Jenny Holt. Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. ISBN: 978075465662-3. Price: US$99.95/£55.00

Rooted in the elite boarding school (“public school”) culture of Victorian England, the school story is a branch of children’s literature that flourished in the latter half of the nineteenth century and has evolved and persisted in the century-and-a-half since Thomas Hughes published Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). As Jenny Holt points out in the first chapter of her study of this genre, Victorian boys’ school stories such as Hughes’s and F. W. Farrar’s equally popular Eric: Or, Little By Little (1858) remained in print well into the twentieth century, when they were supplemented by stories (often more comic or more formulaic) aimed specifically at working- and lower-middle-class readers, such as Frank Richards’s Billy Bunter series, and at middle- and upper-class girls, as in the series by the popular and prolific writers Angela Brazil and Enid Blyton. With all these variations included, the English school story has demonstrated not only temporal but also geographical reach. I can remember (as an American elementary school student) being fascinated by the jolly-hockey-sticks universe of Blyton’s Mallory Towers and Saint Clare’s series in freshly published paperbacks as late as the 1970s, while postcolonial authors from the Trinidadian CLR James to the Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga have reflected on the complexity of encountering these stories’ celebrations of English liberty as young subjects of English imperial regimes. In Public School Literature, Holt surveys a range of Victorian school stories, from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which redirected earlier, didactic tales by female authors such as Maria Edgeworth and Harriet Martineau toward a more ambivalent, male-authored exploration of masculine development, to Kipling’s Stalky & Co (1899), which veers close to an outright rejection of adult masculinity and the establishment it supports. Across this period, as Holt demonstrates, “public school stories . . . grew out of an incredibly complex mixture of motivations, and often had multiple, contradictory aims” (23), including nostalgia (most of the authors of public school stories were themselves public school graduates), ambitions for reform (of practices and traditions such as flogging, fisticuffs, and “fagging,” the practice of requiring younger students to wait upon the eldest), and skepticism about the educability and morality of adolescent boys. In her first, introductory, chapter, Holt discusses the development of the then-new concept of adolescence as a distinct and formative life-stage, in definitions of which religious, physiological, psychological and political models and concerns contended. For Holt, it is the representation of political ideology that forms the most significant thread of the public school story, which purported to portray the adolescence—which is to say, the formative conditions—of the nation’s governing class. The aim of her project is to analyze public school novels as models or allegories for the civic participation of the future leaders who are their adolescent protagonists. As Holt points out, “far from displaying a unitary view of youth and its place in society the public school genre is fraught with a whole array of political contradictions, many of them resulting from conflicting attitudes towards the role of young people as emergent citizens” (17). Her study attempts to capture the range of these conflicting attitudes in an equally broad range of public school stories. The second chapter, on Tom Brown’s Schooldays, presents by far the most optimistic vision of adolescent male development, in what is (perhaps not coincidentally) still the best-known of Holt’s examples. Though the novel portrays routine bullying, schoolboy rebellion, and oppressively narrow standards of masculinity, Hughes’s narrative suggests that “boy and nation [can] develop together” toward an ideal of (paternalistically administered) social justice (82). By contrast, the following chapter discusses F. W. Farrar’s equally popular novel …