the em-
pire of which it is the “heart”) and new in that they are to be administered by
the Salvation Army, under the autocratic leadership of its General.21 Booth’s
campaign aims at remaking the concept “English public” by converting the
working classes such they have a role in the life of the empire; yet he retains
an essentialist notion of class difference that subtly renders these converts
“others” within the English public, a subordinate group that remains subject
to middle-class supervision.
Booth’s call to arms is directed at the English middle classes, the group
he seeks to commission in the larger project of regenerating the poor. Al-
though Booth admits that the middle classes also need reformation, he estab-
lishes different registers with which to scrutinize and judge different classes.
By faulting his readers’ lack of concern for the poor, Booth hopes to swell the
ranks of beneficent public persons like himself, to solicit volunteers who will
aid in the surveillance of the working classes, and yet to retain the sanctity of
middle-class private life. Regarding the chart-topping success of Stanley’s In
Darkest Africa, Booth wonders:
how strange it is that so much interest should be excited by a narrative of

human squalor and human heroism in a distant continent, while greater
squalor and heroism not less magnificent may be observed at our very
doors. . . . the stony streets of London, if they could but speak, would tell
of tragedies as awful, of ruin as complete, of ravishments as horrible, as if
we were in Central Africa. (IDE 12–13)
Implying that the streets speak only when their tales are interpreted by
an attentive urban investigator, Booth charges his middle-class contemporar-
ies with the sin of disengagement; he blames them, in effect, for ignoring
their responsibilities as public persons. Few will realize, as Booth does, that
East London “is the great Slough of Despond of our time,” because “what a
slough it is no man can gauge who has not waded therein, as some of us have
done, up to the very neck . . . with open eyes and with bleeding heart” (IDE
13). In order to teach his readers to translate sympathy for the London poor
into effective surveillance of this “residuum,” to transform “bleeding heart”
into “open eyes,” he encourages all sorts of private gentlemen and gentle-
women to come forward with any resources that will propel his scheme—
such as a million sterling (IDE 251), or information regarding how best to
build workers’ cottages (IDE 227). Yet he asks these gentlefolk to go public
only with those aspects of their lives (wealth, knowledge of engineering) that
are already part of their public characters. Booth urges his middle-class readers
into public affairs, but nevertheless leaves middle-class private life privileged
as an invisible norm, requiring no scrutiny. In Darkest England thus represents
power in terms of a simultaneous possession of vision and invisibility, a rep-
resentation of the sort that Donna J. Haraway fortuitously describes as a “god-
trick.” Booth slyly associates his class with what Haraway calls a “conquering
gaze from nowhere . . . that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that
makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to
represent while escaping representation.”22 As briefly suggested in Chapter
1, Booth imagines his own visionary role (and that of similarly endowed
middle-class reformers) as possessing far more surveying power than the
limited observational abilities that Henry Mayhew (for instance) claims for
himself. As Haggard remarks in defense of Booth against his critics, “What
people of slower mind and narrower views may mistake for pride, in his case,
I am sure, is but the impatient and unconscious assertiveness of superior
power, based upon vision and accumulated knowledge.”23 Haggard echoes
what is a motif throughout In Darkest England: “vision,” in the sense of that

possessed both by the urban investigator and the visionary social reformer,
provides the middle-class subject with “accumulated knowledge,” and the
two together constitute the “superior power” that justifies “impatient and
unconscious assertiveness” in pursuing schemes to reform a working-class
population understood to be utterly lacking in such vision, knowledge, and
power.
As noted above, In Darkest England is, like Mayhew’s work, especially
concerned with working-class youth; as we will see, Booth’s text has frequent
recourse to domestic and developmental narratives about the ruination of
working-class childhood in order to explain the etiology of working-class
degeneration. By contrast, Booth prefaces his book with a narrative of his
own childhood that shows how public life offers middle-class subjects vision-
ary power while not encroaching on middle-class domestic privacy:
When but a mere child the degradation and helpless misery of the poor
Stockingers of my native town, wandering gaunt and hunger-stricken
through the streets droning out their melancholy ditties, crowding the Union
or toiling like galley slaves on relief works for a bare subsistence, kindled
in my heart yearnings to help the poor which have continued to this day
and which have had a powerful influence on my whole life. (IDE preface)
Significantly, beginning his book with an anecdote from his childhood

does not reduce the sense of visual power Booth claims for himself but, rather,
suggests that it inheres in middle-class subjects—and is unavailable to
working-class ones—regardless of age. However great his “yearnings to help
the poor,” Booth’s vignette establishes his infant power as a middle-class
urban investigator through identification against, rather than with, the
stockingers, who sing childlike “ditties.” Significantly, although Booth’s many
biographers remind the reader that he grew up in considerable want, repre-
senting the poverty of the helpless stockingers does not prod any reflection
on his own youthful feelings of social and economic inferiority—what he
later briefly referred to as his own “humiliating bondage” as an apprentice in
a pawnbroker’s shop.24 Booth’s prefatorial narrative of his childhood, with
its spectatorial sweep and emphasis on the sympathy “kindled in” his heart,
erases the fact that he viewed the Nottingham workers primarily from behind
the counter of a pawnbroker’s shop—a position that is at once stationary,
conventionally viewed as parasitic, and “humiliating” for the aged Booth to
recall. Rather, the preface describes the slavelike weavers as distant and es-
sentially different from young William Booth. Both pitiable and threatening—
“gaunt” and “hunger-stricken,” yet “wandering” and “crowding” like
Mayhew’s nomadic predators—the poor are transformed into a spectacle that
reinforces Booth’s visionary power, and the workers’ lack of it. Although
wandering the streets, they do not possess the mobility of the boy who surveys
their condition: rather, the stockingers are “like galley slaves,” chained to the
slums of Nottingham. In contrast, even though he is “a mere child,” Booth is
apparently able to survey (effortlessly, unperceived, and in perfect safety) a
variety of city spaces (streets, Union, relief works). Finally, the placement of
this childhood narrative at the beginning of the adult social reformer’s text
indicates that this contact with poverty does not taint Booth but becomes
instead the foundation of the General’s life work. Erasing his own childhood
limitations (economic, bodily, intellectual), Booth’s preface points us towards
the epic survey of “darkest England” and the solution of its problems—the
public man’s “forty years of active service in the salvation of men” (IDE
preface). Seeming to promise a description of the scene’s psychological effects
on the boy, autobiography here does not render the private person, William
Booth, available for spectatorial scrutiny, but instead proves that from child-
hood he is destined to visionary social reforms and national social status.
The preface naturalizes the representation of middle-class subjects as able to
be both private persons who engage in disembodied surveillance and public
persons active for the nation’s good.
Although Booth also hopes to recruit the poor for service in his Army,
he imagines this group’s entry into public life in such a way that surveying
power is withheld from them, that their domestic lives are always public
issues, and that their privacy is an impossibility. Unlike the narrative of his
own childhood, with all its strategic omissions, Booth’s exposure of the de-
generacy of working-class youth—the “lawlessness of our lads, the increased
license of our girls” (IDE 66)—is remorselessly frank. Like most middle-
class Victorian writers, male and female, Booth finds prostitution quite fasci-
nating,25 and he summarizes its juvenile origins in a single melodramatic
case history:
The bastard of a harlot, born in a brothel, suckled on gin, and familiar

from earliest infancy with all the bestialities of debauch, violated before
she is twelve, and driven out into the streets by her mother a year or two
later, what chance is there for such a girl in this world—I say nothing
about the next? Yet such a case is not exceptional. There are many such
differing in detail, but in essentials the same. (IDE 47)
Unfortunate birth, malnutrition, exposure to primal scenes, rape, and

abandonment all reinforce the girl’s victimization by environment rather than
emphasize her faulty character; yet the insistent blaming of the girl’s mother
personalizes the degenerating environmental influence, locates it squarely in
working-class character and culture, and leaves unasked and unanswered the
apparently too-immense question of what caused the mother to be “a harlot.”
Although Booth momentarily flirts with what seems an atypical analysis of
the economic origins of prostitution when he states that “there is no industrial

career in which for a short time a beautiful girl can make as much money
with as little trouble as the profession of a courtesan” (IDE 50), even this
comment charges insistently toward imputations of working-class laziness
(“little trouble”) and immorality (“courtesan”). Booth’s case studies seek to
establish the environmental etiology of prostitution, yet wind up leaving
working-class character as much to blame as environmental circumstance:
“Some there are, no doubt, perhaps many, who—whether from inherited pas-
sion or from evil education—have deliberately embarked upon a life of vice,
but with the majority it is not so” (IDE 50). Such cloudy renditions of
“statistics” are quite strategic, and the difficulty of determining how many
(“Some,” “many,” not the “majority”) instances of degeneration result from
environmental influences (“evil education”), and how many from character
traits (“inherited passion,” “deliberately”) implies both that degeneration is
reversible and that the poor cannot help themselves. Booth raises this contra-
diction so as neatly to resolve it: if degeneration can be ameliorated but not
by the poor themselves, then middle-class reformers must intervene.26
The “essential” similarity of Booth’s case studies posits that working-
class culture itself is the degenerating force to be replaced by a more whole-
some culture, engineered and maintained by middle-class surveyors who can
provide laws for lawless lads and restrict the license of licentious girls. Thus,
Booth treats the prostitute as a synecdoche for a supposed moral infirmity
that disqualifies the entire working-class population from self-determination:
“untrained to labour, demoralised by a life of debauchery, accustomed to the
wildest license, emancipated from all discipline but that of starvation,” the
“lost women of our streets . . . suffer from almost every fault that human
material can possess” (IDE 261). This representation of the prostitute as
“emblematic” of the working classes—examples of which are legion in Vic-
torian and Edwardian writings27—enables many of the most powerful
representations of the working classes (as licentious, criminal, infectious,
feminine, physical, and benighted) and, in turn, confirms the middle classes
in their self-representation (as continent, law-abiding, healthy, masculine,
rational, and knowing). Although this chapter focuses primarily on Booth’s
treatment of “licentious girls” (plenty on boys in the next chapter), his less-
extensive discussions of “lawless lads” similarly assume the inherent degen-
eracy of working-class culture:
And with boys it is almost as bad. There are thousands who were begotten
when both parents were besotted with drink, whose mothers saturated
themselves with alcohol every day of their pregnancy, who may be said to
have sucked in a taste for strong drink with their mothers’ milk, and who
were surrounded from childhood with opportunities and incitements to
drink. (IDE 47)
Booth’s gendering of deviance (girls become prostitutes, boys drunkards)

is significant, but so is his implication that, between the two genders, the
entire working-class population tends toward some sort of sensual depravity.28
Booth’s insistent focus, like that of Mayhew in London Labour, on the juvenile
origins of this tendency reinforces the possibility of reversing it, a possibility
on which the reformist ambitions of Booth’s text and the Salvation Army
itself both depend; at the same time, the focus on juvenile origins suggests
the childlike helplessness of the working classes, and thus their need for
paternalistic regulation by the middle classes. Moreover, in his discussion of
“licentious girls” Booth defines the infirmity of the working classes in terms
of vision and thereby reinforces the qualifications (established in his preface)
of the middle classes, the Salvation Army, and its General to undertake the
regeneration of the poor. Women fall into prostitution, he claims, because
they “see the glittering bait” of riches, but the “penalty” of “disease, degra-
dation and death” is “hidden” from their sight (IDE 50–51). The apparently
less sinful girl who is “driven out into the streets by her mother” (IDE 47) is
similarly helpless, and her tale does not establish reader identification with
her plight but with the visual power of the middle-class reformer, who has
the foresight to discern social consequences. The prostitute’s “nature . . . is
short-sighted” (IDE 51), but supposedly that of Booth—or any middle-class
subject “who looks below the surface” (IDE 50)—is not.
According to Booth, the mystery about what lies “below the surface” of
working-class home life demands more middle-class investigation so as to make
this private realm a public issue, so as to make that realm subject to regulation
and reformation, before thirteen-year-olds become “public women.” Booth
implies that his visionary abilities qualify the Salvation Army for such a re-
generating intervention, just as his prefatory autobiography opposes the nar-
rative of the working-class girl’s upbringing: the prostitute’s career as a “public
woman”—who “serves” men, according to Booth’s logic, by damning herself
and them—begins when as a child she witnesses a degradation that is danger-
ous in that it is domestic, private, infectiously close; Booth’s career as a “public
person”—who “serves” men and women by saving them—begins when as a
child he surveys the public degradation of the stockingers from a distance
that protects him from its effects. Booth’s social scheme seeks to remove
working-class people from unregulated private spaces (brothels, gin-palaces,
and bedrooms full of bestial debauchery) and to replace them in more salu-
brious open spaces (Salvation Army city, farm, and overseas colonies).
If the unregenerate prostitute “accepts her doom . . . and treads the long and
torturing path-way of ‘the streets’ to the grave” (IDE 53), Booth offers a
contrasting, upbeat narrative of what happens when young women join the
Salvation Army Slum Brigade. The Brigade is “composed of women” some
of whom are “ladies born and bred” but most of whom—Booth asserts, using
typically juvenile language to describe the Slum Brigade members regardless
of their age—are “children of the poor” (IDE 158) who themselves engage in
the “rescue of many fallen girls” (IDE 169). The adult “lasses” of the Slum
Brigade have an experience of “the streets” very different from that of pros-
titutes: “our . . . lasses go unharmed and loved at all hours, spending every
other night always upon the streets” (IDE 55). In Darkest England here renders
ambiguous the concept of “public woman”29 in order to imply that working-
class women can inhabit the streets either as prostitutes subject to violence
or as Salvationists protected from harm by the uniform they share with the
General. Judith R. Walkowitz’s study of the participation of late-Victorian
women in such public realms as the Salvation Army has begun a useful revision
of claims, such as Janet Wolff’s,30 about the essential link between action in
the public sphere and maleness. Walkowitz argues that the Hallelujah lass
represents “a new style of working-class woman” who “impinged on the civic
spaces of her class superiors” and posed challenges to “conventions of gender,”
both of which acts were in turn “contained and channeled . . . into obedience
to a highly authoritarian institution.”31 However, by identifying the Salvation
Army—with its “authoritarian” demand for “obedience”—as the circumscrib-
ing institution, Walkowitz obscures how authoritative conceptions of essen-
tial working-class character much more efficiently limit such transgressions.
That is, the ability of working-class Salvationist women to revise “conven-
tions of gender” is contained precisely by the mapping of “civic spaces” that
their “class superiors” perform—in other words, such revisions are contained
by exclusive class divisions institutionalized partly through organizations such
as Booth’s but certainly more diffusely throughout English culture.
The Salvation Army should, indeed, be of great interest to feminist schol-
ars, not only because of the public authority and publishing success of
Catherine Booth, but because of the Army’s controversial attempt to institu-
tionalize equality between women and men. Indeed, even H. Rider Haggard—
surely, no reader’s idea of a pro-feminist writer—effused that “a study of the
female Officers of the Salvation Army is calculated to convert the observer
not only to a belief in the right of women to the suffrage, but also to that of
their fitness to rule among, or even over men.”32 One can certainly read the
comment that follows—”Only I never heard that any of these ladies ever
sought such privileges”33—as a relieved after-thought on the part of the author
of such wildly misogynist texts as She and King Solomon’s Mines (1886), but
it is also worth noting that Haggard here understands the competent “female
Officers” of the Army to be middle-class “ladies.” As Pamela J. Walker argues,
Salvationist women—including working-class ones—“were, in some respects,
‘new women’—activist, urban women who created new professional oppor-
tunities for other women and sought to broaden their cultural and political
landscape,” and Walker does much to challenge the common notion “that the
‘new woman’ was middle class and that working-class women shared neither
her aspirations nor her achievements.”34 However, the history of the Salvation
Army should remind us that feminist gains never necessarily imply working-
class ones. For example, Ann R. Higginbotham has revealingly detailed the
divisions between Salvationist women, in particular how the Women’s Social
Services—founded in 1884 and administered, with relative independence from
other branches of the Army, primarily by middle-class women—“may well
have appealed to Salvationist women who would have hesitated to lead a
brass band or harangue a crowd in the slums of Whitechapel.”35 The history
of the Women’s Social Services demonstrates the difficulty of uniting middle-
and working-class women within the Salvation Army and suggests that its
incorporative ideals do not offer working-class women as much mobility as
Walker, and especially Walkowitz, imply. If, by giving speeches to their class
equals in the East End, working-class Salvationist women demonstrated their
desire, like “new women,” to take on public and professional activities—
which were most commonly available to wealthy women, such as Octavia
Hill and Beatrice Webb, who engaged in social work in the slums—this late-
Victorian development perhaps signals a significant change in the cultural
position of working-class women. It is not, however, a radical shift in the
balance of power between the classes that would allow one to imagine, for
example, working-class women investigating and reforming the home lives
of their “betters.”
Rather, the “new style of working-class woman” that Walkowitz de-
scribes is placed between (on the one hand) the “unrespectable” poor that a
working-class Salvationist observes and (on the other hand) the middle classes
that supervise her. Walker persuasively argues that working-class Salvation-
ist women were especially effective as critics of supposedly excessive drinking
and gambling by men of their own class,36 and Catherine Booth makes clear
the benefits of this arrangement to middle-class reformers. According to Booth,
the degenerate poor can only be led to regeneration “by people of their own
class, who would go after them in their own resorts, who would speak to
them in a language they understood, and reach them by means suited to their
own tastes.”37 Not even bothering to disguise the aggressive policing implied
in “go after them,” Catherine Booth’s description of the enlistment of working-
class women in making working-class men’s private lives a public issue does
not imply a transgression of class boundaries per se but, rather, is a resonant
example of the strategy of divide and conquer that has long buttressed middle-
class power.
Moreover, even as the working-class Hallelujah lass advertises her dif-
ference, as a “public woman,” from the prostitutes she rescues, her difference
from middle-class women is just as heavily marked. For instance, although
William Booth claims that the Hallelujah lasses “go unharmed and loved at
all hours, spending every other night always upon the streets” (IDE 55), his
use of the word “loved” and the phrase “spending every other night always
upon the streets” insinuates that even these regenerated lasses still bear the
taint of the “licentious girls” they were and the traces of “darkest England,”
from which they come. Similarly, the Salvation Army uniform seems to be
an equalizing costume38 that makes it impossible to distinguish between “ladies
born and bred” who are slumming as Salvationists and those who are essen-
tially “children of the poor” (IDE 158); yet the permanent inner marks of the
latter will, apparently, always penetrate any outer covering. Thus, Josephine
Butler praises Catherine Booth for her training of working-class “girl sol-
diers”: “As a rule, the manners of the Salvation Lasses are beautiful, in spite
of occasional dropped h’s, provincial accent, and other such defects. As
women, we cannot but rejoice that even a portion of our women of the hum-
bler ranks . . . is subjected to such a training as this.”39 Butler treats the dropped
aspirates that she frequently ponders40 as an ineradicable sign of working-
class identity—the more dangerous qualities of which she unambiguously
describes two pages earlier in her document on Catherine Booth, where Butler
depicts the working classes as “a mass of creatures hardly human, debased
through generations of misery, and ignorance, and vice, full of hatred—hatred
of society and of everything which exists; wild beasts ready for vengeance.”41
In a less virulently classist, but, nevertheless, similar vein, Haggard describes,
in a Liverpool home for children, a small girl who resembles one of Mayhew’s
nomadic interviewees in that her “mania was to run away from home, where
it does not appear that she was ill-treated, and to sleep in the streets, on one
occasion for as long as five nights.” Haggard relates that the girl “had been
ten months in the Home and was doing well. Indeed, the Matron told me that
they had taken her out and given her opportunities of running away, but that
she had never attempted to avail herself of them.” Yet Haggard cannot resist
the opportunity to describe even this successful case as involving a working-
class young person who is permanently marked by the signs of essential dif-
ference from the members of a modern nation:
This child had a very curious face, and even in her sleep, as I saw her,
there was about it something wild and defiant. When the Matron turned
her over she did not yawn or cry, but uttered a kind of snarl. I suppose that
here is an instance of atavism, that the child threw back for thousands or
tens of thousands of years, to when her progenitors were savages, and that
their primitive instincts have reasserted themselves in her, although she
was born in the twentieth century.42
Butler’s and Haggard’s statements thus reinforce the strategic contra-

diction—the reformed working classes nevertheless remain essentially dif-
ferent from, inferior to, and in need of continued watching by the middle
classes—on which Salvationist and, more broadly, social-imperialist dis-

courses depend.
Indeed, many of the waspish criticisms of the Salvation Army, which
followed it from its founding until well into the twentieth century, imply that
the Army itself is tinged by the inherent degradation of the slumdwellers it
seeks to convert. Thus an 1884 Saturday Review writer complains of “a noisy
mob rambling after a banner and a band, with a reformed housebreaker or
converted potboy performing antics in front,” and consistently describes the
Army itself in terms lifted from writings on the “dangerous classes”—as “a
howling mob,” “a heated and gabbling mob,” “ignoble fanatics,” “the stupid-
est of mankind,” “coarse and ignorant.”43 Similarly, Charles H. Pearson, de-
tailing in 1893 the “inheritance of premature decrepitude” that undermines
working-class life and character, argues that among the signs of this undesir-
able legacy are not only a “horizon narrowed to parochial limits, with no
interests except those of the factory or the Trades-Union” but also “the faith
of the Salvation Army, that finds expression in antics and buffoonery.”44 Even
a sympathetic 1894 report on the Salvation Army Farm Colony at Hadleigh
notes that “the denizens of the slums” conveyed to the Essex site “usually
convert the rural scene into more or less of a slum during their
labors.”45 Throughout his book, Booth seeks to anticipate such critiques and
to advertise the necessity for his scheme by negotiating between (on the one
hand) the claim that the Salvation Army can convert the “dangerous classes”
into productive and placid workers and (on the other hand) the notion that
even the working classes thus regenerated will retain an essential flaw—the
tendency towards the degradations identified with working-class culture—
and, thus, will require continual regulation by the Salvation Army. For in-
stance, in the “Salvation Army Social Campaign” lithograph (Figure 6), the
city colony lighthouse directs the eye up from the urban morass, through the
airy clouds of various Salvationist activities and the arboreal branches of the
farm colony, to the heavenly colony across the sea; in answer to the worry
that the undisciplined poor do not even “know how to bake a loaf or wash
their clothes” (IDE 63), the illustration is capped by a lad and a lass, intent on
baking and washing, who have apparently transcended the disciplinary maze
contained by the social campaign arch. Yet their muscular industry is circum-
scribed by framing lines indivisible from the arch, which is heavily rein-
forced by ponderous statistics regarding their former evils.
Every slum had sent its half-a-score

The round world over. (Booth had groaned for more.)
...
Drabs and vixens in a flash made whole!

Gone was the weasel-head, the snout, the jowl!
Sages and sibyls now, and athletes clean,
Rulers of empires, and of forests green!
—Vachel Lindsay, “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” (1913)46
Both the Salvationist scheme and the critiques of it share a notion of an ines-
capably degraded working-class culture. This notion, pervasive in Salvationist
writing as in Victorian and Edwardian culture, must attenuate any attempt to
view the Salvation Army either as an organization seeking to foster class
equality or as an authentic working-class movement—views that are com-
mon not only among some of Booth’s contemporary admirers but among
recent historians. For instance, in addition to Haggard’s Regeneration, Beatrice
Webb’s My Apprenticeship (1926) defines the spirit of the late-Victorian and
Edwardian years as involving “a new consciousness of sin among men of
intellect and men of property,” a “growing uneasiness . . . that the industrial
organisation, which had yielded rent, interest and profits on a stupendous
scale, had failed to provide a decent livelihood and tolerable conditions for a
majority of the inhabitants of Great Britain.”47 Webb relates that this “class-
consciousness of sin was usually accompanied by . . . a deliberate dedication
of means and strength to the reorganisation of society on a more equalitarian
basis,” and among these forms of “devoted personal service” she identifies
“a theological category,” including “General Booth.”48 The apparent desire
to reorganize society “on a more equalitarian basis”—which makes the Sal-
vation Army and its most famous literary product so much a part of Booth’s,
Haggard’s, and Webb’s liberal time—is in tension with a desire to retain an
essentialized notion of class difference. Thus, Vachel Lindsay’s rendition of
the Salvationist conversion narrative, quoted as the epigraph to this section,
is of course ironic; the statements by the Booths and their admirers, such as
Josephine Butler, in no way suggest that the working classes will lose the
signs of inferiority (“the weasel-head, the snout, the jowl”) and become “Sages
and sibyls” who can act as “Rulers of empires.” According to In Darkest
England, visionary sagacity, sibylline knowledge, and the capacity to govern
either England or the British Empire remains the prerogative of Booth and
like-minded members of the middle classes. That is, without minimizing the
rhetorical impact of the egalitarianism implicit in many aspects of the Salvation
Army’s functioning, it is equally important to note how Salvationist discourse
limits such apparent affirmations of the “classlessness” of the organization
by reaffirming its alignment with discourses that circulate widely in Victorian
culture—such as the depiction of the middle classes in terms of visionary
power and domestic privacy and the working poor in terms of physical em-
bodiment and public visibility.
Figur
iguree 6 “Salvation Army Social Campaign” lithograph. From William Booth, In Darkest England
and the Way Out (1890). Courtesy of the Salvation Army.
For instance, the very metaphor “army” is both seemingly egalitarian

and ultimately hierarchical: perfectly aware that the supposedly equalizing
Salvation Army outfit would fascinate even his detractors, Booth uniformly
appears in photographs, for which he loved to pose, wearing the jersey and
insignia that identify both General and rawest recruit as subject to a Salva-
tionist order that transcends any individual soldier. Moreover, despite his oft-
criticized authoritarianism,49 Booth challenges the hierarchies of other armies
and claims that his “makes every soldier in some degree an officer, charged
with the responsibility of so many of his townsfolk, and expected to carry on
the war against the streets, street, or part of a street allotted to his
care.”50 Indeed, Army officers sent among the Zulus and Indians were ordered
to learn their languages and customs so that, as K. S. Inglis says, “foreign
sinners could be met as intimately as sinners at home.”51 Although In Dark-
est England never admits as much, the missionary goals of Booth’s coloniza-
tion scheme would seem to require that regenerated working-class people
who are to be sent overseas as Salvationists would require and receive this
considerable education. Yet, Booth asserts that they would not need to vote in
the elections of whatever country to which they were sent, as such people
should not “bother their heads about politics.”52 In the context of the Reform
Act of 1884, Booth’s fantasy of a realm where newly enfranchised working-
class men would no longer need or desire to retain this right can only be
described as regressive liberalism.
Booth’s presentation of his social-reform scheme everywhere seeks
masterfully to resolve the contradictions between these two claims, both of
which possess great power in liberal rhetoric about the working classes: insti-
tuting hegemonic imperialism, by converting the urban poor into participants
in the British imperial enterprise, is the least violent means of removing the
danger supposedly posed by such outsiders; reinforcing a belief that these
converts retain essential working-class flaws in turn entrenches the divisions
on which middle-class power depends. One must treat with suspicion the
effort, on the part of a number of historians, to describe the Salvation Army
as, in Victor Bailey’s words, “an expression of independent working-class
cultural development, and not as an agency of middle-class domination.”53
Although he offers intriguing evidence for the similarity of Salvationist and
some socialist operations, to claim that the former caused a “change in the
social habits of the urban masses”—towards “self-discipline, self-respect and
self-help”54—is to grant Booth’s regeneration scheme the credit he so richly
desires. It may be true that the last decades of the nineteenth century and the
early years of the twentieth involved a self-transformation of English working-
class culture—a gravitation away from the carnivalesque celebration of
outsiderness (which one often hears in statements by Mayhew’s interviewees)
and toward an investment in notions of respectability akin to those held by
the lower middle classes.55 However, there is also evidence that only a small
minority of working-class people joined the Salvation Army and that it thus
could have had relatively little to do with any such broad transformation in
working-class culture.
As Norman H. Murdoch has demonstrated, even turn-of-the-century

commentators on the Salvation Army criticized it precisely for failing to attract
the working classes.56 Moreover, the gulf between the Salvation Army’s am-
bitions and the effect of the organization on the late-century working classes
is suggested by numerous turn-of-the-century sources. Thus, Charles Booth
notes in Life and Labour of the People in London (1889) that, if the student of
religion among the poor
turns his eyes from those conducting the [Salvationist] service to those
for whom it is conducted, he sees for the most part blank indifference.
Some may “come to scoff and stay to pray,” but scoffers are in truth more
hopeful than those—and they are the great bulk of every audience of which
I have ever made one—who look in to see what is going on; enjoying the
hymns perhaps, but taking the whole service as a diversion.57
A literary instance that confirms Charles Booth’s assessment of “blank

indifference” can be found in the response to Salvationism by Jane Snowden,
a character in George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889): “A promenade of
the Salvation Army half-puzzled, half-amused her; she spoke of it altogether
without intolerance, as did her grandfather, but never dreamt that it was a
phenomenon which could gravely concern her.”58 Likewise, in his autobio-
graphical study of Edwardian Salford, Robert Roberts notes that many people
in that working-class community treated the Salvation Army as a musical
diversion but not as a catalyst to conversion: “Though the Salvation Army
came often, they soon departed, gleanings spiritual or material being few;
but one stood grateful for the burst of glory and hated the silence as it flowed
back.”59 However welcome the bands might have been in neighborhoods like
Roberts’s, there is reason to believe that his mother was not the only work-
ing-class person who comprehended, and opposed, the fact that Salvationism
had the interests of the middle classes and not the working classes at heart:
Roberts reports that his mother, like “many socialists of the time,” was “bit-
terly opposed to the Salvation Army, with its acceptance of society and indif-
ference to the economic causes of poverty. ‘So long as you’re saved,’ she
said, ‘they don’t give a damn why you’re starving.’”60
Given that the Salvation Army’s religious goals were met with apathy
by many working-class people such as the unnamed Londoners Charles Booth
observes, Jane Snowden, and Robert Roberts’s neighbors—or were met with
active opposition by others, such as Mrs. Roberts—it is hard to see how the
Army could have achieved its related goal, the institutionalization of hege-
monic imperialism among the working classes. That Salvationism would have
this result was a cherished desire on the part of many social imperialists, as
Booth’s friend W. T. Stead makes clear in a October 23, 1890 letter to Alfred,
Viscount Milner: “You will be delighted to see that we have got the Salvation
Army solid not only for Social Reform but also for Imperial Unity. I have
written to Rhodes about it and we stand on the eve of great things.”61 One can
be led to presume that the great day Stead predicts came to pass by the fact
that, twenty years later, H. Rider Haggard describes the scope of Salvationist
imperialism in terms almost as fantastical as William Booth’s: “the Salvation
Army is unique, if only on account of the colossal scale of its operations. Its
fertilizing stream flows on steadily from land to land, till it bids fair to irrigate
the whole earth.”62 However, to mistake the wishes of such social imperialists
as a fait accompli requires that one (at best) ignore the resistance of working-
class people such as Roberts’s mother or (at worst) assume that the working
classes were a politically unselfconscious, easily manipulated group and,
thereby, confirm the assumptions of middle-class writers such as William
Booth. Booth’s attempt to use the Salvation Army as an instrument with which
to institute hegemonic imperialism does seek, as Pamela J. Walker puts it, to
remind “all converts, no matter how humble, that they might take part in the
glory of the imperial quest,” to “affirm their position as British Christians,”
and to emphasize “the superior, metropolitan location of British Salvation-
ists.”63 It is important to differentiate between this desire and its reception by
working-class people whose “view of imperialism—when they held one at
all and where records of it survive—was by no means monolithic,” as Stephen
Donovan persuasively argues:
Those who had newly begun organising would certainly not have shared
the view that imperialism was the answer to their demands for houses,
education, employment, trade union rights, political representation . . .
Some of their leaders were outspoken opponents of “capitalist” imperialism
and readily linked the oppression of colonial peoples to the exploitation
of the working class in Britain.64
Indeed, the specifics of Booth’s scheme now appear primarily to be the

whimsies of an elderly eccentric: except for an 1890 bestseller, the planet
bears few traces of the farm and overseas colonies he envisioned.65 Yet, the
conversion narrative that propels In Darkest England had a formidable influ-
ence, in the following century, on middle-class adults’ relation to working-
class youth culture. While attempting to incorporate working-class young
people in the British imperial enterprise, Edwardian social imperialists, like
Booth, seek to pose a definitive limit to that inclusiveness: an essentialist
notion of class difference whereby the middle-class subject is understood to
possess the visionary power to observe and regulate working-class people,
who are, in turn, understood to be an embodied, juvenile group subject to
such paternalist observation and regulation and from whom such visionary
power is withheld. Armed with this janus-faced sociological discourse, the
Edwardian middle classes go scouting for lads and lasses who can be remade
into organized agents of imperial aggrandizement.
5
The Boy Scouts and
the Working Classes
It should come as no surprise that the title character of Rudyard Kipling’s

