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These were, I suppose, an interesting pair to read back-to-back! Two books about the lives of children in the pre-Victorian period, in very different settings and at opposite ends of the social scale.
Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy by Frances Trollope (1840). One of the earliest industrial novels, and a bitingly satirical indictment of the cruelties of factory work in the early nineteenth century, especially but not exclusively the use of child labour. Michael Armstrong, a nine-year-old boy who works in a Lancashire cotton mill, attracts the attention of the mill owner Sir Matthew Dowling when Dowling's mistress is frightened by a cow and Michael intervenes; at the lady's behest, Dowling adopts Michael, bringing him to live at his grand country house, and decides to use him as a nice prominent public example of his own incredible benevolent philanthropy to set against all those awkward things people are saying about 'didn't a girl die in the factory last month?' and 'wouldn't it be a good idea if all the workers went on strike?'. Of course Dowling, whose cruelty and hypocrisy are the subject of much biting wit from the author, soon gets tired of Michael and ends up sending him as an apprentice to an even worse factory some distance away.
As well as the injustices of the factory system itself—which Trollope describes in harrowing enough detail and with a passionate sense of working against powerful interests for a just cause—the book also criticises the way male factory owners keep women of their own class in ignorance about where the wealth that supports their lifestyles comes from; the book's other main character is Mary Brotherton, a young orphan heiress from a factory-owning family, who, through her interest in Michael, comes to learn more about the origins of her wealth and understand that her own social position is based on such injustice. Through Mary and the other campaigning characters she meets, Trollope makes a clear argument for her view that philanthropy on the part of the well-meaning wealthy—even those who both appreciate the reality of the situation and have enough of a conscience to admit it's wrong—is not enough to solve the social problems of the capitalist factory system; sweeping legal changes are needed. She even aims some of her satire at 'philanthropist' Christian factory owners who are gracious enough to provide Sunday schools for child workers—who are far too exhausted after working day and night all the rest of the week to get any benefit from an education. This is a really progressive view for a Victorian writer of industrial novels! Trollope's characters argue for the limitation of the working day to ten hours, which became law in 1847; I don't think this particular Factory Act had quite the all-encompassing reforming effects hoped for here, but it was certainly one important step in the gradual curbing of the worst excesses of nineteenth-century capitalism.
The political arguments are combined, especially later on in the book, with a rather sentimental and dramatic plot, which I enjoyed as one does enjoy sentimental and dramatic Victorian novel plots. I especially liked Mary—unafraid, independent-minded and determined, she's a great heroine—and her relationship with Martha Dowling, the unattractive and socially-outcast daughter of Sir Matthew who's torn between her love for her father and her suspicion that perhaps something is wrong about his treatment of Michael and his morals in general. And I very much enjoyed that both Mary and Martha spend most of the book single and with no obvious love interest in sight; unfortunately Mary does get paired off in the last chapter, and in a particularly unappealing way, but it's frankly so unconvincing that it's pretty easy to write off as a sop to convention and ignore.
Frances Trollope, incidentally, was the mother of Anthony Trollope, also a famous novelist, and it was interesting to compare their styles! There's definitely some similarity in the mood of the narration and the satirical tone, but obviously a very different choice of subject matter from e.g. the Barsetshire novels.
Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes (1857). I thought I couldn't really call myself a fan of the Victorians and of school stories without having read this one—which, while not the first school story to be published, is generally credited with kicking off the genre as it later became an established type of story. We meet Tom Brown, a typical young boy from the country squire class of the early nineteenth century, and follow him throughout his school career at Rugby in the time of the renowned and memorable Dr Thomas Arnold.
