ABSTRACT
It is frequently assumed that adolescent fi ction either ignores boys’ sexuality or hints at it in darkly censorious tones. Henty claimed that after receiving “a very indignant letter from a dissenting minister” when a twelve-year-old boy kissed a girl of eleven, he vowed to “never touch a love interest” (qtd. in Arnold 10). In contrast, George Orwell points out,
In the ’nineties The Boys’ Own Paper . . . used to have its correspondence columns full of terrifying warnings against masturbation, and books like St Winifred’s and Tom Brown’s Schooldays were heavy with homosexual feeling, though no doubt the authors were not fully aware of it. (93)
Orwell is certainly right about the “guilty sex-ridden atmosphere” of some of the novels and magazines. In the BOP the following reply to an “Anxious Youth” was quite typical:
Be pure in thought and deed, or everything else will fail. Try a teaspoon of Fellow’s syrup in water. It is constantly employed as a tonic by medical men. Take it twice a day after breakfast. Take a cold bath in the morning and cold local douches frequently. Moderate exercise. Hard bed. (1891: 160)
But there are quite a few “anxious” youths in the correspondence columns who may not have committed any sexual vice and cold baths and exercise were the standard remedy for just about every malady in which a visit to the doctor was not advised. In terms of genre, school stories evoke such guilt far more strongly than the Robinsonades and adventures stories, presumably because much of their action takes place indoors. The most blood-curdling reference to illicit sexuality is in Erik, or Little by Little, the fi rst major school story after Tom
Brown’s School Days, where Frederic W. Farrar refers to Kibroth-Hattavaah, the place in the Book of Numbers where those who suffered “that burning marl of passion . . . found nothing but shame and ruin, polluted affections and an early grave” (94). Jonathon Gathorne-Hardy argues that this reference must be to the specifi c vice of masturbation (88), which is surely right given that these “shadows” warn the “boy who reads this page . . . by the waving of their wasted hands” (86). For all its Gothic hysteria, however, this is the only allusion to such a vice in the novel.