Kim (1901) is one of the first Boy Scouts. Of all social-imperialist organiza-
tions, the Scouts is the most irrepressibly optimistic about the ability to remake
working-class young people into servants of the British Empire, and few
characters in imperialist literature are more given to such metamorphoses
than Kim. Thus, Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good
Citizenship, the international bestseller with which the Boer War hero Robert
Baden-Powell founded the Scouts in 1908, recommends that Scouts read Kim
(among many other works now established in the canon of juvenile literature)
because a “good example of what a Boy Scout can do is to be found in Rudyard
Kipling’s story.”1 Of course, Kim exemplifies primarily the spy’s capacity
for shifting between presumably essential and instantly recognizable identities.
In the novel, Kim’s tremendous usefulness to the imperial enterprise (his
ability to thwart the attempts of Russian spies to undermine British rule in
India) has everything to do with the fact that, although Kimball O’Hara is the
son of an Irish soldier, “Kim was English,” as well as the fact that, although
“he was burned black as any native . . . Kim was white—a poor white of the
very poorest.”2 Kipling’s novel goes to great lengths to maintain that the am-
biguities surrounding Kim’s national and racial identity are valuable: he is “a
white boy . . . who is not a white boy”3 when it suits his superiors in the secret
service to have him infiltrate native communities; similarly, while “thinking
hard in English” about his duty to those superiors, the violent “Irish devil in
the boy’s blood” brings about the “fall of his enemy.”4 However, the one
aspect of his identity that never plays a role in Kim’s success as a spy is his
being “a poor white.” Significantly, the only other member of the English
working classes to appear in the novel is also one of Kim’s few enemies, and
one of the few characters to whose information the ever-studious Kim refuses
to listen: “Kim of course disbelieved every word the drummer-boy spoke
about the Liverpool suburb which was his England.”5 Kim’s association with
both Sahibs and Indians, his identification with both English and Irish, and
his ability to turn his capacity for transformation to the benefit of the British
Empire all demand that, in English class terms, he identify only with elite
107
metropolitans like Colonel Creighton. Indeed, Baden-Powell’s handbook

elides the unambiguously class-specific term “poor white” and euphemisti-
cally describes Kim as a boy “who lived in a humble way in India” (SB 7).
Similarly, the juvenile literature of the Boy Scout organization is moti-
vated by a desire to incorporate working-class boys into the British imperial
project and presumes that this process requires their renunciation of working-
class culture and adoption of middle-class character. Baden-Powell founds
the Boy Scouts in 1908, in response to prevalent concerns about the physical
deterioration of the urban working classes and their inability to participate in
the military defense of the British Empire; Baden-Powell claims that Scouting
will provide character for juvenile delinquents and in turn manufacture citizens
trained to defend England against invasion by other imperialist nations. This
ambitious scheme for the rejuvenation of empire is an attempt, like Booth’s,
to institute what in the introduction to Youth of Darkest England I describe as
hegemonic imperialism. According to Baden-Powell, rendering the urban poor
fit for imperial service depends on a wholesale transformation of English
society, whereby the working classes must identify with the pro-imperialist
values that Baden-Powell, like most social imperialists, understands to be
held by the majority of middle-class English people. Baden-Powell in turn
imagines, like Booth, that the reformed working classes will be available to
aid the middle classes in the work traditionally reserved for this group—
surveillance of the urban poor. Baden-Powell thus seeks to train the Scout to
be a young urban observer; in order to do so, however, the Scout must protect
himself from urban dangers by engaging in ceaseless bodily self-regulation,
and Baden-Powell offers copious instructions to Scouts regarding how to
brush their teeth, breathe, defecate. Through this medico-moral discourse,
Baden-Powell places a class-based limitation on his apparently egalitarian
notion of imperial citizenship for all boys: the handbook ultimately depicts
not only urban working-class culture but the working-class Scout himself
not as capable (like Kim) of thorough recuperation for imperial activities but
as a self-corrupting entity. Finally, the handbook disseminates a representation
of the working-class body in terms of machinery, a representation that rein-
forces the normative depiction, in British imperialist literature, of the middle
classes in terms of visionary regulation.
England was not merely beneath the heel of the invader. It was be-
neath the heels of nine invaders.
There was barely standing-room.
—P. G. Wodehouse6
Cobbled together from various imperialist and sociological discourses, Scout-

ing for Boys borrows heavily from the “invasion scare” narrative prevalent in
The Boy Scouts and the Working Classes 109
the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.
Invasions of England figure prominently in various turn-of-the-century
genres—in gothic fictions and detective thrillers (Bram Stoker’s Dracula
[1897] and Sax Rohmer’s The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu [1913]), in the “sci-
entific romance” (H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds [1898] and The War in
the Air [1908]), and in the emergent genre of spy fiction (epitomized by Erskine
Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service [1903]).7 The
ideological apparatus of both invasion scare narrative and Boy Scout hand-
book is in large measure designed to repair the embarrassments of the Second
Boer War (1899–1902). In spite of Britain’s defeat of the Boer settlers of
South Africa, the heavy costs of the war—lost lives, limbs, and nationalist
morale—suggested to many that Britain’s imperial destiny was by no means
manifest and that, without suitable opposition to competitors in the imperial
arms race, Britain risked not only the loss of colonial possessions but also
invasion by other European nations.8 The invasion narrative is only the most
extravagant index of British anxieties, in the early twentieth century, about
the increasing power of other European empires, particularly that of Ger-
many. Generally considered the instigator of the genre, Lieutenant-Colonel
Sir George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a
Volunteer (1871) imagines a German invasion of England as the inevitable
sequel to recent events—in particular, the January 1871 seizure of Versailles
by the King of Prussia and the succeeding armistice between France and
Germany, which effectively signalled the decline of French military control
of the Continent and the rise of Germany as an imperial power. At the turn of
the century, worries about the decline of British military efficiency com-
pounded, for many writers and readers, the German menace fantasized in
Chesney’s bestseller. Although the exemplary Edwardian invasion narrative,
Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands, notes in its preface that the book is written
with no “intention of provoking feelings of hostility to Germany” but solely
with the aim of “exterminating the scaremonger, who trades on public igno-
rance,”9 the novel concludes with the unambiguous question: “Is it not be-
coming patent that the time has come for training all Englishmen
systematically either for the sea or for the rifle?”10 Like Childers’s novel,
Scouting for Boys begins by offering a seemingly level-headed observation
about national defense: “we ought to be prepared in Britain against being
attacked by enemies” because, although such an event “may not be probable,
it is quite . . . possible” (SB 10). By the end of the handbook, Baden-Powell
adopts a far more sinister tone and asserts that it “is quite likely that Britain
will some day be attacked . . . by a large number of enemies” (SB 274):
we have many powerful enemies round about us in Europe who want very
much to get hold of the trade in our great manufacturing towns, and of our
vast farm-lands in our Oversea Dominions . . . Their only way—and they
know it—is to stab suddenly at the heart of the Empire, that is, to attack
Britain. If they succeeded, the whole of the Empire must fall at once,
because the different parts of it cannot yet defend themselves without
help from home. (SB 273–74)
Availing himself of a common political rhetoric, Baden-Powell informs

the reader that, if politicians who wish to reduce military spending “are allowed
to have their way,” the English “may as well learn German . . . for we shall
be conquered” by these neighbors (SB 280).
In the wake of Britain’s slim victory against the Boers, journalistic and
parliamentary debates inflamed anxieties about the suitability of Englishmen
for military service and in turn paid increased attention to the group from
which the military recruited most of its volunteers, working-class men. From
the start, invasion narratives focus on the working classes and their role in
domestic and imperial security. Thus, Chesney concludes The Battle of
Dorking by noting that the fictional invasion of England by Germany was
due in part to the defects of newly enfranchised working-class men:
The warnings of the few were drowned in the voice of the multitude. Power
was then passing away from the class which had been used to rule . . . into
the hands of the lower classes, uneducated, untrained to the use of political
rights, and swayed by demagogues.11
In consonance with the writings on penny dreadfuls and anticipating the

expression of a similar anxiety in Haggard’s She, Chesney’s 1871 text aims a
large portion of its scaremongering rhetoric at the danger of expanding the
franchise to include adult working-class men, a process initiated by the re-
cently passed Reform Act of 1867 and accomplished by the Reform Act of
1884.12 At the end of the Second Boer War, by contrast, anxiety about the
future defense and expansion of the empire is inseparable from the recognition
that the working classes must be included in, rather than excluded from, the
British imperial plot. Chesney’s lament about granting the vote to the work-
ing classes coincides with the late-Victorian sociological theories discussed
in the previous chapter, which theories argued that urbanization had trans-
formed laborers into an inherently degenerate “residuum” whose physical,
psychological, and moral defects could be passed on to succeeding gener-
ations of poor city dwellers and who were thus fundamentally disqualified
from participation in the political life of a modern, imperial nation. In contrast,
Baden-Powell and many of his contemporaries apply up-to-date environmen-
talist sociological theories of urban decline in order to argue that increased
urbanization results not in the inherent degeneration of the working classes
but only in their physical deterioration.13 Thus, in a 1903 speech in the House
of Lords, the Earl of Meath worries that
the poorer populations in our large towns are exposed to conditions which,
if continued, must inevitably contribute to a low national standard of physi-
cal health and strength, seeing that if such be the case it would constitute
a grave national peril.14
Rehabilitation of the poor is necessary, Meath argues, “so that future

generations may be able fearlessly to face and bear the burden which fierce
foreign competition and the ever increasing responsibilities of extending Em-
pire have placed, and will place, on the shoulders of the subjects of King
Edward.”15
The discursive shift from degeneration to deterioration implies a signifi-
cant change in thinking about class: by claiming that the working classes
have deteriorated from a condition on which full citizenship depends, writers
such as Meath and Baden-Powell assert that the urban poor can once again
attain that condition—and these writers do so with more assurance than schem-
ers who plot the regeneration of the poor who supposedly inherit degenerate
qualities from their parents. With all the authority of a military careerist,
Baden-Powell repeats recent “reports on the deterioration of our race,” which
“ought to act as a warning to be taken in time, before it goes too far”: “Our
standard of height in the Army was 5 ft. 6 in. in 1845; it was FOUR INCHES
less in 1895. In 1900 forty-four men in every thousand recruits weighed under
7 st. 12 lb.; and this deficiency has been increasing since” (SB 177). From
these “and the many similar reports,” Baden-Powell concludes that “much
PREVENTABLE deterioration is being allowed to creep in among the rising
generation, largely owing to ignorance on the part of parents and of the children
themselves” (SB 178). Predictably, the social ills that Baden-Powell lists as
evidence of such deterioration point to the working-class sensuality paraded
throughout Victorian writings on the urban poor: “there is also prevalent a
great amount of illness resulting from self-abuse and venereal disease, as
well as from drink. Also much pauper over-population due to want of self-
restraint on the part of men and women” (SB 178). These two observations—
that British imperial progress is threatened by working-class deterioration,
and that such deterioration is “PREVENTABLE” and “largely owing” to
working-class “ignorance”—are central to the Boy Scout social-reform
scheme, as they are to Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London
Poor. On the one hand, Scouting for Boys—at heart an education manual—
treats “ignorance” as a lack to be rectified and working-class deficiencies as
“PREVENTABLE,” not inherent. On the other hand, by aiming its reformist
zeal at the insufficiencies of the working classes, the handbook presumes the
superiority of middle-class cultural values. As we will see, Baden-Powell in
turn argues that the working classes must adopt middle-class cultural values
if their deterioration is to be halted “in time, before it goes too far.”
In response to contemporary fears that working-class deterioration, and

the resulting unfitness for military service, might lead not only to a repetition
of the South African fiasco but to an invasion of England, Scouting for Boys
posits that every young Briton—regardless of class—can be recruited for
service to the British Empire. Indeed, the handbook identifies class conflict
itself as a danger to the empire and seeks to foster, instead, a national identity
that unifies all classes:
If a strong enemy wants our rich commerce and Colonies, and sees us in
Britain divided against each other, he would pounce in and capture
them. . . . you must begin, as boys, not to think other classes of boys to be
your enemies. Remember, whether rich or poor, from castle or from slum,
you are all Britons in the first place, and you’ve got to keep Britain up
against outside enemies. . . . If you despise other boys because they belong
to a poorer class than yourself you are a snob; if you hate other boys
because they happen to be born richer and belong to higher class schools
than yourself you are a fool. (SB 272)
Baden-Powell shrewdly observes that class prejudice has very different

effects on different social groups: middle-class boys who despise their inferiors
are mere snobs, whereas working-class boys who hate their betters are utter
fools. Yet the handbook asserts that Scouting, which “appeals to boys of every
class” (SB viii), can be the means of eradicating such destructive enmity. To
foster this unity, Baden-Powell cleverly shifts the target of his disdain from
the lazy working classes of conservative fantasy to laziness itself. Scouting
opposes “the growth of ‘shirkers’ in every class of the community—men who
shirk their duties and responsibilities to the State and to others, and men who
shirk work in any form” (SB 290; my emphasis).16 In a revealing attempt to
naturalize the danger of laziness, Baden-Powell condemns the “horde of un-
employed, leading miserable, wasted lives in all parts of the country—the
great army of drones in our hive” (SB 290). Baden-Powell’s many books
frequently recycle this metaphor in order to insist that, as he says in
Scoutmastership: A Handbook for Scoutmasters on the Theory of Scout Train-
ing (1919), the non-working male “drones in our social hive” exist not only
among the poor but also “among our well-to-do classes.”17 In spite of this
apparent egalitarianism, however, the specific examples of shirking in Scout-
ing for Boys conform to stereotypical depictions of working-class laziness—
just as the Boy Scout is presumed to be an upholder of middle-class values,
regardless of his class. Baden-Powell seeks to reorganize English society
along the lines suggested by the soldier whose plan for resistance to Martian
occupation is one of the funnier moments in Wells’s The War of the Worlds:
“And we form a band—able-bodied, clean-minded men. We’re not going to
pick up any rubbish that drifts in. Weaklings go out . . . Play cricket, perhaps.
That’s how we shall save the race.”18 Similarly, but without Wells’s irony,
Baden-Powell insists that Scouts of all classes can be qualified for patriotic
service to the empire—but only by remaking themselves in the image of the
middle classes, by becoming exemplars of “able-bodied, clean-minded” mas-
culinity. Likewise, all shirkers are equally abominable “rubbish,” due to their
“unemployment.” As Baden-Powell informs Scouts in a campfire lecture on
“animals,” bees are “quite a model community, for they respect their queen
and kill their unemployed” (SB 169).19
There suddenly appeared in my world—I saw them first, I think, in 1908—

a new sort of little boy, a most agreeable development of the slouching,
cunning, cigarette-smoking, town-bred youngster . . . I liked the Boy Scout,
and I find it difficult to express how much it mattered to me, with my
growing bias in favour of deliberate national training, that Liberalism hadn’t
been able to produce . . . anything of this kind.
—Richard Remington, M.P., in Wells’s The New Machiavelli 20
Baden-Powell’s plan for the rejuvenation of empire takes him scouting for
boys from all classes—but particularly the working classes, a numerical
majority; he imagines that the Boy Scout organization will be able to prevent
working-class boys from becoming juvenile delinquents and will be able to
transform these “rough lads” into good citizens qualified to defend Britain
against invasion. Scouting for Boys and the Edwardian educational theory
that informs it typically view the child, whether middle- or working-class, in
Wordsworthian terms—as the raw material of an adult individual, a being
whose character will be formed either by environment or education. For turn-
of-the-century reformers, the distressing condition of the working classes,
supposedly indicated by both their physical deterioration and their propen-
sity to crime, threatens imperial and domestic security; according to widely
recognized experts on youth such as the Earl of Meath and Baden-Powell,
physical deterioration and criminal behavior are not defects inherent in work-
ing-class people, but are the effects of the slum environment and the lack of
an education that would counter its influence.21 For instance, “Juvenile crime
is not naturally born in the boy,” Baden-Powell proclaims in Scoutmastership,
“but is largely due either to the spirit of adventure that is in him, to his own
stupidity, or to his lack of discipline, according to the nature of the indi-
vidual.”22 Baden-Powell here blurs the terms of environmentalist sociology
(“not naturally born in the boy”) and those of essentialist notions of class
difference (“the spirit . . . that is in him,” “the nature of the individual”).
Throughout the Edwardian period, there was in fact considerable slippage
between the terms “degeneration” and “deterioration,” even among more care-
ful theorists than Baden-Powell. Yet, as Richard Soloway notes, the term
“deterioration” was in general “carefully chosen to avoid any presumption of
inherent degeneration”23—particularly by writers (such as Baden-Powell)
concerned to incorporate the working classes into imperial activities. Baden-
Powell’s ambitious scheme for domestic reform and imperial defense consis-
tently emphasizes the principles if not the terminology of environmentalist
sociology: everywhere focusing on the malleability of youth, his upbeat project
aims to retain the spirit of the adventurous, educate the stupid, and provide dis-
cipline for all by giving British boys of every class a middle-class character.24
In his contribution to The Heart of the Empire (1901), Charles F. G.
Masterman announces the existence of “a new race, hitherto unreckoned and
of incalculable action”: “the ‘City type’ of the coming years; the ‘street-bred’
people of the twentieth century; the ‘new generation knocking at our doors.’”25
According to Masterman, “the future progress of the Anglo-Saxon Race, and
for the next half-century at least the policy of the British Empire in the world”
would depend on the “development and action” of this urban population.26 In
order to shape this new force so that it would support rather than undermine
the empire, Edwardian reformers focus in particular on the development of
this “new generation”—what Masterman calls “our city children.”27 In an
essay on “The Children of the Town” (1901) commissioned for The Heart of
the Empire, Reginald A. Bray argues that a city such as London,
fostering excitement while it diminishes vital force, is . . . rearing a people

whose decreasing physical vigour will render them unfit for any useful
work, and whose increasing instability of character will prove a real dan-
ger to the very existence of the Empire.28
Bray here confirms the assumption—on the part of many Victorian social
observers—that what Henry Mayhew calls “the confusion and uproar”29 of
the city streets exert a harmful fascination for working-class Londoners. Ac-
cording to Mayhew, the “education of these children is such only as the streets
afford,” and this education instills a “hatred of the least restraint or controul.”30
Yet Bray, like Mayhew, also has an acute sense of the pleasures of being in a
crowd:
No one can wander along the crowded roads … without being seized by a
curious thrill of excitement. . . . A multitude of living beings has a strange
intoxicating effect . . . Child and adult are alike in this, and, once they
have been subjected to this crowd-passion, crave for a repetition of the
emotion.31
Going further than Mayhew, Bray acknowledges that this “concentrated

power of the human element . . . breeds excitement and dislike of any restraint
in all alike who inhabit a large city,”32 whether those inhabitants are middle-
or working-class. However, Bray’s metaphors “intoxicating” and “crave” slyly
suggest that the working classes so commonly identified with alcoholism are
less able to manage this pleasure—and that responsible enjoyment of the
urban space requires middle-class education and self-regulation.
For Bray, enjoying “in excess” the massive “human element” that char-
acterizes the city streets, “gives to the town child that restless temperament
which appears in its most accentuated form as Hooliganism.”33 Bray’s etiology
of juvenile delinquency depends on an important distinction between the
concepts “rough lad” and “hooligan.” The working-class “rough lad” is a
malleable raw material that can be transformed into one of two forms. If
proper education shapes what Seth Koven refers to as the rough lad’s “admi-
rable audacity”34 into desirable character traits, the rough lad becomes a useful
citizen—what Wells’s character Richard Remington calls “a most agreeable
development of the slouching, cunning, cigarette-smoking, town-bred young-
ster,” a new creature who is likeable because, presumably, the slouching and
smoking have been eradicated while the cunning has been retained and directed
to productive ends, as in the case of Kipling’s boy-spy Kim. However, if left
solely to the influence of the over-stimulating streets, the rough lad becomes
a “hooligan”—a juvenile delinquent given to either lazy shirking (at best) or
criminal violence (at worst). As Mrs. Humphrey Ward notes in 1901, the
“‘spirited element’ of boy-nature must have its food and its outlet. Train it,
and it will serve the State. Let it run to waste and riot, and you will get your
‘Hooliganism,’ as you deserve.”35 Similarly, in a 1900 letter to the London
Times—titled, significantly, “Cadets or Hooligans”—the Earl of Meath asserts,
“the suppression of Hooliganism amongst the rough lads of our towns is one
of the most pressing social questions of the day.”36 Meath’s own answer, in
addition to his spirited support of organizations such as the Scouts, is his
founding in 1899 of the Lads’ Drill Association. According to Meath’s intro-
duction to its 1904 annual report, the Association aimed at “reforming the
loafing elements to be found amongst all classes” through military drill, which
“would implant in the youthful mind a respect for the manly virtues which
tend towards the manufacture of good and useful citizens.”37 As Bray notes,
the chief component in this manufacturing process—whereby rough lads are
turned into cadets rather than hooligans—is the installation of “character”:
Formation of internal character must be the object of all education; that is

to say, we must strive to so order a child’s environment that the germs of
all that is highest within him, while he is still young and not yet thrust
down into the sunless dungeon of life’s servitude, may grow strong and
unfold their treasures.38
Bray recommends no particular reforms such as Scouting; yet the con-

sensus among such writers that educators should, as Bray puts it, “develop
the corporate spirit”39 gives an opening to Baden-Powell’s organization—the

goal of which, according to his handbook, is “to instil ‘character’ into the
men of the future” (SB 293).
Like Bray, the Earl of Meath, and Mrs. Ward, Baden-Powell laments
that “hundreds of thousands of boys in our great cities . . . are being left to
drift into the ranks of the ‘hooligans’” (SB 293); he in turn seeks to channel
the rough-and-ready qualities of working-class boyhood into appropriate
imperialist activities. Much more daring than those other authors, however,
Baden-Powell insists that Scouting, due to “its variety of attractions,” should
“appeal directly to the boys themselves—even to the worst, the ‘hooligans’”
(SB 294). Addressing Scoutmasters on the difficulty of “attracting the boys
and of maintaining their interest” (SB 294), Baden-Powell even admits a par-
allel between the organization of Scouting and that of juvenile delinquency:
“From the boys’ point of view Scouting puts them into fraternity-gangs, which
is their natural organization, whether for games, mischief, or loafing” (SB
vii).40 Similarly, Baden-Powell insists that a “great amount of poverty and
unemployedness” in Britain “results from boys being allowed to run riot out-
side the school walls as loafers” (SB 227). The seeming contradiction in this
observation—how exactly does one “run riot” while “loafing”?—is actually
no contradiction at all but an ironic use of “run riot”: the danger that the
working classes pose to national progress, Baden-Powell implies, is not the
mob violence that had so long fascinated conservative scaremongers but sim-
ply laziness. The riotous fun of rough lads is far preferable to this laziness, of
course, as long as those energies are directed by an organization such as the
Scouts and by the middle-class “character” which that organization promotes.
Character itself, Baden-Powell asserts in Scoutmastership, “is very gen-
erally the result of environment or surroundings”: “There are thousands of
boys being wasted daily to our country through being left to become charac-
terless, and, therefore, useless wasters, a misery to themselves and an eyesore
and a danger to the nation.”41 Thus, Baden-Powell characteristically reminds
Scoutmasters that such boys “could be saved if only the right surroundings
or environment were given to them at the receptive time of their lives.”42 The
environment that fosters “character” is shot through with middle-class norms,
as indicated in the following vignette:
For example, take two small boys, twins if you like. Teach them the same
lessons in school, but give them entirely different surroundings, compan-
ions, and homes outside the school. Put one under a kindly, encouraging
mother, among clean and straight playfellows, where he is trusted on his
honour to carry out rules of life and so on. On the other hand, take the
second boy and let him loaf in the slums, with a filthy home, among foul-
mouthed, thieving, discontented companions. Is he likely to grow up with
the same amount of character as his twin?43
Formal education—whether one receives it at a public or board school—

is here irrelevant. Social environment—family and friends—is everything.
In order to ameliorate the destructive influence of the “slum,” Scouting would
provide a Scoutmaster to fill the place of the parent who is significantly ab-
sent from the narrative of the poor “loafer,” and would supply the boy with
suitable replacement companions. Baden-Powell’s story identifies the “right
surroundings or environment” as one that idealizes the values of the middle-
class home and the public school—a “kindly, encouraging mother” who harks
back to Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House (1854–1863) and “clean
and straight playfellows” borrowed from the school story. This definition of
the “right” environment in turn demonizes the degraded doubles of these
ideals, which Baden-Powell locates in the “slum”—in “a filthy home” and
“foul-mouthed, thieving, discontented companions.”
Furthermore, Baden-Powell’s plan for the rejuvenation of empire reveals
the extent to which social imperialism operates in middle-class interests. In-
deed, Baden-Powell treats imperialism and middle-class values as identical.
The Boy Scout organization’s attempt to establish hegemonic imperialism—
such that English people of all classes identify with one another as members
of an imperial nation—depends upon providing working-class boys with
middle-class character and transforming them into upholders of middle-class
notions regarding the importance of imperial progress and domestic defense.
This process demands that they renounce working-class culture. Frantz Fanon
notes that texts for young people, including Boy Scout materials, play an
important role in the establishment of hegemonic colonialism, whereby the
“colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of
the mother country’s cultural standards.”44 Fanon reports how, perusing “a
children’s paper,” he encountered “a caption to a picture in which a young
black Boy Scout was showing a Negro village to three or four white Scouts:
‘This is the kettle where my ancestors cooked yours.’”45 As Fanon notes, the
picture celebrates racial harmony between the boys as evidence that colonial-
ism civilizes the natives (cannibalism is no more). Moreover, this harmony
demands that the black Scout himself accept, repeat, and thus reinforce the
most mendacious racist stereotypes and those most commonly used to justify
colonial domination. Similarly, Scouting for Boys aims to foster a harmony
between classes that depends on the working-class Scout’s acceptance of the
middle-class social reformer’s view of him. Fanon’s acidic comment on the
cartoon—“Unquestionably, this is progress”46—ought surely to apply equally
well to Baden-Powell’s vision of a “classless” society: Baden-Powell’s tale
of the twins imagines that the working-class “loafer” is elevated above his
“slum” status in proportion to his adoption of middle-class cultural standards.
Although hegemonic colonialism and hegemonic imperialism function
according to a similar assimilationist logic, they are aimed at racially differ-
ent groups and have different political goals. The former asks the colonized
to consent to colonial domination, whereas the latter asks the working classes
to adopt middle-class cultural values. Baden-Powell is perfectly aware of
this racial differential. Scouting for Boys initially displays no interest in trans-
mitting “civilized” values to “savages”; rather, early editions of the handbook
address British boys, and the adults who go scouting for them, regarding the
value of transmitting middle-class “character” to working-class youths.47 In-
deed, Baden-Powell imagines that a well-regulated “savagery” can invigorate
a decadent England. He thus embraces the notion of “recapitulation” com-
mon in Edwardian educational theory and initially put forth in G. Stanley
Hall’s Adolescence (1904). Hall posits that, during the period of adolescence,
Westerners “recapitulate” and move through the three “stages . . . of racial
history”—savagery, barbarism, civilization.48 According to Hall—and, follow-
ing him, Baden-Powell and like-minded writers on youth—adults should
encourage, rather than repress, this recapitulation of “savagery” and “barbar-
ism” in the Western adolescent: “These nativistic and more or less feral in-
stincts can and should be fed and formed,” so that after indulging such
“recapitulatory impulses, the child can enter upon his full heritage, live out
each stage of his life to the fullest, and realize in himself all its manifold
tendencies.”49 Thus controlled, “savage” and “barbaric” practices (like the
plucky energy of “hooligans”) can benefit a “civilized” nation. For instance,
Scouting for Boys notes that it “is quite a lesson to watch a Zulu scout making
use of a hilltop or rising ground as a look-out . . . hoping that he will be
mistaken for a stump or a stone” (SB 151). In his Sketches in Mafeking and
East Africa (1907), Baden-Powell offers a self-portrait of sorts (Figure 7) in
which the middle-aged but boyish Baden-Powell “recapitulates” the Zulu
scout’s “savage” activities: “On one occasion I stalked an Impala buck for
nearly two hours, one hour of which was spent trying to flatten myself out
while he stood and stared at the few blades of grass behind which I was
trying to hide. I got him.”50 The following year, the structure of this sketch is
reduplicated on the cover51 of Scouting for Boys (Figure 8), where Baden-
Powell (imitating the Zulu hunter) transforms into a Boy Scout, the African
veldt into the English coast, and the Impala buck into an enemy warship
depositing a vanguard of troops on the shores of Britain.
Similarly, meetings of Wolf Cubs, the division (founded 1914) of the
Scouts for boys ages eight to eleven,52 begin with practice in howling tech-
niques, as depicted in a 1916 photograph (Figure 9) of the 16th North Poplar
(Bow Church) Wolf Cub Pack. These Wolf Cubs, unlike the slum loafer in
Baden-Powell’s story of the twins, have all the benefits Scouting can pro-
vide. A circle of “clean and straight playfellows” watched over by “kindly,
encouraging” den mothers, “savage” behavior here is an early stage in the
process of transforming East London boys into a well-ordered, uniform group.
In turn, they dominate the surrounding city space that, significantly emptied
F igur
iguree 7 “Flattening Oneself.” From Robert Baden-Powell, Sketches in Mafeking and East
Africa (1907).
of menacing hooligans, appears merely as an atmospheric background to
their fun. Crucially, although this “recapitulation” of the “savage” is suppos-
edly a means of “elevating” the child to “civilization,” the working-class
Scout can take advantage of this process only by renouncing his identifica-
tion with working-class culture—even in its most “civilized” forms, such as
political radicalism.
Thus, in Scouting for Boys Baden-Powell encourages Scouts to have
contempt for the “lots of men who go about howling about their rights who
have never done anything to earn any rights” (SB 222; my emphasis). On
another occasion, Scouting for Boys criticizes working-class radicals via an
allusion to Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894), which Baden-Powell also rec-
ommends (SB 171) that Scouts read. As the handbook notes, every scouting
F igur
iguree 8 Cover of the first edition of Scouting for Boys (1908).
F igur
iguree 9 Howling practice. Photograph of 16th North Poplar (Bow Church) Wolf Cub Pack,
1916. Reproduced by permission of The Scout Association (UK) licence no. 0304. British
Scout Association, London.
“patrol is named after some animal, and each scout in it has to be able to
make the cry of that animal in order to communicate with his pals, especially
at night” (SB 13). Baden-Powell then instructs Scouts on choosing their ani-
mal mascot: “you may be ‘the Wolves,’ ‘the Curlews,’ ‘the Eagles,’ or ‘the
Rats’ if you like. But don’t be a ‘Monkey Patrol,’ that is a patrol that plays
games but has no discipline and wins no badges” (SB 13). The handbook
here alludes to “Kaa’s Hunting,” one of the best known of Kipling’s Mowgli
stories. Throughout Kipling’s tale, the narrator mocks the monkey-people
Bandar-log, who “were always just going to have a leader, and laws and
customs of their own, but they never did . . . so they compromised things by
making up a saying: ‘What the Bandar-log think now the jungle will think
later,’ and that comforted them a great deal.”53 The saying that Kipling puts
into the mouths of the monkey-people parodies a motto common, in the 1890s,
among working-class Manchester radicals: “What Manchester thinks to-day,
England will think tomorrow.” Moreover, Baden-Powell’s jab at undisciplined
working-class people might also suggest the slang term “monkey parade,”
used to describe street-corner socializing between young working-class men
and women.54 Baden-Powell thus distinguishes between (on the one hand) a
recapitulation of “savagery” that is regulated by middle-class values and (on
the other hand) the animalistic regression suffered as a result of identification
with working-class urban culture. Throughout the handbook, the former is
paraded as the means of solving the problems that the latter has caused and
as a means of preventing the decline of empire due to the supposed disease at
its heart.
London is itself the problem of all problems.

—Reginald A. Bray55
Near the beginning of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), the title character is
stationed on a “training ship for officers of the mercantile marine.”56 From
the foretop of this ship, Jim
looked down, with the contempt of a man destined to shine in the midst of
dangers, at the peaceful multitude of roofs . . . while scattered on the out-
skirts of the surrounding plain the factory chimneys rose perpendicular
against a grimy sky, each slender like a pencil, and belching out smoke
like a volcano.57
Jim’s contemptuous distance from the industrial city not only enables
him to misapprehend the “grimy” urban space as a bucolic “plain” but also to
construct a romantic image of his own imperial destiny that, Conrad asserts
with sinister foreshadowing (“He saw himself saving people from sinking
ships . . .”58), will not match the reality of his behavior when the Patna
founders. Jim’s woefully mistaken assumption that “nothing less than the
unconceivable itself could get over his perfect state of preparation”59 echoes
contemporary worries about the lack of preparation, on the part of working-
class soldiers, for military engagements with the Boers—and anticipates the
motto of the Boy Scout organization, “Be Prepared.” Published in the midst
of the Second Boer War, Conrad’s novel insists that the modern imperial
adventurer must face a world that is fraught with dangers, requiring great
preparation and training:
it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister
violence of intention—that indefinable something which forces it upon
the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents . . . are
coming at him with a purpose of malice.60
The Boy Scout organization may seem to parallel Jim’s distancing of

himself from the city in that Scouting is apt to evoke images of camping,
woodcraft, and the nostalgic view of the countryside so familiar in other

Edwardian texts for young people, such as Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Chil-
dren (1906) and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908). How-
ever, although Scouting does represent “a revulsion against urbanisation,”61
the handbook ironically expresses that revulsion by in part training Boy Scouts
to become well-prepared urban adventurers. Like Lord Jim, Scouting for Boys
presumes that shunning the city not only perpetuates class division, but makes
even the middle-class subject poorly prepared for his or her domestic and
imperial duties. Indeed, the handbook is largely devoted to training the Scout
to perform a limited form of the labor traditionally assigned to the adult
middle-class subject: surveillance of the urban poor.
The view of modern city life in the Scout handbook is every bit as threat-
ening as the picture of nature, with its malevolent “complication of accidents,”
in Conrad’s modernist text. Indeed, the word “accident” must be one of the
most common in Scouting for Boys, which informs us that “Accidents are
continually happening . . . In London alone during one year 212 people have
been killed and 14,000 injured in street accidents” (SB 239); Baden-Powell
later reminds us that “Accidents are continually occurring from runaway horses
running over people” (SB 248) and that “Accidents are continually occurring
from escapes of gas in mines, sewers, and houses” (SB 254); as if exhausted
by the need to enumerate all these accidents, late in the handbook Baden-
Powell observes, “One cannot go through the whole list of accidents that
might come under your notice” (SB 249). The handbook communicates its
homey bits of wisdom through “campfire yarns,” and Camp Fire Yarn 24 is
titled “Accidents and How to Deal with Them: Panic—Fire—Drowning—
Runaway Horse—Mad Dog—Miscellaneous.” The follow-up yarn (Camp
Fire Yarn 25, “Helping Others: Rendering First Aid—How to Revive a
Drowned Man—Suicides—How to Carry a Patient”) explains the remedies
for bleeding, broken limbs, burns, acid burning, choking (“Sometimes a good
hard smack on the back will do him good” [SB 257]), electric shock, fainting,
fishhook in the skin, fits, frostbite, grit in the eye (“gently brush it out . . . with
a paint brush” [SB 258]), hysterics (“Nervous people, especially women, get
hysterics when excited” [SB 256]), poisoning, blood-poisoning, tonsillitis,
snake bite (“same treatment does also for wounds from poisoned arrows”
[SB 258]), and suicides (“if possible, try to get a Salvation Army officer to
see him; he will probably set him right” [SB 260]).62 A world of perpetual
menace demands perpetual vigilance on the part of even the young, and thus
Baden-Powell warns his readers that preparation for accidents is a prerequi-
site not only for a life of adventure but for life itself: “wherever you are, and
whatever you are doing, you should think to yourself, ‘What accident is likely
to occur here?’ and, ‘What is my duty if it occurs?’” (SB 240).63 Such con-
tinual rehearsal for accidents constitutes a thorough self-regulation, and thus
the working-class Scout who follows the handbook’s guidelines regarding
how to become a well-prepared urban observer must identify not with working-
class culture but with middle-class “character”: “When once observation and
deduction have been made habitual in the boy, a great step in the develop-
ment of ‘character’ has been gained” (SB 118).
Baden-Powell imagines that the working-class boy who has become a
Scout, and, thus, has had middle-class character instilled in him, will usually
have as the object of his urban observations another working-class person.
Thus, the handbook expresses the desire, so prominent in William Booth’s In
Darkest England and the Way Out, to convert the working-class subject not
only into one who upholds middle-class values but also into one who actively
works to police his or her own class. For example, at one point Baden-Powell
explains the fine points of “How the Wearing of a Hat Shows Character”
(Figure 10): “If it is slightly on one side, the wearer is good-natured; if it is
worn very much on one side, he is a swaggerer; if on the back of his head, he
is bad at paying his debts; if worn straight on the top, he is probably honest
but very dull” (SB 121). Here wealth (the luxurious top hat of the gentleman
at the bottom) is linked with a middle-class ideal (honesty) and a minor defect
(dullness), whereas poverty (the thin cheeks and attenuated arms of the sloppy
F igur
iguree 110
0 “How the Wearing of a Hat Shows Character.” From Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting
for Boys, 7th ed. (1915).
character at the top) is the result of the sort of character flaw commonly
associated with the working classes (failure to pay debts). Even more strik-
ingly, one page later Baden-Powell gives the Scout a quiz that is supposedly
designed to test his ability to “Practise Observation” but that in fact asks him
to endorse notions about the legibility of middle-class virtue and working-
class vice: ironically asking “Perhaps you can tell the characters of these
gentlemen?” (SB 122), Baden-Powell offers a drawing (Figure 11) in which
what is clearly a moral as well as physical ideal of Anglo-Saxon masculinity
is flanked (on left) by the signs of defective working-class character as shown
in the lesson on hats (drooping eyelids, weak chin) and (on right) by the
simian slumdweller of middle-class nightmare.
The handbook thus presumes that the Boy Scout, regardless of the class
from which he comes, will identify with the views of the middle classes and
against the working classes represented by such stereotypes. Sander L. Gilman
argues that stereotypes serve as a defense against various forms of disinte-
gration that always threaten the cohesiveness of any social group: “The per-
ception of the Other as a threat to the individual’s autonomy is thus a reflection
of the loss of autonomy felt within the group.”64 Stereotypes enable members
of the group to project the “potential . . . corruption of the self . . . onto others,”
so that the self and the group are distinguished from, and bound together in
defense against, an exterior world that is “seen as both corrupt and corrupting,
polluted and polluting.”65 The anxieties that, in Gilman’s formulation, lead to
stereotyping are particularly powerful in imperialist contexts such as the physi-
cal-deterioration scare at the close of the Second Boer War: for a writer such
as Baden-Powell, the security of the British Empire seems to face multiple
threats, both from without (German invaders) and from within (class conflict).
Whereas agonistic relations with competing imperial nations testify to
Britain’s imperial success (and, indeed, justify the existence of Baden-Powell’s
F igur
iguree 111
1 “Practise Observation.” From Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys, 7th ed.
(1915).
own profession, that of soldier), domestic class conflict is particularly un-

nerving in that it belies the national unity that is the ideological justification
for imperialism in the first place. Scouting for Boys attempts to repair an
England disunified by class conflict through a two-part process: first, by pro-
jecting, onto a stereotypical depiction of the working-class citydweller, the
political and social conflicts that threaten the concept of a unified England;
and second, by uniting middle- and working-class youths in their mutual
opposition to this figure. Seeking to cure class conflict by means of hegemonic
imperialism, the Boy Scout organization aims to construct a corporate identity,
as Homi K. Bhabha says of hegemonic colonialism, “in the face . . . of the
disruption and threat” posed by the “heterogeneity of other positions”66—
such as identification with working-class culture.
In spite of the global reach of the Boy Scout organization,67 Baden-
Powell failed to achieve the goals thus set forth in the handbook. The best
scholarship on the class constitution of the Scouts musters compelling evi-
dence for the fact that the organization drew primarily middle- and lower-
middle-class boys. John O. Springhall notes that in 1910 Baden-Powell himself
“was reluctantly persuaded to confess, to a meeting of the National Defense
Association, that Scouting made more of an appeal to the lower middle classes
than to the working classes.”68 Moreover, according to H. Llewellyn Smith’s
1935 work The New Survey of London Life and Labour, in that year only 9.4
percent of London youths aged ten to twenty belonged to one of the three
most prominent youth organizations—the Boy Scouts, the Boys’ Brigade, or
the Church Lads’ Brigade.69 And a Mass Observation survey commissioned
in 1966 by the Baden-Powell Scout Guild revealed that, as Springhall reports,
“44% of the middle classes among those interviewed had been Boy Scouts
but only 25% of the working classes had joined. Those in the middle classes
also tended to stay in for longer than those in the working classes.”70 Working-
class responses to Scouting suggest that Baden-Powell’s intended recruits
resisted capture by Scoutmasters for a variety of reasons—in particular, the
cost of uniforms and gear, the emphasis on middle-class notions of character
and implicit or explicit denigration of working-class culture, and the wide-
spread concern that Scouting encouraged military drill and conscription, to
which there was much working-class resistance. For instance, the Teachers’
Labour League criticized the Boy Scouts, soon after its founding, thus:
The militarists and nobility in control, the capitalists who provide the funds,
all alike agree with the aims of the Scout Movement. These are to train
working class children to be “loyal” to their employers and traitors to
their class, to be ready to serve as cannon fodder in the approaching war
which modern imperialism is leading to . . . 71
Although Baden-Powell desires to render imperialism hegemonic in

precisely the terms used by the Teachers’ Labour League, much analysis of
the Scouts has too quickly credited the organization with such a propagan-
distic social control of the working classes. Although Michael Rosenthal is
correct when he states that Scouting was “designed to monitor the conduct”
of working-class boys and to “shape it into forms acceptable to . . . middle-
and upper-class perspectives,”72 it does not follow, as John M. MacKenzie
claims, that in fact “the working class as a whole received a considerable
infusion of middle-class values” through such youth organizations.73 Sweeping
judgments about the social control that organizations such as Scouting exerted
depend on a notion that the working classes are prone to propagandistic man-
ipulation, and such judgments in turn obscure the fact that ordinary working-
class people could reach the same conclusions about Scouting as those of an
organized entity such as the Teachers’ Labour League.
This fact is suggested, for instance, by Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning (1958), in which the working-class hero Arthur Seaton,
while expressing his disgust for military service, vilifies a neighbor who “sent
his sons to join the Scouts and always voted Liberal, a traitor to the solid bloc
of anarchistic Labour in the street.”74 Moreover, there is reason to believe
that such conscious opposition to the middle-class ideologies of Scouting
influenced not only working-class adults’ views of appropriate leisure activi-
ties for their children but also working-class children’s choices of leisure
activities. Thus, Robert Roberts’s study of working-class culture in Edwardian
Salford offers a telling anecdote about youth organizations such as the Scouts:
With a uniform that cost 15s, the Scout movement was far beyond
the means of most lower-working-class lads; not one in our district, to my
knowledge, ever became a member. Once, however, with an older friend,
Sydney, and unbeknown to my parents, I did try an obscure troop across
the town where uniform was not de rigueur. Here we soon noted that the
leader, a manly type, seemed over fond of looking one straight in the eye
and, hand on shoulder, giving what he called “health chats.” “We don’t go
to no camps!” said Syd briefly . . .
Many boys in our district sported for a time the pillbox of the Church
Lads’ Brigade. This movement, at the time paramilitary in intent, had its
greatest strength in the Manchester region. Its attraction for boys lay in a
very cheap, sketchy uniform and the pleasure of marching through Sunday
morning streets (cursed by late sleepers) to the sound of bugle and drum.
But our local ranks were continually thinned by the rector’s insistence on
members’ weekly attendance at classes for Bible reading and drill.75
Roberts implicitly confirms Sillitoe’s representation of working-class

parental opposition to Scouting: he joins the “obscure” troop “unbeknown
to” his parents. The complaint about the fifteen-shilling price for a Scout
uniform initially suggests that the boyish critique of youth organizations that
are “paramilitary in intent,” like Scouting and the similar Church Lads’
Brigade, has only to do with economics. However, the resistance to “Bible
reading and [paramilitary] drill” in the Brigade and “health chats” in the
Scouts indicate that young Robert and Sydney, like other Salford and Manches-
ter boys (“our local ranks were continually thinned”) are perfectly capable of
understanding, and disliking, the ideological orientation of the training of-
fered by these groups. Finally, the pleasure they do briefly take in them is,
rather than the adoption of middle-class “character,” exactly the opposite of
what organizers like Baden-Powell intend: the use of bugle and drum to break
the peace.
The “health chats” that appear to be the primary feature of Roberts’s experience
of Scouting are discursively central to Scouting for Boys, and to its attempt to
get inside the working-class lad. In order to train the Boy Scout to be an
urban observer well-defended against the modern city—a realm, according
to Baden-Powell, even the microscopic denizens of which threaten the boy at
every turn—the handbook encourages ceaseless bodily self-regulation in the
Scout. Baden-Powell instructs boys regarding how to sit (upright) and walk
(fast); how often to brush one’s teeth (twice a day) and to cut one’s finger-
nails (every week); how often to smoke and to masturbate (never); even how
to breathe (through the nose) and how often to have bowel movements (of-
ten). In this way, even as the handbook argues that self-regulation is central
to the working-class Scout’s acquisition of middle-class “character,” Scout-
ing for Boys reinforces the notion that the working-class city space is an
inherently dirty realm and that the working-class city boy—in spite of the
handbook’s suggestion that he can be an effective urban observer—remains
a thoroughly embodied entity.
As much a hygiene manual as anything else, the handbook offers a home-
spun pathology to explain contagion to its juvenile readers: “Disease is car-
ried about in the air and in water by tiny invisible insects called ‘germs’ or
‘microbes,’ and you are very apt to breathe them in through the mouth . . . and
then they breed disease inside you” (SB 200).76 Baden-Powell’s little microbes
enjoy “living in dark, damp, and dirty places . . . they come from bad drains,
old dustbins, and rotting flesh, etc.; in fact, generally where there is a bad
smell” (SB 201). Thus, he advises the Scout to “keep away from places that
smell badly” (SB 201)—advice which is, of course, impossible to follow if
the Scout is to be an effective urban observer of working-class city spaces
supposedly characterized by stinks, and thus to avoid the miserable fate of
unprepared Lord Jim, loftily doomed in his foretop. Since the Boy Scout
must penetrate dark, damp, dirty, smelly city spaces, the only way in which
to keep his “blood . . . in really good order” (SB 201) is to engage in continual
bodily self-regulation. This sanguine cleansing primarily involves, Baden-

