Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction

George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope

Alice Crossley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781472445575
• eBook ISBN: 9781317102120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Focusing on works by George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, Alice Crossley examines the emergence of adolescence in the mid-Victorian period as a distinct form of experience. Adolescence, Crossley shows, appears as a discrete category of identity that draws on but is nonetheless distinguishable from other masculine types. Important more as a stage of psychological awareness and maturation than as a period of biological youth, Crossley argues that the plasticity of male adolescence provides Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope with opportunities for self-reflection and social criticism while also working as a paradigm for narrative and imaginative inquiry about motivation, egotism, emotional and physical relationships, and the possibilities of self-creation. Adolescence emerges as a crucial stage of individual growth, adopted by these authors in order to reflect more fully on cultural and personal anxieties about manliness. The centrality of male youth in these authors' novels, Crossley demonstrates, repositions age-consciousness as an integral part of nineteenth-century debates about masculine heterogeneity.

1 Introduction

The fluidity of adolescent identity, which itself could be viewed with anxiety or even outright suspicion in mid-Victorian society, creates fascinating and informative tensions within the novels of George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope. In their fiction there is often a struggle to reconcile the transitional aspects of male adolescence with more crystallised ideals of Victorian manhood. The focus of each author on male adolescence as a transient, formative stage of development on the one hand, but as a separate masculine type or identity with its own characteristics on the other (often simultaneously), has as yet received limited critical attention despite its prominence and recurrence in their fiction. This has led to a tendency to distortion of perspectives on identity and self-presentation, sexual consciousness, and the discussion of manliness in their work. Through detailed analysis of a range of the novels written by each author, this volume establishes such issues as significant elements of their work, to suggest that each aspect is mutually constituted and as such forms part of a wider discourse about the cultural value invested in male adolescence. In doing so, Meredith, Thackeray and Trollope participate in the increasing recognition of various forms of experience which arise specifically from this period of individual development, or discrete marker of identity. At the same time, in their representations of the male adolescent, these writers negotiate various challenges necessarily involved in the prioritisation of this hitherto largely marginal figure, who still obtained a fairly liminal position (lacking agency, politically disenfranchised, financially dependent, or socially alienated), and so was not yet possessed of significant social status and cultural cachet. Bound up in the politics and psychology of identity formation, male youth in their work emerges as a legitimately complex stage of life, rather than a temporary category of maturation to be swiftly overcome or a symbol of comic ineptitude.

In responding to their cultural climate, in which childhood was increasingly valorised as a markedly different form of experience from adulthood, while adolescence remained a nebulous concept not yet fully conceptualised or categorised, these authors’ work serves to invigorate the consideration of youth as a separate stage in the lifecycle. Male adolescence emerges as a crucial facet of male identity. Adolescence is often constructed throughout the mid-nineteenth century by a range of discourses as a fluid period of formation, in which appropriate masculine values may (and should) be learned. Its instability, however, also features as a cause for concern as such plasticity could be conceived as either exciting or dangerous. With increasing urgency, educators, medical writers, and various ‘civilizing’ institutions and societies began to emphasise the unique role of the adolescent, who was not only the site of individual potentiality, but was also emblematic of wider national futurity (and so at once custodians of existing political and social values, as well as impending instigators of cultural change). The boy was, in popular adage, father to the man, and the individual youth represented the rising generation. Adolescence was emerging as a period of life which warranted careful guidance and surveillance for the promise that it held.

