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?A School-Boy's Story?: Writing the Victorian Public Schoolboy Subject

2004; Indiana University Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/vic.2004.46.3.455

1527-2052

William N. Weaver,

Australian History and Society

“A School-Boy's Story”:Writing the Victorian Public Schoolboy Subject William N. Weaver (bio) A consensus exists among educational historians and literary critics that two mid-Victorian literary works, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley's Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D. D. (1844) and Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), were crucial in promoting Thomas Arnold and his Rugby schoolboy subjects as exemplary Victorian icons, and the Arnoldian ideal as a powerful, class- specific Victorian ideology.1 These critics, however, largely ignore the first literary writings that helped formulate these notions: occasional works written and edited primarily by Rugby schoolboys and published in the Rugby Magazine (1835-37) and the Rugby Miscellany (1845-46).2 In the pages that follow, I focus on these fascinating texts, which helped synthesize what would later be defined as a specifically Victorian schoolboy subject. They did so, I argue, by distinguishing between what their authors saw as the collective identificatory bond among Rugby schoolboy peers and the dangerous solipsism they associated with particular Romantic poets. Because Rugby schoolboy essays, poems, and stories illuminate the reception of Arnoldian pedagogy by its immediate target audience—the boys themselves—analyzing these writings helps fill a void within a century of critical work on pedagogy at Arnold's Rugby and, by extension, Victorian public school pedagogy more generally. Agreeing on the importance of Arnold's Rugby as a pedagogical ideal, critics have often differed greatly on the effects that Arnold's own pedagogy had at Rugby and on the influence that the Arnoldian system had elsewhere. Following Stanley, educational historians such as David Newsome and J. R. de S. Honey have argued that Arnold's rethinking of the exclusively grammatical emphasis of the nineteenth-century public school classical curriculum; his reemphasis of the pastoral bonds between masters and boys, especially through the reinvigoration of the tradition of the headmaster performing the school's weekly chapel [End Page 455] service; and his encouragement of mentoring bonds among older and younger boys through a revamped, and presumably meritocratic, prefect disciplinary system all served as influential educational templates for Victorian public school reform. And yet, most public schools in the mid-Victorian period continued to employ a traditional classical curriculum and a laissez-faire disciplinary system, most often associated with Eton, in which masters respected boys' self-government and "liberties" by leaving them largely without adult supervision (Chandos 30-47; Mack 171-210). Furthermore, boys and traditionalists at many public schools, including Rugby, staunchly resisted reforms that encroached on the boys' authority to govern themselves. Historians such as John Chandos have used these facts to argue that Arnold's own pedagogy had a profound influence only on a handful of his students and, therefore, that the importance attributed to his educational reforms is radically overstated.3 By contrast to previous work that promotes or debunks an idealizing "great man" approach to educational history, this essay provides an ethnography of early Victorian Rugby schoolboy culture that allows a more nuanced account of Arnold's pedagogical influence, one stressing the boys' self-understanding as Rugby schoolboy subjects. The writings of these boys also help explain a shift within early- to mid- Victorian accounts of public schools. The 1830s and early 1840s promoted a headmaster-centered perspective, most famously depicted in Stanley's account of boys raptly listening to Arnold in the pulpit at Rugby, with "their attention strained to the utmost to catch every word that he uttered" and being "struck, as boys naturally would be, by the originality of [Arnold's] thoughts" (157). The emerging perspective in the 1850s centered on relations among schoolboys and is most obviously suggested by Hughes's focus on Rugby schoolboy culture and his prosaic account of Arnold's sermons: "We couldn't enter into half that we heard; we hadn't the knowledge of our own hearts or the knowledge of one another; and little enough of the faith, hope, and love needed to that end" (142). Both the Rugby boys and Arnold, in his educational writings and a popular series of published sermons, represented male/male identification as central to the Arnoldian educational system. The boys and Arnold, however, used images of these...