Powell argues through some very odd physiology lessons, having frequent
bowel movements—by “going regularly to the ‘rear’” (SB 201)—and by
breathing through the nose. In this way, Baden-Powell’s text reinforces a
common notion of middle-class “character,” which the working-class Scout
is supposed to adopt, as the epitome of self-disciplined resistance to the mani-
fold contagions identified with the working-class urban space. Peter
Stallybrass and Allon White argue that, in the education of the middle-class
child,
the lower bodily stratum is regulated or denied, as far as possible . . . by

the censoring of the lower “bodily” references along with bodily wastes.
But whilst the “low” of the bourgeois body becomes unmentionable, we
hear an ever increasing garrulity about the city’s “low”—the slum, the
rag-picker, the prostitute, the sewer . . . The vertical axis of the body’s top
and bottom is transcoded through the vertical axis of the city and the sewer
and through the horizontal axis of the suburb and the slum or of East End
and West End.77
Not only do Baden-Powell’s depictions of the urban poor confirm

Stallybrass and White’s claims about the embodiment of the working-class
city in Victorian discourse; moreover, Baden-Powell’s frank lessons in bodily
discipline suggest that the working-class boys at whom his handbook was
aimed were meant to understand themselves as embodied beings much more
than as conscious subjects, to see themselves as caught up in the futile attempt
to cleanse themselves of a corruption that originates not so much in the slum
in which they live but in their own bodies. In order “to be healthy and strong,”
Baden-Powell pronounces, “you must keep your blood healthy and clean in-
side you. This is done . . . by clearing out all dirty matter from inside your
stomach, which is done by having a ‘rear’ daily, without fail; many people
are the better for having it twice a day” (SB 193). Scatologically obsessed
with the need for “cleanliness of the body both inside and out” (SB 181),
Baden-Powell identifies the cloacal “slum” with its internally dirty child resi-
dents such that the germ-infested thing from which the Scout must attempt to
protect himself is himself, and not so much the surrounding city. This seem-
ing logical difficulty—the working-class Scout must remain clean yet is him-
self the origin of filth—causes Baden-Powell no difficulties at all but is, rather,
a sustained and strategic contradiction at the heart of his discourse, one that
enables him to retain an essentialized conception of class difference, like
William Booth and in spite of the hearty egalitarianism that would seem to
be at the center of Scouting, unlike Salvationist, discourse. Thus, Baden-
Powell recommends that Scoutmasters remind their charges about the value
of exercising regularly—not, as one might expect, in order to produce the
athletic Anglo-Saxon male of public-school glory but in order to “work all

your internal organs” (SB 18) and to make “the skin perspire to get rid of the
dirt from the blood” (SB 180). Of course, the purity of “blood” is a common
metaphor for class superiority, just as it is impossible to dispose of contami-
nants in one’s blood by sweating: the implication is that no amount of exercise
will remove the class-based impurities from the working-class Scout’s bodily
system.
Baden-Powell’s text, like Mayhew’s and Booth’s, thus depends on a
strategic contradiction between his incorporative model of the imperial nation
and the limit he places on the liberalism of his project: on the one hand,
Baden-Powell claims that the working-class boy can adopt middle-class “char-
acter” and become a model urban observer and imperial subject; on the other
hand, Baden-Powell represents the working-class boy as an inherently corrupt,
and self-corrupting, body. This discursive maneuver is particularly evident
in the discussions of respiration in Scouting for Boys. Baden-Powell is most
determined about the importance of breathing properly: “Scouts breathe
through the nose, not through the mouth; in this way . . . they don’t suck into
their insides all sorts of microbes or seeds of disease that are in the air” (SB
18). Indeed, among the many texts he recommends for further reading is one,
by a “Mr. Catlin, in America,” titled Shut Your Mouth and Save your Life (SB
181). Not surprisingly, the necessity of breathing through the nose, on which
Baden-Powell expends so much ink in his handbook, is closely related to the
danger of city spaces and the menace of the working-class crowds that inhabit
them:
you need not be afraid of diseases if you breathe through your nose and
keep your blood in good order. It is always well on coming out of a crowded
theatre, church, or hall, to cough and blow your nose, in order to get rid of
microbes which you might have breathed in from other people in the crowd.
(SB 201)
However, the working-class Scout is himself a member of this same

crowd, and his excretions not only fail to cleanse him but, in turn, infect
others around him. Thus Baden-Powell reminds his audience:
You frequently see notices in omnibuses and public places requesting you
not to spit. The reason for this is that many people spit who have diseased
lungs, and from their spittle the microbes of their diseases get in the air,
and are breathed by healthy people into their lungs, and they become also
diseased. Often you may have a disease in you for some years without
knowing it, and if you spit you are liable to communicate that disease to
sound people; so you should not do it for their sake. (SB 201)
The opening of this passage suggests that the “people . . . who have dis-
eased lungs,” and who are the addressees of the notices “requesting you not
to spit,” are not the working-class Scouts who are the addressees of Baden-
Powell’s passage. However, the repetition of “you,” and the ominous
observation that “you may have a disease in you,” which you can “commun-
icate . . . to sound people,” here identifies the Scout’s respiratory process not
so much as that which can protect him from external germs but as the source
of those germs, whether he breathes through the nose or mouth. If the thorough
regulation of the most minute of the Scout’s bodily operations—breathing—
seems to imply the need to protect him from the infestations of the city, Baden-
Powell’s metaphors in fact imply that this social danger derives from the
internally “unsound” working-class Scout himself, however much he may
try to adopt the external signs of middle-class character.
Moreover, Baden-Powell treats the self-regulation in which the working-
class Scout engages as a mechanistic process, rather than as the character-
forming act that has long been vaunted as the defining quality of middle-class
subjectivity. Reduced to a mere system of intake and output, breathing and
shitting, the depiction of self-regulation that Baden-Powell offers not only
represents the working-class Scout as a thoroughly embodied entity but meta-
phorically transforms him into a mechanized one. For instance, in
Scoutmastership Baden-Powell offers a revealing comment on physical edu-
cation:
Oxygen for Ox’s Strength—I saw some very smart physical drills by
a Scout Troop quite recently in their club headquarters.
It was very fresh and good, but, my wig, the air was not! It was, to
say the least, “niffy.” There was no ventilation. The boys were working
like engines, but actually undoing their work all the time by sucking in
poison instead of strengthening their blood.78
With the phrase “working like engines,” this passage makes explicit the
mechanization of the working-class body that is implicit in the physiological
advice discussed above. As Mark Seltzer argues, the Boy Scout “character
factory . . . standardizes the making of men, coordinating the body and the
machine within a single system of regulation and production”;79 however,
Seltzer is not particularly attentive to the class component of this mechaniza-
tion of the Scout’s body. Defined fairly simplistically, a machine is an apparatus
that consumes something so as to produce something else (usually a desirable
commodity) often while producing an (often undesirable) additional some-
thing. For instance, a locomotive commuter train of Baden-Powell’s day con-
sumes coal so as to transport businessmen from suburb to city (middle-class
mobility is the desirable product), while producing pollution (the undesir-

able additional something), which in turn confirms the businessmen’s sense
that cities are dirty and that one should live in a suburb. In Baden-Powell’s
discourse, the mechanized working-class bodies doing physical drills in their
Scout troop consume air so as to build bodies necessary to protect the empire—
or, rather, they would thus “strengthen their blood” if their Scoutmaster had
the sense to open a window—while producing a kind of pollution—the
“poison” that they essentially contain and that, due to the lack of ventilation
in this poorly run troop, they suck back in. However, even a well-run troop
would not avoid the sense that the Scouts contain the poison, nor would it
obviate the larger political issue involved in representing the working-class
as a mechanized body, an issue neatly summarized by the Oxford English
Dictionary definition of a prominent metaphorical use of “machine”:
A combination of parts moving mechanically, as contrasted with a being

having life, consciousness and will. Hence applied to a person who acts
merely from habit or obedience to rule, without intelligence, or to one
whose actions have the undeviating precision and uniformity of a
“machine.”
However few working-class boys actually joined the Scouts in response

to Baden-Powell’s call, his representation of the urban poor certainly had an
influence on the middle classes—for instance, on some of the forty-four
percent of middle-class Britons who, according to the Mass Observation
survey, did join the Scouts, not to mention their parents, Scoutmasters, and
other interested parties whose avid readership of Scouting for Boys sent it
through seven editions in as many years. Baden-Powell’s handbook contributes
to a powerful variant of the discourses on class and youth—a representation
of middle and working classes as, respectively, visionary surveyors and mecha-
nized bodies that, as the next chapter will show, is an ideological precondition
for the horrors of the First World War.
6
Patriot Games
Football and the First World War
The grim irony that lies behind the metaphorical notion of “war games” is
nowhere more apparent than at the beginning of the Battle of the Somme in
the First World War. On the morning of July 1, 1916, a captain of the 8th East
Surrey Regiment, W. P. Nevill, distributed four footballs among his men and
offered a prize to the first of his platoons to dribble a ball behind German
lines. Private L. S. Price of the 8th Royal Sussex recorded the scene:
As the gun-fire died away I saw an infantryman climb onto the parapet
into No Man’s Land, beckoning others to follow. As he did so he kicked
off a football. A good kick. The ball rose and travelled well towards the
German line. That seemed to be the signal to advance.1
Captain Nevill was killed on that day, along with at least 19,000 other
British soldiers. However, two of his footballs were recovered and are pre-
served in the National Army Museum and in the Queen’s Regiment Museum
at Canterbury. It is common to treat such relics—and the sporting ideology
that they memorialize—as signifying the ethos of the public school and that
quaint Edwardian society that, we are told, was destroyed by the First World
War. To pick a quotidian but influential example, The Norton Anthology of
English Literature introduces the poets of the First World War by informing
us that “World War I broke out on a largely innocent world, a world that still
associated warfare with glorious cavalry charges and the noble pursuit of
heroic ideals”; in contrast, according to this introduction, the “savage ironies”
with which poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen depicted the
war “portrayed a world undreamed of in the golden years from 1910 to 1914.”2
Rather than treat the cultural processes that landed Captain Nevill and his
footballs at the Western Front as the antiquated ideology of an upper-class
minority, this chapter instead investigates how such fabrications of sporting
masculinity involve thoroughly modern discourses on national identity and
class difference—discourses that, in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods,
are institutionalized through educational policy and juvenile literature. Far
from being merely a remnant of public-school ideals, the association of sport
133
and war is, at the turn of the century, part of the broad project to institute
hegemonic imperialism, a project that negotiates national and class identities
according to what is, as we have seen, a particularly powerful representational
paradigm: on the one hand, writings on sport and war imagine the benefits of
a Britain free of class conflict and united by imperialist ambitions; on the
other hand, writers who seek to spread sporting ideology among working-
class young people maintain prevailing notions of class difference by distin-
guishing between middle and working classes in terms of vision and the body.
Thus, although it is valuable to abandon the platitude that the First World
War was the culmination of an Edwardian period resembling one long garden
party, the war is the culmination of the late-Victorian and Edwardian project
to incorporate the working classes into the British imperial enterprise. The
First World War was an imperial war, a result of the European competition
for colonial spaces in the late nineteenth century and in the early twentieth.3
Whereas Queen Victoria’s so-called “little wars” of imperial expansion de-
pended primarily on professional soldiers, the escalation of industrialized
warfare in 1914–1918 demanded the enlistment—and eventually the con-
scription—of large industrial populations; in order to win this new imperial
war, it was necessary to mobilize a large fighting force constituted primarily
by young men of the working classes.4 The discussion that follows will focus
on writings for children concerning sport and war, and on First World War
recruiting materials that recycle the images and ideologies of those writings,
in order to examine how they participate in this war-era version of the project
to institute hegemonic imperialism. Depicting athleticism as a form of imperial
service available to all classes and depicting leadership as a disembodied
vision that guides a supposedly classless group of soldier bodies, texts on
sport and war assert the desirability of (indeed, in 1914–1918, the urgent
need for) a unified nation. At the same time, such works seek to retain dominant
notions of class difference in a new form and deploy the strategic contradiction
that is at the heart of all projects to institute hegemonic imperialism. Writings
on sport and war perform this ideological work by representing class differ-
ence in terms of machine culture, a representation that is cut to the measure
of industrialized warfare but that is also the legacy of, for instance, Scout
literature. That is, the popular culture of the First World War prominently
figures the visionary abilities of middle-class military and political leaders in
terms of technology and the embodiment of working-class soldiers in terms
of machinery subordinate to that technology. The concluding section of this
chapter, in turn, examines critiques of the social-imperialist discourse on sport
and war through a reading of journalistic reports regarding the views on class
held by soldiers in the trenches and through a reading of what is perhaps the
best-known representation of the fallout from the war on the home front,
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
Patriot Games 135
In the decades preceding the First World War, military experts as well as
specialists on youth were obsessed with football.5 As previously discussed,
the embarrassments of the Second Boer War (1899–1902) were often attributed
to the physical deterioration of young men from the working classes, and this
deterioration was itself often viewed as a symptom of class conflict. Many
writers argued that the cure for both physical deterioration and class conflict
was the inculcation of sporting ideals in working-class young people. For
instance, in Scoutmastership: A Handbook for Scoutmasters on the Theory of
Scout Training (1919), Robert Baden-Powell laments:
Many of our working-class lads have never known what it was to play any
regular game with strict rules. . . . Nor do boys of that kind usually have
discipline, sense of fair play, or keenness for winning simply for the honour
of the thing without thought of prizes or rewards.6
Educational reform in the early years of the twentieth century largely

involved the desire to extend, to working-class urban boys, this “discipline,
sense of fair play,” and “keenness for . . . the honour” of winning, the lack of
which Baden-Powell laments in working-class lads. Thus, the attempt to in-
culcate in working-class boys what J. A. Mangan calls the public-school
“games ethic”7 involves not only making those boys physically fit (a chief
concern in the years of the physical-deterioration scare following the Second
Boer War) but also instilling in them the prerequisites of imperialist militarism:
discipline, esprit de corps, patriotism.
In the latter third of the nineteenth century, athleticism had become an
institutionalized signifier of upper-class prestige—the most obvious index of
which is the transformation of the curricula of English public schools, between
1860 and 1880, to include compulsory participation in sports.8 In the En-
glish public school, the bodily and ideological discipline provided on the
playing field is an adjunct to the elite education designed to prepare boys
from titled and middle-class families for university study and, ultimately, for
service in imperial administration and the officer corps of the colonial mili-
tary.9 Thus, in 1888 Montague Shearman declares:
Health, endurance, courage, judgment, and above all a sense of fair play,
are gained upon the football field. A footballer must learn, and does learn,
to play fairly in the thick and heat of a struggle. Such qualities are those
which make a nation brave and great. The game is manly and fit for
Englishmen; it puts courage into their hearts to meet any enemy in the
face.10
By the end of the century, many writers considered that such virtues as
Shearman enumerates could be provided to working-class as well as public-
school boys by the same means: capitalizing on young people’s interest in
play, for instance on the football field, in order to inspire in them a sense of
“fair play,” and all that it implies in a militarist nation that depends on the
well-disciplined esprit de corps of its male citizenry. Thus, in an 1896 com-
ment on the Boys’ Brigade (founded in 1883 by William Alexander Smith to
instill military discipline in working-class lads), Lieutenant-Colonel Seton
Churchill (himself the founder in 1892 of the Universities Camps for Public
Schoolboys organization) suggests that an interest in sports and soldiering
are inherent in all boys who are “developing naturally,” whether they are
middle-class and trained in the public schools or working-class and trained
in such organizations as the Boys’ Brigade:
Boys are especially interested in soldiers, in drill, in discipline, and things

of that kind; and I think every one of us must also be willing to add the
word games. Wherever you find Boys, there you will find—that is to say
if they are developing naturally—you will find them playing games.11
One of the most prominent features of early twentieth-century educa-

tional reform in England is the attempt to institutionalize broadly what, ac-
cording to Churchill, the Boys’ Brigade achieves in a more localized manner:
extending certain of the benefits of an elite education to the children of the
poor.
It could perhaps go without saying that the benefits which middle-class
military experts such as Baden-Powell and Churchill seek to extend in this
way are not those which would enable a working-class young person to be-
come, for instance, a general or an imperial administrator. Rather, what the
Board School child gets from this supposedly liberal transformation of edu-
cational policy are those qualities that make for a good foot soldier: in Baden-
Powell’s terms, “discipline” and an understanding of the importance of
adhering to “strict rules . . . without thought of” any “rewards.” Moreover,
the emphasis on sports as the means of effecting this transformation not only
answers concerns raised by the Boer War-era physical-deterioration scare
but also reinforces the physical embodiment of the working-class people who
were supposed to benefit from this change in educational policy.12 These class-
based implications of educational policy changes are not, however, manifest
when reformers articulate their reasons for transferring the games ethic to
working-class children. Rather, such articulations tend towards utopian state-
ments that sporting ideology encourages national cohesion and a corporate
subjectivity not riven by class differences. Thus, in the preface to the New
Code of Regulations for Elementary Schools (1904), Robert Moran (an old
Winchester boy) proclaims simply that the “corporate life of the school,
Patriot Games 137
especially in the playground, should develop the instinct for fair play and for
loyalty to one another which is the germ of a wider sense of honour in later
life.”13 The diffusion of the games ethic seeks not only to rehabilitate the
supposedly deteriorating urban poor but also to unify English people such
that they identify along the lines of nation rather than those of class. This
remaking of education and recreation also seeks to obscure class divisions
previously signified, in part, by the games ethic itself: long associated with
the public-school playing field, football and cricket become, early in the twen-
tieth century, associated simply with Englishness.
At their most utopian, middle-class writers recommended the diffusion
of sporting ideology due to its supposed ability to ameliorate class conflict
itself. In a more pragmatic vein, those writers granted widespread support to
the diffusion of athleticism—through the elementary-school curriculum and
such organizations as the Boy Scouts and the YMCA14—due to the notion
that imparting manly health and sporting values to poor city boys could only
improve the military efficiency of the British Empire. Such frank reflections
on the comparability of sport and war are legion in the years leading up to
Captain Nevill’s deadly literalization of this metaphor.15 For instance, one
Captain Guggisberg, in a 1903 book for children titled Modern Warfare; or,
How our Soldiers Fight, asserts the bond between war and football:
An army, in fact, tries to work together in battle or a large manoeuvre in

much the same way as a football team plays together in a match; and you
need scarcely be told what an important thing that is if you want to win.
The army fights for the good of its country as the team plays for the honour
of its school. Regiments assist each other as players do when they shove
together or pass the ball from one to another; exceptionally gallant charges
and heroic defences correspond to brilliant runs and fine tackling. All work
with one common impulse, given to the army by its general, to the team
by its captain.16
Guggisberg emphasizes the kinetic physicality of both army and football

team—working, playing, fighting, assisting, shoving, passing, charging, and
defending, soldiers and players are utterly embodied, a corps in every sense,
operating “with one common impulse.” Crucially, that impulse does not derive
from soldiers or players but is only “given” to them by their general or team
captain. However, the captain of a football team is likely to be of the same
class as the players whose bodily movements he strategically orders; by con-
trast, a general directs soldiers recruited or conscripted from a male citizenry
that is, in an industrial society, primarily working- and lower-middle-class.
Certainly, in Edwardian Britain, generalship is a position determined by class
privilege—signified principally by education at public schools and at presti-
gious military colleges such as the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and
the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich.
Thus, in Questions of Empire (1900), former Prime Minister Lord

Rosebery effuses about the benefits of football to the nation in the following
terms:
I know of no sport which affords such lessons for national success as

Association football. I do not indeed understand the refinements of the
game. But the meanest intellect can grasp that it implies incessant watch-
fulness; that its essence is an alert combination of all powers for one ob-
ject; that indolence or selfishness are fatal; that the player indeed who
does not do his best to coöperate or who plays for his own hand must
necessarily be outlawed. So it is with nations. If they desire to survive
they must constantly sharpen their intelligence and equipment. They need
the constant coöperation of the government with the governed; of science
and vigilance with commerce; of the teachers with the taught . . .17
Like Guggisberg, Lord Rosebery emphasizes the unity that character-

izes the football team and that should, ideally, characterize the nation. Yet, he
subtly reinforces the class-based separation between vision and the body,
technology and machinery, “intelligence and equipment.” The “incessant
watchfulness” that combines all powers, identifies the indolent or selfish,
and outlaws uncooperative individuals clearly suggests “intelligence” and
the related terms (“government,” “science and vigilance,” and “teachers”),
just as the “equipment” thus observed and managed suggests those who must
be led by their “betters” (that is, the working-class “governed,” those who
labor in support of “commerce,” and those who need to be “taught”). Earlier
in his text, Lord Rosebery claims, “in the present state of the world an active
vigilance is more than ever required. We have to make sure of our equip-
ment.”18 Certainly, when he delivered the address subsequently published as
Questions of Empire—to the students of the University of Glasgow—this
“we,” which must exercise such vigilant watchfulness over an equipment
distinct from it, is socially middle-class: “the youth of a University; trained
like intellectual athletes for the struggle with the world.”19 Moreover, when
transplanted from the playing field to Whitehall, such metaphors take on new
meanings and indicate forceful class divisions. Both “incessant watchful-
ness” and “intelligence” imply not only the more sinister “great game” of
spying but the direction of such activities by an invisible administration at
the War Office, whereas “equipment” suggests not only the new machineries
of death being prepared in the early 1900s but the masses of soldiers who
would kill with and be killed by them.
That is, while fantasies of playing-field egalitarianism seek to repair the
class conflicts that fracture Edwardian society, the discourse on sport and
war actually reaffirms a distinction between (on the one hand) the visionary
power of middle-class regulators of the poor and (on the other hand) the
Patriot Games 139
embodiment of the urban working classes. As Colin Veitch has admirably

demonstrated, middle-class reformers who sought to extend the games ethic
to working-class urban boys were especially disturbed by the rise of specta-
tor sports.20 For instance, George F. Shee in 1901 claims that “the undoubted
decrease of bonâ-fide athletic sports, coupled with the detestable develop-
ment of ‘professionalism’”—by which Shee means commercial sporting
events at which one merely watches professional athletes rather than partici-
pating in the games oneself—“are at once the causes and the outward symp-
toms of a tendency to seek amusement in vicious and unhealthy forms.” Shee
presents universal military service as a form of physical education capable of
transforming “‘hooligans’ into men,” of “rescuing our physical and moral
degenerates from the slums of our great cities, and letting them feel that they,
too, could be of use to their country.”21 Similarly, in Scouting for Boys: A
Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship (1908), Robert Baden-Powell
observes a football match in a working-class suburb of London and is re-
pelled by the spectacle of
thousands of boys and young men, pale, narrow-chested, hunched up,

miserable specimens, smoking endless cigarettes, numbers of them bet-
ting, all of them learning to be hysterical as they groan or cheer in panic-
unison with their neighbours—the worst sound of all being the hysterical
scream of laughter that greets any little trip or fall of a player.22
The football match is so distressing for Baden-Powell because the

working-class sports fans are indulging in spectatorship rather than athleticism.
When working-class lads thus appropriate the visual prerogative of middle-
class reformers of the poor (watching others), those lads display the stigmata
of physical deterioration about which writers on the Second Boer War ago-
nized (“pale, narrow-chested, hunched up, miserable specimens”), and the
boys, in turn, display signs of effeminate illness (the term “hysterical” is
twice repeated). Moreover, the fans are united not by nationalism but by
unsportsmanlike behavior (the “laughter that greets any little trip or fall of a
player”) and by cowardice (“panic-unison with their neighbours”). Baden-
Powell advises the Scoutmaster: “Get the lads away from this—teach them
to be manly, to play the game, whatever it may be, and not be merely onlook-
ers and loafers.”23 When working-class lads are diverted from visual to bodily
activities (they should “not be merely onlookers” but should “play the game”),
their physical participation makes them appropriately “manly” subjects. This
working-class “mass” of potential soldier bodies can then be subjected to the
ordering gaze of the middle-class youth expert and military leader—both of
which roles are conveniently, but not accidentally, filled by the founder of
the Boy Scouts, Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Baden-Powell.
This separation between the visionary powers of general headquarters

and the corporeality of soldier bodies is influentially dispersed in juvenile
fictions, such as the adventure novels of G. A. Henty. Especially relevant to
the war recruiting materials to which I will turn presently is Henty’s 1903
bestseller With Kitchener in the Soudan. The narrative follows the formula of
Henty’s many other juvenile novels (With Clive in India [1884], With Wolfe
in Canada [1887], With Roberts to Pretoria [1902], etc.): raised in reduced
circumstances and unaware of his aristocratic lineage, the orphan protagonist
of With Kitchener in the Soudan, Gregory Hilliard, joins the military as a
subaltern, distinguishes himself (with the aid of his native sidekick) in a series
of famous battles, and finally rises from poverty to assume his rightful place
in English class society, after attracting the notice of the imperialist hero of
the title. Gregory’s success in Kitchener’s Sudan campaign has everything to
do with the fact that Gregory’s athleticism attenuates what everyone believes
to be his lower-class status: his muscularity makes him appear more like the
gentleman he really is.24 Encouraged by his mother “to take long walks, to
swim, and to join in all games and exercises,” Gregory “grew up strong and
hearty”:25 “Thus, at fifteen Gregory was well grown and athletic, and had
much of the bearing and appearance of an English public-school boy” (WKS
55). One of Gregory’s superiors later reports that, unknown to the protagonist,
Kitchener himself has “seen a great deal of him” and has declared: “The lad
is a perfeet [sic] gentleman . . . I consider him in all respects—except, of
course, a classical education—fully equal to the average young officer on
first joining” (WKS 90–91). The ideological work of Henty’s novel thus
depends on slyly rendering Gregory’s class status ambiguous: the long narra-
tive of his military adventures everywhere indicates that soldierly athleticism
can transform working-class men into gentlemen, yet this apparent celebra-
tion of class mobility is safely contextualized by the opening and concluding
chapters, which inform the reader that Gregory is in fact heir to the Marquis
of Longdale, from whom Gregory’s father estranged himself by marrying a
governess.
Nevertheless, Henty’s novel overwhelmingly affirms that the proper role
for the working classes is a dutiful physicality controlled by visionary supe-
riors. Throughout the text, Gregory is sharply distinguished from Kitchener,
as body is from vision in writings on sport and war. In Gregory’s first meet-
ing with Kitchener, the commander’s “keen glance seemed to Gregory to
take him in from head to foot, and then to look at something far beyond him”
(WKS 65). By contrast, Gregory represents himself as incapable of far-range
visions. Regarding a future career in imperial activities, he admits: “I have
really never thought much about the future. My attention from childhood has
been fixed upon this journey to the Soudan, and I never looked beyond it”
(WKS 161). As with Henry Mayhew’s representation of street people, Henty’s
Patriot Games 141
depiction of Gregory’s lack of vision is both figurative and literal. At one

point Gregory asks of his native servant, “What do you make them out to be,
Zaki? Your eyes are better than mine” (WKS 335). Henty’s novel is largely
responsible for manufacturing the very different image of Kitchener as an
omniscient visionary, which (as we will see) is so central to First World War
propaganda. The narrator affirms that Kitchener
knew the exact position of every one of the units between Cairo and him-
self, and from every station he received messages constantly and despatched
his orders as frequently. There was no hitch whatever. The arrangements
were all so perfect that the vast machine, with its numerous parts, moved
with the precision of clockwork. (WKS 210)
Although in the novel’s last chapter Gregory inherits the title of the
Marquis of Longdale (and, incidentally, becomes the class superior of
Kitchener, first Earl of Khartoum and of Broome), the text reinforces Gregory’s
subordination to the title character with a striking infantilization of the now-
aristocratic protagonist: the novel’s final sentence declares, “Gregory says
he must learn his lessons perfectly before he ventures to take his place in
society” (WKS 384). Moreover, within the military narrative that is the heart
of the novel, the class position of all soldiers relative to Kitchener is finally
unambiguous: in Kitchener’s Sudan campaign they all “worked with as much
regularity as in a great factory at home” (WKS 81).26 Seeking to obscure but
ultimately reaffirming the class-based distinction between soldiers and
officers, body and vision, corps and headquarters, the celebrations of sport-
ing militarism that dominate Edwardian texts such as Henty’s achieve their
most potent form in the recruitment materials that, following 4 August 1914,
sought to lead a generation to war.
One face more than any other looks inexorably out from the early years of
the First World War. On recruiting posters, magazine covers, and similar
popular-culture texts, the visage most often used to arouse patriotism is that
of Horatio Herbert Kitchener, the lionized commander in the Sudan campaign
and Secretary of State for War from 1914 until his death in 1916. The pictorial
logic of Kitchener’s mass-produced image borrows heavily from the repre-
sentation of the commander in popular literary works such as Henty’s, which
render him a disembodied visual power capable of surveying masses of soldier
and civilian bodies. For instance, his visage adorns a recruitment poster (Figure
12) issued late in 1915, just before the Military Service Act of 1916 introduced
conscription. “Men, Materials & Money are the immediate necessities,” we
F igur
iguree 112
2 “Lord Kitchener Says . . . ENLIST TO-DAY.” Recruiting poster, Great Britain, 1915.
(Negative Number Q33108) Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.
are told; yet the obvious message of the poster (“ENLIST TO-DAY”) focuses
only on the need for “Men,” implying that they are equivalent to “Materials”
and “Money,” objects to be distributed according to plans formed by the su-
perior intelligence of the War Office, here represented by Lord Kitchener.
The poster quotes a portion of his July 9, 1915 speech—the barely veiled
threat that, if “the call of duty” should find “no response” in the addressee of
the poster, that call would be “reinforced—let us rather say superseded—by
the call of compulsion.” This sinister announcement contrasts with the pho-
tograph, which oozes the iconography of British military heroism. In addi-
tion to emphasizing the general’s eyes, visual depictions of Kitchener usually
take advantage of his striking moustache so that a shadow obscures his mouth.
Thus, the poster at once attributes the threatening speech to the War Secre-
tary and divorces it from the tight-lipped commander, leaving the silent gaze
of the concerned patriot to do its work on the populace. The depiction of
Kitchener as a disembodied, visionary force is even more apparent in the
best-known British recruiting poster, “[Kitchener] ‘Wants You’” (Figure 13),
based on Alfred Leete’s cover illustration for the September 5, 1914 London
Opinion. Here too the steely eyes transfix the wayward civilian, just as the
moustache hides the mouth—such that the demand for “You” comes less
from Kitchener than from a disembodied “call of duty.”
Patriot Games 143
F igur
iguree 113
3 “[Kitchener] ‘Wants You.’” Recruiting poster, Great Britain, 1914. (Negative Number
Q48378A) Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.
Most importantly, this poster is structured so that the white background

stands in for the rest of Kitchener’s uniform, and thus for his invisible body.27
By contrast, posters depicting everyday soldiers—that is, posters which en-
courage civilians to identify with and join young men already enlisted—
F igur
iguree 114
4 “Which? Man You Are Wanted!” Recruiting poster, Australia, 1914. (Negative Number
Q79868) Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.
Patriot Games 145
emphasize the athletic embodiment of fighting men. For instance, “Which?

