ABSTRACT
Discipline is a perennial concern on the educational agenda. Those who are harrowed by reports of playground and classroom violence are sometimes tempted to imagine a time in the past, usually vaguely Victorian, when attentive children sat in neat rows reciting times-tables in unison. The Victorians, however, seem to have viewed the behavior of the younger members of their society as anything but idyllic and devoted huge amounts of time and space to debating how to solve disciplinary problems. In this chapter, I will discuss the way in which the idea of youth figured in the debate on discipline in the periodical press and in public school stories during the second half of the nineteenth century. I will show not only how the genre promoted new ideas of progressive discipline among the upper classes, but also how it was used, in some cases, to promote a broader idea of social discipline and political quietism among the lower classes. A key event for juvenile discipline at this time was the infamous R v. Hopley case of 1860, which involved a schoolteacher who had killed a boy while caning him. The Hopley case not only sparked a significant response from educationalists anxious to discuss the idea of ‘reasonable’ discipline, but also established the legal concept of ‘moderate and reasonable’ chastisement for minors which stands to the present day. Here, I will concentrate mainly on works that appeared in the decade before and the two decades following the Hopley case and I will discuss the climate of debate surrounding the judgment. The immediate aftermath of Hopley saw a minor outpouring of fiction that opposed corporal punishment and attempted to offer suggestions as to how alternative methods might work. I have focused on these because the revulsion towards corporal punishment that followed on the Hopley case seems to have opened up an opportunity for thinking about adolescence and discipline in new ways. This reforming zeal, however, seems to have died down somewhat by the end of the century, and I have provided some examples (for instance, C.J. Mansford’s Bully, Fag and Hero of 1896) in a discussion of how a backlash against progressive ideas occurred.
