Youth of Darkest England examines the representation of English
working-class children-the youthful inhabitants of the poor urban
neighborhoods that a number of writers dubbed "darkest England"-in
Victorian and Edwardian imperialist literature. In particular, the
book focuses on how the writings for and about youth undertook an
ideological project to enlist working class children into the
British imperial enterprise.
It is generally assumed that the dominant middle-classes succeeded
in recruiting the working-class youth and thus easily manipulating
these young people for nationalist purposes. However, Boone
demonstrates convincingly that this was not the case and that the
British working-class youth resisted a nationalist identification
process that tended to eradicate or obfuscate class differences.
In the first chapter he explores the contradictory aspect of
imperialist writings through a careful study of Henry Mayhew's
"London Labour and the London Poor." In the next two chapters he
examines the "penny bloods," cheap adventure stories, which
contained subversive tendencies and were condemned by the middle
class but appreciated and grasped by working class youth. As a
counter to the "penny hoods," new more conservative magazines were
developed. In the chapters that follow Boone carefully analyzes the
middle-class representations of working-class culture such as
William Booth's "In Darkest England and the Way Out" to show how
this culture was linked to degeneration and needed to be
regenerated by middle-class visionaries. Most of the schemes or
organizations for "reforming" or "co-opting" working class youth
such as the scout organizations involved an instrumentalization
ofthe working-class young which resisted this process through World
War I.
Lucidly written and thoroughly researched, Youth of Darkest England
is a major contribution to our understanding of youth culture and
children's literature in the nineteenth century.
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