Lewis Carroll · Charles Kingsley · Thomas Hughes · Boy’s Own · W.H.G. Kingston · Captain Marryat · G.A. Henty
LOOKED AT IN ONE WAY, THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY was a time of worldliness, prosperity, and unprecedented national self-confidence. The Anglican Church marched in lockstep with the Crown. Empire was in its pomp; and the fruits of that pomp had never been more visible at home. At mid-century, marvels of technology and global exotica flowed into the Great Exhibition of 1851.
The very venue – Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, thrown up in London in less than a year – was a scintillating image of technological ingenuity. Inside it were the most advanced telescopes in the world, daguerreotypes, cutting-edge home appliances, demonstrations of steel-making, and advanced agricultural technologies. Colt’s new revolvers spoke of growing technologies of war, while the Koh-i-Noor diamond and artifacts from New Zealand whispered of riches beyond the sea. The launch of the yacht race that was to become the America’s Cup spoke of the ever-greater ease of getting there.
England was outward-looking. It was powerful. But at the same time, the prosperity was not spread evenly. The poor –not the picturesque rural sort but the rootless and putatively criminal urban poor drawn to the towns by the Industrial Revolution – aroused those good Aristotelian emotions, pity and fear, in the middle and upper classes. Charles Dickens – not a children’s writer, but one whose concern with children and childhood shadows all the children’s writers of the second half of the nineteenth century – had close-up experience of the wretchedness of debt. He was eleven in 1823 when he was consigned to the blacking factory. He never forgot it.
Though Church and state were harmoniously married in the person of the sovereign, the new sciences were starting to chip away at old theological certainties. Is it significant that of the three writers whose work is credited with starting the new era of children’s writing two – Lewis Carroll and Charles Kingsley – were churchmen? Carroll’s radically disruptive Alice in Wonderland stories imagine a world in which religious certainty, indeed any certainty, is unobtainable; Kingsley’s Water-Babies offered a queasily pantheistic attempt to marry religion with his scientific fascinations. Meanwhile the third, Thomas Hughes, in Tom Brown’s School Days, offered a story whose “muscular Christianity” linked body and soul in the trainee servants of Empire.