Man You Are Wanted!” (Figure 14), an Australian recruiting poster of 1914,
prominently incorporates the association of sport and war. The poster assumes
that any male youth will comprehend the parallel between battlefield and
playing-field valor and between the Victoria Cross and sports equipment,
neatly arranged to form a cross. At the same time, the poster insists that, now
that his country needs him, any such youth should enter manhood by choos-
ing the “great game” of war over mere sports. If the question “Which?” sug-
gests that sports alone is an inappropriately civilian display of masculinity in
time of war, the invitation to join the “Sportsmen’s Thousand” (Victorian
23rd Battalion) nevertheless reinforces the continuity between a civilian life
dominated by games and the similarly physical activities of the soldier who
participates in the “great game” of war. Moreover, although the poster is
obviously modelled on the depiction of the pointing Kitchener, the enlisted
man (unlike the general) is both thoroughly embodied and utterly
contextualized by the battle into which his body is thrown. The soldier’s
wider eyes—along with the underlined “are” and the exclamation point—
communicate a less controlled urgency than that expressed by Kitchener’s
icy gaze. That finger, perhaps the visual index of First World War
propaganda,28 obscures the bottom half of the soldier’s face, deprives him of
individuality, and sharply distinguishes him—like the young protagonist of
Henty’s novel—from the instantly recognizable Lord Kitchener. Whereas
Kitchener—stationed in Whitehall at the War Office—looks out at us from
the ethereal whiteness of abstract command, the soldier’s finger associates
him with the pointing silhouette in the battle scene over his right shoulder,
just as the bayoneted rifle he grasps anchors him to the materiality of war.
Moreover, the athleticist embodiment of soldiers in such posters rein-
forces the assertion—which remains common among many middle-class
writers even in the 1920s—that war, like games, can make class divisions
obsolete. As Baden-Powell optimistically preaches in 1919, the
class boundary is an entirely artificial erection, and can, therefore, be pulled

down if we only set our minds to it. . . . Indeed, the war has almost done
the trick for us with its conscription of all, rich and poor without distinc-
tion, with its common sharing of hardship and danger, and its common
sacrifice for a common ideal at the Front.29
Similarly, in the 1915 poster “Step into Your Place” (Figure 15), a diver-
sity of individuals—laborers with pitchforks and pickaxes, businessmen and
barristers with briefcases and wigs, and, of course, the requisite sportsman,
with a golf club—are transformed into a troop of soldiers whose uniforms
and gear signify no class distinctions. The poster is structured so that the line
of men leads the eye to the word “place”—which here signifies neither the
class-specific position in which “you” should stay nor the trenches of the
F igur
iguree 115
5 “Step into Your Place.” Recruiting poster, Great Britain, 1915. (Negative Number
Q33089) Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.
Western Front but the classless identity “soldier,” itself absorbed into a future
that the individual recruits cannot fathom. Such representations have, of
course, little to do with the facts of First World War recruitment and military
service: for instance, in contrast to the class diversity fantasized in such posters
and in texts by such writers as Baden-Powell, recruitment schemes such as
the “pals’ battalions”—which encouraged voluntary enlistment by promising
that men would be able to serve with local mates rather than strangers—
constituted a de facto class segregation of Kitchener’s new armies, particu-
larly when coupled with the territorial basis of regiments in the British
Army.30 Furthermore, the fact that such appeals were directed in large measure
at young men of the working classes is clear from the 1915 poster “Join the
Brave Throng That Goes Marching Along” (Figure 16). Associated with “the
F igur
iguree 116
6 “Join the Brave Throng That Goes Marching Along.” Recruiting poster, Great
Britain, 1915. (Negative Number Q33106) Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.
Patriot Games 147
mob,” like the crowds of football fans in Shee’s and Baden-Powell’s com-
ments on spectator sports, the word “throng” here undergoes a sanitization
by being paired not only with the word “brave” but with the image of smiling
young volunteers. Moreover, the organization of the poster’s design treats
the soldiers as embodied, but they resemble happy football players rather
than cannon fodder: the recruiting slogan itself not only joins the men together,
but is printed as if on the chests of team jerseys. Virtually reversing the visual
dynamic of “[Kitchener] ‘Wants You’”—in which the blurring of Kitchener’s
white uniform and the poster background rendered the general bodiless—
here the soldiers’ bodies are at once the khaki mass that weights the bottom
of the poster and an indivisible unit.
The depiction of Kitchener’s military leadership in terms of visionary
disembodiment, and of the ordinary soldier as utterly embodied, relies on a
representation of Kitchener that had already been manufactured not only by
juvenile works such as Henty’s novel but also by journalism reporting on his
imperial campaigns in Egypt and the Sudan. Kitchener’s public image is
largely the construction of the journalist G. W. Steevens, whose war corre-
spondence from the Middle East swelled the sales of the half-penny newspaper
the Daily Mail, which Lord Northcliffe launched in May 1896.31 Steevens’s
most popular journalistic writings were in turn reprinted in bestselling volumes
and became influential late-Victorian promulgators of imperialist iconography:
for instance, his book With Kitchener to Khartum (1898) went through nineteen
reprintings in the first year of its publication.32 In this work Steevens provides
the portrait of Kitchener as a visionary commander that was so commonly
recycled in recruiting posters: “He has no age but the prime of life, no body
but one to carry his mind, no face but one to keep his brain behind. The brain
and the will are the essence and the whole of the man.” 33 In addition,
Kitchener’s “precision is so inhumanly unerring, he is more like a machine
than a man,”34 and his “officers and men are wheels in the machine: he feeds
them enough to make them efficient, and works them as mercilessly as he
works himself.”35 This last observation—that armies are egalitarian as well
as hierarchical and that, after all, Lord Kitchener and the greenest recruit are
both soldiers united in the cause of the British Empire—is obscured by
Steevens’s more assertive representation, throughout his text, of Kitchener
as a thinking entity, one whose body is irrelevant (it exists merely as a con-
tainer in which “to carry his mind”) and whose “inhumanly unerring” strategies
equate him with the (in 1898) novelty of technological warfare. Crucially,
although Steevens uses the phrase “more like a machine than a man,” the
words “more . . . than a man” not only dematerialize Kitchener but emphasize
the “brain and the will” that constitute the commander’s “essence.” Writings
such as Steevens’s rely upon an important, if unstated, distinction between
the concept “technology” (from the Greek techne, “art” or “skill”), which
involves the intelligent capacity to design and construct something, and

“machinery” (from the Greek mechane, “means” or “expedient”), which des-
ignates an object that may produce things, but can neither design nor construct
them, and must itself be designed and constructed by an intelligent being’s
“art” or “skill.” The distinction between technology and machinery is crucial
to such authors because it enables them to retain, while subtly embroidering
on, the distinction between (on the one hand) the constructive and supervisory
power of the middle-class subject and (on the other hand) the embodiment
and intellectual limitation of the working-class person conceived as an ob-
ject. That is, Steevens actually treats Kitchener in terms of technology—the
intellectual “art” or “skill” (techne) that plans a battle—and not in terms of
machinery, unlike the ordinary soldiers who are “wheels in the machine” and
provide the “means” or “expedient” (mechane) whereby the commander’s
plans are carried out. This technologization of Kitchener is repeatedly rendered
in Henty’s With Kitchener in the Soudan, where the commander spends, per-
haps, more time telegraphing England than anything else. Kitchener “tele-
graphed to England for white troops” (WKS 167); he “telegraphed home for
another British brigade and additional artillery” (WKS 207); he has “tele-
graphed this morning that material and stores are to be sent up at once” (WKS
254). So impressive to Gregory is all this telegraphing that he must admit
that, compared to “the Sirdar’s [Kitchener’s] plans,” the “life of a subaltern
like myself is a matter scarcely to be considered” (WKS 104).
Steevens’s representation of the technologized, disembodied intelligence
of Kitchener—as opposed to the mechanical operations of his embodied,
less-knowing soldiers—is, at one level, merely an updating of the distinction
between strategy and tactic understood by every military commander since
the ancients. Strategy (from the Greek strat ēgikos, “office or command of a
general”) involves the art of projecting the outcome of a campaign and direct-
ing its larger military movements and operations; tactic (from the Greek
taktikē, “fit for arrangement”) involves the physical actions undertaken by
individual soldiers or units in order to accomplish the larger strategy envi-
sioned by generals. This distinction is famously rendered by the sergeant’s
instructions to new recruits in Henry Reed’s poem about the Second World
War, “Movement of Bodies” (1950): “Tactics is merely/The mechanical
movement of bodies,” whereas “Strategy . . . is done by those up above,
and . . . refers to / The larger movements over which we have no control”—
that is, as the sergeant puts it to the recruits using an appropriately bodily and
class-based metaphor, “Strategy, to be quite frank, you will have no hand
in.”36 Steevens’s depiction of Kitchener relies on a clustering of metaphoric
associations whereby strategy is to tactic as macro is to micro, technology to
machine, intelligence to body, and—in terms of the representations discussed
throughout Youth of Darkest England—middle to working classes.
Patriot Games 149
Thus, describing the Battle of Atbara (1898), Steevens comments that

the “modern system” of war depends on a division between “mind and me-
chanics” in order to create “this clean-jointed, well-oiled, smooth-running,
clockwork-perfect masterpiece of a battle.”37 Likewise, Henty’s preface to
With Kitchener in the Soudan tells us that the defeat of the dervish forces
“was a marvellous campaign—marvellous in the perfection of its organization,
marvellous in the completeness of its success,” all of which was due to “the
moving spirit of this enterprise, the man [Kitchener] whose marvellous power
of organization had secured its success” (WKS vi). That the ordinary soldiers
who participate in this enterprise are merely so many bodies—or machine
parts in the “organization”—that are set in motion by the “moving spirit” of
the commander is clear from the depiction of an English soldier in Steevens’s
Egypt in 1898 (1898) as the “round peg . . . dropped straight into the round
hole.”38 In the same book, another Englishman, “late of the Bechuanaland
Police,” is described as “eloquent, not in speech, but in every strong, self-
contained movement of his body.”39 That is, the subalterns who served under
Kitchener, the Egyptian Sirdar, are objects whose movements are most appro-
priately described using the passive voice (pegs “dropped” by some unnamed
force, ultimately by the strategist Kitchener). Whereas in the recruiting posters
Kitchener is depicted as disembodied speech, his soldiers are here depicted
as profoundly embodied speechlessness. The notion that Kitchener repre-
sented a new sort of military commander (a technologized strategist) and the
extent to which this representation reflects the consummation of Victorian
notions about class difference (whereby the working classes are depicted as
mechanized bodies40) was apparent to observers less keen than Steevens on
the qualities represented by imperialists such as Kitchener. For instance, in
The People of the Abyss (1903), Jack London remarks on the parades cele-
brating the 1901 coronation of Edward VII thus: “Kitchener of Khartoum;
Lord Roberts of India and all the world—the fighting men of England, masters
of destruction, engineers of death! Another race of men from those of the
shops and slums, a totally different race of men.”41 And, according to London,
the destiny of the London poor is implied by the ascendancy of “engineers of
death” such as Kitchener: “before rapid-fire guns and the modern machinery
of warfare, they [the poor] will perish the more swiftly and easily.”42
Throughout his writings, Steevens is quite concerned to anticipate this
complaint—common in the First World War, and probably in all wars—that
commanders view the average soldier as so much cannon fodder. Steevens
promotes the notion, so central to writings on sport and war, of military service
in the cause of empire as erasing class distinctions that fracture English society.
In his description of the Battle of Atbara, Steevens effuses over the coordinated
effort of “Birmingham and the West Highlands . . . muscle and machinery,
lord and larrikin, Balliol and the Board School, the Sirdar’s brain and the
camel’s back—all welded into one, the awful war machine went forward into
action.”43 Steevens here imagines the “awful” (in the sense of “awe-inspiring”)
“war machine” as an entity that overcomes a variety of domestic divisions,
most prominently class divisions: urban industry and rural farming (“Bir-
mingham and the West Highlands”), Oxford degree and state education
(“Balliol and the Board School”), aristocrats and hooligans (“lord and
larrikin”) are all, like the “camel’s back,” so many mechanized bodies (“muscle
and machinery”) that serve the will of Kitchener’s “brain.”
Indeed, in Henty’s With Kitchener in the Soudan the title character him-
self offers an apparent critique of the mechanization of the working classes
and echoes the emphasis on character building, so prominent in paramilitary
organizations such as the Boy Scouts:
At home a subaltern is merely a machine to carry out orders . . . He has

never thought for himself, and he can’t be expected to begin to do so after
working for twenty years like a machine. You will see, if we ever have a
big war, that will be our weak point. (WKS 98)
In spite of this apparently liberal rhetoric on the part of one of the “en-
gineers of death,” to borrow London’s phrase, Henty’s novel makes clear, as
does Guggisberg’s comparison of football and war in Modern Warfare, that
the apparently individualist abilities of any soldier ultimately can derive only
from the commander who represents another class: “The Sirdar’s force of
will seemed to communicate itself to every officer under him, and it is safe to
say that never before was an expedition so perfectly organized and so
marvellously carried out. At Atbara the Sirdar saw to everything himself”
(WKS 210–211). Indeed, the difference between the soldier’s tactical point
of view and the general’s strategic vision is made clear by the recruiting
posters themselves. Looking “inwards,” the men “find . . . response” to “the
call of duty”; they then look out for opportunities to perform “unquestioning
duty-doing.” Looking “outwards,” Kitchener sees “you,” whom your country
needs; looking inwards, he sees we know not what—because he has that
“face . . . to keep his brain behind.”
It has long been assumed that the propaganda of the early years of the
war—including, perhaps most memorably, the recruitment posters featuring
Kitchener—were astoundingly effective in their aim. According to the well-
worn explanation of the unprecedented voluntary enlistment of 1914–1915,
such propaganda materials tapped a rich vein of imperialist sentiment in young
men of the working-class majority, a sentiment that had already been cultivated
by the forces—such as the curricular reforms designed to spread athleticist
ideology among all classes—that sought to render imperialism hegemonic in
England. Although the statistics regarding working-class volunteerism before
Patriot Games 151
the advent of conscription in 1916 are undeniable, it does not necessarily

follow that this volunteerism resulted from the imperialist or militarist values
of the pre-war working classes. As Stephen Humphries cogently remarks,
working-class “individuals were selective and discriminating in their re-
sponses, often involving themselves in an activity for its own sake and reject-
ing any ideological trappings attached to it. Thus enthusiastic participation
in school sports, for example, does not imply automatic development of the
specific character traits intended by the school authorities.”44
Moreover, as J. M. Bourne argues, it is unreasonable to assume that
imperialist youth organizations achieved “the ‘psychological preparation’ of
the British people for war”: indeed, the British working-class attitude towards
the army “was almost wholly negative even when not openly hostile.” Bourne’s
insightful comment regarding youth organizations such as the Boy Scouts
applies equally well to the attempts to spread sporting ideology among the
working classes: “The growth of quasi-military youth movements during the
Edwardian period reflected rather than resolved right-wing concern about
the ‘unsuitability’ of the urban working class for war.”45 Finally, war-era obser-
vations reveal that there were many other reasons, generally occulted by re-
ceived wisdom, that prompted working-class men to join up. For instance, a
First World War recruiting officer observed that posters were unlikely to ap-
peal to “human nature as it exists” in “the Lower Orders, and which, though
not unfeeling or unpatriotic, is sub-cynical, undemonstrative, and irresponsive
to cheap rhetoric.” Much more likely to succeed, the recruiting officer argues,
is “a poster setting forth” the “liberal scale of rations supplied to the men at
the front.”46
Indeed, the assumption that recruitment materials operated in precisely
the terms intended by the War Office—inspiring or appealing to patriotic
sentiment in the working classes of an imperialist nation—allows no room
for a complex critical relation, on the part of working-class subjects, to the
often contradictory claims of nation and class. As Stephen Humphries has
detailed, there was a good deal of resistance, even on the part of schoolchil-
dren, towards imperialist jingoism in the school curricula, and “young people’s
resistance to imperialism was most commonly motivated by the contradic-
tions between imperialist rhetoric and the bitter daily experience of class
inequality,” which contradictions “were highlighted by socialist schoolteachers
who increasingly infiltrated the state education system from 1890 onwards.”47
That many young men similarly responded to First World War propaganda
critically is indicated, for instance, by the recollection of F. L. Goldthorpe,
who joined the 5th Duke of Wellington’s Regiment in 1914:
I was subjected to a continual bombardment of skilled propaganda from

the War office, newspapers, friends who had joined up, recruiting meetings,
and even the pulpits … The accusing finger of Kitchener stabbed me at

every bill-posting, and tales of German atrocities and stricken Belgium
dinned into my ears daily. I suppose it was a combination of these many
urgings which sent me to the local drill hall on November 15th. My age
then was then 17½.48
Goldthorpe’s language testifies to a sophisticated analysis of propaganda,

undertaken by an urban working-class adolescent critical of the “dinnings”
of his generational and class superiors. Here Kitchener’s entreaties are treated
as a form of personal assault (the finger “stabbed” Goldthorpe) and, indeed,
a form of class warfare (a “bombardment” of working-class youth by the
War Office). Goldthorpe offers an eloquent description—and an implicit cri-
tique—of the aggressive activities directed at working-class youth by an
“accusing” but invisible entity (the War Office), although, as Goldthorpe notes,
such propaganda was more widely dispersed throughout Georgian culture
(newspapers, pulpits, etc.) by middle-class proponents of bellicose national-
ism. Goldthorpe may be unusually perceptive about propagandistic appeals
to national identity, and it would certainly be erroneous to assume that work-
ing-class men enlisted solely in order to obtain liberal rations (which were
seldom seen on the Western Front) and never for reasons of patriotism. But
the patriotism of the working classes need not be equated with the imperial-
ist jingoism that writings on sport and war, as well as recruitment posters,
truck in. As J. M. Bourne eloquently argues, in the case of First World War
enlistment it “is more accurate, perhaps, to speak of ‘patriotisms’”:
The public schoolboy infused with a heady mixture of Kiplingesque Im-

perialism and Christian chivalry viewed things differently from the
Northumberland pitman labouring in the dark 600 feet below the North
Sea. They may both have been ‘patriotic’ but the country they loved was
not the same place.49
Indeed, the urgings of “friends who had joined up,” which influence
Goldthorpe’s decision to enlist, were chief among the local “patriotisms”
and community loyalties that the War Office sought to exploit. Bourne notes
that, in addition to the Pals’ Battalions, there “were dockers’ battalions, clerks’
battalions, public schools’ battalions … There was even a stockbrokers’ bat-
talion.”50 Just as dockers and stockbrokers are likely to have different notions
of their relation to empire (and, of course, differential access to imperialist
authors such as Kipling), they are likely to have different notions of exactly
what loyalties constitute patriotism. They are also, of course, likely to have
different experiences of warfare, given the class segregation implied by such
battalions, as well as the fact that officers and other ranks were typically (if
not uniformly) middle- and working-class, respectively. Certainly the First
Patriot Games 153
World War represents not a leveling of society in the name of imperialist

patriotism but a continuation of peacetime class stratification by other means.
Among many other forms of such stratification, the differentiation of classes
along the lines of vision and the body—which is so central to the recruitment
materials that Goldthorpe critiques and to the writings on sport and war—
receives extensive critical treatment both in post-war journalistic exposés
and in the best-known modernist depiction of the war and its aftermath,
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
Given the pervasive association of athleticism and war in writings on the

working-class body, it is perhaps predictable that Septimus Warren Smith,
the shell-shocked hero of Woolf’s novel, is harassed before and after the war
by figures who recommend sports as a means of improving the young man’s
health.51 Noting his lack of robustness, Septimus’s pre-war supervisor Mr.
Brewer—with all the authority of G. A. Henty, Captain Guggisberg, or a
recruiting poster—“advised football.”52 With haunting irony, the novel rein-
forces the deadly implications of this seemingly harmless sporting advice:
“There in the trenches the change which Mr. Brewer desired when he advised
football was produced instantly; he [Septimus] developed manliness; he was
promoted . . . The War had taught him. It was sublime” (MD 86). This chilling
recitation of athleticist ideals derives not from the stream of consciousness
of Mr. Brewer or Septimus (much less from the perspective of Woolf) but
from an impersonal omniscience that speaks the language of imperialist writ-
ings for young people regarding athletics, war, and the working-class
body.53 Indeed, Woolf’s novel offers a pointed critique of this lethal discourse
on sport and war by consistently associating it, and the imperialist popular
culture through which it was proffered, not with working-class readers sup-
posedly given to being manipulated by propaganda but, rather, with the middle-
class social imperialists who convene at Clarissa Dalloway’s party. For
instance, the liberal politician Richard Dalloway represents “the public-
spirited, British Empire, tariff-reform, governing-class spirit,” and one could
“know to a tittle what Richard thought by reading the Morning Post” (MD
76-77). Similarly, Peter Walsh—in spite of his self-representation as “dislik-
ing India, and empire, and army” (MD 55)—is a product of jingoistic mass
culture: he “had worshipped” General Gordon “as a boy” (MD 52), and it
could almost go without saying that, for Peter, “cricket was no mere game.
Cricket was important” (MD 162–63).54
In Mrs. Dalloway, such social-imperialist discourse is represented pri-
marily by Lady Bruton and by the medical men Holmes and Bradshaw.55 If
Lady Bruton’s gender seemingly prevents her from fulfilling her martial des-
tiny— “She should have been a general of dragoons herself” (MD 105), her
activities as a reformer of the London poor are described in explicitly military
terms.56 Her pet social scheme—a Boothian project involving the emigration
of the poor to Canada—is “the ramrod of her soul,” the “sublime conception”
of “a strong martial woman” whose letter on the subject to the editor of the
London Times is “a morning’s battle” (MD 108–109). Lady Bruton envisions
the marshalling of the teeming masses of the imperial metropolis: “Murmuring
London flowed up to her, and her hand, lying on the sofa back, curled upon
some imaginary baton such as her grandfathers might have held, holding
which she seemed, drowsy and heavy, to be commanding battalions marching
to Canada” (MD 112). Just as Lady Bruton is a parody of the social schemers
of the previous decades, Holmes and Bradshaw represent those surveillant
figures so prominent in Victorian writings on the city, the middle-class ob-
servers of the urban poor—as Woolf none-too-subtly indicates by giving the
physicians the names (respectively) of the best-known literary detective and
of Bradshaw’s Guide to the English railway system, which Sherlock Holmes
and Dr. Watson frequently use in their policing of the criminal classes of
London and its environs (“Just look up the trains in Bradshaw,” Holmes says
to Watson in “The Copper Beeches” [1892]57). The eugenicist Sir William
Bradshaw—who “penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propa-
gate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion” (MD 99)—
would seem the more sinister of the two physicians; significantly, however, it
is the apparently more kindly Dr. Holmes who most effectively employs the
discourses on sport and on the embodiment of the poor. Thus Dr. Holmes
advises Rezia, Septimus’s young wife, to make her husband notice “real
things”—a category constituted by the athleticism with which imperialist
literature sought to inspire nationalism in working-class youths: “play
cricket—that was the very game, Dr. Holmes said, a nice out-of-door game,
the very game for her husband” (MD 25). The novel in turn exposes, by
means of grim puns on the words “troop” and “stumps,” the cause-and-effect
relation between the pre-war attempt to extend the “games ethic” to working-
class young people and the mutilated soldier bodies in the trenches: “‘Look,’
she [Rezia] implored him [Septimus], pointing at a little troop of boys carry-
ing cricket stumps” (MD 25).
Moreover, in her critique of middle-class discourses on sport and war,
and the related discourses on vision and the working-class body, Woolf aligns
those discourses with conservative representational practices. Holmes’s “real
things” and Bradshaw’s “proportion” constitute the materialist norms of re-
alism—which norms, according to Woolf, a radical modernist aesthetic must
oppose.58 Woolf’s 1925 essay “Modern Fiction” famously pits modernism
against a Bradshawesque and Holmesian realism “concerned not with the
spirit but with the body.”59 Woolf insists that the modernist writer must “have
the courage to say that what interests him is no longer ‘this’ but ‘that’”: “For
Patriot Games 155
the moderns ‘that,’ the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of
psychology.”60 The terms that Woolf here uses to distinguish the material
details accumulated in realist fiction (“this”) from the psychological emphasis
of modernism (“that”) echo Philip Gibbs’s description, in his 1920 exposé
Now It Can Be Told, of the black humor among soldiers in the trenches. Such
humor involves
the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an
ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life
was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to
perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive,
savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all
art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise.
Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground.
The contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enor-
mous world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morn-
ing coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a
piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying, in a
filthy gutter. The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at the
sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled.61
The war exposes progressivist ideology as the old lie—which, Gibbs

astutely observes, is dispersed largely by “poetry” and “art” that themselves
rely on a class-based distinction between vision and the body: the artist here
is an “ironical fate” superior to readers, the mere “mortals” who wind up in
the trenches. The passage in turn offers a radical subversion of this power
relation: the laughter in the trenches signifies the empowering new knowl-
edge on the part of the “low”—now identified not with the body but with the
“soul”—who delight in a vision whereby signifiers of middle-class status are
rendered ridiculously material (the “china vase dashed to hard ground,” the
“highly dignified man” who winds up in the “gutter”). In order to offer much
the same criticism, Woolf recuperates the truth-telling power of art; whereas
Gibbs emphasizes the fact that the material destruction of war (“This”)
explodes pre-war progressivism (“That”), Woolf eschews depiction of the
realities of trench combat (“this”) and examines instead the middle-class im-
perialism and militarism which led a generation to the trenches (“that,” the
“dark places of psychology”).
Woolf’s critique of the ideologies of her own class is both the value of
her work and its limitation: the self-positioning of modernism as a radical
aesthetic to some degree reinstates the very class divide that it critiques by
reaffirming the middle-class artist’s privileged ability to attain a critical vision.
What separates Woolf’s work from those of the middle-class social imperialists
she criticizes is the fact that she reveals how modernist aesthetics can be used
as a means of attacking previous aesthetics and ideologies and also, by
implication, how it could be reappropriated to serve the bellicose interests of

the middle classes. Thus, “Modern Fiction” begins with an explicitly martial
metaphor to represent modernism and its realist predecessors:
On the flat, in the crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to
those happier warriors, whose battle is won and whose achievements wear
so serene an air of accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from
whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us. . . . We only
know that certain gratitudes and hostilties inspire us.62
The very metaphor “avant garde” is of course a military one, an irony

Mrs. Dalloway does not flinch from registering by associating, even fleetingly,
its own stream-of-consciousness practice with the products of mass destruc-
tion: “Her words faded. So a rocket fades” (MD 23–24). However, what is
not present in Woolf’s text is a critique of social imperialism that derives
from working-class consciousness rather than from the perspective of the
writer concerned with her or his own aesthetics. By contrast, Gibbs’s Now It
Can Be Told offers both perspectives. Gibbs’s own prose is fractured by (on
the one hand) a bitter critique of social-imperialist ideology and (on the other
hand) a tendency to slide into the depictions of class difference in which that
ideology so glibly trades. Thus, his discussion of the mechanization of soldier
bodies reports that men were trained
until they became automata at the word of command, lost their souls, as it
seemed, in that grinding-machine of military training, and cursed their
fate. Only comradeship helped them—not always jolly, if they happened
to be a class above their fellows, a moral peg above foul-mouthed slum-
dwellers and men of filthy habits, but splendid if they were in their own
crowd of decent, laughter-loving, companionable lads.63
Gibbs’s critique of the discourse on the mechanized working-class body

is as incisive as his succeeding contrast between the dirty urban poor and the
respectable English is trite. However, Gibbs’s work shares with Woolf’s a
valuable self-consciousness about the potential alignment of his representa-
tional practices with warfare itself: he describes a war correspondent’s use of
the typewriter as a process of “working it like a machine-gun, in short, furious
spasms of word-fire.”64
What Gibbs primarily, and most valuably, presents in Now It Can Be
Told is a record of vocal working-class consciousness, formed in the trenches
and articulated by the soldiers themselves. Thus, Gibbs quotes an officer
who asserts:
G.H.Q. [General Headquarters] lived, said our guest, in a world of its

own, rose-colored, remote from the ugly things of war. They had heard of
Patriot Games 157
the trenches, yes, but as the West End hears of the East End—a nasty
place where common people lived. Occasionally they visited the trenches
as society folk go slumming, and came back proud of having seen a shell
burst, having braved the lice and the dirt.
“The trenches are the slums,” said our guest. “We are the Great Un-
washed. We are the Mud-larks.”65
Rejecting the fantasies of classlessness that dominate writings on sport

and war, the officer explicitly compares (on the one hand) the relations be-
tween soldiers in the trenches and commanders to (on the other hand) the
relations between the urban poor and the social investigators of the previous
decades: associating the “engineers of death” (such as Kitchener and his field
marshals) with social investigators (such as Mayhew, Booth, Beatrice Webb,
Baden-Powell, and their ilk), the officer discredits the supposedly benevo-
lent intentions of the latter and by implication assigns them responsibility for
the disaster of the First World War. Gibbs does not state whether the officer
he quotes is working-class or (as is somewhat more likely) middle-class. If
the latter, his bitter denunciation of middle-class discourses on the poor is
even more striking. So too is his argument that soldiers of all classes are
indeed united, but not by imperialist values. War transforms them all into the
equivalent of an urban working-class population whose bodies are destroyed
in laboring to realize the visions of middle-class capitalists and imperialists,
and Gibbs unflinchingly records the revolutionary, and anti-imperialist, im-
plications of this union among soldiers:
“The politicians are the guilty ones,” said one cavalry officer. “I am all for
revolution after this bloody massacre. I would hang all politicians,
diplomats, and so-called statesmen with strict impartiality.”
“I’m for the people,” said another. “The poor, bloody people, who
are kept in ignorance and then driven into the shambles when their rulers
desire to grab some new part of the earth’s surface or to get their armies
going because they are bored with peace.”66
Indeed, Gibbs’s text reverses the class-based divide between vision and
embodiment in a series of theatrical metaphors67 that establish the soldiery—
which is rendered the equivalent of a unified working-class group—as pos-
sessing a visionary ability that makes them superior to the middle-class
“engineers” of war. Thus, Gibbs himself describes politicians and generals
as puppets: “men who thought they were directing the destiny of the world
were merely caught in those woven threads like puppets tied to strings and
made to dance. It was the old Dance of Death.”68 Finally, Gibbs represents
the soldiers who identify with the working classes as the audience for this
show, a position that he describes not in terms of the passive reception of a
spectacle but in terms of revolutionary action: “It will go hard with the
government of England if it plays a grandiose drama before hostile specta-

tors who refuse to take part in it. It will go hard with the nation, for it will be
engulfed in anarchy.”69
By contrast, the interior monologues of Septimus—the only soldier to
receive extensive representation in Mrs. Dalloway—do not suggest that his
war experience results in his embracing any revolutionary political position,
whether in opposition to empire or in support of working-class solidarity.
Rather, Septimus is a thoroughly literary figure, a double for the Woolfian
modernist. Septimus volunteers not out of a sense of imperialist pride or
even economic necessity but “to save an England which consisted almost
entirely of Shakespeare’s plays” (MD 86),70 and this pre-war valuation of art
is practically all that remains coherent in Septimus’s shattered post-war con-
sciousness. However artificially aestheticized, the interior monologues of
Septimus—like the observations of the soldiers in Now It Can Be Told—
nevertheless constitute a sustained critique of the class-based discourse on
vision and the body that proliferate in imperialist writings on and for work-
ing-class youths. Indeed, Septimus’s interior monologues, like the statements
of the soldiers Gibbs quotes, frequently reverse the class-based assumptions
of those discourses: the war wound from which Septimus suffers involves
not a lost limb, or even lost memory, but an excess of visionary knowledge.
Septimus’s interior monologues represent modernist aesthetics as a critical
vision turned on the horrific materials of the war itself. Thus, his first “vision”
is only apparently a description of his felt union with the natural surroundings
of Regent’s Park. Rather, Septimus indicates that he can only see the park
from the perspective of a victim of trench warfare:
leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by
millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and
down; when the branches stretched he, too, made that statement. The spar-
rows fluttering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains were part of the
pattern; the white and blue, barred with black branches. . . . A child
cried. . . .
“Septimus!” said Rezia. He started violently. People must notice.
(MD 22–23)
In keeping with Woolf’s impressionistic tactics, Septimus’s meditation

on the bucolic enclave of Regent’s Park gestures at, without depicting in any
realistic detail, the horrors of trench warfare. The adjective “jagged” seems
less appropriate to a description of a fountain than to a description of the
barbed-wire fences marking battlefield borders, just as the image of “white
and blue, barred with black branches” is less evocative of any park than of
the now-well-known photographs of the battle-scarred landscape of the West-
ern Front (Figure 17). If read thus, as superimposing the landscape of war-
fare onto the supposedly pacific domestic front, Septimus’s vision bleakly
Patriot Games 159
F igur
iguree 117
7 Australian soldiers in Chateau Wood, Third Battle of Ypres, 1917. (Negative Number
E(1914) 1220) Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.
reinforces the fact that bellicose nationalism has effects on young people far
different from those fantasized in social-imperialist writings on working-
class youth: whereas narratives such as Henty’s end with young men achiev-
ing glory and manhood, Septimus’s monologue concludes with the pathetic
outburst of an infant (“A child cried”). In this way, Septimus’s disjunctive
impressions not only appear quite sane but encapsulate the political burden
of Woolf’s novel, the modernist critique of imperialist war.
Finally, that modernist critique has everything to do with pre-war writings
on working-class youth. The first sign that Septimus is insane—his notion
that he is a sort of marionette connected to leaves “by millions of fibres”—is
a sinister means of linking his madness with the embodiment of the soldierly
athlete in imperialist juvenile literature. Moreover, Septimus’s stream of con-
sciousness here ironically echoes texts by pre-war experts on working-class
youth—such as Spencer J. Gibb’s 1906 book The Problem of Boy-Work, a
Taylorist proposal for the organization of supposed after-school loafers into
useful part-time errand boys:
Boys are what we set moving. Boys are the material in which we deal.
Boys are our tools: every wire has a boy at the end of it. Every message
starts a boy. Every parcel hurried, every bit of latest news, every pressure
for the quickened movement of news, is a call for boys. Out they pour—in
armies, in mobs, to ply in our service.71
Gibb’s depiction of boys as the communication nodes of an extensive

“wire,” along which information and materials can be transmitted, imagines
“mobs” of working-class boys as the “material” that is transformed into
“armies” that “ply” in the service of empire. Gibb’s text parallels Henty’s
description of soldiers in the Sudan campaign as the “numerous parts” of a
“vast machine” that “moved with the precision of clock-work”—all under
the ordering direction of the ceaselessly telegraphing Lord Kitchener, who
“received messages constantly and despatched his orders as frequently” (WKS
210). Only the most famous shellshock victim in literature, Septimus repre-
sents the outcome of the discourse on middle-class technologies of vision
and the mechanization of the working-class body. The “millions of fibres”
connecting Septimus to disparate leaves evoke nothing so much as the thou-
sands of miles of communication trenches connecting soldiers on the battle-
field (Figure 18). The logical conclusion of the rationalization of working-class
childhood, so prominent in imperialist writings from the mid-Victorian pe-
riod on, is the technological sophistication of warfare that is the definitive
characteristic of our modernity.
Patriot Games
161
Figur
iguree 118
8 Aerial photograph of the trench system, taken on 15 July 1915 before the Battle of Loos.
(Negative Number Q60546) Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. I focus on England rather than Britain for two reasons. First, the latter entity is
comprised of four competing national identities and even as seemingly focused
a topic as British working-class youth and imperialism is more than one book
can properly address. Second, imperialist writers generally understand England
to be the symbolic “heart” of the British Empire. As Ian Duncan puts it, “En-
gland signifies both a discrete national identity and, in its synecdochal overlay
with modern Britain, a mobile, expansive principle of imperial dominion.” See
Duncan, “Wild England: George Borrow’s Nomadology,” Victorian Studies 41
(1998): 386. Furthermore, I focus on the urban working classes, for fairly obvi-
ous reasons: Victorian and Edwardian reformers are obsessed with them rather
than with the rural poor, who generally appear in reformist writings merely as a
positive counterpoint or as an object of nostalgia. Finally, although on a few
occasions I will discuss representations of cities other than London, the reader
will note that I focus primarily on the capital city, due to its centrality to nine-
teenth-century writings on urban matters in England. As Gill Davies accurately
remarks of the East End of London, the urban locale that dominates reformist
writings on “darkest England,” it “became a sign for ‘the condition of England,’
always charged with greater meaning than the street names and locales pos-
sessed in themselves. To uncover the mystery of London would be to understand
‘England,’ that other powerful signifier of nation, empire and the British way of
life.” See Davies, “Foreign Bodies: Images of the London Working Class at the
End of the 19th Century,” Literature and History 14 (1988): 64.
2. Throughout this book I use “middle classes” and “working classes” instead of
the singular form of these terms in order to signify that these are not homog-
enous social groups but, rather, two distinct social categories that contain within
them a wide range of economic, social, and ideological positions. For a well-
known description of the class stratification within working-class culture, see
Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Cen-
tury (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 13–31. My use of these plurals indicates
that I would consider it an error to equate the circumstances of, for instance, a
lower-middle-class Victorian clerk with those of Cecil Rhodes, just as it would
be an error to equate the circumstances of one of Henry Mayhew’s impoverished
dung-collectors with those of a highly skilled artisan, or what was often called
the “labor aristocracy.” That said, I would also insist that “middle-class” and
“working-class” signify two distinct social categories in the period I study: the
clerk and Rhodes are likely both to identify as middle-class and against a working-
class population that they would see as constituted by both the dung-collector
163
164 Notes
and the artisan. As Pamela Horn remarks, “Anxiety to maintain social distance”
from the working classes “was especially acute among the humbler ranks of the
middle class, for, as the Royal Commission on Secondary Education put it, ‘the
resolve to avoid contact with social inferiors is usually most inflexible where the
social distinction is narrowest.’” See Horn, The Victorian Town Child (New York:
New York University Press, 1997), 24. I often use the term “the poor” inter-
changeably with “the working classes” to reflect an historical and social reality:
as any reader of Victorian or Edwardian working-class autobiographies (or even
selections from Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor) will
note, most of even the continuously employed working classes were quite poor,
and even the best-off workers could easily become so.
I would thus accord with Bernard Waites’s statement that before “1914 the
social problem was still dominated by the problem of poverty, and though poverty
was itself recognised as a detailed social hierarchy, ‘the poor’ and ‘the working
classes’ were interrelated terms.” See Waites, A Class Society at War: England,
1914–1918 (Leamington Spa: Berg; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 74.
3. Disraeli, Sybil: or The Two Nations (London: Oxford University Press, 1970),
67.
4. Disraeli, Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honourable the Earl of Beaconsfield,
ed. T. E. Kebbel (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), 2:527–28. The best discus-
sion of Disraeli’s treatment of class and imperialism in his novels and political
speeches is Daniel Bivona, Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Do-
mestic Debates in Victorian Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press;
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), esp. 2–14.
5. Middle-class hostility to the 1867 Reform Act is discussed at some length in
Chapter 3 of this book; in Chapter 4 I deal briefly with the similar hostility to the
1884 Reform Act, which further extended the working-class franchise.
6. Quoted in V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular
Outline (New York: International Publishers, 1939), 79. Excepting its occasional
lapses into psychobiography, the best study of Rhodes’s imperialist views is
Robert I. Rotberg and Miles F. Shore, The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pur-
suit of Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), esp. 84–107.
7. Thus, V. I. Lenin quotes this statement of Rhodes’s to demonstrate that he “ap-
plied the imperialist policy in the most cynical manner.” See Lenin, Imperialism,
78.
8. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Na-
tionalism (London: Verso, 1983), 16.
9. Horn, The Victorian Town Child, 3. Hugh Cunningham observes that the ratio of
children to adults achieved a peak of 1,120 children for every thousand adults in
1826. See Cunningham, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Child-
hood since the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 20. See
also E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England,
1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 443–
50.
10. Cunningham, The Children of the Poor, 217.
11. Gilbert, The Evolution of National Insurance in Britain: The Origins of the Wel-
fare State (London: Michael Joseph, 1966), 120.
Notes 165
12. The late-Victorian reformist view of working-class children is deeply ambiguous,

of course. As we will see, Lockean and Wordsworthian views of the salvageable
working-class child frequently coexist with a notion that he or she has been
deeply contaminated by an environment riddled with poverty, vice, and so forth.
In her study of Margaret McMillan, Carolyn Steedman describes well the position
of Victorian and Edwardian reformers, such as those I discuss in Youth of Dark-
est England, who address “the divisions in social position and social function
between different classes of children by sometimes denying that working-class
children were children, in the post-Wordsworthian sense”: “the observed working-
class child represented corruption as well as innocence and the natural, in the
tradition McMillan inherited and used.” See Steedman, Childhood, Culture and
Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan, 1860–1931 (London: Virago Press, 1990),
67. As Judith Plotz compellingly demonstrates, however, the problem of class
troubled even the romantic discourse on childhood, for all its apparent utopianism.
Plotz argues that this discourse not only constructs “The Child, who is unmarked
by time, place, class, or gender but is represented as in all places and all times
the same” but also “declassifies and erases certain kinds of merely literal children
by stripping them of that honorific label [The Child]”: because the lives of “urban
laboring children” are “so clearly shaped and deformed by their environments,
these young persons cease even to be seen as real children at all” and are instead
considered to be “embedded in a thick social context from which they cannot be
extricated.” See Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (New York:
Palgrave, 2001), 5, 30. The Victorian and Edwardian youth experts I discuss
often retain the basic presumptions of this class-based division between an ide-
alized middle-class childhood and a contaminated working-class one but take a
more ameliorist approach. They acknowledge, usually at great length and with
great disgust, the deforming environment, but their goal is precisely to classify
rather than erase, to extricate the working-class child from his or her social context,
and to replace him or her in a better one, or at least an ideologically preferred
one. That better social context, for the writers I study in this book, is shot through
with middle-class and imperialist values.
13. Koven, “From Rough Lads to Hooligans: Boy Life, National Culture and Social
Reform,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris
Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Routledge, 1992), 368.
14. Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought 1895–
1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 24.
15. Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (Lon-
don: Verso, 1993), 2–3.
16. See W. T. Stead, ed., The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes, with
Elucidatory Notes, to Which Are Added Some Chapters Describing the Political
and Religious Ideas of the Testator (London: “Review of Reviews” Office, 1902),
58–59.
17. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial
Difference in Colonialist Literature,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 80–81.
18. Masterman, “Realities at Home,” in The Heart of the Empire: Discussions of
Problems of Modern City Life in England. With an Essay on Imperialism, ed.
166 Notes
Charles F. G. Masterman (New York: E. P. Dutton; London: T. Fisher Unwin,

1902), 4.
19. And in which he explicitly acknowledges that the Disraelian ideal remains unre-
alized:
Sixty years ago, Disraeli described the rich and poor of England as two
nations. Today, even national distinctions seem less estranging than the
fissure between the summit and basis of society. . . . We are gradually
learning that “the people of England” [the poor] are as different from, and
as unknown to, the classes that investigate, observe, and record, as the
people of China or Peru.
See Masterman, The Condition of England, ed. J. T. Boulton (London: Methuen,
1960), 4, 88–89.
20. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opin-
ion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1984), 246, 224.
21. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1994),
53.
22. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 53.
23. Chrisman, Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and South Af-
rican Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner, and Plaatje (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2000), 7–8.
24. See Pelling, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain (London:
Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968), 82–100; Price, An Imperial
War and the British Working Class: Working-Class Attitudes and Reactions to
the Boer War 1899–1902 (London: Routledge; Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1972), 1–11, 46–96, 233–42; Scally, The Origins of the Lloyd George
Coalition: The Politics of Social-Imperialism, 1900–1918 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1975), 29–47; Cunningham, “The Language of Patriotism,
1750–1914,” History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist Historians 12 (1981):
23–28; and Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working
Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 179–
238.
25. Low, White Skins/Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism (London:
Routledge, 1996), 46.
26. Hendrick, Images of Youth: Age, Class, and the Male Youth Problem, 1880–1920
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 252.
27. Colvill, “Anarchy,” in Anarchy or Order: Twelve Papers for the Times (London:
Duty and Discipline Movement, 1914), 22.
28. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, with Some of Their Applications to Social
Philosophy, ed. William Ashley (Fairfield, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley, 1987), 756–
57.
29. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 959.
Notes 167
32. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 381–82.

