My Schoolfellows, My Patrons, My Public: English Schoolboy Authorship 1786-1798
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My Schoolfellows, My Patrons, My Public: English Schoolboy Authorship 1786-1798 Jill Elizabeth Gage Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 3 Abstract Over the course of the eighteenth century, schoolboys were prolific writers, producing poetry, speeches, plays, periodicals, and novels to entertain their schoolfellows as well as a broader public, who listened to and read their work, criticised it, copied it, circulated it, had it printed, and purchased it. My research has yielded over seventy works published in print and manuscript by boys at English schools between 1660 and 1800. Yet schoolboy authors have been largely ignored by scholars, even as recent work has been produced on the history of education, on childhood, and on the rise of children’s literature as a distinct genre in the mid-to-late eighteenth century. This thesis provides a survey of the corpus of schoolboy writing, along with three case studies of schoolboy authors who published between 1787 and 1800. The first case study concerns three schoolboy-authored periodicals: The Microcosm (1786–1787), The Trifler (1788), and The Flagellant (1792), which together form the largest corpus of identifiable schoolboy writing in print. The second study considers the work of James Boswell Jr (1778-1822), son of the biographer, whose juvenilia comprises verses, essays, plays, and letters, and is possibly the largest extant collection of extra-curricular literary manuscripts by a single eighteenth- century schoolboy. The third study examines a nearly five hundred page manuscript novel loosely based on Robinson Crusoe, written and illustrated by a boy named Jonathan Banks, at an unidentified school, probably in the mid-1790s. In surveying how schoolboy authors chose genres and formats, circulated material, and interacted with their intended and actual audiences, I hope to reveal how the experience of the schoolroom influenced their writing, how they defined authorship, both for 4 themselves and their readers, and how their schools functioned as a space of literary production and consumption. 5 Table of Contents English Schoolboy Authorship 1660-1798: An Overview pp. 6-48 Puny Authorlings: Three Schoolboy Periodicals, 1786-1792 pp. 49-97 The Cub at Westminster pp. 98-145 The Schoolboy Hermit pp. 146-192 Conclusion pp. 193-205 Appendix A: Bibliography of Printed Schoolboy Works, pp. 206-224 1660-1798 and Selected Manuscripts Appendix B: Illustrations pp. 225-230 Bibliography pp. 231-250 6 English Schoolboy Authorship 1660-1798: An Overview Samuel Johnson once asserted that ‘a schoolboy’s exercise may be a pretty thing for a schoolboy; but it is a treat for no man’.1 Such criticism, however, did not stop English schoolboys from publishing works in both print and manuscript form throughout the eighteenth century, nor did it reflect the public’s interest in such works. Schoolboys were, in fact, seemingly inexhaustible authors: in addition to their schoolboy exercises, they produced poetry, speeches, plays, periodicals, and novels to entertain their schoolfellows as well as a broader public. My research has yielded over seventy works published by schoolboys during the long eighteenth century; moreover, there is much anecdotal evidence concerning schoolboy authorship during this period. Notably, Johnson himself wrote a number of poems while at school in both Lichfield and Stourbridge, including ‘On a Daffodil, the first Flower the Author had seen that Year’ and a now lost Latin poem on the glow-worm. Christopher Smart’s talent in Latin verse-making at Durham School attracted the attention of Henrietta, Duchess of Cleveland; while Alexander Pope recollected, ‘When I was twelve, I wrote a kind of a play, which I got to be acted by my schoolfellows’; and Samuel Richardson commented that his schoolmates often asked him to tell them stories ‘from […] my Head, as mere Invention; of which they would be most fond. One of them […] was for putting me to write a History, as he called it, on the Model of Tommy Potts’.2 1 James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. by G.B. Hill and L.F. Powell, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934-50), II, p. 127. 2 W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 62; Karina Williamson, ‘Smart, Christopher (1722–1771)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography < http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk/view/article/25739> [accessed 12 March 2011] (para. 5); Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and Men (London: W.H. Carpenter, 1820), p. 276; Samuel Richardson, Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. by John Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 228–235. ‘Tommy Potts’ refers to a chapbook, first published as The Lover’s Quarrel; or, Cupid’s Triumph (Edinburgh: [n. pub.], [1750?]), 7 Towards the end of the century, Robert Southey exulted in the extra-curricular literary culture of Westminster School, and compelled his roommate James Boswell the younger to write a mock biography of another schoolfellow, which was then circulated.3 If eighteenth-century schoolboy authors were so prolific, why have they, along with the literary culture that produced them, been largely ignored by scholars even as recent work has been produced on the history of early modern education, school libraries, and the rise of children’s literature as a distinct genre in the mid-to-late eighteenth century?4 The problem is partially rooted in the term ‘children’s literature’, which has come to be understood as literature written for children, but not by children. While Matthew Grenby’s work on child readers and book owners, and Jan Fergus’s study of the reading habits of boys at Rugby School open up new ways of thinking about children – and specifically schoolboys – as readers, this work still focuses on children as consumers rather than creators of literary texts.5 First and foremost, this dissertation shifts the focus from children’s literature to literature by children. All forms of children’s writing are generally grouped under the rubric of ‘juvenilia’, another term that is rather problematic since, as Christine Alexander points out, it is simply ‘extra-textual, deriving from the biographical criterion of age’. and beginning in 1776 as The History of Tommy Potts; or, The Lover’s Quarrel (London: [n. pub.], 1776). 3 William Haller, The Early Life of Robert Southey, 1771-1803 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1917), p. 35. 4 See, for example: Children and their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, ed. by Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Ian Green, ‘Libraries for School Education and Personal Devotion,’ in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Volume II 1640-1850, ed. by Giles Mandelbrote and Keith Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp.47-64; and Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 5 M. O. Grenby, The Child Reader 1700-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 8 Most scholarship assigns a somewhat arbitrary cut-off age for the production of juvenilia, generally between the ages of twenty and twenty-four, yet the term is not consistently applied: as one example, Alexander points out that John Keats wrote most of his poetry before the age of twenty-four, yet few would refer to his poetry as juvenilia. The writing of young authors varies wildly: in some instances it is simplistic and filled with mistakes, whereas in others ‘the writing may be as sophisticated as any adult production’. Despite this wide range in quality there remains the ‘illogical assumption that adult endeavours are somehow intrinsically “better” than youthful ones’.6 While some scholarship has worked to situate juvenile works in a more serious light, the work has largely concentrated on famous writers such as Jane Austen, Leigh Hunt, or Virginia Woolf, and views their early work merely as a prelude to their later writing (a notable exception perhaps being the Brontës). Moreover, this work has traditionally been viewed as secret – or at least private – writing that would have circulated amongst family (if it circulated at all); the publication of this juvenilia often comes at a much later date, edited by family who ‘seek to suppress family secrets or evidence of coarseness or immaturity’.7 My project looks to examine a subset of juvenilia – schoolboy writing – as a distinctive literary culture with its own conventions and practises. It considers this writing not merely as a prologue to later work, but as a lens through which one might investigate the eighteenth-century English school as a space of literary production and consumption that fostered the creation and circulation of both curricular and extra-curricular work in manuscript and print. 6 Christine Alexander, ‘Defining and Representing Literary Juvenilia’, in The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, ed. by Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 70-97 (pp. 72-73; p. 79). 7 Ibid, p. 79. 9 While this introduction discusses schoolboy authorship between 1660 and 1800, the three case studies that follow focus on the last fifteen years of the eighteenth century. This narrow time frame allows the writing of these particular schoolboy authors to be placed within a fairly specific historical