The structure of the book after the first few chapters is loose and episodic, recounting various episodes from Tom's eight years at Rugby without much of a continuous plot, and it features many very familiar trappings of the school story: friends, alliances and bullies; boys of various characters, decent sorts and bad sorts and moral commentary thereupon; the vital importance of games, including the traditional detailed account of a cricket match and also, of course, Rugby football; fagging; various schoolboy scrapes and adventures. This is all very enjoyable, and Hughes's style—he's an extremely chatty, intrusive Victorian narrator, frequently offering spirited commentary and opinions on the characters and events and interrupting the story to go off on various tangents—made it more so. There are some really nice character and relationship bits, too! At one point Dr Arnold is concerned that Tom, in the middle of his school career, is too careless and is in danger of going altogether to the bad, so he decides to encourage Tom to reform by giving him a shy, delicate new boy to take under his wing; Tom and the new boy, George Arthur, end up developing a really sweet friendship, with the bold, outgoing but rash and sometimes careless Tom and the sensitive, conscientious Arthur balancing out each other's characters perfectly (and have some lovely hurt/comfort, when there's an outbreak of fever at the school and the delicate Arthur catches it). I also loved Arthur's friendship with Martin, a boy who is something of an outcast at the school on account of his eccentric obsession with science and natural history. (The actual curriculum at the school appears to consist entirely of Latin and Greek, which accords with Lytton Strachey's view of Arnold in Eminent Victorians).
Somewhat unusually for a school story, the book takes a while to get to the actual school, spending several chapters at the beginning describing the Vale of White Horse and Tom's early childhood there before he goes to Rugby. I was rather enjoying this bit and would happily have read a novel that stayed there instead! But, having read the rest of the actual book, I wonder if this bit contributes to the general theme of its development: Tom's progress through the school, and his development in character and morals as he grows up, seem to reflect both the moral and character development of Rugby School itself under Arnold (an important figure portrayed throughout with gravity and reverence, almost always referred to simply as the Doctor) and the development of society in general around it. (Something that especially struck me was the contrast between Tom's first journey to school, a long and rather arduous stage-coach trip described in some detail, and the casual mention of taking the railway to Rugby when he goes back at the end of the book). And Hughes has a rather peculiar and idiosyncratic attitude to change and progress. He establishes himself in the early chapters as an old-style Tory of the early nineteenth century: strongly in favour of tradition, stability and the social order of old English rural society, and yet equally strongly opposed to snobbish superiority from high towards low and the impersonal cruelties of modern capitalism. His attitude towards the older barbarities of school life is ambivalent. He clearly thinks that bullying, for instance, is wrong and that bullies are to be regarded as cowards and Not Decent Sorts, and yet he views a certain amount of violence and mockery between the boys with a sort of 'well, boys will be boys, there's no harm done as long as they reform in the end' indulgence. At one point he goes on a spirited rant in which he defends physical fights between boys as manly and Christian and derides pacifists and reformers as silly, but his portrayal of a fight between Tom and another boy clearly expresses the notion that fighting is a little less than ideal; he describes the fight with gusto and says it was better for the boys that they got to fight out their disagreement, but when Arthur, horrified at the violence, tells the Doctor and gets him to intervene, the narrative certainly seems to think that the Doctor is wise and sensible to stop the fight and that Arthur was more or less in the right (it would have been easy and obvious to portray his actions as shameful tale-telling, and neither Hughes nor the sympathetic boy characters do). I really found the combinations and contradictions of social attitudes fascinating—I love seeing the different and sometimes surprising social and moral perspectives of the past, and if they're sometimes weird and contradictory, isn't that just the best thing about Victorian fiction?
There is a brief reference to homosexual relationships in public schools—Hughes thinks they're bad, apparently largely because they involve older boys corrupting the characters of younger ones by teaching them to drink and swear, but also describes some otherwise-similar relationships as 'noble friendships'. A small detail, but interesting. Somewhat relatedly, I was surprised to see that this book apparently has no fic on AO3, given its general fame and the definite existence of a fanbase for school stories in general; I would totally read Arthur/Martin future fic where they go on some Beagle-esque voyage together, discover all sorts of new species and get into dreadful hurt/comfort situations on the sea or in the wilderness.
Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy by Frances Trollope (1840). One of the earliest industrial novels, and a bitingly satirical indictment of the cruelties of factory work in the early nineteenth century, especially but not exclusively the use of child labour. Michael Armstrong, a nine-year-old boy who works in a Lancashire cotton mill, attracts the attention of the mill owner Sir Matthew Dowling when Dowling's mistress is frightened by a cow and Michael intervenes; at the lady's behest, Dowling adopts Michael, bringing him to live at his grand country house, and decides to use him as a nice prominent public example of his own incredible benevolent philanthropy to set against all those awkward things people are saying about 'didn't a girl die in the factory last month?' and 'wouldn't it be a good idea if all the workers went on strike?'. Of course Dowling, whose cruelty and hypocrisy are the subject of much biting wit from the author, soon gets tired of Michael and ends up sending him as an apprentice to an even worse factory some distance away.