33. For instance, see the essays in Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan, eds., Victorian
Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1995) and those in Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally
Shuttleworth, eds., Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (New
York: Routledge, 1990). The notes to the chapters that follow will indicate more
fully the scholarship on visuality and the body in Victorian and Edwardian studies
that has been especially useful to me.
34. See Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nine-
teenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).
35. Ruskin, Modern Painters, Volume III: Containing Part IV, “Of Many Things,” in
The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London:
George Allen; New York: Longmans, Green, 1903–1912), 5:333.
36. Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 56–57. The example Gagnier provides
of this latter individual—the essentially embodied worker who is a positive figure
by virtue of his “natural” distance from industrialization—is Adam Bede.
37. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1986), 135.
38. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge,
1992), 201, 205.
39. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 265.
40. Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 7–8.
41. Poovey, Making a Social Body, 8.
42. Poovey, Making a Social Body, 34–35.
43. Poovey, Making a Social Body, 34. Poovey locates the origin of this intentionally
contradictory discourse on class difference—at once seeking to unify the social
body and to retain the differentiation of the population along class lines—in
Scottish Enlightenment theories, particularly the writings of Adam Smith. As
Poovey convincingly claims, such “theories—many of which focused on an ag-
ricultural society—were infused into the English reform movement, which was
preoccupied with urban problems and the administration of the social domain.”
See Poovey, Making a Social Body, 76. I argue that the generation of reformers
following the mid-century ones on whom Poovey focuses continue to find this
contradictory discourse on class extremely useful, but that they apply it with
especial vigor to matters of youth culture and imperialism, the particular obses-
sions of the latter third of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the
twentieth.
44. Lentricchia, “Foucault’s Legacy—A New Historicism?,” in The New Histori-
cism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 234.
45. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1979), 170–71.
46. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 305, 221.
47. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202–203.
168 Notes
48. I am thus in sympathy with Colin Gordon’s attempt to provide a corrective of

those critics who claim that Foucault posits “a monolithic regime of social sub-
jection.” As Gordon puts it, the
misunderstanding here consists in a conflation of historical levels which
reads into the text two massive illusions or paralogisms: an illusion of
“realisation” whereby it is supposed that programmes elaborated in cer-
tain discourses are integrally transposed to the domain of actual practices
and techniques, and an illusion of “effectivity” whereby certain technical
methods of social domination are taken as being actually implemented
and enforced upon the social body as a whole.
See Gordon’s “Afterword” to Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected In-
terviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gor-
don, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Random House,
Pantheon Books, 1980), 246.
49. Pecora, “The Limits of Local Knowledge,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram
Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 244.
50. Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991), 196.
51. Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics, 160.
CHAPTER 1
1. Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (New York: Dover Publications,
1968), 1:xv. Subsequent references to volumes and page numbers of London
Labour, abbreviated LL, will appear parenthetically in my text. Much of the
material that constitutes London Labour and the London Poor originally ap-
peared, between 19 October 1849 and 12 December 1850, in eighty-two “let-
ters” to the Morning Chronicle. Mayhew published the first book-length version
of London Labour, a three-volume work composed of selections from and ex-
pansions on the Morning Chronicle reportage, in 1851; a revised and (still fur-
ther) expanded three-volume edition, the version on which I primarily focus,
was published by Griffin, Bohn and Company in 1861, with a fourth volume
added in 1862. For a brief discussion of the publication history and successive
revisions of the text, see Eileen Yeo and E. P. Thompson’s Appendix I in Henry
Mayhew, The Unknown Mayhew, ed. Eileen Yeo and E. P. Thompson (New York:
Schocken Books, 1971), 476–80.
2. Although I am more interested here in the shifting figurative language with which
Mayhew represents the working classes as disqualified from citizenship in the
English nation, it is worth noting that in the census reports of the period they
were literally not counted as citizens—“the government population returns not
even numbering them among the inhabitants of the kingdom,” as Mayhew him-
self notes (LL 1:xv).
3. Mayhew, Unknown Mayhew, 312.
4. Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Cen-
tury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 325.
Notes 169
5. Elsewhere Mayhew refers to “that almost painful look of precocity which

characterises those whose childhood is one of toil.” See Mayhew, Unknown
Mayhew, 383. The unpleasant spectacle of prematurely aged or precocious
working-class people—which implicitly reinforces that childlike qualities are
the proper state of this group—is a feature of Mayhew’s reportage from the first.
In the essay on Jacob’s Island, which in the 24 September 1849 issue inaugurated
the Morning Chronicle investigations into “London and the Poor” (which would
become London Labour and the London Poor), Mayhew offers the grotesque
image of a prematurely aged baby and, in turn, a metaphor suggesting that the
culture of the urban poor, by which the baby is surrounded, is juvenile:
At one house, a child sat nursing a dying half-comatose baby on a door-
step. The skin of its little arms, instead of being plumped out with health,
was loose and shrivelled, like an old crone’s, having a flabby monkey-like
appearance more than the character of the human cuticle.
I was stopped by my companion in front of a house “to let.” The build-
ing was as narrow and as unlike a human habitation as the wooden houses
in a child’s box of toys.
See Mayhew, Voices of the Poor: Selections from the “Morning Chronicle”
“Labour and the Poor” (1849–1850), ed. Anne Humpherys, Cass Library of
Victorian Times 10 (London: Frank Cass, 1971), 4.
6. Mayhew’s refreshing disdain for the moralistic tendencies of mid-Victorian phi-
lanthropy crops up in even the most minute details of his reportage, as when he
leaves uncorrected and unglossed a street photographer’s (intentionally?)
malapropistic use of “philandery” in place of “philanthropy” (LL 3:205).
7. The bond between Mayhew and his middle-class readers is more than merely
implicit: in a manner similar to Dickens, Mayhew cultivated an apparently “inti-
mate” relationship with his audience, represented for instance by the “Answers
to Correspondents” that appeared on the wrappers for the weekly parts of Lon-
don Labour. See Anne Humpherys, Henry Mayhew, Twayne’s English Authors
Series 396 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984), 139–43. If for no other reason
than that (as she reports) she “can’t read or write” (LL 1:152), the watercress
girl, like most of Mayhew’s interviewees, has no access to this circuit of bonhomie
that links the author and his readers.
8. Herbert, Culture and Anomie, 212.
9. Similarly, Catherine Gallagher notes that, although Mayhew
seems, at first, to locate the wanderers outside the social body, they are
very quickly internalized and equated with society’s circulatory system.
Mayhew’s description is typical of Victorian social discourse: society is
still imagined as a body, but as a corporate body menaced by those very
overly physical individual bodies that distribute its sustenance.
See Gallagher, “The Body Versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus
and Henry Mayhew,” in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society
in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Ber-
keley: University of California Press, 1987), 91.
170 Notes
10. Mackay, Forty Years’ Recollections of Life, Literature, and Public Affairs (Lon-
don: Chapman and Hall, 1877), 2:152.
11. Similarly, Regenia Gagnier argues that, in “Mayhew’s interviews with metro-
politan labor, subjectivity that is confined to isolation within the body obliterates
the greatest part of human subjectivity: intersubjectivity.” See Gagnier,
Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 60–61. Also, Anne Humpherys notes that
Mayhew’s interviews “projected a picture of men and women as cut off from
one another in life as they were in the form of the reports Mayhew made of his
interviews,” and thus he “details a story of essentially isolated individuals.” See
Humpherys, Travels into the Poor Man’s Country: The Work of Henry Mayhew
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 63.
12. Herbert, Culture and Anomie, 231–32. Similarly, Richard Maxwell argues that
in London Labour “street-life also suggests ‘a perfect liberty’ which Mayhew
comes to find attractive,” such that his text “admits discontinuity to be an accept-
able mode of existence.” See Maxwell, “Henry Mayhew and the Life of the
Streets,” Journal of British Studies 17.2 (1978): 99. Such comments regarding
Mayhew’s “identification” with his interviewees are common in the scholarship
on London Labour; I find more compelling Audre Jaffe’s claim that Mayhew
“detached himself from his subjects precisely through the act of writing about
them: the sympathy and identification which enable his work in fact keep away
the possibility that he will actually occupy the beggar’s place.” As Jaffe notes,
Mayhew “began to write out of financial need,” and thus continuing the reportage
staves off his own poverty; moreover, as I am arguing, the ideological enterprise
of London Labour involves promoting continuous labor and the eradication of
predatory vagabondage among the working classes. See Jaffe, “Detecting the
Beggar: Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Mayhew, and ‘The Man with the Twisted
Lip,’” Representations 31 (1990): 108–109.
13. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 24.
14. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 6.
15. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1979), 195–228; and Benjamin,
Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry
Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), 35–66.
18. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1984), xix.
19. For a brief discussion of Cochrane’s development of the Street Orderly Brigade,
see James Winter, London’s Teeming Streets: 1830–1914 (London: Routledge,
1993), 122–26.
20. The street-orderly system exemplifies a form of working-class participation in
their own discipline, the search for which is a dominant theme in London Labour.
As Catherine Gallagher puts it, “For Mayhew the opposite of productive labor
that fixes itself is quite explicitly unproductive labor that moves about.” See
Notes 171
Gallagher, “The Body Versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus
and Henry Mayhew,” 99.
21. According to Mayhew, the dangers of offering the poor even a modicum of “im-
provement” without proper middle-class supervision are suggested by a super-
intendent of police, whom he approvingly quotes on the subject of the ragged
schools in a Morning Chronicle letter: “No doubt there is a great risk run at these
Ragged Schools; bad boys, in a cluster, will always corrupt good boys. Worse
still with girls. . . . with a proper supervision, and a prudential training, Ragged
Schools do good; without it, they are dangerous.” Mayhew’s informant describes
the nature of this danger in terms that resonate throughout London Labour: noting
that the streets are “less crammed with vicious boys and girls,” the superinten-
dent uneasily observes “that they go to the Ragged Schools, many of them, and
are then out of sight.” See Mayhew, Voices of the Poor, 12. On Mayhew’s critique
of the ragged schools, see E. P. Thompson, “The Political Education of Henry
Mayhew,” Victorian Studies 11 (1967): 52–53; Humpherys, Travels into the Poor
Man’s Country, 56–59; and Humpherys, Henry Mayhew, 106–108.
22. Both the illustration and Mayhew’s discussion of the street-orderly system confirm
Lynette Finch’s description of the goal that drives middle-class reformist prac-
tices directed at the poor: “Everyone was mapped and ordered, the organisation
of individuals was made to equate with the organisation of space.” See Finch,
The Classing Gaze: Sexuality, Class and Surveillance (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen
and Unwin, 1993), 146.
23. See Mayhew, Unknown Mayhew, 72.
24. In the case of emigration (as in many others), Mayhew’s writings had an influence
on contemporary debates that exceeds what he actually says on the subject:
Mayhew’s early investigation of prostitution among seamstresses in the Morning
Chronicle spurred Lord Ashley (later Lord Shaftesbury), Sidney Herbert, and
like-minded philanthropists to propose a scheme to aid such women in emigration
to Australia. For more on this issue, see Thompson, “The Political Education of
Henry Mayhew,” 48–51; and Humpherys, Travels into the Poor Man’s Country,
55–56.
25. Mark Seltzer rightly observes that attempts to organize the poor (such as the
street-orderly system) have as their “nominal function . . . to train, to educate,
to correct, to reform; but clearly, their effect is to impose a general disciplinary
and supervisory authority over areas of urban life that have heretofore evaded
scrutiny and control.” However, as Christopher Herbert suggests, Seltzer is inac-
curate in describing Mayhew’s work, which so self-consciously details the limi-
tations placed on the middle-class observer of the metropolis, as representing
what Seltzer calls “a dream of absolute surveillance and supervision.” Yet, Herbert
seems to miss the point of his own reasonable comment that, according to
Mayhew, “the Victorian authorities oppress the poor most cruelly . . . by a
systematic insufficiency of ‘surveillance’”—a complaint that, in London Labour
as elsewhere, is a call for greater regulatory supervision of the poor. Certainly
Herbert’s claim that “refusing to see . . . becomes the Victorian ‘mode of power
par excellence’” is hard to credit: one need not accept Foucault’s work whole-
heartedly in order to perceive that the forms of social organization introduced in
172 Notes
Victorian society (and still very much with us) have not typically endorsed will-
ful blindness as the best means of organizing large populations. See Seltzer,
Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 38,
34; and Herbert, Culture and Anomie, 327. Regenia Gagnier is correct to ques-
tion whether “Mayhew’s interviews . . . appear in the role of a Foucauldian
power-knowledge,” which phrase I take to mean “a means of surveillance” of
panoptic effectiveness; yet, if the “Enlightenment practices of classification . . .
did not culminate in Mayhew’s case in a predictable power-knowledge,” it hardly
follows that in London Labour they culminate (as Gagnier claims) “in the final
obliteration of class boundaries.” See Gagnier, Subjectivities, 64, 84.
26. Mayhew, Unknown Mayhew, 98. Indeed, rather than represent himself as an invis-
ible observer of the poor, Mayhew frequently locates himself in individual scenes
by including the often comical comments that working-class interviewees address
to him. A street-seller of cutlery swears to Mayhew, “that’s as true as you have
got the pen in your very hand” (LL 1:340), and, after explaining a bit of patterer
slang to Mayhew, another informant tells him, “make a footnote of that, sir” (LL
1:224). The same interviewee comments on the similarity of crying the news in
the streets and writing for newspapers: “This must be left out, and that put in;
’cause it suits the walk of the paper. Why, you must know, sir. . . . Don’t tell
me. You can’t have been on the Morning Chronicle for nothing” (LL 1:225).
27. The percentage of regularly employed working-class men and women who were
domestic servants has long been a subject of debate. It is sufficient for my purposes
that Mayhew believed them to be the largest number of workers in London:
Arranging the occupations of the people in the metropolis in the order of
the number of individuals belonging to them, we shall find that . . . First
come the Domestic Servants of London, numbering as many as 168,000
individuals, and constituting about one-twelfth of the whole population
of the metropolis.
See Mayhew, Unknown Mayhew, 181.
CHAPTER 2
1. For a summary of the Courvoisier case, see The Complete Newgate Calendar
(London: Navarre Society, 1926), 5:296–304. On Courvoisier’s confession, and
his implication of Ainsworth’s novel in the murder, see Keith Hollingsworth,
The Newgate Novel 1830–1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens, and Thackeray
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), 145–48. The debate about the
relation between fictional and real violence was vigorously renewed in 1869
when Jean-Baptiste Troppmann, arrested for murdering a French family of seven,
attributed his crime to a fascination with Eugène Sue’s Le Juif errant (1844–
1845). On the Troppmann case, see Michael Anglo, Penny Dreadfuls and Other
Victorian Horrors (London: Jupiter Books, 1977), 28.
2. As Joseph Grixti notes, more recent opponents of popular representations of
violence consistently ignore the fact that this is a century-old debate and instead
imagine that they are identifying a new social problem—a misrecognition that is
Notes 173
a particularly effective means of conserving rather than questioning dominant

notions regarding (for instance) popular culture, youth, and class. See Grixti,
Terrors of Uncertainty: The Cultural Contexts of Horror Fiction (London:
Routledge, 1989), 108–110.
3. The reviewer’s chief complaint is that the novel offends middle-class taste:
“Crime—bare, rascally, unmitigated, ferocious crime—becomes the idea con-
stantly thrust before us.” The reviewer does, however, worry about the many
(unauthorized) plays, loosely based on Ainsworth’s novel, being performed in
cheap theaters. According to the review, these plays are more problematic than
the novel due to the class of their audience, which consists of “all the candidates
for hulks or rope—and especially the youthful ones—that infest this vast city.”
See Review of Jack Sheppard, Examiner [London] 3 Nov. 1839: 691–93. Simi-
larly, in a December 1839 letter to his mother, William Makepeace Thackeray
observes that “one or two young gentlemen have already confessed how much
they were indebted to Jack Sheppard who gave them ideas of pocket-picking and
thieving wh[ich] they never would have had but for the play.” See Thackeray,
The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon N.
Ray (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945–1946), 1:395. In brief, the
plays attract the same criticism as the penny bloods I discuss in this chapter (that
they foster crime) because they are addressed to the same (working-class) audi-
ence, the members of which are presumed either to tend towards criminality
(“candidates for hulks or rope”) or to have no moral resistance to tempting de-
pictions of a life of crime (as in the case of Thackeray’s playgoers). Thackeray’s
use of the term “gentlemen” is, of course, ironic.
4. “Mr. Phillips’s Defence of Courvoisier,” Examiner [London] 28 June 1840: 402.
5. “Mr. Phillips’s Defence,” 402.
6. As Richard D. Altick puts it, “if hunger was great in Belgravia for such recitals
of criminal adventure . . . it was infinitely greater in Bethnal Green. What
Ainsworth brought to the drawing-room audience, the hacks of Salisbury Square
manufactured for the tenements.” See Altick, The English Common Reader: A
Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1957), 290.
7. Since the publication of R. K. Webb’s The British Working Class Reader, schol-
ars have generally rejected previously prevailing notions regarding widespread
working-class illiteracy and accepted the fact revealed by the commercial suc-
cess of Lloyd’s penny bloods—that some degree of functional literacy was fairly
normative among most of even impoverished mid-Victorians. See Webb, The
British Working Class Reader 1790–1848: Literacy and Social Tension (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1955), esp. 13–35. On technological innovations in
the printing industry, working-class literacy, and the penny blood, see Altick,
The English Common Reader, 260–93, 318–347; Louis James, Fiction for the
Working Man 1830–50: A Study of the Literature Produced for the Working
Classes in Early Victorian Urban England (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin
Books, 1974), 1–50; and David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England
1750–1914, Cambridge Series in Oral and Literate Culture 19 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1989), 196–227.
174 Notes
8. Greenacre murdered Hannah Brown, a middle-class woman he had sought to

seduce and defraud, and hid parts of her body in construction sites throughout
London. For the grisly details of the Greenacre case, see The Complete Newgate
Calendar, 5:286–90.
9. In the best book-length study of cheap juvenile literature, Kirsten Drotner does
briefly observe (but does not pursue the implications of the fact) that “penny
bloods were especially popular among urban adolescents.” See Drotner, English
Children and Their Magazines, 1751–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988), 71.
10. Thomas Frost, Forty Years’ Recollections: Literary and Political (London:
Sampson Low, Marton, Searle, and Rivington, 1880), 90.
1968), 3:378. Subsequent references to volumes and page numbers of London
Labour, abbreviated LL, will appear parenthetically in my text. Similarly, in an
early contribution to his Morning Chronicle series on “Labour and the Poor,”
Mayhew quotes a superintendent of police regarding the deleterious effect of
even the minimal literacy education offered by the ragged schools:
Mere reading and writing is a harm to a vicious child. It makes him steal
more boldly, because with more judgment, for he sees prices marked.
Without moral training it’s a harm. The smartest thieves I have met with,
and those having the longest run, could all read and write, and some could
defend themselves at trial without a lawyer, just by having studied the
newspaper.
See Mayhew, Voices of the Poor: Selections from the “Morning Chronicle”
“Labour and the Poor” (1849–1850), ed. Anne Humpherys, Cass Library of
Victorian Times 10 (London: Frank Cass, 1971), 13. Although the phrase “to a
vicious child” might seem to limit the superintendent’s criticism of working-
class literacy, it should be remembered that Mayhew’s reportage often depicts
practically the entirety of working-class culture as tending to produce vice in
children.
12. Mayhew and Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life
(London: Frank Cass; New York: A. M. Kelley, 1968), 45.
13. Mayhew and Binny, Criminal Prisons, 45. This point should be borne in mind in
reference to the penny bloods as well: the communal consumption of working-
class popular culture—to which both Mayhew’s interviewees and the Punch car-
toon, in their very different ways, testify—suggests that many young people
who were actually illiterate or who could not afford the penny price were never-
theless able to enjoy such texts.
14. Christopher Herbert has argued that Mayhew’s texts represent the London poor
as similarly reworking dominant culture in order to fashion a “dissident
(sub)culture”:
Mayhew shows that the way of life developed for themselves by the Lon-
don “nomads” is the bourgeois way turned with programmatic violence
inside out, with license exalted in place of discipline, rascality in place of
Notes 175
rectitude, gaudiness in place of sobriety, mobility in place of fixity, car-

nality in place of spirituality.
See Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth
Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 243.
15. Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1988), 132.
16. Similarly, David Vincent remarks that the penny bloods provided, for their
working-class readers, “a form of expression which would reflect their own lives
in their own circumstances, yet provide a dramatic working out of the moral
dilemmas with which they were constantly faced.” See Vincent, Literacy and
Popular Culture, 205–206. As I will argue with regard to Varney, the Vampyre,
central among those “moral dilemmas” is the issue of what role violence should
play in working-class agitation.
17. On Reynolds’s penny melodramas and their articulation of working-class radical-
ism, see Louis James, “The View from Brick Lane: Contrasting Perspectives in
Working-Class and Middle-Class Fiction of the Early Victorian Period,” The
Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981): 87–101.
18. Knight, “Address to the Reader,” Knight’s Penny Magazine 16 (1846): 231–34.
19. For a discussion of the riots of the 1830s, see John Stevenson, Popular Distur-
bances in England, 1700–1870 (London: Longman, 1979), 218–74. The scholarly
literature on Chartism is of course immense. Among the best-known studies are
J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Age of the Chartists 1832–1854: A
Study of Discontent (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967); the essays in Asa
Briggs, ed., Chartist Studies (London: Macmillan, 1959); J. T. Ward, Chartism
(London: B. T. Batsford, 1973); David Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975); David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–1848
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Dorothy Thompson, The Char-
tists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (New York: Random House,
Pantheon Books, 1984); and John Saville, 1848: The British State and the Char-
tist Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
20. Ward, Chartism, 111–142, offers a useful description of the division between
the moral and physical force contingents of the movement, which division is a
central consideration in any sound interpretation of violence in Chartist discourse
and, I will suggest, in the penny blood.
21. Mayhew, The Unknown Mayhew, ed. Eileen Yeo and E. P. Thompson (New York:
Schocken Books, 1971), 111.
22. E. P. Thompson notes that public concerns about Chartism in part initiated
Mayhew’s investigations of “Labour and the Poor” for the Morning Chronicle.
However, the tone of these quotations does not suggest, as Thompson claims,
that “the series commenced as an effort at social reconciliation, in the aftermath
of Chartism.” Rather, although Thompson is correct that by 1849 the Chartist
movement “was in virtual collapse,” Mayhew’s various comments, spread over
three volumes of London Labour (much of the material for which was composed
or revised as late as 1860), suggest considerable middle-class anxiety regarding
a resurgence of the movement. See Thompson, “The Political Education of Henry
Mayhew,” Victorian Studies 11 (1967): 45.
176 Notes
23. On the association of Chartism, working-class literacy, and monstrosity in Vic-

torian writings (including Carlyle’s), see Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson:
The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1998), esp. 65–66, 93–94. The particular image of
monstrosity on which Brantlinger focuses is the one deriving from Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), rather than the one deriving
from (among other texts) John Polidori’s The Vampyre: A Tale (1819); all this
means is that middle-class writers used every available popular-culture source to
create metaphors with which to condemn working-class literacy when it leads to
radicalism.
24. Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896–1901), 53.
25. Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets, 55.
26. Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896–1901), 2:108.
27. Carlyle, Past and Present, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1896–1901), 211.
28. Lombroso’s description appears in his introduction to Gina Lombroso-Ferrero,
Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso, Patterson
Smith Reprint Series in Criminology, Law Enforcement, and Social Problems
134 (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972), xxv. Although first published in
1876 and not translated into English until Lombroso-Ferrero’s 1911 sampling of
her father’s work, L’Uomo delinquente draws on and gives scientific prestige to
stereotypes about the working classes that abound in earlier British and European
writings.
29. Mill, “Liberty of the Press,” in Essays on Government, Jurisprudence, Liberty of
the Press, and Law of Nations (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967), 18.
30. Quoted in James, Fiction for the Working Man, 86. James has noted that penny
bloods such as Egan’s could thus openly endorse political reform because their
flamboyant fictionality allowed them to evade the fourpence tax on all newspa-
pers—the “Tax on Knowledge” whereby the Seditious Publications Act of 1819
attempted to control the spread of radical ideas. Yet, James’s assertion that in
“reading of violence, larceny, and murder we are vicariously exploring the dark
corners of our own personality” is only a more sympathetic version of middle-
class objections to the penny blood and does not adequately explain the political
implications of this fictional form. See James, Fiction for the Working Man, 15,
40–41, 182.
31. Nancy Armstrong briefly gestures at the intersection of the penny blood and
working-class radicalism when she notes the striking minority of realistic novels
published in England during the 1830s and early 1840s. The mainstream of Vic-
torian realism has its source in the late 1840s, with the appearance of the first
major novels of the Brontës, Gaskell, Thackeray, and Trollope; Dickens’s works
of the late 1830s and early 1840s—especially Oliver Twist (1837–1838)—looked
like Newgate novels to many critics, who scrutinized his productions with suspi-
cion and only grudgingly gave them a clean bill of health. According to Armstrong,
realistic fiction of the later 1840s refigures class conflict as domestic conflict
Notes 177
and thus fantasizes a middle-class regulation of the preceding decade’s agita-

tion. See Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the
Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 161–86. Regarding Dickens
and the Newgate novel, see Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel, 111–131, 177–
182; Beth Kalikoff, Murder and Moral Decay in Victorian Popular Literature
(Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986), 35–54; and Brantlinger, Reading Les-
son, 69–92.
Armstrong’s generally illuminating analysis of the novelistic tradition as a
discursive power struggle is limited by her focus on realistic fiction: she eschews
actual discussion of the penny bloods of the late 1830s and early 1840s and
obscures how, as Martha Vicinus notes, their “melodramatic situations . . . pro-
vided readers with a means of interpreting and managing violence.” See Vicinus,
The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working-Class Lit-
erature (London: Croom Helm, 1974), 16.
32. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into
a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 169.
33. Bersani and Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern
Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 56.
34. Bersani and Dutoit, The Forms of Violence, 56.
35. Carol J. Clover convincingly makes a similar argument about the relations be-
tween film theory and “low” horror cinema—in particular slasher and rape-re-
venge films that reveal a masochistic identification of male spectator with
endangered heroine that is “less exploited, and/or less admitted, in higher forms.”
According to Clover, film theory (including feminist film theory and its empha-
sis on the sadistic power of the male gaze) is “itself deduced from higher forms”
and has, “rather than exposing the cultural lie on which higher forms of cinema
are based . . . wittingly or unwittingly colluded with it.” See Clover, Men,
Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992), 230.
36. Quoted in James, Fiction for the Working Man, 34.
37. Bersani and Dutoit, The Forms of Violence, 20.
38. Varney, the Vampyre; or, The Feast of Blood. A Romance of Exciting Interest
(New York: Dover Publications, 1972), 4. Subsequent page references to Varney,
the Vampyre, abbreviated VV, will appear parenthetically in my text.
39. Readers of D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police will recognize how my dis-
cussion of well-regulated agitation responds in part to his analysis of the sensa-
tion novel of the 1860s. According to Miller, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in
White (1860) depicts physical sensation as a dangerous feminization that the
hero (and reader) must master. See Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988), 146–91. Instead of such a mastery that
would erase agitation, Varney endorses a moderated, properly “masculine,” and
English form of agitation. These two novels thus promote definitions of the
modern subject that correspond to the class identities and desires of different
audiences. The fantasy of eradicating agitation is particularly resonant for a
middle-class audience and is as prominent in Collins’s work (serialized in a
178 Notes
fashionable journal and republished in an expensive three-volume edition) as it

is negligible in Varney.
40. Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York:
Random House, Vintage Books, 1985), 84–85, 61.
41. It is normative for the relatively few scholars who discuss the penny blood to
assert, following Jürgen Habermas, a parallel between the aesthetic quality of
the penny blood and a “low-class” audience prone to manipulation and conserva-
tism–a presupposition that, as we will see in later chapters of Youth of Darkest
England, is common in analyses of juvenile literature. For example, Patricia
Anderson argues that, by choosing to become consumers of mass culture, “work-
ing people had by mid-century . . . indicated their consent to the conventional
social values represented in many mass-circulation books and magazines.” Pre-
dictably, Anderson can only muster an arch and dismissive irony when mention-
ing the penny blood:
naturally, they attracted a substantial following of people in search of plea-
surable terror, revulsion, titillation, and general escapism. After all, who
but the most dedicatedly serious-minded reader could fail to respond to
the lure of titles such as . . . Varney the Vampire [sic], also published
[sic] as The Feast of Blood?
Anderson’s claim that such a work fails to demonstrate “a modicum of restraint
in style and content” disenables an analysis of how, in Varney, the intersection of
narrative style and content promote restraint from violence as a political ideal
that rhymes with the apparently more sophisticated contemporary discourses
seeking to mobilize the working classes for radical agitation. See Anderson, The
Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790–1860 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991), 158, 162.
Instead, my analysis of the penny blood is aligned with Patrick Joyce’s spir-
ited opposition to critical treatments of popular art that assert “a false polarity of
protest and consolation,” subversion and social control. Joyce maintains that
popular culture “served to handle the very real contradictions and ambiguities of
class, resolving them, failing to resolve them, or simply presenting them to view.”
He further argues that such texts offer both “a means of handling the present
reality of their readers” and “imaginative projections” of “the way the world
should be.” See Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Ques-
tion of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 266,
123–24. I also find valuable Michael Denning’s argument that American dime
novels—which, like the penny bloods, were the focus of a moral panic about the
ability of cheap literature to encourage crime and violence among young people—
should “be understood neither as forms of deception, manipulation, and social
control nor as expressions of a genuine people’s culture, opposing and resisting
the dominant culture” but as “a contested terrain, a field of cultural conflict where
signs with wide appeal and resonance take on contradictory disguises and are
spoken in contrary accents.” Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Work-
ing-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1987), 3.
Notes 179
42. Although granting the vote to costermongers clearly seemed unimaginably radical
to the members of parliament who twice refused to consider Chartist petitions
carrying millions of signatures, the Chartist demand for universal male suffrage
(as has often been pointed out) accorded with dominant Victorian notions of
gender, as represented in part by the middle-class parliamentarians who passed
the three nineteenth-century Reform Acts successively extending male suffrage,
but who did not grant the vote to all adult women until 1928.
43. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House,
Vintage Books, 1963), 732.
44. As Gareth Stedman Jones argues in his analysis of Chartist discourse,
the dominant language of radicals had been a form of constitutionalist
rhetoric, which . . . elaborated a mythical history of saxon or medieval
England to reclaim rights which historically belonged to the English people.
See Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class His-
tory 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 125. A con-
gruent point is made by Hugh Cunningham, “The Language of Patriotism,
1750–1914,” History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist Historians 12 (1981):
17–18.
45. Joyce, Visions of the People, 217.
46. [Hitchman], “Penny Fiction,” Quarterly Review 171 (1890): 160. The subject of
the essay is the late-Victorian penny dreadful and not the mid-Victorian penny
blood; however, the mode of production (including lowly paid hack work) being
nearly identical in the two forms, it is reasonable to presume that a similar class
of authors were attracted to, or forced by poverty into, the penny blood industry.
47. As Helen Bosanquet notes in an essay on the penny dreadful: “I fear that, like all
who work for quantity rather than for quality, they are among those whose toil
brings them neither fame nor the more solid goods of life.” See Bosanquet, “Cheap
Literature,” Contemporary Review 79 (1901): 672.
48. David Vincent offers a similar analysis of the penny blood Evelina, the Pauper’s
Child; or, Poverty, Crime, and Sorrow, a Romance of Deep Pathos (1851), which
like Varney has often been attributed to Thomas Prest. Vincent argues convinc-
ingly that Evelina “is pervaded by a sense of its own limitations” and represents
“a deliberate admission of the inadequacy of written language in the process of
communication.” However, rather than, like Vincent, condemn a refusal of
vraisemblance as mere “writing by numbers for those for whom the printed word
was still an artificial mode of communication,” and applaud with relief the fact
that “the classics of fiction and poetry were becoming more available,” I would
suggest that such a refutation of aesthetic and realistic norms is a self-reflexive
representation of the artificiality of print communication that is much to be desired.
See Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, 218–219, 221. Regarding the dis-
placement of the penny blood by cheap editions of “the classics,” I find more
rewarding Paul Thomas Murphy’s discussion of how, responding to the rise in
working-class literacy, “working-class critics worked hard to destroy the idea of
a universal or class-transcendent canon and to promote an alternate canon that
180 Notes
overlapped the established one but served a completely different audience with
its own unique values.” See Murphy, Toward a Working-Class Canon: Literary
Criticism in British Working-Class Periodicals, 1816–1858 (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 1994), 19.
49. Edward Jacobs argues that “both the early bloods of Lloyd and Reynolds and the
street culture surrounding London gaffs conventionally equated literacy with
industrial work-disciplines, and subjected this ‘industrial literacy’ to traditional
forms of ‘festive misrule.’” Jacobs presents a compelling reading of Varney as
such a form of unruly alternative literacy that did not so much imitate “street
culture’s tropes in order to increase . . . circulation” as, rather, it “mocked in-
dustrial literacy because London’s paper-working and gaff economy had already
established this mockery” as a discursive trope that “London’s poorest yet most
numerous and hardest-to-please readers . . . demanded, and with which writ-
ers who wished to penetrate the popular market typified by crime broadsides
effectively had to interact.” See Jacobs, “Bloods in the Street: London Street
Culture, ‘Industrial Literacy,’ and the Emergence of Mass Culture in Victorian
England,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 18 (1995):
323, 338.
CHAPTER 3
1. There is considerable slippage between the terms “penny blood” and “penny
dreadful” among both Victorian commentators and recent scholars. I follow John
Springhall in applying the former term to the mid-century works produced by
Edward Lloyd and his rivals and the latter term—a coinage of the 1870s—to the
later-century publications of Edwin J. Brett and his competitors. However, I dis-
agree with Springhall’s assertion that the “earlier serials . . . associated with
Lloyd” were exclusively “for adults,” whereas “their later counterparts,” the penny
dreadfuls, were “addressed chiefly to a more youthful clientele.” Nineteenth-
century accounts offer evidence for the latter claim and, as the previous chapter
indicated, evidence against the former one. See Springhall, “‘A Life Story for
the People’?: Edwin J. Brett and the London ‘Low-Life’ Penny Dreadfuls of the
1860s,” Victorian Studies 33 (1990): 227. It is more accurate to claim, as Helen
R. Smith does, that by “the end of the 1860s penny part fiction was aimed more
obviously at boys, and sometimes girls” (my emphasis), whereas the penny bloods
of the 1840s were aimed largely at children but did not indicate (for instance,
through a title such as Boys of England) that they were not reading for adults.
See Elizabeth James and Helen R. Smith, Penny Dreadfuls and Boys’ Adven-
tures: The Barry Ono Collection of Victorian Popular Literature in the British
Library (London: British Library, 1998), xii.
2. Springhall, “‘A Life Story,’” 231. The genealogical relations between the penny
bloods of Lloyd, the penny dreadfuls of Brett, and the improving penny maga-
zines is a complex branch of Victorian publishing history that has received a fair
amount of scholarly attention. In addition to Springhall’s “‘A Life Story,’” see
Louis James, “Tom Brown’s Imperialist Sons,” Victorian Studies 17 (1973): 89–
Notes 181
99; Patrick A. Dunae, “Penny Dreadfuls: Late Nineteenth-Century Boys’ Litera-

