Writing Through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century : Age, Gender, and Work

__Writing through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century__ explores how boyhood was constructed in different creative spaces that reflected the lived experience of young boys through the long eighteenth century—not simply in children’s literature but in novels, poetry, medical advice, criminal broadsides, and automaton exhibitions. The chapters encompass such rituals as breeching, learning to read and write, and going to school. They also consider the lives of boys such as chimney sweeps and convicted criminals, whose bodily labor was considered their only value and who often did not live beyond boyhood. Defined by a variety of tasks, expectations, and objectifications, boys—real, imagined, and sometimes both—were subject to the control of their elders and were used as tools in the cause of civil society, commerce, and empire. This book argues that boys in the long eighteenth century constituted a particular kind of currency, both valuable and expendable—valuable because of gender, expendable because of youth. Contents 9 Acknowledgments 11 Introduction: Time for Boys 13 1 The Boy in Breeches: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) Growing into Gender 28 2 The Boy in School: Ellenor Fenn’s Rhetorical Tools in School Dialogues, for Boys (1783) 44 3 The Boy in the Machine: Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s Automaton, the Writer (1774) 75 4 The Boy in the Chimney: Sweeps’ Apprentices, Suffering Bodies, and Jonathan Swif 96 5 The Boy in the Gallows: Crime, Punishment, Broadsheets, Afterlives 116 6 The Boy in the Printing Press: Printer’s Devils and Upward Mobility 138 Conclusion 158 Notes 163 Bibliography 209 Index 233 Looking at privileged boys in school as well as those of the laboring class, criminal boys who ended up in prison, and apprentices in the printing press whose labor helped them achieve respectable manhood, this book argues that boys in the long eighteenth century constituted a particular kind of currency, both valuable and expendable--valuable because of gender, expendable because of youth. As such, boys were all, one way or another, made useful, and their stories run the gamut from trivial to tragic.