As well as the injustices of the factory system itself—which Trollope describes in harrowing enough detail and with a passionate sense of working against powerful interests for a just cause—the book also criticises the way male factory owners keep women of their own class in ignorance about where the wealth that supports their lifestyles comes from; the book's other main character is Mary Brotherton, a young orphan heiress from a factory-owning family, who, through her interest in Michael, comes to learn more about the origins of her wealth and understand that her own social position is based on such injustice. Through Mary and the other campaigning characters she meets, Trollope makes a clear argument for her view that philanthropy on the part of the well-meaning wealthy—even those who both appreciate the reality of the situation and have enough of a conscience to admit it's wrong—is not enough to solve the social problems of the capitalist factory system; sweeping legal changes are needed. She even aims some of her satire at 'philanthropist' Christian factory owners who are gracious enough to provide Sunday schools for child workers—who are far too exhausted after working day and night all the rest of the week to get any benefit from an education. This is a really progressive view for a Victorian writer of industrial novels! Trollope's characters argue for the limitation of the working day to ten hours, which became law in 1847; I don't think this particular Factory Act had quite the all-encompassing reforming effects hoped for here, but it was certainly one important step in the gradual curbing of the worst excesses of nineteenth-century capitalism.
The political arguments are combined, especially later on in the book, with a rather sentimental and dramatic plot, which I enjoyed as one does enjoy sentimental and dramatic Victorian novel plots. I especially liked Mary—unafraid, independent-minded and determined, she's a great heroine—and her relationship with Martha Dowling, the unattractive and socially-outcast daughter of Sir Matthew who's torn between her love for her father and her suspicion that perhaps something is wrong about his treatment of Michael and his morals in general. And I very much enjoyed that both Mary and Martha spend most of the book single and with no obvious love interest in sight; unfortunately Mary does get paired off in the last chapter, and in a particularly unappealing way, but it's frankly so unconvincing that it's pretty easy to write off as a sop to convention and ignore.
Frances Trollope, incidentally, was the mother of Anthony Trollope, also a famous novelist, and it was interesting to compare their styles! There's definitely some similarity in the mood of the narration and the satirical tone, but obviously a very different choice of subject matter from e.g. the Barsetshire novels.
Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes (1857). I thought I couldn't really call myself a fan of the Victorians and of school stories without having read this one—which, while not the first school story to be published, is generally credited with kicking off the genre as it later became an established type of story. We meet Tom Brown, a typical young boy from the country squire class of the early nineteenth century, and follow him throughout his school career at Rugby in the time of the renowned and memorable Dr Thomas Arnold.
The structure of the book after the first few chapters is loose and episodic, recounting various episodes from Tom's eight years at Rugby without much of a continuous plot, and it features many very familiar trappings of the school story: friends, alliances and bullies; boys of various characters, decent sorts and bad sorts and moral commentary thereupon; the vital importance of games, including the traditional detailed account of a cricket match and also, of course, Rugby football; fagging; various schoolboy scrapes and adventures. This is all very enjoyable, and Hughes's style—he's an extremely chatty, intrusive Victorian narrator, frequently offering spirited commentary and opinions on the characters and events and interrupting the story to go off on various tangents—made it more so. There are some really nice character and relationship bits, too! At one point Dr Arnold is concerned that Tom, in the middle of his school career, is too careless and is in danger of going altogether to the bad, so he decides to encourage Tom to reform by giving him a shy, delicate new boy to take under his wing; Tom and the new boy, George Arthur, end up developing a really sweet friendship, with the bold, outgoing but rash and sometimes careless Tom and the sensitive, conscientious Arthur balancing out each other's characters perfectly (and have some lovely hurt/comfort, when there's an outbreak of fever at the school and the delicate Arthur catches it). I also loved Arthur's friendship with Martin, a boy who is something of an outcast at the school on account of his eccentric obsession with science and natural history. (The actual curriculum at the school appears to consist entirely of Latin and Greek, which accords with Lytton Strachey's view of Arnold in Eminent Victorians).