ture and Crime,” Victorian Studies 22 (1979): 133–50; Dunae, “Boys’ Literature
and the Idea of Empire, 1870–1914,” Victorian Studies 24 (1980): 105–121;
Dunae, “New Grub Street for Boys,” in Imperialism and Juvenile Literature, ed.
Jeffrey Richards (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1989), 12–33; Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a
Man’s World (London: HarperCollins, 1991), 4–92; Kelly Boyd, “Exemplars
and Ingrates: Imperialism and the Boys’ Story Paper, 1880–1930,” Historical
Research 67 (1994): 143–55; and Springhall, “‘Pernicious Reading’?: ‘The Penny
Dreadful’ as Scapegoat for Late-Victorian Juvenile Crime,” Victorian Periodicals
Review 27 (1994): 326–49.
3. Quoted in F. J. Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of
Social Life, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 269.
4. [Johns], “The Literature of the Streets,” Edinburgh Review 165 (1887): 62.
5. Salmon, “What the Working Classes Read,” Nineteenth Century 20 (1886): 115.
6. For histories of the passing of the Second Reform Act, see F. B. Smith, The
Making of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1966); Maurice Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution: The Pass-
ing of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967);
and Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian
Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. 71–118. On the passing of the Third
Reform Act, see Andrew Jones, The Politics of Reform 1884 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1972).
7. The scholarship on the penny dreadful tends to emphasize such objections to its
criminalizing tendencies rather than middle-class critics’ concerns regarding the
education of the newly enfranchised working classes. For instance, see Dunae,
“Penny Dreadfuls,” 133–50; Springhall, “‘A Life Story,’” 223–46; and Springhall,
“‘Pernicious Reading,’” 326–49.
8. [Hitchman], “Penny Fiction,” Quarterly Review 171 (1890): 152.
9. Wright, “On a Possible Popular Culture,” Contemporary Review 40 (1881): 35.
10. [Hitchman], “Penny Fiction,” 150. As Patrick Brantlinger notes, Lowe’s actual
statement in his 15 July 1867 parliamentary speech (“I believe it will be abso-
lutely necessary that you should prevail on our future masters to learn their let-
ters”) has been “frequently, and dramatically, misquoted.” See Brantlinger, The
Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British
Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 230. Lowe’s statement
is typical in that it infantilizes the working classes (“learn their letters”); the
misquotes stress this infantilization even more than does Lowe by suggesting
that it is the middle classes (“We”) who must undertake the education of working-
class “masters.”
11. On the 1870 Elementary Education Act, see Eric E. Rich, The Education Act
1870: A Study of Public Opinion (London: Longmans, Green, 1970); and Patrick
Jackson, Education Act Forster: A Political Biography of W. E. Forster (1818-
1886) (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated
University Presses, 1997), esp. 136–206.
182 Notes
12. Salmon, “What the Working Classes Read,” 117. As Patrick Brantlinger
insightfully argues, in the mid-Victorian “industrial novels” the working classes
are depicted as possessing “considerable literacy and knowledge, only it is the
wrong sort of knowledge. Just how the workers have gained their miseducations
and how to provide them with correct knowledge are major preoccupations of
middle-class discourse between the two Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867.” See
Brantlinger, Reading Lesson, 95.
13. Salmon, Juvenile Literature as It Is (London: Henry J. Drane, 1888), 185.
14. Wright, “On a Possible Popular Culture,” 25, 36.
15. Wright, “On a Possible Popular Culture,” 36.
16. Wright, “On a Possible Popular Culture,” 35, 37–38.
17. Salmon, “What the Working Classes Read,” 115.
18. [Hitchman], “Penny Fiction,” 170. Patrick Brantlinger’s analysis of George Eliot’s
Felix Holt—which was published in 1866, during the debates leading up to the
passage of the Second Reform Act—confirms how thoroughly the concerns shared
by Wright, Salmon, and Hitchman were dispersed in middle-class culture: “As
far as Felix is concerned . . . there is no sense and a lot of danger in extending the
franchise to voters who are the opposite of wise—who are ‘ignorant’ and there-
fore either ‘wicked’ or susceptible to the ‘wickedness’ of others.” See Brantlinger,
Reading Lesson, 108.
19. Wright, “On a Possible Popular Culture,” 43–44.
20. Salmon, “What the Working Classes Read,” 115.
21. Wright, “On a Possible Popular Culture,” 35–36.
23. [Johns], “The Literature of the Streets,” 61.
24. Bosanquet, “Cheap Literature,” Contemporary Review 79 (1901): 679.
25. [Johns], “The Literature of the Streets,” 62.
26. On the founding of the Boy’s Own Paper, see Patrick A. Dunae, “Boy’s Own
Paper: Origins and Editorial Policies,” Private Library, n.s. 9 (1976): 123–58.
The Religious Tract Society published a parallel magazine for girls, the Girl’s
Own Paper, which ran from 1880 to 1965. The best studies of the Girl’s Own
Paper are those of Kirsten Drotner, English Children and Their Magazines, 1751–
1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 115–180; and Kimberley
Reynolds, Girls Only?: Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Britain, 1880–
1910 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 138–50. Given that the desire
to replace the penny dreadful with improving penny magazines is motivated
largely by changes in electoral politics, which in the late-Victorian period affected
only males, Victorian critics tend to emphasize working-class boys’ recreational
reading. However, girls’ reading habits were by no means immune to such middle-
class scrutiny. Thus Edward G. Salmon attacks the “penny novelette,” the feminine
equivalent of the penny dreadful:
the high-flown conceits and pretensions of the poorer girls of the period,
their dislike of manual work and love of freedom, spring largely from
notions imbibed in the course of a perusal of their penny fictions. . . . the
bad influence of these works on themselves is handed down to their chil-
dren and scattered broadcast throughout the family.
Notes 183
Salmon in turn laments that the “high-class girls’ magazine,” such as The Girl’s
Own Paper, “falls in very limited numbers into the hands of the poor,” although
if such improving literature “could be brought to bear on the women and girls of
the democracy, it might have an effect for good such as none can foresee.” See
Salmon, Juvenile Literature as It Is, 198, 194, 197. Moreover, as Kathryn Castle
convincingly argues, improving magazines for girls, like those for boys, seek to
disperse imperialist ideals among the female population: although “most studies
have considered the imperial message a province of male socialisation, it is clear
that within the constraints of the role deemed appropriate for imperial girls, there
was ample scope for service to Empire” and that “girls picked up their brothers’
magazines and enjoyed them.” See Castle, Britannia’s Children: Reading Colo-
nialism Through Children’s Books and Magazines (Manchester: Manchester
University Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 8.
27. As David Reed puts it, such magazines “helped turn the youthful desire for ad-
venture away from heroes who operated outside the law or on its margins, as in
the ‘bloods,’ and channelled it towards the outposts of empire.” See Reed, The
Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States 1880–1960 (Toronto: Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 1997), 85. Reed’s use of the verb “helped” (instead of,
say, “sought”) assumes too much—namely, that the improving magazines ac-
complished the imperialist reformation of working-class young people that they
identified as their mission. Similarly, although Joseph Bristow aptly summarizes
the “aesthetics of a new kind of militaristic masculinity” in the improving maga-
zines—“Violence had to be taken away from the recently named hooligan and
restyled for the respectable boy”—he makes the same dubious assumption as
Reed when he claims that, because of the “imperial spirit” of such magazines,
“boys of all classes gravitated towards serials published in the B.O.P. [Boy’s
Own Paper].” See Bristow, Empire Boys, 47. Unfortunately, this statement ech-
oes the presuppositions of the magazine editors themselves, by implying that
“imperial spirit” is innate in boys of all classes, not that the Boy’s Own Paper
had to work overtime in the attempt to manufacture it.
28. McCleary, “Stevenson in Young Folks,” Fortnightly Review, n.s. 165 (1949): 126.
29. Springhall, “‘A Life Story,’” 224.
30. Kathryn Castle notes that a central goal of the improving juvenile magazines
was the institution of what I call hegemonic imperialism. As Castle argues, rep-
resentations of colonial adventure “in the juvenile press lent their service to press-
ing needs of Empire and nation” by “mediating the tensions of class division
among whites with a ‘consensus’ fashioned from the imagery of racial domi-
nance”: “If all classes and interests could be seen rallying behind the imperial
ethos, internal discontents could be submerged and Britain’s social order left
unchallenged.” However, like many scholars, Castle treats this desire on the part
of publishers, editors, and writers as an effect of the magazines on their working-
class readers, and she does not offer evidence for her assertion that the “papers
crossed class . . . boundaries, that working-class youth read the ‘improving’
annuals when possible.” See Castle, Britannia’s Children, 115, 8.
31. Springhall, “‘Pernicious Reading,’” 340.
184 Notes
33. Quoted in Dunae, “Penny Dreadfuls,” 139.

34. Loxley, Problematic Shores: The Literature of Islands (Houndmills, Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1990), 27. Loxley’s observation is more sound than Louis James’s
and Kirsten Drotner’s evaluations of editorial statements recommending the
Samuel Smiles brand of self-help in Brett’s Boys of England. Based on this edi-
torial material, James concludes that the magazine’s readership consisted prima-
rily of upwardly mobile lower-middle-class boys, whereas Drotner uses the same
material to offer the opposite claim: “it seems evident, not only from the editorial
address but also from the correspondence pages, that the paper reached many
older working-class boys.” See James, “Tom Brown’s Imperialist Sons,” 90; and
Drotner, English Children and Their Magazines, 75. Certainly, middle-class Vic-
torian writers spent a good deal of ink recommending self-help to adolescents
and adults of all classes. By contrast, the presumption, in the Boy’s Own Paper,
that the reader’s parents employ domestic servants is a less ambiguous index of
the class of boys expected to buy the magazine. For similar evidence that the
imperialist views common in the Boy’s Own Paper were addressed to middle-
class children, see Patrick A. Dunae, “Boys’ Literature and the Idea of Race:
1870-1900,” Wascana Review 12 (1977): 84–107.
35. Quoted in Dunae, “Penny Dreadfuls,” 146.
36. Like its brother publication, The Religious Tract Society’s Girl’s Own Paper
had an impressively long run, ending circulation in 1965 after eighty-five suc-
cessful years.
37. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, ed. Wendy R. Katz (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 58. Subsequent page references to Treasure
Island, abbreviated TI, will appear parenthetically in my text.
38. Bristow, Empire Boys, 113–14.
39. Loxley, Problematic Shores, 161.
40. Loxley, Problematic Shores, 160.
41. Silver’s speech also contradicts Naomi J. Wood’s claim that, for the pirates in
Treasure Island, “the money is a means to an end, a way to fuel and temporarily
satisfy their desires.” See Wood, “Gold Standards and Silver Subversions: Treasure
Island and the Romance of Money,” Children’s Literature 26 (1998): 67. The
novel does depict certain of Silver’s comrades according to this notion that pirates
(like Mayhew’s street-people) are devoid of “foresight”; yet this depiction is in
tension with what the novel presents as the real threat to capitalist and imperialist
enterprises, Silver’s outline for a piratical subversion of class hierarchies.
42. Marcus Rediker’s history of merchant seamen and pirates reveals how thoroughly
eighteenth-century maritime culture was imbued with class conflict, and with
the notions regarding how to resist and subvert it that Silver outlines. As Rediker
argues, the experience of seamen aboard the eighteenth-century merchant vessel
prefigures that of hands in the nineteenth-century factory in that both groups
were wage-laborers who “did not own the instruments of their production” and
who “were confined within an enclosed setting to perform, with sophisticated
machinery and under intense supervision, a unified and collective set of tasks.”
Mutiny, and especially piracy, in turn “represented a social world constructed
apart from the ways of the merchant and the captain” in which sailors “expropri-
Notes 185
ated the workplace and arranged it anew” according to “the collectivist tendencies
produced by life and labor at sea”—in particular, the democratic election of
pirate captains and egalitarian distribution of plunder. Thus, Rediker convincingly
argues, the “social constellation of piracy . . . provides valuable clarification of
more general social and cultural patterns among seamen in particular and the
laboring poor in general.” See Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue
Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–
1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 83, 106–107, 286.
43. Wood also remarks on this comment of Jim’s, perceptively observing that, at
such points, the narrative “brings us out of preindustrial, eighteenth-century ro-
mance and into the thick of the late-nineteenth-century realistic novel”—and, I
would add, into the thick of the class conflict that dominates that later period, if
not necessarily its realist fictions. In general, I find rewarding Wood’s examina-
tion of the relation between Treasure Island and contemporary debates regarding
the institution of the gold standard. Noting that “the silver standard was associated
with populist politics, whereas the gold standard was advocated by conservative
establishment types,” Wood argues that Stevenson capitalizes on these associa-
tions in order to represent the working-class pirates, especially the unsubtly named
Long John Silver, in terms of “the debasing silver-standard values of expediency
and contingence.” Thus, according to Wood, while Stevenson teases “his readers
with the possibility of escape from capitalist modes, Treasure Island closes it
off.” See Wood, “Gold Standards and Silver Subversions,” 76, 62, 69, 80.
44. However, given the threat posed by Silver’s intended subversion of the class
hierarchy that is the norm on the Hispaniola and in Victorian (as well as
eighteenth-century) England more generally, it is difficult to accept Sandison’s
(nevertheless witty) claim that for “a middle-aged pirate to put out a prospectus
offering superannuated security in good society as an inducement to sail under
his skull-and-cross-bones flag adds a Gilbertian touch which everyone (including
Silver) enjoys and no one believes.” See Sandison, Robert Louis Stevenson and
the Appearance of Modernism: A Future Feeling (Houndmills, Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1996), 76–77. At the very least, the middle-class adventurers believe
that this prospectus warrants wiping out or marooning most of the pirates.
45. See Paul Maixner, ed., Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 125–26.
46. The pirates’ childishness has also been discussed by David H. Jackson, “Trea-
sure Island as a Late Victorian Adults’ Novel,” Victorian Newsletter 72 (1987):
29.
47. Bersani and Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern
Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 52, 47.
48. See Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, Criminal Man, According to the Classification of
Cesare Lombroso, Patterson Smith Reprint Series in Criminology, Law Enforce-
ment, and Social Problems 134 (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972), xxv.
49. I have not dealt with the differences between the text serialized in Young Folks
and the revised version of the novel published by Cassell in November 1883. I
have based my analysis on quotations from the latter (the source-text of all modern
editions) because the 1883 novel is much more readily available to my readers
186 Notes
and, more importantly, because the differences between the two versions primarily
involve stylistic changes and shifts in characterization that do not impinge upon
my argument. The exception is a crucial change in the description of Silver’s use
of his crutch to kill Tom, which in Young Folks reads: “John whipped the crutch
out of his armpit, and, bereft of his support rolled face forward on the ground;
but, at the same instant, that uncouth missile, hurtling through the air, struck”
poor Tom (TI 252). This earlier version not only emphasizes Silver’s difficulty,
due to his disability, in committing the murder, but also makes the crutch itself
the agent (not instrument) of destruction; missing is the crucial verb added in the
later version (“John . . . sent that uncouth missile hurtling through the air”). In
Young Folks, the death of Tom is similar to that of Israel Hands, where Jim does
not actually fire the pistols that kill the coxswain. Stevenson is careful in revision
to remove any similarity between Silver the murderer and Hawkins the hero and,
as David D. Mann and William H. Hardesty, III, note in their brief discussion of
this revision, to make “Silver both more ruthless and more self-controlled.” See
Mann and Hardesty, “Stevenson’s Revisions of Treasure Island: ‘Writing Down
the Whole Particulars,’” Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship
3 (1987): 385. For detailed discussions of the changes Stevenson made for book
publication, see, in addition to Mann and Hardesty, David Angus, “Youth on the
Prow: The First Publication of Treasure Island,” Studies in Scottish Literature
25 (1990): 83–99. All of the substantive variations between the Young Folks serial-
ization and the book version of the novel are recorded (243–70) in the textual
notes to Wendy R. Katz’s edition of Treasure Island.
50. Margery Hourihan offers a brief reading of the differences between Silver’s killing
of Tom and a scene similar to Jim’s dispatching of Hands, one in which Squire
Trelawney snipes at the pirates aboard the Hispaniola: “Silver’s killing of the
honest hand, Tom, is given in extreme close-up,” whereas the “death of the pirate
whom Trelawney shoots . . . is observed from a desensitizing distance.” In addi-
tion, Hourihan notes, “the responses of Jim and Livesey to the respective murders
are used to define the one as a deed of horror and the other as a straightforward
and dutiful action, though each is committed for the same reason—to reduce the
numbers in the opposing camp.” See Margery Hourihan, Deconstructing the Hero:
Literary Theory and Children’s Literature (London: Routledge, 1997), 147–48.
51. Treasure Island’s serialized form was at least successful enough that two of
Stevenson’s subsequent historical novels for juvenile readers, Kidnapped (1886)
and The Black Arrow (1888), were also serialized in Young Folks. For a perceptive
study of the way in which late-Victorian critics sympathetic to Stevenson quickly
divorced Treasure Island from its origin within the pages of a juvenile penny
magazine so as to herald it as a triumphant participant in the fin de siècle ro-
mance revival, see Jason A. Pierce, “The Belle Lettrist and the People’s Pub-
lisher; or, The Context of Treasure Island’s First-Form Publication,” Victorian
Periodicals Review 31 (1998): 356–68.
52. Bosanquet, “Cheap Literature,” 678–79.
53. Hourihan, Deconstructing the Hero, 150.
54. My reading of the enjambment of (on the one hand) the use of the seemingly
modern boyish protagonist and (on the other) the act of setting the novel in the
Notes 187
historical past, reaches a very different conclusion from that of David H. Jackson,
who sees this union as a “clever melding of two different nostalgias”—for “the
reader’s . . . own childhood” in the first instance and for “a simplified account of
eighteenth-century hierarchical society” in the second. The first sort of nostalgia
might be an effect of Treasure Island, although I do not deal with it. But
Stevenson’s depiction of “eighteenth-century hierarchical society” certainly ac-
knowledges a fierce class conflict that should hardly inspire nostalgia, even
(perhaps especially) for a middle-class Victorian reader. See Jackson, “Treasure
Island as a Late-Victorian Adults’ Novel,” 28.
55. According to Marcus Rediker, piracy “was largely eliminated by 1726,” a process
that “entailed ruthless suppression of popular challenges to merchants’ property.”
See Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 74–75.
56. Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, ed. Dennis Butts (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989), 5, 7, 10.
57. Gail Ching-Liang Low notes that, in the press coverage of the Anglo-Zulu wars
(which she convincingly locates as the context of King Solomon’s Mines), Brit-
ish imperialism is understood as a world-historical contest between races:
here more than anywhere else one finds the black man crucial to the he-
roic narrative of the white man writ large. In the battle of races, heroism
on the side of the Zulu warriors only mirrors more heroism. To be de-
feated by such men was to be their equals, to defeat such an enemy was to
be more than their equals.
See Low, White Skins/Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism (London:
Routledge, 1996), 55. The absence of any natives in Treasure Island further em-
phasizes the class-based nature of the threats to imperial adventuring that the
novel imagines but places in the historical past. Haggard’s She: A History of
Adventure (1887), however, is much more concerned with class than is his ear-
lier novel, as the opening of the next chapter details.
58. Loxley, Problematic Shores, 138. Claudia Nelson’s comment regarding G. A.
Henty’s imperialist fictions is also apposite to this discussion of Treasure Island:
“Like most Victorian historical novelists, Henty writes about the past in order to
comment on the present; whether set one year or a thousand before the publication
date, his subject is always in some sense current events.” See Nelson, Boys Will
Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857–1912 (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 106.
CHAPTER 4
1. According to Stephen Donovan, Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out
sold as many as 100,000 copies in the first two months after its publication in
November 1890, and by the end of 1891 it had been translated into Dutch, French,
German, Japanese, and Swedish. See Donovan, “In Darkest England and the
Way Out: Imagining Empire, Imagining Britain,” Moderna Språk 93 (1999): 12–23.
2. Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought 1895–
1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 24.
188 Notes
3. Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, ed. Daniel Karlin (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1991), 3, 47. Subsequent page references to She, identified as such,
will appear parenthetically in my text.
4. My reading of the depiction of class in She is indebted to Laura Chrisman’s
discussion of Haggard, and her challenge that it “should be possible for critical
analysis of imperial/colonial discourse to begin to address questions of capitalism
and political economy,” including the domestic class relations central to those
questions. See Chrisman, “The Imperial Unconscious?: Representations of Im-
perial Discourse,” Critical Quarterly 32.3 (1990): 40–41.
5. Nina Auerbach describes this doubling succinctly when she remarks that Ayesha’s
plot “takes shape in an imperial blueprint for the invasion of England,” in the
process of which Ayesha appears as “a galvanized and transfigured Queen Victoria,
aligning Haggard’s magic country alarmingly with his reader’s expanding national
reality.” See Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 37. The importance of Queen
Victoria to Haggard’s representation of Ayesha has also been noted by Adrienne
Auslander Munich, “Queen Victoria, Empire, and Excess,” Tulsa Studies in
Women’s Literature 6 (1987): 272; and Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women,
Empire, and Victorian Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 197.
6. Haggard, Regeneration: Being an Account of the Social Work of the Salvation
Army in Great Britain (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), 139.
7. Haggard, Regeneration, 34.
8. Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes
in Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 328.
9. For a useful account of this transformation, see Stedman Jones, Outcast Lon-
don, 127–51, 262–314. Booth’s scheme also depends on the contemporary favor
for ameliorist discourse, which complements the desire to establish hegemonic
imperialism, as Philip Abrams suggests when he argues that ameliorist discourse
both posits “reforms that would so ameliorate social conditions that individuals
would be enabled, or forced, to improve themselves” and also presumes “a fun-
damental consensus and community of interest among individuals and classes.”
See Abrams, The Origins of British Sociology: 1834–1914 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1968), 38, 9.
10. Reginald Brabazon [Twelfth Earl of Meath], Social Arrows, 2nd ed. (London:
Longmans, Green, 1887), 13–14.
11. Brabazon, Social Arrows, 13.
12. Brabazon, Social Arrows, 27.
13. Smith, “The Industrial Training of Destitute Children,” Contemporary Review
48 (1885): 117.
14. Smith, “The Industrial Training of Destitute Children,” 111.
15. Smith, “The Industrial Training of Destitute Children,” 118.
16. Quoted in Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Young Statesman 1901–
1914, vol. 2 of Winston S. Churchill (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 30–31.
17. Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London: Salvation Army, n.d.
[1890]), 133, 73. Subsequent page references to In Darkest England and the
Way Out, abbreviated IDE, will appear parenthetically in my text.
Notes 189
18. It is quite common for scholars simply to claim that In Darkest England asserts
a parallel between the East End working classes and colonized Africans: for
instance, Pamela J. Walker insists that “Booth likened the cannibals and pygmies
of Darkest Africa to these denizens of Darkest England” and thus “racialized the
very poor by linking them to the inhabitants of Britain’s imperial conquests.”
See Walker, Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victo-
rian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 236, 240. Deborah
Epstein Nord offers a more useful discussion of the prominence of “urban savage”
as a literary trope, though she underestimates the extent to which Booth’s work
uses the same rhetorical maneuver as Mayhew’s London Labour (presenting the
parallel as a shock tactic and then quickly abandoning it). See Nord, “The Social
Explorer as Anthropologist: Victorian Travellers among the Urban Poor,” in
Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Literature, and Art, ed. William
Sharpe and Leonard Wallock (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987),
122–34.
19. White, “The Common Sense of Colonization and Emigration,” Contemporary
Review 49 (1886): 379.
20. White, The Problems of a Great City (London: Remington, 1886), 226.
21. Of course, the history of “state-aided” emigration directed primarily at removing
the poor and criminals from England antedates late-century schemes such as
Booth’s. In the best study of emigration as a trope in imperialist literature, Patrick
Brantlinger notes that, at least since mid-century, the discourse on emigration
employs a “conversion motif” that reinforces both “a vision of the dangerous,
contagious effects of overpopulation” and a notion that removal to distant lands
can sanitize undesirable populations. See Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British
Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988),
116–117.
22. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 188.
24. Booth’s recollection is quoted in George S. Railton, General Booth (London:
Salvation Army; Hodder and Stoughton, 1912), 6. The many biographies of Booth
consistently narrate his early life as a Dickensian tale of middle-class drive for
respectability frustrated by Booth’s father—who (ironically) speculated in the
construction of cheap houses for Nottingham workers, ruined the family, and
died when William was thirteen. Among biographies of Booth, which uniformly
tend toward hagiography, the liveliest account of his youth is that in St. John
Ervine, God’s Soldier: General William Booth (New York: Macmillan, 1935),
1:3–11, 1:28–37. The best histories of Booth’s attraction to revivalism, his found-
ing of the Salvation Army, and its movement toward social reform are Norman
H. Murdoch, Origins of the Salvation Army (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1994), 146–67; and Walker, Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down, 8–63.
25. Judith R. Walkowitz compellingly demonstrates that Victorian assaults on pros-
titution exemplify the reformist desire to render working-class privacy an impos-
sibility: the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869 were aimed, she
argues, at “forcing prostitutes to acknowledge their status as ‘public’ women
190 Notes
and destroying their private associations with the general community of the la-
boring poor,” at making it “impossible for a subject woman to keep her private
and public worlds apart.” Walkowitz also details how feminists agitating for the
repeal of these acts, as “mature, affluent women . . . enjoyed an unusual freedom
to engage in public activities,” even as “more often than not their actual relation-
ship with working-class women was hierarchical, controlling, and punitive.” See
Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 5, 202, 118, 131.
Walkowitz’s analysis is a valuable corrective to studies such as that of Edward
J. Bristow, who credits social-purity vigilantes Josephine Butler and Ellice
Hopkins with discrediting the sexual “double standard,” advancing feminism by
making “prostitution a paradigm for the condition of women,” and lowering “the
incidence of incest” in the working classes. See Bristow, Vice and Vigilance:
Purity Movements in Britain since 1700 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan; Totowa,
NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), 62, 130.
26. So as to reinforce such circular logic, turn-of-the-century degeneration theory
heavily embroiders on Bénédict Augustin Morel’s well-known definition of de-
generation as “deviations from the normal type of man.” See Morel, Traité des
dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine et
des causes qui produisent ces variétés maladives (Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1857), 5.
According to the theories that Booth borrows from and helps to popularize, degen-
eration is not the result of hereditary weakness—which would render the work-
ing classes essentially disqualified from improvement and thus from incorporation
into the life of a modern imperial nation—but is instead the result of environ-
mental influences, namely urban poverty. However, as William Greenslade notes,
the “Lamarckian idea that the characteristics of an organism could be acquired
from the environment and then passed on had considerable appeal.” See
Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1994), 17. Similarly, Daniel Pick argues that texts which
“are often seen as the definitive environmentalist refutation” of the primary strains
of degenerationism, such as that running throughout Lombrosian criminology,
“in fact opt only for a different brand of hereditarian theory.” See Pick, Faces of
Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 5. Booth, like other writers, finds this option so appeal-
ing because it enables the double-vision requisite to social-imperialist discourse,
which seeks to incorporate the working classes into the imperial enterprise yet
retain the subordination of this group to their “betters.”
27. Numerous scholars have noted such common parallels between the prostitute
and the working classes. For instance, Mary Poovey remarks:
as bodies that (sometimes) carried syphilis from man to man, prostitutes
provided a literal site where the dirt and disease associated with the poor
could be assumed to breed. Manage prostitution, some reformers seemed
to believe, and you would simultaneously contain pauperism, control popu-
lation growth, and reverse the moral debility that vitiated national pros-
perity.
Notes 191
See Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 88. Similarly, Carolyn Steedman ar-
gues that for many reformers there were “grounds for seeing the potentially
diseased state with which the young prostitute threatened the social body as only
a heightened and baroque example of the threat posed by all working children,
whose need to labour cut across newly established ideas about childhood as a
state both innocent and separate from the adult world.” See Steedman, Child-
hood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan, 1860–1931 (London:
Virago Press, 1990), 67.
28. For an insightful discussion of the differing representations of boys and girls in
Salvation Army social work schemes, see Louise A. Jackson, “‘Singing Birds as
well as Soap Suds’: The Salvation Army’s Work with Sexually Abused Girls in
Edwardian England,” Gender and History 12 (2000): 107–126.
29. For a rewarding discussion of the ambiguity surrounding the concept “public
woman” in treatments of the Hallelujah lass, see Walker, Pulling the Devil’s
Kingdom Down, 133–37, 196–98.
30. Wolff has influentially argued that the “rise and development of sociology in the
nineteenth century was closely related to the growth and increasing separation
of ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres of activity in western industrial societies” and
that the power associated with the public realm—the urban explorer’s “freedom
to move about in the city”—causes the invisibility of women and a “consequently
partial conception of ‘modernity.’” Wolff’s analysis is relevant to a discussion of
how Booth’s text participates in such a separation of “the public world of work,
politics, and city life” and “the ‘private’ sphere of the home.” Yet, Wolff’s claim
that this separation of spheres divides power exclusively along the lines of gen-
der—male public and female private—erases from the history of “sociology as a
new discipline” the very class issues that are so central to it. Whereas Wolff
argues that the sociological literature of modernity is “primarily concerned with
the ‘public’ spheres of work, politics, and the market place,” the dominant enter-
prise of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sociology is in fact the investigation,
classification, and reformation of every aspect of the private lives of the poor.
The conception of modernity thus fostered is indeed partial: working-class privacy
is an impediment to sociological knowledge, which must make such private affairs
public so as to subject them to scrutiny by men and women of the middle classes,
who are public figures but who nevertheless retain their status as private indi-
viduals. The asymmetries of power between middle-class men and middle-class
women have been the subject of much rewarding feminist investigation but should
not obscure the fact that, as a group with mutual class interests, male and female
middle-class social reformers unite in the project of maintaining spectatorial
and discursive control over the working classes. See Wolff, Feminine Sentences:
Essays on Women and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990),
43–44, 39, 43, 34, 44.
31. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Vic-
torian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 73–74. Similarly,
in her analysis of Beatrice Webb’s undercover investigations into sweatshop con-
ditions, Deborah Epstein Nord argues, “Webb’s disguise, which freed her as a
192 Notes
middle-class woman to enter into a working-class context, complicates the notion

. . . that in urban space sex ultimately takes precedence over class in determining
women’s experience and consciousness within that space.” Certainly, the
discursive power of Victorian and Edwardian reformers such as Webb, Catherine
Booth, Josephine Butler, Ellice Hopkins, and Octavia Hill should “argue for a
subtler and more complex sense of how this relationship between sex and class
figures in any given representation of the female spectator.” See Nord, “The
Urban Peripatetic: Spectator, Streetwalker, Woman Writer,” Nineteenth-Century
Literature 46 (1991): 373–74. Regarding how turn-of-the-century feminists were
deeply invested in sociological discourses, including eugenicist ones, about the
need to regenerate the working classes, see Sally Ledger, “In Darkest England:
The Terror of Degeneration in Fin-de-Siècle Britain,” Literature and History
4.2, 3rd series (1995): 71–86.
34. Walker, Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down, 147–48.
35. Higginbotham, “Respectable Sinners: Salvation Army Rescue Work with Un-
married Mothers, 1884–1914,” in Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760–
1930, ed. Gail Malmgreen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 217.
36. See Walker, “‘I Live But Not Yet I for Christ Liveth in Me’: Men and Masculin-
ity in the Salvation Army, 1865–90,” in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain
since 1800, ed. Michael Roper and John Tosh (London: Routledge, 1991), 101–
109. Similarly, Laura Lauer offers an interesting discussion of how the Salvation
Army sought to eradicate the supposed norms (violence, drunkenness) of working-
class masculinity; however, she certainly overstates the extent to which Salva-
tionist divergence from notions of “muscular Christianity” meant that the
organization was radically discontinuous with “an imperial enterprise which
viewed war as a necessary corollary.” See Lauer, “Soul-Saving Partnerships and
Pacifist Soldiers: The Ideal of Masculinity in the Salvation Army,” in Masculinity
and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, ed. Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne
Hogan, and Sue Morgan (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 2000), 201.
37. Catherine Booth’s comment is quoted in K. S. Inglis, Churches and the Working
Classes in Victorian England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1963), 176.
38. This perception is a frequent motif in writings on the Salvation Army. For instance,
K. S. Inglis claims that “in a society where dress normally recorded the wearer’s
status, the clothing worn by a Salvationist was classless.” See Inglis, Churches
and the Working Classes in Victorian England, 182. See also Walkowitz, City of
Dreadful Delight, 73–74; and Walker, Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down, 116–
117.
39. Butler, “Catherine Booth,” Contemporary Review 58 (Nov. 1890): 648.
40. In a different mood, Butler claimed that her “sympathies are wholly with the
non-privileged, even when they drop every ‘h’” (quoted in Walkowitz, Prostitution
and Victorian Society, 115).
41. Butler, “Catherine Booth,” 646.
Notes 193

