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Synopsis

Warrior Generation? Militarism and British Lower-Class Boys, 1865-1885

Warrior Generation addresses the question of if, as some have claimed, Britain’s lower

classes had become militarized by the end of Victoria’s reign. It examines the culture of

lower-class boys (e.g., from artisan, working, factory, farming, and pauper families) who

were born between 1865 and 1885, and whose common experiences should indicate an

embrace of military culture. Those common experiences included living in traditional

lower class families far removed experientially from Britain’s other classes; going to

school in the new government-financed elementary schools; working in the mills or shops

or offices or on the streets in villages and towns; going to the music hall and other cheap

or free entertainments; reading the avalanche of new boys’ adventure magazines; and

living in increasingly close proximity to the uniformed military. A close study of letters,

memoirs, biographies, and other artifacts left by lower class men of that generation leads

to the conclusion that some certainly admired the military, and an increasing number

decided to enlist for a variety of reasons, but as an institution it actually played a

relatively insignificant role in their consciousness.

Chapter One: Introduction and the Warrior Generation

Early in the morning of September 2, 1898, Brevet Major General Sir Herbert

Horatio Kitchener, Sirdar (Commander in Chief) of the Egyptian Army, led a force of

some 25,000 Egyptian, British, and Sudanese troops against an army of around 60,000

Sudanese Mahdists in the decisive battle of what Winston Churchill called the River War

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at Omdurman. The battle was spectacularly one-sided; by noon, some 12,000 Mahdists

lay dead with another 13,000 wounded and 5000 captured; Kitchener’s forces suffered

forty-seven dead and 387 wounded.

Omdurman was the culmination of a two-year campaign whose justification by

various cabinet officials changed regularly, from providing security for southern Egypt,

to providing cover for the Italians in Abyssinia (ensuring that savage troops would not

succeed in humiliating a civilized army), to ending the purported slave trade in Southern

Sudan, to “avenging Gordon”—Charles George “Chinese” Gordon, the iconic hero of

battles stretching from China to Africa, had been killed by the Mahdists in Khartoum in

January of 1885. To be sure, many in the British government had long entertained

concerns about the growing power and influence of Mahdism, either a cult or a new

branch of Islam, depending on one’s point of view, that had sprung up in the Southern

Sudan in the early 1880s, led by a peasant mystic named Muhammad Ahmed. Ahmed

preached jihad against both corrupt Egyptians and the English, and his Islamic purity led

to his being proclaimed Mahdi, “guided by God.” Shortly after the Mahdi’s followers

had taken over Khartoum and killed Gordon, the Mahdi himself died; his leadership of

the jihad was passed on to his chief lieutenant Abdullahi, who took the title “Khalifa,”

continued to refer to the Mahdi as the spiritual leader of the jihad, and continued

aggressive raids against neighboring peoples in his campaign to spread Islamic purity.

No matter the varying official explanations, the war against Mahdism had been

cast in the popular press as a campaign to “avenge Gordon.” Kitchener’s victory set off

months of celebration across Britain, pitched to what could only be described as a

“sensation”; it made Kitchener’s reputation as a tactical genius and led him on to further

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adventures commanding British forces in South Africa and serving as Secretary of State

for War during the Great War; it solidified the Liberal Imperial strategy of expanding the

Empire; and it contributed to temporarily popularizing the Army in the public eye, which

set off nervous complaints among many anti-militarists and pacifists about the

militarization of British culture.

Why did this now nearly forgotten campaign resonate so strongly with the public

in 1898? Why did the war correspondents insist on singling out (or manufacturing)

heroes? Why the loving detail in the dispatches about tactics, weaponry, and individual

actions, and how did that affect readers? Why the sensation that followed the victory, the

parades and costume balls, the entertainments and instant books, and the general

commodification of the Army and of all things Sudan? And particularly, why the

universal adulation of the Army after the victories over the Mahdists at Firket and Atbara

and ultimately, Omdurman, and why did the adulation cut across class lines?