Somewhat unusually for a school story, the book takes a while to get to the actual school, spending several chapters at the beginning describing the Vale of White Horse and Tom's early childhood there before he goes to Rugby. I was rather enjoying this bit and would happily have read a novel that stayed there instead! But, having read the rest of the actual book, I wonder if this bit contributes to the general theme of its development: Tom's progress through the school, and his development in character and morals as he grows up, seem to reflect both the moral and character development of Rugby School itself under Arnold (an important figure portrayed throughout with gravity and reverence, almost always referred to simply as the Doctor) and the development of society in general around it. (Something that especially struck me was the contrast between Tom's first journey to school, a long and rather arduous stage-coach trip described in some detail, and the casual mention of taking the railway to Rugby when he goes back at the end of the book). And Hughes has a rather peculiar and idiosyncratic attitude to change and progress. He establishes himself in the early chapters as an old-style Tory of the early nineteenth century: strongly in favour of tradition, stability and the social order of old English rural society, and yet equally strongly opposed to snobbish superiority from high towards low and the impersonal cruelties of modern capitalism. His attitude towards the older barbarities of school life is ambivalent. He clearly thinks that bullying, for instance, is wrong and that bullies are to be regarded as cowards and Not Decent Sorts, and yet he views a certain amount of violence and mockery between the boys with a sort of 'well, boys will be boys, there's no harm done as long as they reform in the end' indulgence. At one point he goes on a spirited rant in which he defends physical fights between boys as manly and Christian and derides pacifists and reformers as silly, but his portrayal of a fight between Tom and another boy clearly expresses the notion that fighting is a little less than ideal; he describes the fight with gusto and says it was better for the boys that they got to fight out their disagreement, but when Arthur, horrified at the violence, tells the Doctor and gets him to intervene, the narrative certainly seems to think that the Doctor is wise and sensible to stop the fight and that Arthur was more or less in the right (it would have been easy and obvious to portray his actions as shameful tale-telling, and neither Hughes nor the sympathetic boy characters do). I really found the combinations and contradictions of social attitudes fascinating—I love seeing the different and sometimes surprising social and moral perspectives of the past, and if they're sometimes weird and contradictory, isn't that just the best thing about Victorian fiction?
There is a brief reference to homosexual relationships in public schools—Hughes thinks they're bad, apparently largely because they involve older boys corrupting the characters of younger ones by teaching them to drink and swear, but also describes some otherwise-similar relationships as 'noble friendships'. A small detail, but interesting. Somewhat relatedly, I was surprised to see that this book apparently has no fic on AO3, given its general fame and the definite existence of a fanbase for school stories in general; I would totally read Arthur/Martin future fic where they go on some Beagle-esque voyage together, discover all sorts of new species and get into dreadful hurt/comfort situations on the sea or in the wilderness.
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Date: Mar. 27th, 2022 12:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Mar. 27th, 2022 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Mar. 27th, 2022 12:47 pm (UTC)It IS different in that the headmaster is really central to the book, which is really Hughes' loving RPF tribute to Arnold: hence the fact that the book ends with Tom going back after Arnold's death. And, as you say, the beginning at-home scenes are much more drawn out than they are in later school stories. So the beginning and end are different, but it's like later authors looked at the middle and just said "THIS" and translated it directly into their own contexts. (And dropped some of the stuff about prayers along the way.)
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Date: Mar. 27th, 2022 04:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Mar. 28th, 2022 12:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Mar. 27th, 2022 08:25 pm (UTC)Have you read any of Frederic Farrar’s? Wildly emotional and over the top. I am very fond of John Mowbray’s boys’ school stories, which are a couple of generations on (1920s) but harder to track down.
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Date: Mar. 28th, 2022 04:17 pm (UTC)I haven't read any of Farrar's yet, but Eric, or Little by Little is on my list of books to get to at some point—it sounds tremendously OTT fun. :D
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Date: Mar. 27th, 2022 09:19 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: Mar. 28th, 2022 06:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Mar. 27th, 2022 11:54 pm (UTC)I am also surprised by that! And without having read more than excerpts of this novel decades ago in a children's encyclopedia originally belonging to my grandmother, would definitely read your projected adventures of Arthur and Martin.
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Date: Mar. 28th, 2022 04:23 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: Apr. 8th, 2022 06:27 am (UTC)