43. “Rowdy Religion,” The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art
31 May 1884: 700.
44. Pearson, National Life and Character: A Forecast (London: Macmillan, 1893),
355, 28.
45. C. S. Bremner, “Hadleigh Farm Colony,” The Nation [New York] 30 Aug. 1894:
155.
46. Lindsay, “General William Booth Enters into Heaven,” in Collected Poems, rev.
ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 123-24.
47. Webb, My Apprenticeship, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1926), 154–55.
48. Webb, My Apprenticeship, 157, 155.
49 .Pamela J. Walker has detailed well the criticisms that the religious establishment
levelled at Booth. See Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down, 209–219.
50. Booth, “What Is the Salvation Army?,” Contemporary Review 42 (1882): 178.
51. Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England, 194. In a fine
study of the Salvation Army’s missionary work in India from 1882 until the
1930s, Rachel J. Tolen notes that the leaders of this work, Frederick and Emma
Booth-Tucker, “advocated adapting Salvation Army practices to customs familiar
to the peoples of India,” including incorporating turban and dhoti into the Salva-
tionist uniform. As Tolen notes, the Salvationist “endeavor to reform the criminal
tribes” of India not only participated in “the spatio-temporal extension of the
British Empire” but also involved “an iconic replication [in India] of the structures
and practices of institutional types [that the Army had] conceived in Britain”—
including, prominently, the understanding of native, like working-class, culture
as a criminalized and degenerating force. See Tolen, “Colonizing and Transform-
ing the Criminal Tribesman: The Salvation Army in British India,” American
Ethnologist: A Journal of the American Ethnological Society 18 (1991): 116,
120.
52. Booth’s comment is quoted in Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Vic-
torian England, 200.
53. Bailey, “‘In Darkest England and the Way Out’: The Salvation Army, Social
Reform and the Labour Movement, 1885–1910,” International Review of Social
History 29 (1984): 134.
54. Bailey, “‘In Darkest England and the Way Out,’” 149. By contrast, in an earlier
essay Bailey persuasively describes the attempt to convert working-class popu-
lar culture into Salvationist forms as a “moral imperialism” that “looked to
colonise spaces in which ‘savage’ entertainments were performed.” See Bailey,
“Salvation Army Riots, the ‘Skeleton Army’ and Legal Authority in the Provincial
Town,” in Social Control in Nineteenth Century Britain, ed. A. P. Donajgrodzki
(London: Croom Helm; Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), 238.
55. This is a frequent motif in, for instance, Robert Roberts’s autobiographical study
of working-class life in turn-of-the-century Salford. See Roberts, The Classic Slum:
Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (London: Penguin Books, 1990),
esp. 13–58. However, Peter Bailey convincingly demonstrates that Victorian at-
tempts to make the working classes more “respectable” by replacing their typi-
cal leisure pursuits with “rational recreations” more in keeping with middle-class
194 Notes
values—a project that the Salvation Army wholeheartedly embraced—was in

many ways a failure. See Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Ratio-
nal Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), esp. 35–55, 80–105.
56. See Murdoch, Origins of the Salvation Army, 71–87, 115–145.
57. Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London. First Series: Poverty
(New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1869), 1:126.
58. Gissing, The Nether World, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992), 152.
59. Roberts, The Classic Slum, 151.
60. Roberts, The Classic Slum, 151.
61. Stead’s letter to Milner is quoted in Frederic Whyte, The Life of W. T. Stead (New
York: Houghton Mifflin; London: Jonathan Cape, n.d. [1925]), 2:13. I do not
address the much-debated issue of to what extent Stead co-authored In Darkest
England: the long association of the Salvation Army and sensation journalism
should raise more weighty concerns about how liberal constructions of working-
class “depravity” operate on many discursive fronts.
63. Walker, Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down, 196.
64. Donovan, “In Darkest England and the Way Out,” 18. Similarly, Gareth Stedman
Jones has compellingly argued that one of the chief characteristics of working-
class politics at the end of the century was apathy toward militant movements,
both religious and imperialist. See Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies
in English Working Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1983), 179–238. Stedman Jones provides a useful corrective of Pamela
J. Walker’s (unsubstantiated) assertion that the language of militarism in Salva-
tionist discourse was attractive to working-class converts because it was “ex-
pressive of the rough, physical world the working class inhabited.” See Walker,
Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down, 183. However, it is certainly an error to
ignore the bonds between Salvationism and nationalism and argue, as John Wolffe
does, that in the Salvation Army “the military styles and language were . . .
metaphorical, and the overriding aims were evangelistic and social rather than
patriotic.” See Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in
Britain and Ireland, 1843–1945 (London: Routledge, 1994), 231.
65. The Western cityscape, needless to say, extensively signifies the success of Booth’s
plans to erect missionary city colonies in urban slums. The overseas colony project
was never successful; yet, particularly in the United States, the Army did relo-
cate some working-class city families to farm colonies opened in 1898 at Fort
Romie in California, Fort Amity in Colorado, and Fort Herrick in Ohio. Regard-
ing these colonies, see Clark C. Spence, The Salvation Army Farm Colonies
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 15–76. Although the short-lived
development of the United States farm colonies is beyond the scope of this chap-
ter, the fact that the site of the Fort Romie colony—four miles from Soledad,
California—is now in the neighborhood of a penitentiary is an irony worth re-
cording.
Notes 195
CHAPTER 5
1. Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizen-
ship, 7th ed. (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1915), 7. Subsequent page references
to Scouting for Boys, abbreviated SB, will appear parenthetically in my text.
2. Kipling, Kim, ed. Alan Sandison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 1.
3. Kipling, Kim, 100.
4. Kipling, Kim, 242–43. Patrick Williams argues that Kim’s racial and national
identities “are blurred in order to be more strictly redefined,” and thus Kipling’s
novel works to make Kim “black enough to fool everyone, but white enough to
be recuperable as a Sahib”; as Williams convincingly claims, “the problem is
resolved by making Kim culturally Indian and naturally British, and in such a
contest the power of Nature is bound to win.” See Williams, “Kim and
Orientalism,” in Kipling Considered, ed. Phillip Mallett (Houndmills,
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 50–51. Although I would tentatively agree with
Joseph Bristow’s observation that “Kim can only undertake the work so highly
praised by Baden-Powell because Kim is anything but respectably middle-class,”
this work (espionage) and the process of recuperation that Williams describes
both depend on casting out, from the very start of the novel, Kim’s identity as a
working-class English boy. See Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s
World (London: HarperCollins, 1991), 206.
5. Kipling, Kim, 103.
6. Wodehouse, “The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England: A Tale of the Great
Invasion,” in “The Swoop!” and Other Stories, ed. David A. Jansen (New York:
Seabury Press, Continuum Books, 1979), 10.
7. Regarding the proliferation of invasion narratives at the turn of the century, see I.
F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars, 1763–3749, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992), 64–162; and Daniel Pick, War Machine: The
Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993), 115–135. Thomas Richards insightfully argues that “the invasion
novel organized a corporate subject in whom was internalized an epistemological
paranoia that can be seen as part of a larger and systematic phenomenology of
rearmament.” See Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy
of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 115.
8. Regarding the foundation of the Boy Scouts as a response to perceptions, fol-
lowing the Second Boer War, that Britain’s imperial and military might was in
decline, see Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the
Origins of the Boy Scout Movement (New York: Random House, Pantheon Books,
1984), 52–87, 211–229; John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The
Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 246–49; and Robert H.
MacDonald, Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement,
1890–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 145–75.
9. Childers, The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service (Oxford: Oxford
10. Childers, The Riddle of the Sands, 268.
196 Notes
11. Chesney, The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (Edinburgh:

William Blackwood and Sons, 1871), 63–64.
12. Chesney’s concern regarding working-class electoral power is discussed by C. J.
Keep, “Fearful Domestication: Future-War Stories and the Organization of Con-
sent,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 23.3 (1990):
4–9.
13. William Greenslade details the shift towards a more thorough environmentalism
in debates about the suitability of military recruits, such as the 1904 report of the
Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration: “The designation of
physical ‘deterioration’ rather than ‘degeneration’ was validated by the findings
of the report which broadly rejected the hereditary factor as a cause of ‘degen-
eracy.’” As Greenslade notes, there is a complementary discursive shift in positing
the solution to urban problems: “the doctrine of efficiency had become the new
century’s version of a spiritual and moral regeneration.” See Greenslade, Degener-
ation, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 189, 194. Regarding the turn-of-the-century fashion for “national
efficiency” schemes that sought to repair the deterioration supposedly revealed
by the Second Boer War, see G. R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A
Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899–1914 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1971), 34–106.
14. Reginald Brabazon [Twelfth Earl of Meath], Speech in the House of Lords, in
The Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser. (London: HMSO; Wyman and Sons, 1903),
124:1324.
15. Brabazon, Speech in the House of Lords, 124:1336–37.
16. As Stephen Arata claims, whereas degeneration theory tends to focus on “the
urban poor as a degenerate race whose physical and psychological health had
been irreparably damaged by modern city life,” turn-of-the-century writings often
extend “this category to include those portions of the bourgeoisie whose appe-
tites had likewise been brutalized by contemporary conditions.” See Arata, Fic-
tions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 11. However, Baden-Powell, like most writers who adopt the logic
of deterioration rather than that of degeneration, presumes that such damage (in
any class) is reversible, not irreparable.
17. Baden-Powell, Scoutmastership: A Handbook for Scoutmasters on the Theory of
Scout Training (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Knickerbocker Press, 1920),
104.
18. Wells, The War of the Worlds, ed. David Y. Hughes (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 160.
19. Baden-Powell’s social-imperialist project aims primarily at the physical and moral
improvement of working-class boys by means of environmental reforms, par-
ticularly physical education. However, as this quote suggests, the handbook
is greatly influenced by contemporary eugenicist programs for improving the
race—ranging from sex education and the discouragement of alcohol and tobacco
use to the encouragement of more productive, “eugenic” marriages and the sterili-
zation of the “unfit.” Popularized particularly by Francis Galton and Karl Pearson,
Notes 197
eugenics had considerable currency among a wide range of scientific and lay
writers—including feminists and Fabian socialists as well as social imperialists—
concerned with the effects of a large industrial population on the British Empire.
Regarding the appeal of eugenicist theories of heredity, even among staunchly
environmentalist thinkers, see Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Ge-
netics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), esp.
23–24, 32-33, 64–66.
20. Wells, The New Machiavelli (New York: Duffield, 1910), 313–314.
21. Seth Koven argues that the growing popularity of “environmentalist arguments”
led reformers to view working-class “rough lads,” rather than more thoroughly
deteriorated adult men, as the material out of which they could forge ideal citi-
zens. See Koven, “From Rough Lads to Hooligans: Boy Life, National Culture
and Social Reform,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, Mary
Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Routledge, 1992), 368.
22. Baden-Powell, Scoutmastership, 45.
23. Soloway, “Counting the Degenerates: The Statistics of Race Deterioration in
Edwardian England,” Journal of Contemporary History 17 (1982): 148.
24. The fears about military efficiency out of which such character-training organi-
zations as the Scouts emerged determine, of course, that the works of Baden-
Powell and his contemporaries largely focus on the reformation of boys. Although
a more extensive consideration of the gender politics of Scouting is beyond the
scope of this chapter, one should not conclude, as writers such as Anne McClintock
have done, that “women and men did not experience imperialism in the same
way” and that very few women “reaped its vast profits”—due to the supposed
fact that “the intractable violence of male decree bound them [women] in gendered
patterns of disadvantage and frustration.” See McClintock, Imperial Leather:
Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995),
6. Suffice to say that the Girl Guides organization is founded—in 1909 by Rob-
ert Baden-Powell and his sister, Agnes Baden-Powell—along similarly imperi-
alist lines, as is suggested by the title of Agnes Baden-Powell’s foundational
text, A Handbook for Girl Guides, or, How Girls Can Help Build the Empire
(London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1912). See also Rose Kerr, The Story of the
Girl Guides (London: Girl Guides Association, 1932) and Robert Baden-Powell,
Girl Guiding, a Handbook for Brownies, Guides, Rangers, and Guiders (Lon-
don: C. Arthur Pearson, 1934). Likewise, Jeanette Low founded the American
Girl Scouts in 1913 with nationalist and imperialist goals in mind; see her How
Girls Can Help Their Country (n.p.: n.p., 1917). On the imperialist origin of the
Girl Guides, see Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and
Edwardian England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 104–114; Allen
Warren, “‘Mothers for the Empire’?: The Girl Guides Association in Britain,
1909–1939,” in Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperi-
alism, ed. J. A. Mangan (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 96-109; and Tim Jeal, The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord
Baden-Powell (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 469–87. On imperialist ide-
ology in Girl Guide fictions, see also J. S. Bratton, “British Imperialism and the
198 Notes
Reproduction of Femininity in Girls’ Fiction, 1900–1930,” in Imperialism and

Juvenile Literature, ed. Jeffrey Richards (Manchester: Manchester University
Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 206–214.
25. Masterman, “Realities at Home,” in The Heart of the Empire: Discussions of
Problems of Modern City Life in England. With an Essay on Imperialism, [ed.
Charles F. G. Masterman] (New York: E. P. Dutton; London: T. Fisher Unwin,
1902), 7.
26. Masterman, “Realities at Home,” 7.
27. Masterman, “Realities at Home,” 23.
28. Bray, “The Children of the Town,” in The Heart of the Empire: Discussions of
Problems of Modern City Life in England. With an Essay on Imperialism, [ed.
Charles F. G. Masterman] (New York: E. P. Dutton; London: T. Fisher Unwin,
1902), 142.
1968), 1:10.
30. Mayhew, London Labour, 1:24, 1:214.
31. Bray, “Children of the Town,” 125–26.
32. Bray, “Children of the Town,” 126 (my emphasis).
33. Bray, “Children of the Town,” 115.
34. Koven, “From Rough Lads to Hooligans,” 378.
35. Ward, The Passmore Edwards Settlement (London: H. Williams, 1901), 11.
36. Reginald Brabazon [Twelfth Earl of Meath], “Cadets or Hooligans,” Letter to
Times [London], 2 Dec. 1900: 3.
37. Quoted in Rosenthal, The Character Factory, 207.
38. Bray, “Children of the Town,” 113–114.
40. Baden-Powell’s desire to imagine a reformed hooliganism as capable of infusing
spirit into a decadent Britain confirms Stephen Arata’s observation that the
“hooligan’s masculine assertiveness was widely seen as a conscious reaction
against the perceived effeminacy of contemporary life. . . . But in reacting against
one form of degeneracy”—that symbolized by the decadent aesthete—”the hooli-
gan simply fell into another. Avoiding effeminacy, he became barbarous instead.”
See Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle, 13. This negative de-
velopment is precisely what Baden-Powell hopes to prevent by redirecting the
hooligan’s “masculine assertiveness” into proper channels and by regulating it
according to middle-class notions of “character.”
41. Baden-Powell, Scoutmastership, 53–54.
44. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove
Press, 1968), 18.
45. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 203.
46. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 203.
47. From the 1930s, Scouting for Boys was continuously revised in order to render
the Boy Scouts more attractive to youths throughout the British Commonwealth,
and elsewhere. Regarding this attempt to create an interracial, international Scout
Notes 199
organization—which is worthy of more study in terms of hegemonic colonial-

ism—see Allen Warren, “Citizens of the Empire: Baden-Powell, Scouts and
Guides and an Imperial Ideal, 1900–40,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture,
ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 232–
56.
48. Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropol-
ogy, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (New York: D. Appleton,
1914), 1:viii. Regarding Hall and the theory of recapitulation, see John O.
Springhall, Coming of Age: Adolescence in Britain, 1860–1960 (Dublin: Gill
and Macmillan, 1986), 13–37; David I. Macleod, Building Character in the
American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920 (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 97–116; and Hugh Cunningham, The
Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Cen-
tury (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 100, 123–32.
49. Hall, Adolescence, xi.
50. Baden-Powell, Sketches in Mafeking and East Africa (London: Smith, Elder,
1907), 157.
51. The cover of Scouting for Boys was drawn by John Hassall, a member (with
Baden-Powell) of the London Sketch Club.
52. The Boy Scouts are divided into three groups—Wolf Cubs (for boys age 8-11),
Scouts (for young men age 11–17), and Rover Scouts (for men over 17 years)—
just as the Girl Guides (Girl Scouts in the United States) are divided into Brown-
ies (for girls age 8–11), Guides (for young women age 11–16), and Rangers (for
women over 16 years).
53. Kipling, The Jungle Books, ed. W. W. Robson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992), 27.
54. Regarding the “monkey parade,” see Springhall, Coming of Age, 145-47.
56. Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. Thomas C. Moser, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton,
1996), 8.
57. Conrad, Lord Jim, 9.
60. Conrad, Lord Jim, 11. My brief discussion of the dangerous lack of preparation
caused by Jim’s romantic separation from the working-class city space is in-
debted to Fredric Jameson’s subtle analysis of Jim’s “externality to this world,
his absolute structural distance from it.” See Jameson, The Political Unconscious:
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981),
210.
61. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 243.
62. Baden-Powell’s extremely influential representation of the world faced by boys
as one fraught with danger gives the lie to the common claim, in studies of juve-
nile literature, that texts for young people produce, as Gail Ching-Liang Low
says, an “infantilized notion of culture.” See Low, White Skins/Black Masks:
Representation and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996), 43. Similarly, Robert
H. MacDonald argues: “Typically, material written for young children
200 Notes
miniaturises and, obviously enough, simplifies, and so the world is made comic
and safe.” See MacDonald, The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of
Popular Imperialism, 1880–1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 9. Baden-Powell’s texts indicate that the opposite
is the case: the ideological goal of the Scout organization involves making adult
concerns about class and empire a part of everyday life for children. As Baden-
Powell himself notes by quoting his American admirer Dean Russell, who was
Professor of Education at Columbia University, the “program of the Boy Scouts
is the man’s job cut down to the boy’s size.” See Baden-Powell, Scoutmastership,
14.
63. Baden-Powell titled his autobiography Adventures and Accidents (2nd ed. [Lon-
don: Methuen, 1936]).
64. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 25.
65. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 23.
66. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 77.
67. According to a 1929 census conducted by the Boy Scouts, the organization had
690,586 members in the United Kingdom, British colonies, and British dominions,
and 1,180,730 members in other countries. See E. E. Reynolds, The Scout Move-
ment (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 137.
68. See Springhall, “The Boy Scouts, Class and Militarism in Relation to British
Youth Movements 1908–1930,” International Review of Social History 16 (1971):
139.
69. See Llewellyn Smith, Life and Leisure, vol. 9 of The New Survey of London Life
and Labour (London: P. S. King and Son, 1935), 190–91.
70. Springhall, “The Boy Scouts, Class and Militarism,” 138–39. David I. Macleod’s
detailed study of the Boy Scouts of America addresses both the desire to extend
middle-class character to working-class boys, which similarly dominated social-
reform schemes in the United States during the Progressive Era, and the general
failure of such character-building projects to appeal to boys across the classes.
See Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy, esp. 56–71, 133–45,
216–217.
71. Quoted in E. E. Reynolds, Baden-Powell: A Biography of Lord Baden-Powell of
Gilwell (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), 210.
72. Rosenthal, The Character Factory, 7 (my emphasis).
73. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 246. Rather, as Michael J. Childs suc-
cinctly puts it, “the Scout movement failed to hold or even attract working-class
boys,” and thus, on “the evidence of numbers alone, it is difficult to see how
public school loyalties and values could be disseminated among a group who
never joined.” See Childs, Labour’s Apprentices: Working-Class Lads in Late
Victorian and Edwardian England (Montreal: McGill University Press; Kingston:
Queen’s University Press, 1992), 149.
74. Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (New York: Penguin Books, 1992),
134.
75. Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Lon-
don: Penguin Books, 1990), 161.
Notes 201
76. Baden-Powell’s notions conform to the “zymotic” theory of disease, which posited
that the body maintains its health by excreting (through respiration as well as
other means) noxious matter and which posited that disease is spread when the
gases thus disposed of are inhaled by and introduced into the blood of healthy
persons. Regarding the prevalence of zymotic disease theory in the Victorian
period, see Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender
in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 180–
81. Although by the turn of the century most scientists had rejected zymotic
fantasies in favor of the germ theory of disease, Baden-Powell is not alone in
clinging to the earlier model, given that it enables environmental explanations of
working-class “deterioration” and resistance to economic analyses of access to
adequate health care. For instance, in Child Life and Labour (first published in
the same month, February 1908, as Scouting for Boys) Margaret Alden—a phy-
sician and the author of numerous books on children’s health issues—affirms
that tuberculosis is “due to the results of bad air, and if we give the child bad air
in the school, as well as bad air in the home, there can be no doubt as to the final
issue.” Alden applauds inspectors who divide schools “into five classes according
to the degree of foul air and smell which prevailed in them” and notes that the
“micro-organisms were very numerous, and in one school 213 per cubic foot
were found in the infants’ department.” Also she recommends the removal of
adenoids, which “make mouth-breathing, instead of correct nose-breathing, a
necessity.” See Alden, Child Life and Labour, 3rd ed., Social Service Handbooks
6 (London: Headley Brothers, 1913), 69, 88.
77. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell
79. Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 154.
CHAPTER 6
1. Price is quoted in Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1975), 27. Regarding Captain Nevill and his footballs,
see also Colin Veitch, “‘Play up! Play up! and Win the War!’: Football, the Nation
and the First World War 1914–15,” Journal of Contemporary History 20 (1985):
363–65; and Peter Parker, The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School
Ethos (London: Constable, 1987), esp. 213–215.
2. See M. H. Abrams et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th
ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 2:1826. For an illuminating analysis of
such representations of the First World War, see Daniel Pick, War Machine: The
Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993), 189–204.
3. J. M. Bourne offers an excellent discussion of how the diplomatic arrangements
that led Britain to declare war on the Central Powers—the treaties, alliances, and
conventions with the United States, Japan, and Russia, and especially the Anglo-
French Entente of 1904—were explicitly designed to protect British colonial
interests, particularly in the Middle East and on the Indian subcontinent. See
202 Notes
Bourne, Britain and the Great War 1914–1918 (London: Edward Arnold, 1989),
1–8.
4. It should, perhaps, go without saying that a war of attrition (such as the First
World War) requires the mobilization of an extremely large number of soldiers
and that in an industrial nation (such as Georgian England) these soldiers will be
predominantly working-class men, who form the demographic majority of the
male citizenry. Unfortunately, popular and scholarly representations of the First
World War have so often gone without saying any such thing that one must remark,
as J. M. Bourne does, that the
quite disproportionate attention paid to officer casualties and to the “lost
generation” of public schoolboys should not be allowed to disguise the
true nature of Britain’s war losses. Almost 94 per cent of British dead
belonged to the “Other Ranks.” These were overwhelmingly working class.
See Bourne, Britain and the Great War 1914–1918, 205. For a wealth of statisti-
cal information regarding the working-class constitution of the fighting forces
during the war, see P. E. Dewey, “Military Recruiting and the British Labour
Force During the First World War,” Historical Journal 27 (1984): 199–223.
5. The best study specifically focusing on football and the First World War is Veitch,
“‘Play up! Play up! and Win the War!’” 363–78. On football and turn-of-the-
century English culture more generally, see Charles P. Korr, “West Ham United
Football Club and the Beginnings of Professional Football in East London, 1895–
1914,” Journal of Contemporary History 13 (1978): 211–232; Peter Bailey,
Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest
for Control, 1830–1885 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Toronto: Univer-
sity of Toronto Press, 1978), 124–46; Tony Mason, Association Football and
English Society, 1863–1915 (Brighton: Harvester Press; Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press, 1980), 222–58; James Walvin, Football and the Decline of
Britain (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), 1–6, 44–56; and Nicholas
Fishwick, English Football and Society, 1910–1950 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 1–13, 136–50.
6. Baden-Powell, Scoutmastership: A Handbook for Scoutmasters on the Theory of
Scout Training (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Knickerbocker Press, 1920),
34.
7. See Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an
Ideal (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Viking Books, 1986), esp. 17–100. For other
discussions of the importance of games to imperialist ideology, see J. A. Mangan,
Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and
Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981), 179–206; Parker, The Old Lie, 77–84; James Walvin, “Symbols of
Moral Superiority: Slavery, Sport and the Changing World Order, 1800–1950,”
in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America
1800–1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1987), 248–51; and Donald Leinster-Mackay, “The Nineteenth-Century English
Preparatory School: Cradle and Crèche of Empire?” in “Benefits Bestowed”?:
Notes 203
Education and British Imperialism, ed. J. A. Mangan (Manchester: Manchester

University Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 67–72.
8. For a detailed discussion of this curricular transformation see Mangan, Athleticism
in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, 16–21, 68–96.
9. On the public schools as a source of imperial administrators and military officers,
see Geoffrey Best, “Militarism and the Victorian Public School,” in The Victorian
Public School: Studies in the Development of an Educational Institution, ed.
Brian Simon and Ian Bradley (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975), 129–46; Bruce
Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1978), 161–79, 205–226; Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and
Edwardian Public School, 135–40, 191–96; Mangan, The Games Ethic, 27–28,
44–100; Mangan, “‘The Grit of Our Forefathers’: Invented Traditions, Propa-
ganda and Imperialism,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John M.
MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 115–125; Parker,
The Old Lie, 31–68; Walvin, “Symbols of Moral Superiority,” 248–51; W. J.
Reader, At Duty’s Call: A Study in Obsolete Patriotism (Manchester: Manches-
ter University Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 84–100; Leinster-
Mackay, “The Nineteenth-Century English Preparatory School,” 59–65; and
Patrick A. Dunae, “Education, Emigration and Empire: The Colonial College,
1887–1905,” in “Benefits Bestowed”?: Education and British Imperialism, ed.
J. A. Mangan (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1988), 194–208.
10. Shearman, Athletics and Football (London: Badminton Library, 1888), 369–70.
11. Churchill is quoted in John Springhall, “Building Character in the British Boy:
The Attempt to Extend Christian Manliness to Working-Class Adolescents, 1880–
1914,” in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and
America 1800–1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1987), 56.
12. Readers of Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan will recognize how my
argument is indebted to her incisive analysis of the class-based division between
intellectual and manual labor in the pedagogical policies governing, respectively,
secondary education (modeled on the public schools) and terminal elementary
education (for youths destined to manual labor) at the turn of the century. See
Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, rev. ed.
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 1–11, 115–136. Stephen
Humphries similarly describes the elementary school curriculum as focused on
“concrete” thought as opposed to the “abstract” thought encouraged in the public
and secondary schools, although Humphries also details at length the considerable
working-class resistance to the elementary-school syllabus. See Humphries,
Hooligans or Rebels?: An Oral History of Working-Class Children and Youth
1889–1939 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), 28–61.
13. Moran is quoted in Walvin, “Symbols of Moral Superiority,” 256.
14. Until the 1880s the Young Men’s Christian Association was exclusively devoted
to the intellectual and spiritual development of primarily lower-middle-class men;
the YMCA that we are likely to recognize—the urban center dominated by a
204 Notes
gym and swimming pool that can be enjoyed for a minimal membership fee—is
the result of a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century transformation of the
Association’s mission, such that the Y became a purveyor of “Christian manliness”
to working-class men and boys. The best study of the YMCA is David I. Macleod,
Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their
Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 117–
129, 171–229, which focuses on the parallel transformation of the Association
in the United States. The relation of the British YMCA to imperialist national-
ism needs far more study; the best examination to date is H. E. Meller, Leisure
and the Changing City, 1870–1914 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976),
144–60.
15. For other discussions of the metaphorical comparison of sport and war in the
late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, see Parker, The Old Lie, 211–217; Robert
H. MacDonald, “A Poetics of War: Militarist Discourse in the British Empire,
1880–1918,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 23.3
(1990): 17–35; and Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Cul-
ture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (New York: New York University
Press, 1997), 101–116.
16. Ubique [Captain Guggisberg], Modern Warfare; or, How our Soldiers Fight (Lon-
don: T. Nelson and Sons, 1903), 94. The emphases are in the original.
17. Archibald Primrose [Lord Rosebery], Questions of Empire (New York: Thomas
Y. Crowell, 1901), 32.
18. Primrose, Questions of Empire, 9.
19. Primrose, Questions of Empire, 5–6.
20. See Veitch, “‘Play up! Play up! and Win the War!’” 363–78.
21. Shee, The Briton’s First Duty: The Case for Conscription (London: Grant
Richards, 1901), 200.
22. Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizen-
ship, 7th ed. (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1915), 292.
23. Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys, 292.
24. Regarding the construction of sporting militarism in the works of Henty and
similar writers for young people, see Reader, At Duty’s Call, 18–59.
25. Henty, With Kitchener in the Soudan: A Story of Atbara and Omdurman (Lon-
don: Blackie and Son, 1903), 55, 53. Subsequent page references to With Kitchener
in the Soudan, abbreviated WKS, will appear parenthetically in my text.
26. In his valuable study of Henty’s fictions, Jeffrey Richards claims that they offer
a potent combination of Smilesian self-help and class destiny. War is seen
in this formula as a rite of passage, a passport to manhood. It functions
both on a personal level as a force for character-building and character-
testing and on a national level as a morally justified means of imperial
expansion.
See Richards, “Popular Imperialism and the Image of the Army in Juvenile Lit-
erature,” in Popular Imperialism and the Military 1850–1950, ed. John M.
MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1992), 91. Although this is an accurate characterization of the Hentyesque
Notes 205
narrative ideology, the depiction of commander and soldiers in With Kitchener

in the Soudan operates such that “class destiny” places definite limits on the
effectiveness of “Smilesian self-help.”
27. Kitchener was drowned, around 8:00 pm on 5 June 1916, when the cruiser HMS
Hampshire, carrying him on a mission to Russia, struck a mine and sank off the
Orkney Islands. His body was never found. For a fascinating study of the public
response to Kitchener’s death, and especially to his unrecovered corpse, see Joanna
Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 237–52.
28. Leete’s design is in turn the basis of the best-known United States recruiting
poster—James Montgomery Flagg’s “I Want You for U. S. Army,” featuring Uncle
Sam—as well as a British variant of the Second World War that depicts a pointing
Winston Churchill.
30. On the “pals’ battalions,” see Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of
the New Armies, 1914–16 (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 79–100. J. M. Winter makes the convincing argument
that these battalions, among other forms of local loyalties and rather than appeals
to imperialist patriotism, constituted a primary motivation for enlistment; see
Winter, The Great War and the British People (Houndmills, Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1985), 29–33.
31. The best (indeed, the only sustained) studies of Steevens to date are H. John
Field, Toward a Programme of Imperial Life: The British Empire at the Turn of
the Century, Contributions in Comparative Colonial Studies 9 (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1982), 119–201; and Roger T. Stearn, “G. W. Steevens and
the Message of Empire,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 17
(1989): 210–231.
32. See Field, Toward a Programme of Imperial Life, 174–75.
33. Steevens, With Kitchener to Khartum (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1899), 45.
34. Steevens, With Kitchener to Khartum, 50.
36. Reed, Collected Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991), 52; emphasis mine.
37. Steevens, With Kitchener to Khartum, 8, 142.
38. Steevens, Egypt in 1898 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898), 253.
39. Steevens, Egypt in 1898, 155.
40. Daniel Pick offers an extensive examination of the representation of war itself as
a machine, a representation that is prominent in, for example, Steevens’s de-
scription of the Battle of Atbara quoted above. Although I have found Pick’s
study valuable, he does not address the somewhat different representation of
ordinary soldiers in mechanical terms, and the understanding of class difference
that underpins it. For Pick’s discussion of the notion “war machine” in the context
of the First World War specifically, see War Machine, 136–64.
41. London, The People of the Abyss (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1995), 144.
42. London, People of the Abyss, 231.
206 Notes
44. Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels?, 42.

45. Bourne, Britain and the Great War 1914–1918, 179. Similarly, John O. Springhall
remarks that it is difficult to conclude that “the boys’ adventure fiction of G. A.
Henty, the 12th Earl of Meath’s Empire Day, the Church Lads Brigade and Baden-
Powell’s Boy Scouts” created an imperialist militarism “that led to mass volun-
teering on the outbreak of war” in August 1914—“unless the statements of the
youth leaders themselves are taken at their face value.” See Springhall, “The
Boy Scouts, Class and Militarism in Relation to British Youth Movements 1908-
1930,” International Review of Social History 16 (1971): 151.
46. The recruiting officer is quoted in Reader, At Duty’s Call, 116–117. As Stephen
Humphries says, those working-class recruits who did enlist were often “forced
to join up either by economic necessity or by legal compulsion, and their primary
aim was personal survival, not the patriotic self-sacrifice encouraged by youth
movements” and recruitment materials. See Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels?,
135.
47. Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels?, 43.
48. Goldthorpe is quoted in Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, 172.
49. Bourne, Britain and the Great War 1914–1918, 219.
50. Bourne, Britain and the Great War 1914–1918, 219.
51. Woolf’s treatment of the association of sport and war in her novels has also been
discussed by Helen Wussow, The Nightmare of History: The Fictions of Virginia
Woolf and D. H. Lawrence (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press; London:
Associated University Presses, 1998), 109–140.
52. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, Harvest
Books, 1981), 85. Subsequent page references to Mrs. Dalloway, abbreviated
MD, will appear parenthetically in my text.
53. William Greenslade perceptively observes that in Mrs. Dalloway “the sounds of
late Victorian imperialism, psychiatric Darwinism and blind positivism are ren-
dered discordant, troubling, sinister,” and that Woolf thus advertises her opposi-
tion “to the discursive apparatus which, with such facile certainty, separated the
healthy from the weak, the fit from the unfit, the normal from the tainted.” How-
ever, Greenslade does not pursue this analysis of Woolf’s demystification of
middle-class discourses on the urban poor, and he instead rehearses the (now
quite normative) treatment of Woolf’s novel as “an effect of her prolonged suf-
fering” due to mental illness: “By the time she came to write Mrs. Dalloway in
1923, she was ready to objectify her personal suffering.” See Greenslade, De-
generation, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1994), 213, 228.
54. Similarly, in Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room (1922) the title character—an ex-Rugby
boy whose consciousness is almost entirely formed by newspaper reports of a
“strike, a murder, football, bodies found”—sketches for himself a future as a
social imperialist: “He would go into Parliament and make fine speeches” in
order to destroy “wretched slums at the back of Gray’s Inn . . . But then there
was the British Empire which was beginning to puzzle him . . . What did the
Daily Mail say about that?” The consequences of athleticist and imperialist ide-
ology are no less deadly for the middle-class Jacob Flanders, of course, as Woolf’s
Notes 207
ironic narrator makes abundantly clear: “for ever the beauty of young men seems
to be set in smoke, however lustily they chase footballs, or drive cricket balls . . .
Possibly they are soon to lose it.” See Woolf, Jacob’s Room (San Diego: Harcourt,
Brace, and Jovanovich, Harvest Books, 1978), 98, 139, 117.
55. Donald J. Childs offers a perceptive analysis of Bradshaw’s eugenicism and of
Lady Bruton’s eugenicist imperialism. See Childs, Modernism and Eugenics:
Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 38–42, 51–57.
56. The scholarship on Woolf and the First World War is now quite considerable.
The finest book-length study is Karen L. Levenback, Virginia Woolf and the
Great War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), which includes (44–82)
a valuable discussion of Mrs. Dalloway. Frequently, however, studies of Woolf
and the First World War tend to read her fiction as an elaboration of the more
polemical (and fantastical) portions of her Three Guineas (1938), which puts
forth the notion that militarism is inimical to women—a notion to which Woolf’s
representation of middle-class women such as Clarissa Dalloway and especially
Lady Bruton certainly gives the lie. For examples of such scholarship, see Nancy
Topping Bazin and Jane Hamovit Lauter, “Virginia Woolf’s Keen Sensitivity to
War: Its Roots and Its Impact on Her Novels,” in Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction,
Reality, and Myth, ed. Mark Hussey (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991),
14–39; Masami Usui, “The Female Victims of the War in Mrs. Dalloway,” in
Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth, ed. Mark Hussey (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1991), 151–63; Margaret R. Higonnet, “Women in
the Forbidden Zone: War, Women, and Death,” in Death and Representation, ed.
Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1993), 192–209; and Sharon Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing
Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (London: Routledge, 1994),
169–216. A valuable, if brief, corrective is Kathy J. Phillips’s discussion of Lady
Bruton’s imperialist militarism in Virginia Woolf Against Empire (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 8–14.
57. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Richard Lancelyn
Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 279.
58. The best discussion of Woolf’s aesthetic practice in terms of the First World War
is Allyson Booth’s insightful analysis of Jacob’s Room. Booth argues that later
in the war much propaganda, confronted with a multitude of dead and wounded
soldier bodies, uses a rhetoric of bodilessness to represent fighting men—a rheto-
ric that Jacob’s Room ironically repeats in order to subject it to modernist expo-
sure and critique. See Booth, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space
Between Modernism and the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press,
1996), 21–49.
59. Woolf, The Common Reader: First Series (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, and
Jovanovich, Harvest Books, 1981), 151.
60. Woolf, The Common Reader: First Series, 156.
61. Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told (New York: Harper, 1920), 131.
62. Woolf, The Common Reader: First Series, 150–51.
63. Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told, 69–70.
208 Notes
64. Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told, 25.

