Writing through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century

Age, Gender, and Work

Chantel Lavoie

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781644533192, 9781644533208
• eBook ISBN: 9781644533215
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Writing through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century explores how boyhood was constructed in different creative spaces that reflected the lived experience of young boys through the long eighteenth century—not simply in children's literature but in novels, poetry, medical advice, criminal broadsides, and automaton exhibitions. The chapters encompass such rituals as breeching, learning to read and write, and going to school. They also consider the lives of boys such as chimney sweeps and convicted criminals, whose bodily labor was considered their only value and who often did not live beyond boyhood. Defined by a variety of tasks, expectations, and objectifications, boys—real, imagined, and sometimes both—were subject to the control of their elders and were used as tools in the cause of civil society, commerce, and empire. This book argues that boys in the long eighteenth century constituted a particular kind of currency, both valuable and expendable—valuable because of gender, expendable because of youth. 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Time for Boys
• 1. The Boy in Breeches: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) Growing into Gender
• 2. The Boy in School: Ellenor Fenn’s Rhetorical Tools in School Dialogues, for Boys (1783)
• 3. The Boy in the Machine: Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s Automaton, the Writer (1774)
• 4. The Boy in the Chimney: Sweeps’ Apprentices, Suffering Bodies, and Jonathan Swift
• 5. The Boy in the Gallows: Crime, Punishment, Broadsheets, Afterlives
• 6. The Boy in the Printing Press: Printer’s Devils and Upward Mobility
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author