The Voyage to Manhood: The Elusive Quest

Abstract

In recounting the path of his formal education, the famed nineteenth-century English essayist and critic Thomas De Quincey describes the peculiar predicament he found himself confronted with after completing public school: “England … sends her young men to college not until they have ceased to be boys—not earlier, therefore, than eighteen.” Forced to wait a couple of years before being considered eligible for matriculating at Oxford or Cambridge, the author asks in bewilderment: “But when, by what test, by what indication, does manhood commence? Physically by one criterion, legally by another, morally by a third, intellectually by a fourth—and all indefinite.” De Quincey’s efforts to define manhood highlight the elusive and complex nature of this concept: between the two spheres of boyhood and manhood there is no clear line of demarcation. The change is a long process occurring over a variable period of time: “It is hard to say, even for an assigned case, by any tolerable approximation, at what precise era it would be reasonable to describe the individual as having ceased to be a boy, and as having attained his inauguration as a man.” Moreover, the four traditional standards of maturity—the physical, legal, moral, and intellectual—rarely happen concurrently in any individual.