Journal of Narrative Theory

Journal of Narrative Theory 34.1 (2004) 27-53

"One Man to Rely On":

Long John Silver and the Shifting Character of Victorian Boys' Fiction"

Lisa Honaker

I made a mutiny, and I been a gentleman o' fortune; well, but by all stories, you ain't no such saint. I'm a man that keeps company very easy; even by your own account, you ain't, and to my certain knowledge, you're a devil to haze. Which is which? Which is good, and which bad? Ah, you tell me that! Here we are in stays, and you may lay to it!

In 1887, Andrew Lang declared that Robert Louis Stevenson "intended only a boys' book when he wrote 'Treasure Island' and restored Romance" (693). While this observation makes that feat sound innocent and serendipitous, subsequent commentators have made it clear that restoring romance at the end of the nineteenth century meant, in fact, writing only boys' books.¹ The "romances of adventure," which subordinated character to action and often located that action in exotic settings, defined a genre aesthetically and ideologically at odds with nineteenth-century domestic realism. The well-rounded character, whose growth and development had become realism's foundation during the period, came in for particular scorn. This character, finding definition in largely female venues, where, [End Page 27] romancers argued, either decadence or impotence reigned, had little to recommend him, no matter what "school" he came from. Typical are Rider Haggard's remarks on the characters he finds in French and American realism. Dismissing "lewd" French heroines, "living for lust and lusting for life . . . and naught beyond," and pitiful American heroines, who "dissect their petty feelings and elaborately review the feeble promptings which serve them for passions," Haggard denounces realism's heroes as "emasculated specimens of an overwrought age . . . with culture on their lips and emptiness in their hearts" (176, 175).² The romancers urged their own leaner, more daring action hero as an alternative to this soft and/or impotent figure. Forsaking the well-rounded character would, they argued, be good, even character building, for readers since the leaner hero would both display and inspire vigor. Such reasoning was in keeping with the general Victorian vision of the moral power of literature even as it turned upside down accepted notions of character "growth."

The romancers' focus on character, in addition to restoring romance, was in keeping with the avowed aims of Victorian boys' fiction and its implicit imperial ideology. This fiction made the empire attractive to its readership and described those aspects of character—of manhood—needed to serve it. As England's imperial dominance gave way to anxiety about that dominance in the late century, that vision of manhood shifted from philanthropic to militaristic. Claudia Nelson says it best when she declares that the "mid-Victorian's hero is the late-Victorian's sissy" (51). The missionary, who often showed up to provide explicit moral advice to the mid-century boy hero in the course of his imperial adventures, gave way in the late century to the less empathetic soldier.

This clash between mid- and late-century notions of character and manhood in boys' fiction figures as an important feature in Treasure Island's restoration of romance. In essays that consistently and insistently celebrate romance's superiority to realism, Stevenson himself invokes boys' books that display a pared-down hero or the boy readership itself to make points against realism.³ His own insistence on the subordination of character to action and prescription of "psychical surgery" to prepare character for action adhere to the late-century dictates of boys' fiction even as they define romance as the fulfillment of a desire to escape realism's domestication. This resistance to domesticity and female influence not only genders romance, but also engenders the expectations Stevenson uses to [End Page 28] reconfigure the genre for its battle with realism, not least of which is...