ABSTRACT
A middle-class boy awkward among the rural aristocracy, torn between the commands of his betters and his emerging moral consciousness, he holds on to old decorum like a life raft. Young Leo’s words sum up the sensibilities of a boy at the turn of the last century: a boy schooled as much on the cricket pitch as in the classroom, reared as much on the adventures of G. A. Henty as on the epics of Homer, as fluent in Tom Brown as he was in Tacitus. Life was a game that needed to be played by custom and in costume. The Fin De Siècle, therefore, stands not just as a golden age of children’s literature but as a golden age for children’s literature. The power of Verne’s book – and its appeal to generations of young boys – lies so much in the drama of its plot but in the detail of its recipes.
