Empire Boys: Defining Masculinity at the Fin de Siècle
State Sponsored Education
Along with upper-class anxiety about increasing literacy was the uncertain outlook of the Empire itself, particularly in regards to the role that its future leaders (the Victorian schoolboy and his cohorts) would play. As a result, patriotism was used in the early educational system as a means of disciplinary control. Bristow remarks that the new nationalism “stood at the apex of a hierarchy of interconnected loyalties—to one’s house, one’s school, and one’s country” (69). The primacy of Britain in the global community caused curriculum changes that emphasized the subjects of history and geography in the classroom, in addition to the rudimentary “three R’s.” Outside of the schoolyard, organizations such as the scouts also supported militaristic values. This type of propagandized indoctrination was not without its critics, however, as liberal proponents of education reform typically did not support the conservative colonialist model. In his 1902 essay Imperialism, J.A. Hobson wrote:To capture the childhood of the country, to mechanize its free play into the routine of military drill, to cultivate the savage survivals of combativeness…to feed the always overweening pride of race at an age when self-confidence most commonly prevails, and by necessary implication to disparage other nations…to fasten this base insularity of mind and morals upon the little children of a nation and to call it patriotism is as foul an abuse of education as it is possible to conceive. (Bristow 68)
The implication of Hobson’s argument is that Victorian school administrators were merely training a class of model British subjects as opposed to free-thinkers. The son of a British army officer, E.J. Brett furthered this contested brand of patriotism in his magazines, either because he was a moderate himself (though he had earlier been a Chartist) or because he identified both the imaginary possibilities and increased importance of imperialist fiction. Amid the social anxieties of the fin de siècle
, the new class of educated, shiftless working boys that consumed Brett’s papers had no certain future. By making the boy into “an aggrandized subject—British born and bred—with the future of the world lying upon his shoulders” (Bristow 19), the publisher avoided disruption of the social hierarchy. His adventure fantasies allowed for ambitious dreams of wealth and excitement that might not be realistically fulfilled—but there was no harm in proffering a fictitious world that emphasized duty, honor and self-improvement. - next