67. Regarding the prevalence of such metaphors in depictions of “theaters of war”
from 1914 on, see Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 91–230.
70. As Gillian Beer eloquently argues, Woolf’s “one form of patriotism” is her cel-
ebration of “the insouciant resilience of the English language and of literary
history.” See Beer, “The Island and the Aeroplane: The Case of Virginia Woolf,”
in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 286.
71. Gibb, The Problem of Boy-Work (London: Wells, Gardner, Darton, 1906), viii.
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Index
A and social imperialism, 134, 196 n. 19

Abrams, Philip, 188 n.9 and soldiers as embodied, 137–141,
Adventure fiction, 65–66, 69–71, 82–83, 145, 147, 153–154
86–88, 206 n. 45; see also and Virginia Woolf, 153–154, 160, 206
Children’s literature n. 51, 206 n. 54
Ainsworth, William Harrison, 43–44, and war, 4, 18, 133–142, 145, 147–
47–48, 76, 172 n. 1, 173 n. 3, 173 n. 154, 160, 202 n. 5, 204 n. 15, 204 n.
6 24
Alden, Margaret, 201 n. 76 and working classes as embodied,
Altick, Richard D., 173 n. 6 134–141, 154
Anderson, Benedict, 3 and working classes as mechanized,
Anderson, Patricia, 178 n. 41 138
Anglo, Michael, 172 n. 1 Auerbach, Nina, 188 n. 5
Angus, David, 186 n. 49
Arata, Stephen, 196 n. 16, 198 n. 40 B
Armstrong, Nancy, 176 n. 31 Baden-Powell, Agnes, 197 n. 24
Atbara, Battle of (1898), 149, 205 n. 40 Baden-Powell, Robert, 40, 107–132, 195
Athleticism, 13, 112, 151 n. 4, 199 n. 51, 199 n. 62, 200 n. 63;
and Board schools, 136 see also Boy Scout organization;
and children’s literature, 70, 133, 140– Children’s literature
141, 160 and athleticism, 131, 135–136, 139
and educational policy, 133–137, 203 and class constituency of Boy Scout
n. 8 organization, 126, 132, 200 n. 73
and G. A. Henty, 140–141, 202 n. 24 critics of, 18, 126–128
and hegemonic imperialism, 134–136, and founding of Boy Scout organiza-
150, 154 tion, 6, 15, 107–108, 195 n. 8, 197
and masculinity, 133–137, 139, 145, n. 24
153 and founding of Girl Guide organiza-
and middle classes as possessing tion, 197 n. 24
visual power, 134, 137–141, 154 and global influence of Boy Scout
and military commanders as visionar- organization, 126, 198 n. 47, 200 n.
ies, 137–141, 145, 147 67
and physical deterioration scare, 90, and hegemonic imperialism, 108, 117–
135–137, 139 118, 126
and public schools, 71, 130, 133, 135– and invasion scare narrative, 108–110
137, 152 and juvenile delinquency, 108, 116,
and Robert Baden-Powell, 131, 135– 198 n. 40
136, 139 and middle-class domestic life, 117
225
226 Index
Baden-Powell, Robert (continued) and class constituency of Salvation

and middle classes as possessing Army, 18, 104–106
visual power, 108, 132, 139 critics of, 40, 93, 101–106, 193 n. 49
and physical deterioration scare, 108– and degeneration theory, 17, 23, 85–
114, 125, 135, 139, 195 n. 8, 196 n. 86, 89, 91, 94–96
16, 197 n. 24, 201 n. 76 and emigration, 40, 85–86, 92, 154,
and racialist discourse, 118–119, 122 189 n. 21
and recapitulation theory, 118–119 and founding of Salvation Army, 91,
and social imperialism, 107–108, 117, 189 n. 24
196 n. 19 and global influence of Salvation
and urban spectatorship, 108, 123– Army, 104
124, 128–130 and hegemonic imperialism, 17, 85,
and working-class domestic life, 117 104–106, 108
and working-class radicalism, 119, 121 and middle-class domestic life, 92–94,
and working-class resistance to 102, 191 n. 30
hegemonic imperialism, 7, 18, 126– and middle classes as possessing
128, 132, 200 n. 73 visual power, 17, 86, 92–97, 102,
and working classes as embodied, 108, 106
128–132, 139 and prostitution, 95–99
and working classes as manipulated by and racialist discourse, 19, 91, 189 n.
propaganda, 127 18
and working classes as mechanized, and Salvationist women, 98–100, 191
18, 108, 131–132, 134 n. 29
and working classes as possessing and social imperialism, 85–86, 90,
visual power, 123–124, 128, 139 104–106, 190 n. 26
Baden-Powell Scout Guild, 126 self-representation as visionary, 12,
Bailey, Peter, 193 n. 55, 202 n. 5 40, 93–97
Bailey, Victor, 104, 193 n. 54 and urban spectatorship, 93–95
Bazin, Nancy Topping, 207 n. 56 and working-class domestic life, 94–99
Beer, Gillian, 208 n. 70 and working-class resistance to
Benjamin, Walter, 33 hegemonic imperialism, 18, 104–
Bersani, Leo, 53–55, 77 106, 194 n. 64
Best, Geoffrey, 203 n. 9 and working classes as embodied, 102,
Bhabha, Homi K., 126 106
Binny, John, 47–48 and working classes as juvenile, 17,
Bivona, Daniel, 164 n. 4 92, 97–98, 106
Board schools, 67–68, 117, 136, 149– and working classes as lacking visual
150 power, 86, 94–97, 106
Boer War, Second (1899-1902), 6, 109, and working classes as manipulated by
112, 122, 125, 135–136, 139, 195 n. propaganda, 105–106
8, 196 n. 13 and working classes as physically
Booth, Allyson, 207 n. 58 mobile, 94, 100
Booth, Catherine, 98–100, 102, 192 n. Booth-Tucker, Emma, 193 n. 51
31 Booth-Tucker, Frederick, 193 n. 51
Booth, Charles, 105 Bosanquet, Helen, 70, 81–83, 179 n. 47
Booth, William, 85–106, 124, 129–130, Bourke, Joanna, 205 n. 27
157, 187 n. 1, 194 n. 61, 194 n. 65; Bourne, J. M., 151–152, 201 n. 3, 202 n.
see also Salvation Army 4, 206 n. 45
childhood of, 94–97, 189 n. 24 Boyd, Kelly, 181 n. 2
Index 227
Boys’ Brigade, 126, 136 and hegemonic imperialism, 6

Boy Scout organization (United publishing industry, 44–45, 52–53,
Kingdom), 4, 39, 137, 150–151, 199 63–65, 173 n. 7, 179 n. 46
n. 52; see also Baden-Powell, and war, 137, 140–141, 147, 160, 204
Robert n. 24, 206 n. 45
Boy Scouts of America, 200 n. 70 Childs, Donald J., 207 n. 55
Boys of England, 65, 70–72, 180 n. 1, Childs, Michael J., 200 n. 73
184 n. 34 Chrisman, Laura, 7–8, 188 n. 4
Boy’s Own Paper, 70–72, 182 n. 26, 183 Christ, Carol T., 167 n. 33
n. 27, 184 n. 34 Churchill, Seton, 136
Brabazon, Reginald, 89–90, 110–111, Churchill, Winston, 90, 205 n. 28
115–116, 206 n. 45 Church Lads’ Brigade, 126–127, 206 n.
Brantlinger, Patrick, 176 n. 23, 177 n. 45
31, 181 n. 10, 182 n. 12, 189 n. 21 Clarke, I. F., 195 n. 7
Bratton, J. S., 197 n. 24 Clover, Carol J., 177 n. 35
Bray, Reginald A., 114–116, 122 Cochrane, Charles, 35, 170 n. 19
Brett, Edwin J., 65–66, 70, 180 nn. 1–2, Collins, Wilkie, 177 n. 39
184 n. 34; see also Penny dreadfuls Colonialism, hegemonic, 5, 117–118,
Briggs, Asa, 175 n. 19 126, 199 n. 47; see also Imperial-
Bristow, Edward J., 190 n. 25 ism, hegemonic
Bristow, Joseph, 72, 77, 181 n. 2, 183 n. Colvill, Helen Hester, 10
27, 195 n. 4 Conrad, Joseph, 122–123, 128, 199 n. 60
Brontë sisters, 176 n. 31 Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866,
Brooks, Peter, 61 1869), 189 n. 25
Brown, Hannah, 174 n. 8 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 171 n. 24
Budd, Michael Anton, 204 n. 15 Courvoisier, François Benjamin, 43–44,
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 43–44, 48 49, 172 n. 1
Butler, Josephine, 100, 102, 190 n. 25, Cowling, Maurice, 181 n. 6
192 n. 31, 192 n. 40 Crary, Jonathan, 11, 33
Cunningham, Hugh, 4, 8, 164 n. 9, 179
C n. 44, 199 n. 48
Carlyle, Thomas, 29, 51–52, 56, 176 n.
23 D
Castle, Kathryn, 183 n. 26, 183 n. 30 David, Deirdre, 188 n. 5
Certeau, Michel de, 34 Davies, Gill, 163 n. 1
Chartism 45–53, 62–63, 74, 175 nn. 19– Degeneration theory, 17, 23, 85–96, 190
20, 175 n. 22, 176 n. 23, 179 n. 42, n. 26, 196 n. 13, 196 n. 16, 198 n.
179 n. 44 40
Chesney, George Tomkyns, 109–110, Denning, Michael, 178 n. 41
196 n. 12 Detective fiction, 109, 154
Childers, Erskine, 109 Dewey, P. E., 202 n. 4
Children’s literature, 9, 85–86, 178 n. 41, Dickens, Charles, 44, 169 n. 7, 176 n.
199 n. 62, 206 n. 45; see also 31, 189 n. 24
Baden-Powell, Robert; Haggard, H. Disraeli, Benjamin, 2–6, 8, 164 n. 4, 166
Rider; Henty, G. A.; Kipling, n. 19
Rudyard; Penny fiction; Stevenson, Donovan, Stephen, 106, 187 n. 1
Robert Louis Doyle, Arthur Conan, 154
and athleticism, 137, 140–141, 160 Drotner, Kirsten, 174 n. 9, 182 n. 26, 184
canon of, 81, 107 n. 34
228 Index
Dunae, Patrick A., 181 n. 2, 181 n. 7, and working-class resistance to

182 n. 26, 184 n. 34, 203 n. 9 hegemonic imperialism, 157–158
Duncan, Ian, 163 n. 1 and working classes as mechanized, 156
Dutoit, Ulysse, 53–55, 77 and working classes as possessing
Dyhouse, Carol, 197 n. 24 visual power, 157
Gilbert, Bentley B., 4
E Gilman, Sander L., 125
Edward VII, King, 149 Girl Guide organization (United
Egan, Pierce, Jr., 52, 176 n. 30 Kingdom), 197 n. 24, 199 n. 52
Elementary Education Act (1870), 67, Girl Scouts of America, 197 n. 24, 199 n.
181 n. 11 52
Eliot, George, 12, 182 n. 18 Girl’s Own Paper, 71, 182 n. 26, 184 n.
Emigration, 3, 11, 39–41, 69, 85–86, 89– 36
92, 154, 171 n. 24, 189 n. 21 Gissing, George, 105
Ervine, St. John, 189 n. 24 Goldthorpe, F. L., 151–152
Eugenics, 154, 192 n. 31, 196 n. 19, 207 Goodway, David, 175 n. 19
n. 55 Gordon, Colin, 168 n. 48
Gothic fiction, 44, 51, 65, 70, 87, 109
F Grahame, Kenneth, 123
Fabian socialism, 197 n. 19 Greenacre, James, 44, 174 n. 8
Fanon, Frantz, 117 Greenblatt, Stephen, 14
Field, H. John, 205 n. 31 Greenslade, William, 190 n. 26, 196 n.
Finch, Lynette, 171 n. 22 13, 206 n. 53
Fishwick, Nicholas, 202 n. 5 Grixti, Joseph, 172 n. 2
Flagg, James Montgomery, 205 n. 28 Guggisberg, Captain, 137–138, 150, 153
Forster, William Edward, 67
Foucault, Michel, 12, 14, 33, 168 n. 48, H
171 n. 25 Habermas, Jürgen, 53, 178 n. 41
Frost, Thomas, 45–46 Haggard, H. Rider, 110, 187 n. 57, 188
Fussell, Paul, 201 n. 1, 208 n. 67 nn. 4–5; see also Children’s
literature
G and adventure fiction, 86–88
Gagnier, Regenia, 12, 167 n. 36, 170 n. aesthetics of, 82
11, 172 n. 25 and degeneration theory, 86–88
Gallagher, Catherine, 169 n. 9, 170 and domestic servants, 86–88
n. 20 and hegemonic imperialism, 83, 85
Galton, Francis, 196 n. 19 and middle classes as possessing
Gaskell, Elizabeth, 176 n. 31 visual power, 88, 93
Gay, John, 43 and Salvation Army, 85, 87–89, 93,
Gibb, Spencer J., 160 98, 100, 102, 106
Gibbs, Philip, 155-58 and social imperialism, 86
aesthetics of, 156 and urban spectatorship, 88
and middle classes as embodied, 157 and violence, 82–83
and social imperialism, 156–158 and working classes as embodied, 88
and soldiers as mechanized, 156 Haley, Bruce, 203 n. 9
and working-class consciousness of Hall, Catherine, 181 n. 6
soldiers, 155–157 Hall, G. Stanley, 118, 199 n. 48
and working-class radicalism, 157 Hammond, Barbara, 175 n. 19
Index 229
Hammond, J. L., 175 n. 19 I

Haraway, Donna J., 93 Imperialism, hegemonic, 2, 6, 13–18, 83,
Hardesty, William H., III, 186 n. 49 104–106, 150, 183 n. 27, 183 n. 30;
Harmsworth, Alfred, 70, 147 see also Colonialism, hegemonic
Hassall, John, 199 n. 51 and athleticism, 134–136, 150, 154
Hebdige, Dick, 48 compared to social imperialism, 85–86
Hegemonic imperialism, see Imperial- contrasted with hegemonic colonial-
ism, hegemonic ism, 5, 117–118
Hemyng, Bracebridge, 48–49, 53–54, 57, defined, 5, 85
70 as diffusion of middle-class values,
Henderson, James, 70 24, 63, 66, 71, 108, 117
Hendrick, Harry, 9 and First World War, 133–134, 150–
Henley, W. E., 76 152
Henty, G. A., 4, 70, 72, 145, 147, 153, working-class resistance to, 7–8, 18,
187 n. 58, 204 n. 26, 206 n. 45; see 126, 150–152
also Children’s literature Imperialism, social, 101, 104–108, 117,
and athleticism, 140–141, 204 n. 24 153–156, 160, 190 n. 26, 206 nn.
and middle classes as possessing 53–54
visual power, 140–141 and athleticism, 134, 196 n. 19
and military commanders as disem- and class conflict, 9, 156–158
bodied, 148 compared to hegemonic imperialism,
and military commanders as visionar- 85–86
ies, 141, 149–150 defined, 5
and soldiers as embodied, 141 and degeneration theory, 89
and soldiers as mechanized, 149–150 and working classes as juvenile, 9
and working classes as embodied, Inglis, K. S., 104, 192 n. 38
140–141 Inter-Departmental Committee on
and working classes as lacking visual Physical Deterioration, 196 n. 13
power, 140–141 Invasion scare narrative, 108–110, 195 n.
and working classes as mechanized, 150 7
Herbert, Christopher, 23, 29, 32–33, 171
n. 25, 174 n. 14 J
Herbert, Sidney, 171 n. 24 Jackson, David H., 185 n. 46, 187 n. 54
Higginbotham, Ann R., 99 Jackson, Louise A., 191 n. 28
Higgonet, Margaret R., 207 n. 56 Jackson, Patrick, 181 n. 11
Hill, Octavia, 99, 192 n. 31 Jacobs, Edward, 180 n. 49
Historical fiction, 66, 71, 82–83, 185 n. Jacobus, Mary, 167 n. 33
43, 186 n. 51, 187 n. 54, 187 n. 58; Jaffe, Audre, 170 n. 12
see also Stevenson, Robert Louis James, Louis, 173 n. 7, 175 n. 17, 176 n.
Hitchman, Francis, 63, 67–68, 182 n. 18 30, 180 n. 2, 184 n. 34
Hollingsworth, Keith, 172 n. 1, 177 n. 31 Jameson, Fredric, 199 n. 60
Hopkins, Ellice, 190 n. 25, 192 n. 31 Jan-Mohamed, Abdul R., 5
Horn, Pamela, 4, 164 n. 2 Jeal, Tim, 197 n. 24
Hourihan, Margery, 82, 186 n. 50 Johns, B. G., 65, 70
Humpherys, Anne, 169 n. 7, 170 n. 11, Jones, Andrew, 181 n. 6
171 n. 21, 171 n. 24 Jones, David, 175 n. 19
Humphries, Stephen, 151, 203 n. 12, 206 Jordan, John O., 167 n. 33
n. 46 Joyce, Patrick, 63, 178 n. 41
230 Index
K M
Kalikoff, Beth, 177 n. 31 MacDonald, Robert H., 195 n. 8, 199 n.
Keep, C. J., 196 n. 12 62, 204 n. 15
Keller, Evelyn Fox, 167 n. 33 Mackay, Charles, 30
Kerr, Rose, 197 n. 24 MacKenzie, John M., 6, 127, 195 n. 8
Kevles, Daniel J., 197 n. 19 Macleod, David I., 199 n. 48, 200 n. 70,
Kingston, W. H. G., 72 204 n. 14
Kipling, Rudyard, 115, 152; see also Mangan, J. A., 135, 202 n. 7, 203 nn. 8–
Children’s literature 9
and Boy Scout organization, 107– Mann, David D., 186 n. 49
108 Marryat, Frederick, 69
and racialist discourse, 107, 195 n. 4 Marx, Karl, 13
and working-class radicalism, 119, Mason, Tony, 202 n. 5
121 Mass Observation, 126, 132
Kitchener, Horatio Herbert, 140–150, Masterman, Charles F. G., 6, 114, 166 n.
152, 157, 160, 205 n. 27 19
Knight, Charles, 49–50, 53 Maxwell, Richard, 170 n. 12
Korr, Charles P., 202 n. 5 Mayhew, Henry, 4, 19–43, 54, 70, 87,
Koven, Seth, 4-5, 197 n. 21 104, 130, 157, 163 n. 2, 168 nn. 1–
2, 169 nn. 6–7, 174 n. 14
L and Chartism, 50, 52, 175 n. 22
Lads’ Drill Association, 115 and degeneration theory, 23
Lamarck, Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine and domestic servants, 41–42, 172 n.
de Monet, 190 n. 26 27
Lauer, Laura, 192 n. 36 and emigration, 39–41, 171 n. 24
Lauter, Jane Hamovit, 207 n. 56 and middle-class domestic life,
Ledger, Sally, 192 n. 31 33–34
Leete, Alfred, 142, 205 n. 28 and middle classes as possessing
Leinster-Mackay, Donald, 202 n. 7, 203 visual power, 17, 20, 27–32, 40, 92
n. 9 and photography, 30–32
Lenin, V. I., 164 n. 7 and prostitution, 171 n. 24
Lentricchia, Frank, 14–16 and racialist discourse, 19–24, 26–27,
Levenback, Karen L., 207 n. 56 91
Lindsay, Vachel, 102 and ragged schools, 171 n. 21, 174 n.
Llewellyn Smith, H., 126 11
Lloyd, Edward, 44–45, 48, 52–53, 55, and Street Orderly Brigade, 35–37, 46,
63–65, 173 n. 7, 180 n. 49, 180 nn. 171 n. 22
1–2; see also Penny bloods and urban spectatorship, 27–28, 32–
Lombroso, Cesare, 52, 56, 79, 176 n. 28, 34, 93, 114, 171 n. 25, 172 n. 26
190 n. 26 and violence, 47–53, 59, 66
London, Jack, 149–150 and working-class domestic life, 34
London Sketch Club, 199 n. 51 and working-class literacy, 28, 47–48,
Lovett, William, 52 169 n. 7, 174 n. 11, 174 n. 13
Low, Gail Ching-Liang, 9, 187 n. 57, and working-class radicalism, 50, 52,
199 n. 62 175 n. 22
Low, Jeanette, 197 n. 24 and working classes as embodied, 17,
Lowe, Robert, 67, 181 n. 10 20, 27–32, 35, 38, 40, 46, 57, 76,
Loxley, Diana, 72–73, 83, 184 n. 34 170 n. 11
Index 231
and working classes as juvenile, 17, 20, O

25–28, 35, 42, 50, 76, 92, 169 n. 5 Ouditt, Sharon, 207 n. 56
and working classes as lacking visual Owen, Robert, 49
power, 27–32, 46, 76, 140, 184 n. 41 Owen, Wilfred, 133
and working classes as physically
mobile, 19–24, 29–39, 46–47, 94, P
100, 114, 169 n. 9, 170 n. 12, 170 n. Parker, Peter, 201 n. 1, 202 n. 7, 203 n.
20 9, 204 n. 15
and working classes as possessing Patmore, Coventry, 117
visual power, 28, 35–36, 40–42 Pearson, Charles H., 101
McCleary, G. F., 70 Pearson, Karl, 196 n. 19
McClelland, Keith, 181 n. 6 Pecora, Vincent P., 15–16
McClintock, Anne, 197 n. 24 Pelling, Henry, 8
McMillen, Margaret, 165 n. 12 Penny bloods, 4, 7, 43–64, 173 nn. 6–7,
Meath, Earl of, see Brabazon, Reginald 174 n. 13, 177 n. 31, 179 n. 46, 179
Middle classes n. 48, 180 n. 49
domestic life of, 33–34, 92–94, 102, aesthetics of, 55, 57, 62, 64, 77, 81,
117, 191 n. 30 178 n. 41, 179 n. 48
as embodied, 157 and Chartism, 49–53, 62–63, 74, 175
as possessing visual power, 1–2, 9, n. 20
11–20, 27–32, 40, 86, 88–89, 92– as children’s literature, 17, 45–46, 62–
97, 102, 106, 108, 132, 134, 137– 64, 174 n. 9, 180 n. 1
141, 148, 152–155, 160, 191 n. 30 and crime, 46–49, 59, 173 n. 3, 178 n.
Mill, James, 52 41, 183 n. 27
Mill, John Stuart, 10–11 distinguished from penny dreadfuls,
Miller, D. A., 177 n. 39 180 nn. 1–2
Milner, Alfred, 105 middle-class criticisms of, 17, 43–50,
Modernism, literary, 18, 123, 154–156, 52, 55, 59, 65–66, 173 n. 3, 178 n. 41
158, 207 n. 58 and nationalism, 53, 55–57, 59, 61–63
Moran, Robert, 136–137 popularity of, 44, 48, 173 n. 6, 174 n. 9
Morel, Bénédict Augustin, 190 n. 26 and racialist discourse, 56–57
Munich, Adrienne Auslander, 188 n. 5 serial publication of, 44, 52, 57, 81
Murdoch, Norman H., 105, 189 n. 24 and violence, 46–49, 52–64, 74, 77,
Murphy, Paul Thomas, 179 n. 48 81–82, 175 n. 16, 175 n. 20, 176 n.
30, 177 n. 31, 178 n. 41
N and working-class economic and
National Defense Association, 126 social mobility, 56–61, 74, 77
National Philanthropic Association, 35 and working-class intellectual
Nelson, Claudia, 187 n. 58 mobility, 46, 53–61
Nesbit, Edith, 123 and working-class literacy, 44–49, 53
Nevill, W. P., 133, 137, 201 n. 1 and working-class radicalism, 17, 48–
Newgate novel, 43–44, 47–48, 176 n. 31 53, 55–57, 62–64, 74, 81, 175 nn.
New historicist criticism, 14–16 16–17, 175 n. 20, 175 n. 22, 176 nn.
Newsagents’ Publishing Company, 65 30–31, 178 n. 41
Nord, Deborah Epstein, 189 n. 18, 191 n. and working classes as embodied, 46,
31 55–57
Northcliffe, Lord, see Harmsworth, and working classes as physically
Alfred mobile, 55–56
232 Index
Penny dreadfuls, 4, 65–72, 179 n. 46 Poovey, Mary, 13, 167 n. 43, 190 n. 27,
aesthetics of, 70, 81–82 201 n. 76
as children’s literature, 180 n. 1 Pratt, Mary Louise, 12
and crime, 66–67, 181 n. 7 Prest, Thomas, 179 n. 48
distinguished from penny bloods, 180 Price, L. S., 133
nn. 1–2 Price, Richard, 8
and gender of readers, 180 n. 1, 182 n. Primrose, Archibald Philip, 138
26 Prostitution, 48, 95–99, 171 n. 24, 189 n.
middle-class criticisms of, 17, 65–72, 25, 190 n. 27
81–82, 87, 110, 181 n. 7 Public schools, 71, 117, 130, 133, 135–
and violence, 81–82 137, 152, 202 n. 4, 203 n. 9
and working-class radicalism, 66, 68– Public-school story, 70–72, 117
69 Pure Literature Society, 71
Penny fiction; see Penny bloods; Penny
dreadfuls; Penny fictions, “improv- R
ing”; see also Children’s literature Racialist discourse, 19–24, 26–27, 56–
Penny fictions, “improving,” 65–83, 180 57, 91, 107, 114, 118–119, 122, 189
n. 2, 184 n. 36, 186 n. 50; see also n. 18, 195 n. 4, 196 n. 16
Stevenson, Robert Louis Radcliffe, Ann, 61
and adventure fiction, 65, 69–71 Ragged schools, 171 n. 21, 174 n. 11
and gender of readers, 71, 182 n. 26 Reader, W. J., 203 n. 9, 204 n. 24
and hegemonic imperialism, 17, 63, Realism, literary, 154
66, 71, 85–86, 183 n. 27, 183 n. 30 Recapitulation theory, 118–119, 199 n.
and historical fiction, 66, 71, 186 n. 48
51, 186 n. 54 Rediker, Marcus, 184 n. 42, 187 n. 55
serial publication of, 81, 185 n. 49, Reed, Daniel, 183 n. 27
186 n. 51 Reed, Henry, 148
and violence, 63, 186 nn. 49–50 Reform Act, Second (1867), 2–3, 9, 24,
and working-class literacy, 67–69, 182 66–67, 87–88, 110, 164 n. 5, 179 n.
n. 12 42, 181 n. 6, 182 n. 12, 182 n. 18
and working-class radicalism, 63, 66, Reform Act, Third (1884), 9, 67, 76, 87–
68–69, 185 n. 44 88, 104, 110, 164 n. 5, 179 n. 42,
and working-class resistance to 181 n. 6, 182 n. 12
hegemonic imperialism, 71, 184 n. Religious Tract Society, 70–71, 182 n.
34 26, 184 n. 36
and working classes as juvenile, 76, Rendall, Jane, 181 n. 6
185 n. 46 Resnais, Alain, 54
and working classes as lacking visual Reynolds, E. E., 200 n. 67
power, 76, 184 n. 41 Reynolds, G. W. M., 44, 48, 175 n. 17,
Phillips, Kathy J., 207 n. 56 180 n. 49
Photography, 11, 30–32 Reynolds, Kimberley, 182 n. 26
Pick, Daniel, 190 n. 26, 195 n. 7, 201 n. Rhodes, Cecil, 3–6, 11–12, 106, 163 n.
2, 205 n. 40 2, 164 nn. 6–7
Pierce, Jason A., 186 n. 51 Rich, Eric E., 181 n. 11
Plotz, Judith, 165 n. 12 Richards, Jeffrey, 181 n. 2, 204 n. 26
Pluck, 70–71 Richards, Thomas, 5, 195 n. 7
Polidori, John, 51, 176 n. 23 Roberts, Frederick, 149
Poor Law Amendment Act (1835), 9 Roberts, Lord, see Roberts, Frederick
Index 233
Roberts, Robert, 105, 127–128, 163 n. 2, Shore, Miles F., 164 n. 6

193 n. 55 Shuttleworth, Sally, 167 n. 33
Rohmer, Sax, 109 Sillitoe, Alan, 127
Rose, Jacqueline, 203 n. 12 Simkins, Peter, 205 n. 30
Rosebery, Lord, see Primrose, Archibald Smiles, Samuel, 184 n. 34, 204 n. 26
Philip Smith, Adam, 167 n. 43
Rosenthal, Michael, 127, 195 n. 8 Smith, F. B., 181 n. 6
Rotberg, Robert I., 164 n. 6 Smith, Helen R., 180 n. 1
Royal Commission on Secondary Smith, Samuel, 90–91
Education, 164 n. 2 Smith, William Alexander, 136
Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, 137 Social imperialism, see Imperialism,
Royal Military College, Sandhurst, 137 social
Rugby (public school), 206 n. 54 Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Ruskin, John, 11 Knowledge, 49
Russell, Dean, 200 n. 62 Soloway, Richard, 114
Russell, Lord William, 43, 50 Somme, Battle of (1916), 133
Spence, Clark C., 194 n. 65
S Springhall, John O., 65, 71, 126, 180 nn.
Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, 54 1–2, 181 n. 7, 199 n. 48, 199 n. 54,
Said, Edward W., 7 206 n. 45
Salisbury, Lord, see Talbot, Robert Spy fiction, 109
Arthur Stallybrass, Peter, 12, 129
Salmon, Edward, 68–69, 182 n. 18, 182 Stanley, Henry Morton, 19, 93
n. 26 Stead, W. T., 105, 194 n. 61
Salvation Army, 17, 191 n. 28, 192 n. 36, Stearn, Roger T., 205 n. 31
192 n. 38, 193 n. 51, 193 n. 54; see Stedman Jones, Gareth, 8, 89, 179 n. 44,
also Booth, William 188 n. 9, 194 n. 64
Sandison, Alan, 74, 185 n. 44 Steedman, Carolyn, 165 n. 12, 191 n. 27
Sassoon, Siegfried, 133 Steevens, G. W. 147–150, 205 n. 31, 205,
Saville, John, 175 n. 19 n. 40
Scally, Robert J., 8 and middle classes as possessing
Scarry, Elaine, 13 visual power, 148
Schofield, R. S., 164 n. 9 and military commanders as disem-
Scientific romance, 109, 112 bodied, 147
Scott, Walter, 69 and military commanders as visionar-
Searle, G. R., 196 n. 13 ies, 147–149
Seditious Publications Act (1819), 176 n. and soldiers as embodied, 148–149
30 and soldiers as mechanized, 148–149
Seltzer, Mark, 131, 171 n. 25 and working classes as embodied, 148
Semmel, Bernard, 5, 86 and working classes as mechanized,
Servants, domestic, 41–42, 72, 76, 86– 148
88, 172 n. 27, 184 n. 34 Stendhal [Henri Beyle], 54
Shaftesbury, Lord, see Cooper, Anthony Stevenson, John, 175 n. 19
Ashley Stevenson, Robert Louis, 4, 17, 63, 66–
Shearman, Montague, 135–136 67, 70, 72–83, 185 n. 43, 187 n. 57;
Shee, George F., 139 see also Children’s literature; Penny
Shelley, Mary, 176 n. 23 fictions, “improving”
Sherbrooke, Lord, see Lowe, Robert and adventure fiction, 82–83
234 Index
Stevenson, Robert Louis (continued) Victoria, Queen, 87, 134, 188 n. 5

aesthetics of, 77, 81, 186 n. 51 Vincent, David, 173 n. 7, 175 n. 16, 179
and domestic servants, 76 n. 48
and historical fiction, 82–83, 185 n.
43, 186 n. 51, 187 n. 54, 187 n. 58 W
and violence, 74–83, 186 nn. 49–50 Waites, Bernard, 164 n. 2
and working-class economic and Walker, Pamela J., 98–99, 106, 189 n.
social mobility, 73–77 18, 189 n. 24, 191 n. 29, 192 n. 38,
and working-class intellectual 193 n. 49, 194 n. 64
mobility, 74–76 Walkowitz, Judith R., 98–99, 189 n. 25,
and working-class radicalism, 73–78, 192 n. 38
81–83, 184 nn. 41–42, 185 nn. 43– Walvin, James, 202 n. 5, 202 n. 7
44 Ward, J. T., 175 nn. 19–20
and working classes as embodied, 76 Ward, Mrs. Humphrey, 115–116
and working classes as juvenile, 76– Warren, Allen, 197 n. 24, 199 n. 47
77, 185 n. 46 Webb, Beatrice, 99, 102, 157, 191 n. 31
and working classes as lacking visual Webb, R. K., 173 n. 7
power, 76–77 Wells, H. G., 112–113, 115
and working classes as physically White, Allon, 12, 129
mobile, 76–77 White, Arnold, 91
Stoker, Bram, 51, 56, 109 Williams, Patrick, 195 n. 4
Street Orderly Brigade, 35–37, 46, 170 Winchester (public school), 136
nn. 19–20, 171 n. 22 Winter, James, 170 n. 19
Sue, Eugène, 172 n. 1 Winter, J. M., 205 n. 30
Wodehouse, P. G., 108
T Wolf Cub Scouts, 118–119, 199 n. 52
Talbot, Robert Arthur, 71 Wolff, Janet, 98, 191 n. 30
Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 160 Wolffe, John, 194 n. 64
Teachers’ Labour League, 126–127 Wood, Naomi J., 184 n. 41, 185 n. 43
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 54, 173 Woolf, Virginia, 134, 153–160, 207 n. 56
n. 3, 176 n. 31 aesthetics of, 154–158, 207 n. 58, 208
Thomas, Brook, 16 n. 70
Thompson, Dorothy, 175 n. 19 and athleticism, 153–154, 160, 206 n.
Thompson, E. P., 63, 168 n. 1, 171 n. 21, 51, 206 n. 54
171 n. 24, 175 n. 22 and critique of middle classes, 153–
Tolen, Rachel J., 193 n. 51 155
Trollope, Anthony, 176 n. 31 and emigration, 154
Troppmann, Jean-Baptiste, 172 n. 1 and eugenics, 154, 207 n. 55
and hegemonic imperialism, 154
U and masculinity, 153
Union Jack, 72 and middle classes as possessing
Universities Camps for Public School- visual power, 154–155, 160
boys organization, 136 and social imperialism, 153–156, 160,
Usui, Masami, 207 n. 56 206 nn. 53–54
and soldiers as embodied, 160
V and working-class consciousness, 156
Veitch, Colin, 139, 201 n. 1, 202 n. 5 and working classes as embodied,
Vicinus, Martha, 177 n. 31 153–154, 160
Index 235
and working classes as mechanized, resistance to hegemonic imperialism of,

160 7–8, 15, 18, 71, 104–106, 126–128,
and working classes as possessing 132, 151–152, 157–158, 194 n. 64,
visual power, 158 200 n. 73
Working classes World War, First (1914–1918), 6–7, 132–
domestic life of, 34, 94–99, 117, 189 160, 201 nn. 2–3, 202 nn. 4–5, 205
n. 25, 191 n. 30 n. 27, 206 n. 54, 207 n. 56
economic and social mobility of, 56– and conscription, 134, 141–142, 151
61, 73–77 and hegemonic imperialism, 134, 150,
as embodied, 1–2, 9, 11–18, 20, 27–32, 154
35, 38, 40, 46, 55–57, 76, 88, 102, and masculinity, 133, 145, 153
106, 108, 128–132, 134–141, 148, and middle classes as possessing
152–154, 160, 170 n. 11 visual power, 18, 134, 153
and First World War enlistment, 134, and military commanders as disem-
145–146, 150–151, 202 n. 4, 205 n. bodied, 142, 147
30, 206 nn. 45–46 and military commanders as visionar-
intellectual mobility of, 46, 53–61, ies, 134, 141–142, 145, 147
74–76 poets of, 133
as juvenile, 1, 9–11, 14, 16–17, 20, 25– recruiting materials, 4, 18, 134, 140–
28, 35, 42, 50, 76–77, 92, 97–98, 147, 149–153, 205 n. 28, 206 n. 46
106, 169 n. 5, 181 n. 10, 185 n. 46 and social imperialism, 156–158
as lacking visual power, 13, 16, 27– and soldiers as embodied, 18, 134,
32, 46, 76, 86, 88, 94–97, 106, 140– 145, 147, 153–156, 158, 160, 207 n.
141, 184 n. 41 58
literacy of, 28, 44–49, 53, 67–68, 169 n. and soldiers as mechanized, 134, 156,
7, 173 n. 7, 174 n. 11, 174 n. 13, 160, 205 n. 40
176 n. 23, 179 n. 48, 180 n. 49, 182 and working-class enlistment, 134,
n. 12 145–146, 150–151, 202 n. 4, 205 n.
as manipulated by propaganda, 6, 30, 206 nn. 45–46
105–106, 127, 150 and working classes as embodied,
as mechanized, 1, 14, 18, 108, 131– 134, 153, 160
132, 134, 138, 148–150, 156, 160 World War, Second (1939–1945), 148,
as physically mobile, 19–24, 29–39, 46– 205 n. 28
47, 55–56, 76–77, 94, 100, 114– Wright, Thomas, 67–69, 182 n. 18
115, 169 n. 9, 170 n. 12, 170 n. 20 Wrigley, E. A., 164 n. 9
as possessing visual power, 28, 35–36, Wussow, Helen, 206 n. 51
40–42, 123–124, 128, 139, 157–158
radicalism of, 10, 17, 48–53, 55–57, 62– Y
64, 66, 68–69, 73–78, 81–83, 119, Yeo, Eileen, 39, 168 n. 1
121, 157, 175 nn. 16–17, 175 n. 22, Young Folks, 67, 70–71, 81, 185 n. 49,
176 nn. 30–31, 178 n. 41, 184 nn. 186 n. 51
41–42, 185 nn. 43–44; see also Young Men’s Christian Association, 137,
Chartism 203 n. 14
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Youth of

Published in Great Britain by

Copyright © 2005 by Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 0-203-99721-2 Master e-book ISBN

Series Editor’s Foreword ix

Chapter 1 Henry Mayhew’s Children of the Streets 19

Chapter 2 Class, Violence, and Mid-Victorian Penny Fiction:

Chapter 3 Improving Penny Fiction:

Chapter 4 Remaking Lawless Lads and Licentious Girls:

Chapter 5 The Boy Scouts and the Working Classes 107

Chapter 6 Patriot Games:

Dedicated to furthering original research in children’s literature and culture,

Figure 1 “Photographic Saloon, East End of London.” From Henry Mayhew,

This book examines the representation of English working-class children

discourses on gender and race, as well as in discourses on youth, and class. I

Not all of Disraeli’s contemporaries were so sanguine—many among

Rhodes appears to treat the incorporation of the working classes into

on texts for and about young people: Henry Mayhew’s anthropological

Although Youth of Darkest England examines the attempt to establish

It is perhaps embarrassing that sectors of the metropolitan cultures that

“metropolitan dissent was theoretically possible and actually practised. The

In social-imperialist texts, such representations of the working classes

the vote to a supposedly undisciplined class. For instance, Helen Hester

Long ago it occurred to me that most of the arguments in support of the

Lest the now-obscure Colvill be seen as a lone eccentric, John Stuart

to be synonymous with subjectivity, intellect, and the metaphysical. So-

In a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the separate worlds of mind and body,

The particular usefulness of this representation to social-imperialist

might seem politically innocent, as such metaphors are a common way of

In the texts that I examine in Youth of Darkest England, imperialist goals

since everything is always already “representation,” representation is where

In general, Youth of Darkest England shares with works broadly desig-

youth organization, the Boy Scouts, is profoundly contradictory, celebrating

and similarly negative influences associated with the development of the

from the industrious, provident, and civilized portion of the community.

defiant, unpatriotic apathy: “it’s nothing to me who’s king or who’s queen. It

Which “others” should undertake this education of poor children is an

the natives of the streets—the tribe indigenous to the paving-stones—

Such moments confirm Christopher Herbert’s claim that Mayhew—

If “the State, or society”—here constituted by “the rich” and “those

In turn, Mayhew describes his interview with a fourteen-year-old cross-

Although the spectacle of the prematurely aged working-class child

Throughout London Labour, Mayhew employs a representational tactic that

Indeed, Mayhew notes, one sewerman’s eyes “have assumed a peering

It was, in one sense, as if a mighty microscope were applied to the festers,

Described as a microscope and a camera, Mayhew’s writings are com-

Significantly, while they are having their photographs taken—a lengthy

By selling his reportage to middle-class readers, Mayhew seeks to ex-

In London Labour, the middle-class observer of the metropolis is repre-

to each day (indeed, the presence of ex-convict interviewees in his home,

The innate “love of a roving life” . . . appears to be accompanied

By refusing all “law or government,” the roving street-person gives up

a girl has once grown accustomed to a street-life, it is almost impossible

Here Mayhew reiterates the juvenile origins of such wandering ten-

is also the watchman of house-property and shop-goods . . . the experienced

Here, as in most of the engravings in the book, the working-class body is

Although, page by page, London Labour focuses on England’s domestic

appropriate this power in order to observe their “betters.” This possibility is

After the Christmas holidays up to March we have generally little to do,

Moreover, as the craftsman notes, many members of the working classes