ABSTRACT
Rudyard Kipling provided a memorable summary of idealized qualities for those destined for positions of military or civil leadership in the far-flung British Empire. The poem ‘If-’ is fluid, rhythmic and neatly rhymed, easy for schoolboys to commit to memory. Such idealized notions of masculinity were inculcated during the imperial period not only through formal education and training, but also through reading and leisure activities. My focus in this chapter is the entertaining light literature to be found in such annuals as the Empire Annual for Boys 1909-19 and story collections of the same genre. These were published at Christmas and intended as lively, but morally instructive, reading for boys attending public schools, where ‘manliness’, sportsmanship and the team spirit, upright conduct and a horror of effeminate behaviour were lauded. Many of these young men were destined for service in the Empire as army officers or government administrators; numbers of them already had fathers or uncles serving abroad. There are many tales which have as heroes young men holidaying with relatives in various parts of the Empire before going up to Oxford or Cambridge. The clubbable, ‘old-school-tie’, Officers’ Mess world is the background for many stories in these annuals and adventure tales; it is definitely the ethos of the genre. In these tales, the emphasis is on the masculine values of the late Victorian
period and the early years of the twentieth century; a time when, as Gilmore has put it, ‘manhood was an artificial product coaxed by austere training and testing’ (1990: 18). As elsewhere, ‘manhood’ was defined in terms of the received notions of the social environment and the age. To achieve it boys underwent rites of passage which separated them from home and the familiar, most particularly from their
mothers’ care and influence. They passed into the charge of men unrelated to them, and were to suffer the dominance of older boys with authority over them. They were expected to stand on their own feet until the time came for them to exercise authority and power in their turn. The aim was to make ‘big men of little boys’, as the Boy Scout manuals of the day put it. Often actual tests of courage, judgement and initiative were included in these rituals; similar trials appear in Empire Annual stories: a boy may have to stand up to the school bully, or, better still, rescue that unpleasant character from a dangerous situation, the boy thus proving not only his bravery but his mature generosity of spirit as well. The club, the regimental dinner, the boarding school were worlds which
women either did not enter except by special invitation, or were only tolerated in out of necessity as school matrons, maids, cleaners and kitchen staff. Likewise, in these boys’ stories, women characters seldom play a part.1 If they do appear, their roles are circumscribed and used to help to define the hero as bold, honourable and considerate of those weaker than himself – all qualities considered worthy of emulation. For example, women may provide an excuse for a brave rescue by being kidnapped by wild tribesmen or carried away by a swift-flowing river. Arthur Mee, editor of the New Children’s Encyclopedia, indicates that women operate through their influence on men, but not as direct initiators of action; they have ‘great power to stir men to glorious things’, they act as the ‘gentler soul’ at the side of great men; and their ‘greatest pride is to be womanly, not manly’ and to ‘have nothing to do with…girls who would be men’, as ‘the manners of men are not for girls to put on’ (Mee 1913b: 749-50). A woman retains respect only if she accepts circumscription of opportunity and
development; when in the Empire overseas, she takes her boundaries with her, for even there her governance is limited to her domestic circle and those who move within it. Stoler (1991) has noted that those women who went to live in the colonies during this period were subject to greater restrictions on their activities than those who stayed in England. They were to be kept away from natural dangers, as well as close contacts with the indigenous peoples, lest understanding and appreciation of local mores lead to the horror of ‘going native’, bad enough in the case of men, but for women unthinkable. The peripheral role of women in the adventure tales highlights the fact that their involvement in the dangerous situations described would be unlikely, even improper, in real life. Moreover, in the stories, participation of a decisive, outcome-determining type is rare for the subjects of imperial rule in colonial countries. Both were expected to be under ‘mature’ governance, for their own welfare. Women, members of the lower classes, and ‘natives’: all may offer excuses for action but they are almost incidental to its outcome. To be moulded into this imperial masculinity, boys either entered the highly
structured, all-male, boarding-school environment or were presented with idealized views of such institutions through ‘ripping yarns’. Those boys being prepared for entry to public schools were likely to have moved already beyond the governess’s schoolroom, where their sisters and younger brothers attended classes, to the transitional phase of instruction by a tutor. This move signalled a young man’s entry
into male company, with its associated interests, choices of career and means of advancement in the world. At entry to boarding school new loyalties and points of pride – friendship, school, sports team – were generated, preparing boys for later, greater loyalties to regiment, nation and empire. Readership of ‘ripping yarns’ extended to boys from a variety of backgrounds, a positive and beguiling image of the public-school code, presenting the virtues of a class whose position of undeniable power and privilege was, so these books imply, derived from adherence to its ideals.2 Three images stand out in this literature as providing appropriate role models for the shaping of imperial masculinity: the sporting boy, the all-white boy and, above all, the Christian boy.