Specifically, why would the lower classes, who seemed to have had little use for the

Army and certainly no interest in imperial adventures like the Omdurman Campaign

participate so enthusiastically in the celebration of Britain’s military prowess against a far

away, rather primitive people?

The Omdurman excitement didn’t last long, by the way, and that may be why it

has been all but fled the common memory. The Second South African War which started

the very next year began marginalizing it, and of course the Great War marginalized most

of the late-nineteenth-Century colonial adventures. Outside of the name of a few cities

(Kitchener, Ontario), institutions (Gordon Boys Home), and some short-lived kitsch

commodification (Sirdar carpets), the war against the Mahdist forces and Kitchener’s

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Great Crusade to Avenge Gordon died out rather quickly in the public mind. I was drawn

to the campaign not because of the battle itself (although it has intrinsic interest for

military historians) but for the cultural meanings implicit in both the battle and the public

reaction to it.

The cultural importance of Omdurman has not been totally ignored: Peter

Harrington discusses the wide-spread popularity of images from the campaign in

“Visualizing the Sudan Campaign,”1 and Andrew Griffith, in his New Journalism, New

Imperialism, and the Fiction of Empire (2015), shows its importance in New

Journalism’s developing role in popularizing combat as part of the great romance of

Imperial adventure.2 Edward M. Spiers discusses how the key role played by the Sudan

Military Railway popularized technology in the public’s imagining of Empire.3 But what

I was interested in was the celebration of the Army by all classes, and the fetes and social

events showered by middle-class individuals and groups on the other ranks, which were

almost universally composed of lower-class men.

What really piqued my interest was in my scholarly experience, the enlisted men

in the Regular Army of the late nineteenth century were shunned by virtually everyone in

British society, even their own families. Even enlistees didn’t trust other enlistees

(although loyalty to the regiment was embedded in any ranker after a few months of

service). Kipling summarized public attitudes succinctly in “Tommy,” whose soldier-

narrator says resentfully:

I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o' beer,

The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here."

And:

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I went into a theatre as sober as could be,

They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;

So where did this love, this adulation, come from almost all of a sudden?

The Sudan Sensation

England marked the Anglo-Egyptian army’s victory over the Mahdists at

Omdurman with a fervor that crossed the line from mere celebration into sensation.

Within a day of the announced victory, Pattison’s was using it to sell whiskey and Pimms

was using it to sell liqueur (see Images One and Two). Within two days, the Crystal

Palace was advertising a victory celebration complete with specialized fireworks. On

October 7, a month after the battle, the Grenadier Guards battalion and the 37th Field

Artillery Battery returning from the Sudan docked at Southampton. The wildly

enthusiastic public response was uniformly remarked upon by the press: 3000 people at

Southampton to see the troops disembark, thousands lining the railroads and applauding

as the trains rolled by, hundreds more at each of the rural and suburban stations, and huge

throngs at Victoria Station and along the line of march to Wellington Barracks. The

Guardian reported on October 8 that the crowd was “denser far than on the occasion of

Mr. Gladstone’s funeral” earlier that year. On the same day the Times estimated the

crowd at 800,000. The Daily Mail reported that “there were more young men and fewer

ladies than the ordinary occasion attracts. It was a crowd of the fighting classes… .”

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In late October, Kitchener returned to England after a little foray where he sorted

out a French expedition poking around at Fashoda further south up the Nile. Immediately

after he landed a paparazzi-like horde of reporters followed him everywhere, and

published breathless stories about him at the theater (Lloyd’s reported the “The audience

[at the Palace Theatre] stopped the performance to cheer [Kitchener’s entry], and when,

during the interval, the band struck up ‘Rule Britannia,’ the house rose, as one individual,

and insisted on singing it. Such a scene has never been witnessed in a music hall. (Nov.

6)”4 Reporters followed him to the City, to Cambridge, to recognition dinners. The

Graphic ran a graphic of the Savage Club dinner honoring the Sirdar, complete with

menu.

