Abstract
In this article, we investigate the public school novel as represented by Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and the boy’s sea story as represented by W. H. G. Kingston’s The Three Midshipmen (1873). The school novel and the sea story sometimes functioned as twinned forms enabling authors for boys to explore anxieties about male selfhood and relocating oneself in the larger community while growing up. As becomes especially apparent when they are read together, these novels address the boy’s relationship to home and empire, rootlessness and rootedness. The coming-of-age plot found in the boys’ books reveals a literature that embraces both rootlessness/mobility and rootedness/community and that posits an all-male version of something closely resembling domestic life as a way to navigate between the two.
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Notes
Among many others who associate the school story with the narrative of Bildung, see Holt. Jacqueline Rose cites The Three Midshipmen as a narrative using the “starting-point of a voyage” to link “colonial objectives . . . to the growth of the child,” so that “the savage accepts the values of civilisation and the boys’ adventures chart their passage to maturity” (1984, pp. 58–59).
Donald Hall claims that Tom Brown reflects male anxiety over female influence. Benjy’s home, he notes, “is armed against imminent attack; he has decorated it with pistols and swords, making it not only a fortress but also a shrine to a particularly martial form of masculinity. The identity of the potential attacker becomes clear when Benjy and the narrator express vague fears about what will happen if ‘Master Tom should fall back again into the hands of Charity and the women’” (1993, p. 331). Hall is not the only critic to remark on the uses of the martial in Hughes’s novel (for example, see also Deane, 2014, pp. 127–28); our focus in this article on Hughes’s employment of marine matters is intended to complement rather than to contradict such observations.
The title character of “Billy Taylor” has been forced to become a sailor; his fiancée masquerades as a man to follow him but learns that he has been untrue to her, whereupon she kills him. Sexual infidelity and murder may seem to consort oddly with the larger subject matter of Hughes’s novel, but as we shall see, the gender-bending and the idea that lovers may seek to perpetuate shore ties on the high seas are more natural fits here.
The next time that Tom enters the Doctor’s private quarters is when he gets invited to tea with the Doctor and older boys such as Young Brooke. He is proud of being there with those who are more mature than he. As he thinks of Young Brooke as his role model and desires to acquire masculinity as soon as possible, the Doctor’s home also teaches him to pursue a home in which he can function as a husband and father.
Richard D. Fulton and Peter H. Hoffenberg cite the influence of the missionary account upon the South Seas adventure narrative (2013, p. 7). In Hughes’s novel, the influence may be flowing in the other direction. Although Martin becomes a missionary, he does not reveal any religious enthusiasm until he leaves Rugby; rather, his obsession is with natural history. This point suggests that his imperial enterprise has multiple motivations, since it is hard to tell whether his travel is triggered by the desire to explore unknown places, by piety, or by the thirst for knowledge. These multiple motivations can also be found in the sickroom scene; while the narrator emphasizes religious ideas in describing Arthur’s overcoming his fever, we can see that other desires, including the friendship with Tom that Arthur credits with having established his health, also drive Arthur back to life.
Unlike most of his works, it fathered sequels: The Three Lieutenants in 1875, The Three Commanders in 1876, and The Three Admirals in 1878.
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Soyoun Kim is a doctor in English at Texas A&M University; her publications include “Escaping Institutionality: Rebellion and Gendered Space in Eric, or Little by Little and A Little Princess” (Barnboken 2014).
Claudia Nelson, also of Texas A&M, is a professor of English; Claudius M. Easley, Jr., Faculty Fellow of Liberal Arts; and current editor of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. Her most recent monograph is Precocious Children and Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).
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Kim, S., Nelson, C. Navigating Between Home and Empire: Mobility and Male Friendship in Tom Brown’s Schooldays and The Three Midshipmen . Child Lit Educ 49, 323–337 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-017-9321-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-017-9321-y