Lily Tekseng (University of Cambridge)

Writing empire: spaces imagined and made “real”?

Aside from the focus on athleticism, curricular and pedagogical training, students in public schools also lived, breathed, and produced and reproduced a particular brand of school culture. If the public school was a factory/laboratory, its distinctive culture was the air bracketed within its walls, at once both permeable and permeating.

The vibrant print culture at Rugby in the 18th and 19th century mirrored the boisterous and combative public sphere created by the rise of print media in the 18th and 19th century Britain.

Of the dozen or so student magazines published at Rugby from the 1840s onwards to 1910, almost all of them carried editorials and letters to editors which reflected a lively environment of self-reflexive arguments and criticism. It seems as if each of these magazines had something nasty and funny to say about the other contemporaneous magazines, and all of these, across time, seems to have unanimously hated the school’s official record, The Meteor.

This print media-led student culture in public schools is explored in Talbot Baines Reed’s best known “School stories”, The Fifth Form at St. Dominic’s (1881). Written originally for the Boy’s Own Paper—which was a magazine for adolescents published by the Religious Tract Society with the objective of instilling Christian values in young boys—it explores the rivalry between the Fifth and the Sixth forms in a public school setting, wherein the Fifth form decides to start a new school magazine because the Sixth Form Magazine is “rubbish, and unreadable; and though they condescend to let us see it, I don’t suppose two fellows in the Form ever wade through it.”

Baines Reed was a frequent contributor for the Boy’s Own Paper or BOP, as it was popularly known. BOP carried articles ranging from adventure stories, school stories, articles related to sports, travel, tips on scouting, and so on.

The Boy's Own Paper, front page, 11 April 1891. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

What strikes me in my preliminary survey of these magazines and texts produced for juvenile audience in the Victorian era is how adventure becomes an almost irreplaceable and intrinsic component of these writings.

To a certain extent, the thirst for thrill and adventure, which in turn is the catalyst for conflict and its subsequent resolution, is innate to the construction of a story. It is in the very DNA of a story; it is the key mechanism that carries a narrative.

But I think something interesting happens to the genre of adventure fiction and adventure writing during this period, and strikingly, it corresponds and correlates to the rise and expiration of the British empire.

This plate appeared in the 36th The Boy's Own Annual (1913-1914), and is based on the painting A Very Gallant Gentleman by John Charles Dollman. It depicts the last moments of Lawrence Oates. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Starting from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and sustained by a steady production of works such as Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days (1872) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Islands (1883), adventure fiction increasingly and literally starts to travel in the heydays of the British empire.

The world begins to be imagined as either places of familiarity or places where familiarity must be extended and exerted.

Perhaps nowhere was the training for this imagined map of the world more urgently ingrained than in the small but influential group of public schools in Britain.

A theme proliferate in Rugby student magazines around this time, for instance, is various kinds of travel writing. Some of these are detailed descriptions of the landscape, people, animal, objects and life in the colonies, while some others relay accounts of “true stories”.

For instance, The Acorn, published between 1890 to 1894, carries articles such as:

  • “A Visit to Samoa”

  • “School Life in Australia”                 

  • “Life in the Australian Bush”            

  • “Some Curious weapons”                     

  • “A Voyage to Shanghai”

  • “A journey to Australia”                   

  • “Our menagerie”                                

  • “Correspondences [From Madagascar]”                               

  • “Letters From Far Distant Countries” [present day Yantai in Shandong province, China and Melbourne]

  • “Another Australian Letter”                 

So-called “True stories” helped connect the ideologies of the empire with adventure writing in school magazines. A series of articles featured in the 1892 Acorn, centred on the story of “An Englishwoman’s Captivity in Barbary, in 1756”. The author claimed this to be the “perfectly true story of the adventures of his ancestress during the time she was in the power of the Moorish Pirates.”

Another narrative featured the exploits of the adventurer “Johnson”, who unable to find work in England, goes to Australia. Via various unlikely turns of events, including the costly export of a grand piano and the accidental discovery of natural gas, the unwitting Johnson finds himself the founder of “a large manufacturing town, and the formation of companies organized on a large scale”. Instrumental to Johnson’s success, the story continues, were “the enterprising, although detested, Chinamen, who came to places of this sort, made their pile of money, and returned with it again to their native land.”

In such stories, racial and cultural tropes are casually developed: one absurdist vignette has Johnson drugged and abducted by the Chinese owner of a travelling waxwork (the waxwork model depicting the execution of Louis XVI by guillotine). Bound and alone in darkness, Johnson realizes that the “Chinaman” intended to make him the guillotine’s next victim. He is rescued by his friend, Redfer, who knew to keep alert to the “notorious rascality of the Chinese”. The scene ends with a comeuppance for Johnson’s captor:

“There was the Chinaman, his countenance more like that of a madman than a human being, re-arranging the tangled ropes: there on the ground lay their friend, utterly helpless. By the time they had recovered themselves, the Chinaman had finished, and was standing ready to touch the spring, when with a crash the two men broke into the room through the window: with an almost superhuman effort Johnson rolled himself away from the block, and falling against the feet of the Chinaman, caused him to fall across the fatal spot: as he fell, he clutched at the rope, which held the spring; the knife fell, and severed his head from his body.” 

Here we see the conventions of a “true” account (purported eyewitness and biographical account) deployed to create an atmosphere of the real, blurring the lines between adventure, fiction and an imperial landscape built upon literary construct.

In such stories, hero characters are deeply invested in seeking out the unknown, (designating such landscapes and peoples as “unknown”), while also eventually circuiting back to the comforts of the known. Here, something or someone is adventurous when irrespective of a plausibly perilous outcome, events transpire in a way that propels the subject into the middle of the action where they must act, perform, and find resolution, the latter of which crucially separates this genre from tragedy.

Finally, a burgeoning spirit of travel, ownership and curiosity about the colonies is encapsulated in a student debate covered by the Acorn in 1891. The debate motion was put forward by student A.M. ROSS, “That life in the Colonies is altogether better than that in England.”

The Proposer argued that the climate in the Colonies was

“not so variable as in England, and consequently the fruit was far better, and the people inhabiting the Colonies far stronger and wealthier.”

He also argued that education in the colonies was “very good” as was their “natural resources, their forests and prairies”, and had the same kind of games as the English “but had far better shooting”

A P.V. Beatty opposed the motion: he suggested that life in England was the pleasantest “for the Gulf stream did not wash the shores of any of our Colonies”, that England had “greater facilities of communication” and, most importantly, how could you deny, “the superior qualities of English Hotels”. He further continued: “there could be no question about the superiority of the English over the Colonial boy. If life out in the Colonies was so much the best, why did all Colonials always speak of England as “home”? No Colony could exist without England. Fancy living in a place where Christmas came in the middle of the Summer, and calling that kind of life jolly!”

In return, an F.H. Melland posed the question: “if the Colonies were so useless, why had England taken so much trouble to get them? The freedom of life in the Colonies especially delighted him.”

J.M. Moon thought that life in the Colonies was “too dangerous to be pleasant.”

Interestingly, a J.M. Thompson argued that “In the Colonies it was easy to make a fortune either by gold-mining or by farming. Hunting was all very well in England, but it could not compare with Kangaroo-hunting in the Colonies. No gun or dog-licenses were necessary out there.”

A.M. Ross, while closing the debate declared:

“…hotels must be better in the Colonies, for they look on better scenery. The colonies supplied metal… there were no policemen in the colonies. What fun could there be in hunting hares, which could not defend themselves. The Colonies could help England very much in time of war… had it not been for the Colonies we should never have tasted the potato.