And for one of the first times in living memory the other ranks were treated

similarly. On October 12 the Star ran a happy article about Guards non-coms—not

officers, mind you, but non-coms, all lower-class men—“at play.” “Non-Com’s Face the

Music at the Canterbury” ran one subhed, and “They Brought Along Their Wives and

Sweethearts, And Had a Good Time as the Guests of the Management.” “Marie Lloyd,

George Robey, and R. G. Knowles made music and fun for the Guardsmen,” readers

were informed, and “the gallant fellows were on their mettle. They had to reckon with

whole avalanches of beer and whisky, as formidable to mortal man as the Dervishes in

the desert, and they deployed in front of the beer and whisky with all the steadiness they

showed at Omdurman.” The article went on in this vein for the best part of a full column.

Meanwhile, on October 23 Lloyd’s reported “On Friday a hundred men and the officers

of the Howitzer battery which did such execution at Khartoum visited the Alhambra

[music hall].” All this now from a society that, as Chapter Two will describe, had

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historically not treated soldiers well, had, in fact, often barred soldiers in uniform from

certain pubs, music halls, other places of entertainment, and even train cars.

A decade of war reporting—of both British conflicts and others, including the

Spanish-American War—had prepared the newspaper-reading British public for the

Sensation. Kitchener’s campaign had started in the spring of 1896, and had been

followed throughout the two years by a posse of reporters, who reported every move of

the little army in breathless detail. The campaign was perhaps the first large-scale look at

what was to become modern warfare; it even included building a railway for hundreds of

miles along the Nile to provide transportation for troops and supplies when the Nile

became impassable. Kitchener’s forces were armed with modern magazine rifles, long-

range artillery, Nile river gunboats, and machine guns. For the first time, medical support

units included the new x-ray machines. One of the reporters, John Montagu “Mad Jack”

Benett-Stanford even brought along a cinematograph, filmed some of the action, and sold

the primitive movies to music halls in the weeks following the Omdurman victory.

Kitchener and the Army were quickly commodified and used to sell an astonishing list of

items including books, engravings, pictures, Ogden’s Guinea Gold Cigarettes, Bovril,

music hall acts, and “Sirdar Carpets.”

My research led me to narrow my study to the prime actors in this event, the

young lower-class men between the ages of twenty and forty who comprised both the

fighting regiments and the majority of the crowds that lined the railways and streets to

welcome back the England-based units in October, 1898.5 The key term in that sentence

is “lower class” because it is not a class identifier that would have been used in the latter

half of the nineteenth century, and it has not commonly been used by scholars studying

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British society. However, dealing with class labels in a study such as this one can

become exceedingly clumsy, especially if the labels are to be both meaningful and widely

understood. I’ve decided to use the term “lower class” to lump together classes that the

mid-Victorians, with their penchant for classifying and ranking, would have subdivided.6

It combines the rough divisions that the Army Medical Department used to classify the

civilian occupations of new recruits: Labourers, including servants and husbandmen;

Manufacturing Artisans, including cloth-makers, lace-makers, and weavers; Mechanics,

including trades that would promote physical strength and health, like smiths, carpenters

and masons; and Shopmen/clerks. The Medical Department also used Professions

(teachers, pharmacists etc.); and Boys, those under seventeen who, presumably, had no

civilian occupation important enough to identify by name; these latter two may or may

not have fallen into the classic Victorian grouping that would have comprehended “lower

class.” It must be understood, too that the influence of Board Schooling and the rapid

expansion of professional occupations destabilized class boundaries at the upper levels of

the lower classes and the lower middle classes, and the middle classes constantly pushed

back against the sons and daughter of laborers and artisans who, through education, could

become teachers, clerks, and business people and rise “above their station.” A large

percentage of laborers, indeed of all those classifications, were likely paupers (pauper

described both a financial situation and a class), but the Army Medical Department did

not use pauper as an occupation. In fact, even the poverty-stricken unemployed at

enlistment time were grouped in one of those five classifications. From 1870 to 1900 the

vast majority of recruits (between 58 and 65%) were Laborers. Mechanics provided from

10 to 15% of the recruits, as did artisans. Shopmen provided 5-8%, and the professions

