Our modern images of youth and adolescence were essentially the creations of the Victorian middle class. Although most of the essential elements had been in existence well before then, it was not until the 1850’s that they began to coalesce around the familiar themes of separation and dependence. In common with several other strands of Victorian ideology, the emerging ethos of youth was forged in the ‘new’ public schools and publicised in the flood of magazines and novels which followed the successful launching of Boys’ Own Magazine in 1855, and the appearance of Tom Brown’s Schooldays a year later. At first this new definition of youth was confined to the offspring of the middle classes. In successive decades however, it was increasingly detached from this original social base and generalised into a description of a universal stage of individual maturation, so that by the turn of the century the social norms of the middle class had become enshrined as the ‘natural’ attributes of youth per se.1 From the outset, this image of youth carried a peculiarly powerful cultural charge and was intimately bound up with the hopes and fears of a middle class struggling to hold its own against threats both at home and abroad.