The novelists examined in this book, however, are attracted to young male protagonists not only for the cultural freight with which their formation is invested, or for the purposes of retrospective personal nostalgia. Instead, in these novels Meredith, Thackeray and Trollope also attribute discrete forms of behaviour to adolescence to suggest that youth assumes its own masculine models or types, occupies its own place in the fantasies of manly achievement, and was not simply a fleeting stage. Male adolescence could be conceived in terms of failure, cast as imperfect or flawed in its inadequate performance of adult manliness. However, for these writers, this lack is often itself productive. It is therefore not only the process of formation which these three authors find so demonstrably fascinating, as they return to it so often in their writing, but also the experience of adolescence itself as a form of identity. In the negotiations of masculine identity that they enact, these figures are depicted as psychologically complex, socially significant, and aesthetically distinctive; they are therefore important on their own terms. Adolescence therefore emerges as a crucial context to the study of nineteenth century literature. These novelists also help to codify this period of growth and its popular affect during the Victorian period. Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope recognise the liminal status of the male adolescent, but in conducting such sustained studies of this figure it is reinvigorated; its marginalisation, oddness, and otherness are largely recuperated through their analyses of its complexity.

Adolescence in the nineteenth century

The fiction of Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope often responds, openly or indirectly, to a variety of ideas about youth in circulation by mid-century, in their project to expose and illuminate adolescence as a significant age or recognisable stage of development. In conducting a study of adolescence in their work, this book is not concerned to date its emergence. Instead, this volume aims to reposition age-consciousness as an integral part of contemporary Victorian debates about masculine heterogeneity. Each of these three novelists draw on, or write against, dominant discourses of youth and masculine development, thus contributing to the institutionalisation of adolescence as a socially constituted stage in growth and personal experience, as each illuminates this distinct stage of development as an integral and valuable aspect of middle-class masculine identity. However, in order to establish the valence of adolescence as a concept, and the associative ideas which adhered to it in Victorian Britain, this section shows how it was popularly understood, debated, evaluated, and formulated in some of the literature of the period, as well as how recent studies on adolescence and ageing have contributed to a greater awareness of its significance in the nineteenth century.

Scholarly work on intermediary stages of individual experience as determined by age has been gaining purchase in recent years, which has been a most welcome development, as academics working in the areas of nineteenth-century literature, history, and sociology have been increasingly receptive to age studies as a critical approach, and so in turn to the role that age may hold in the study of various cultural materials to include literature. As Kay Heath has observed:

To exclude the concept of age is not only to ignore, but also to deny, its pervasive influence on the way culture constructs our identity as humans and by such denial to remain unconscious of and therefore vulnerable to age’s hegemonic intensity.¹

While Heath’s work is restricted to exploring the middle years of adult life, and this book focuses on the earlier experiences of adolescence, the acknowledgement of the ‘pervasive influence’ of age and the processes of ageing helps to situate adolescence as a key fact of identity in relation to the discrete stages of childhood and adulthood that, in part, define the beginning and end of this stage of the lifecycle.² The consciousness of ageing, and the cultural significance and ‘hegemonic intensity’ that such consciousness upholds, reinforce adolescence as a crucial stage of maturation, recognisable today as being invested with a sense of personal experience overlaid with social expectation. It is this ‘essentially psychological understanding of adolescence’ that signifies its consolidation as a modern process and that is evident in the work of all three novelists examined in this book.³

For some historians and sociologists, adolescence is not just a modern construct but also an extremely recent one, with the idea becoming firmly institutionalised and a part of the cultural consciousness of Western society only, they suggest, in the twentieth century or during the fin de siècle at the earliest.⁴ Philippe Ariès, for example, contends that ‘awareness of youth became a general phenomenon’ only after the end of the First World War, placing the concretisation of adolescence firmly in the 1900s.⁵ John Demos and Virginia Demos, in an early survey of adolescence through history, claim that:

The concept of adolescence, as generally understood and applied, did not exist before the last two decades of the nineteenth century. One could almost call it an invention of that period.⁶

