ABSTRACT
This book examines the representation of English working-class children and adolescents, the youthful inhabitants of the poor urban neighborhoods that a number of writers dubbed “darkest England,” in Victorian and Edwardian imperialist literature. 1 In particular, I focus on imperialist writings that undertook an ideological project with broad appeal among the middle classes 2 : in order to increase the security of the British Empire—and to eradicate the urban class conflict that troubled its symbolic “heart,” England—many writers in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth argued for the desirability of integrating working-class youth into the British imperial enterprise. By examining this ideological project, Youth of Darkest England seeks, in part, to contribute an account of the interrelation between imperialist discourses on nation and metropolitan discourses on class: this book shows that the production of a new working-class youth identity is at the center of attempts to unify the nation in Victorian and Edwardian England. Youth of Darkest England argues that this project to enlist working-class youth in imperial activities relies on a strategic contradiction: what initially seems a unifying proposition (we are all members of the same nation and empire, regardless of class) operates in concert with two rhetorical tactics that seek to reinforce the existing class divisions. The first of these rhetorical tactics involves asserting a parallel between the working classes and youth. This parallel has powerful conservative implications; depicting the working classes in juvenile terms is often a justification for paternalistic control of the poor by the middle classes. This tactic has to do not only with the construction of working-class people but also with the construction of youth. It is deeply involved in the central Victorian and Edwardian project of offering supposedly new destinies for young people particularly the children of the poor. The representation of middle-class “pedagogical” relations with a working-class population imagined as juvenile is buttressed by the second rhetorical tactic common in the writings I examine: a consistent representation of the middle classes in terms of visionary subjectivity and the working classes in terms of an increasingly mechanized physicality. In Western culture, this separation between vision and body has frequently been invoked in order to distinguish between greater and lesser qualification for social power—for instance, in discourses on gender and race, as well as in discourses on youth, and class. I argue that the very intransigence of these two representational tactics reveals the insufficiency of imperialism as a force capable of uniting the classes in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century English culture. Among my overarching goals of this book is to offer a critique of the now-common place view that imperialism achieved hegemonic status in late-Victorian and Edwardian England. In spite of the tremendous national resources devoted to maintaining and extending imperial projects during this period, and in spite of the fact that certain working-class people did, at home and abroad, contribute to that effort, my book argues for the political importance of examining the reception, as well as the production, of dominant discourses, the instances where they proved ineffective, and the resistance to them on the part of working-class populations, manifested partly as a refusal to accept opportunities for nationalist identification.