In a similar vein to this claim, Kent Baxter has more recently suggested that ‘the term had little currency before 1900 and made a sudden and pronounced appearance in a wide variety of discourses at the [twentieth] century’s beginning’.⁷ The term itself, Baxter asserts, was used only sporadically until the fin de siècle, although many critics are adamant that the concept was nonetheless recognised, and indeed formalised, earlier in the nineteenth century. For sociologist John Davis, changes in education and legislation of the early Victorian period mark ‘the universal institutionalization of this age grade as a major subdivision of the human life-cycle’, although its origins are clearly traced back to the institutions of the charivari and the persistence of early modern traditions of misrule.⁸ Social historian John Gillis cites a drop in child mortality rates, and the educational changes that extended the period of dependence, as evidence of the “discovery” of adolescence by the nineteenth-century middle classes, and literary critics Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson draw attention to the popularity of public schools, the Boy Scout movement, and the rise in juvenile literature during the Victorian era as likely causes for the formalisation of adolescence, while Stephanie Olsen draws on a wide number of groups and institutions who emerged as ‘stakeholders of youth’, from child psychologists to educators, and scientists to temperance organizations, all of whom had a hand in the way that juvenile citizenship was consolidated from 1880.⁹

What arises from these various contentions about dating the history of adolescence, and from the different means of justifying it as an increasingly familiar institution in the culture of the period, is less significant for the purposes of this study than what it suggests about how adolescence itself is defined, understood, and discussed. For Gillis and John Springhall, the emergence of adolescence in the mid-nineteenth century is connected to developing ideas about delinquency, for example, and Jenny Holt expands upon private education as prompting important debate:¹⁰

As the phenomenon of adolescence attracted greater discussion, middle- and upper-class boys at public school became the main focus of attention for writers, sociologists and policy-makers eager to investigate and influence this period of life.¹¹

By isolating particular aspects of the evolving focus on youth in the nineteenth century, whether this interest is related to ‘boys at public school’ or their delinquent tendencies, an understanding of the ways in which adolescence was conceptualised and defined can develop. Certain shared values or characteristics occur frequently in both the various discourses that combine to formulate the idea of adolescence in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and in the criticism that analyses those different forms of writing from a twentieth- or twenty-first-century perspective. These may be loosely separated (despite some inevitable overlapping) into the relationship between biological determination and cultural construction, the connections between sexual, social and psychological responses, and the relative values placed on adolescence as either a purely transitory period or as a distinct and significant experience in its own right. In the texts discussed in each of the following chapters, adolescence is frequently described in terms of most, if not all, of these often conflicting characteristics and forms of experience, suggesting that this stage of life could be concurrently invested with different personal and cultural significance at any one time. As Holt has surmised, ‘changing adult priorities conditioned popular views on youth’, and so adolescence may be seen to simultaneously assume numerous shapes and forms in the literature of this period.¹²

Adolescence was understood by some between 1850 and 1880 as a biologically determined fact of life. From a medical perspective, taken from the first lines of a work by William Acton published in 1857:

The period of youth is distinguished by that advance in the evolution of the generative apparatus in both sexes, and by that acquirement of its power of functional activity, which constitutes the state of PUBERTY. At this epoch a considerable change takes place in the bodily constitution […]¹³

This establishes puberty as a biological fact, relative to age, and suggests that ‘youth’ [original emphasis] corresponds with this physiological change. For others, however, its cultural origins were acknowledged by comparison with earlier, less-precise experiences of youth, suggesting that the concept of adolescence was not understood simply in terms of physical development. Looking back on this period, more sophisticated attempts to understand the ways that adolescence was constructed placed a greater emphasis on its evolution as a social and cultural response rather than just a biological imperative, leading to recent observations that adolescence ‘was the response to an observable fact – the fact of a youth culture’, or that it was a ‘social role’, or ‘a socio-cultural construction’, rather than a period of purely physical change heralded by puberty and experienced in the same way by each generation.¹⁴ As with Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope, many writers on youth in the Victorian period engaged with the social and psychological characteristics of youth as an extension of, or a response to, the physiological developments that occur at puberty. As such, a recognisable view of adolescence in the period is present not only in fiction, but also in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note on textual editions
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Bildungsroman and advertising: Thackeray’s Pendennis novels
• 3 Manly conduct: Meredith and the culture of improvement
• 4 Investments in youth: speculation and liberal adolescence in Trollope
• 5 The language of filial dialogue in Meredith
• 6 Aberrant youth: the dandy, the wild man, and the deviant
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index