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never exceeded 1.3%. Boys who could be recruited only under special circumstances

ranged from 1-3%.7

So, to understand the reactions of the young men in those crowds at Victoria

Station and along the Mall (the statistics of class identification in 1898 would indicate

that some 83% of them must have shared class status with the troops) it is clearly

important to understand how those attitudes had likely been formed, and to do that one

must look not at just the newspapers and periodicals of September-December 1898 that

sought to explain the adoring reception in contemporary terms, but to the young men’s

boyhood in which many of the attitudes manifested on the streets and in the marketplace

in late 1898 must have been formed. Because despite what some of the jingoist middle-

class journalists in 1898 would like to have believed, the widespread demonstrations

were not a spontaneous outburst of patriotism/imperialism/militarism by the “fighting

classes,” but were actually a manifestation of a fairly simple, if clearly divided, lower-

class attitude toward the military and the enlisted men in the military that had been

evolving over the last thirty years or so: on the one hand, “Chuck him out the brute”; on

the other “O it's ‘Thin red line of 'eroes’ when the drums begin to roll.’”

The sources of the admiring, warm, and supportive attitude are many and

complex, and I’ve spent a number of years, trying to tease them out of the mass of

cultural studies on the Victorians in general. And establishing a reasonable, clear

structure for discussing those sources is itself a complicated task. I’ve had to make some

assumptions that, as it turns out, are generally supported by the literature, the first one

being the contention that there was a clearly describable lower-class boys’ culture, with

all of its attendant attitudes, values, and assumptions, for the generation that were born

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and grew up in the period 1865-1885, and lined the streets to cheer the heroes of

Omdurman. It was a culture that differed somewhat from the generation previous and the

generation to come.8 And in that culture there was a generally consistent, admiring

attitude toward the military that certainly differed from the previous generation’s attitude.

I contend that their attitude was formed by a variety of influences embedded in their daily

routine: family, friends, school, work, play, entertainments, reading, life expectations.9

Thus, to identify the many attitudes that lower-class boys generally held toward the

military, in the following study I will provide a general description of these important

contexts, and then examine those aspects of each context that touched on the military.

An explanatory note on terms is necessary here. As the next chapter will show,

boys of the Warrior Generation experienced several kinds of military: Regular Army,

Reserves, Volunteers, Militia, even the Yeomanry. It was the Regular Army that was

seemingly universally detested by all of English society (the troops that were being

celebrated in late 1898 were Regular Army troops). I will use the term “military” when

discussing the general non-naval armed services of Britain, and specify which of the

branches when specification is important.

*****

When I began this study, I temporarily labeled this group the “Imperial

Generation” in recognition of the common view that the period from about 1895 to 1914

was the high tide of Imperialism in Britain, even among the lower and working classes,

and that the Army that made Imperialism possible was composed of men who had been

born in the period 1865-1885.10 Through my research it became clear that identifying

that generation of lower-class boys with Imperialism was dead wrong, even if on the

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surface those boys who joined the Queen’s army and fought in the Sudan and elsewhere

in Africa and Asia, and their brothers who stayed home and worked, and packed the

streets in celebrating their victorious march through London appeared on the surface to

be celebrating Imperialism. As the following study will show, both the troopers and their

brothers who lined the streets to welcome them home were celebrating a good fight and a

victory, not the British Empire. This generation was neither Imperialist nor Militarist:

more accurately, it was a Warrior Generation.11

While it would not be too far off the mark to describe the entire generation of

boys no matter their class as members of the Warrior Generation, this study focuses on

lower-class boys. The Victorian middle and upper classes, graduates of a variety of

grammar and public schools, scions of reasonably financially comfortable families,

inheritors of a seemingly infinite set of life opportunities, roughly the top 17% of the

population, have been examined at length. And this group truly saw themselves in

romantic terms as officers, as explorers, as adventurers out of a tale from Boys of

England or a book from G. A. Henty, and incidentally, a significant percentage of them

were indeed Imperialists. But outside of a few classic studies, lower-class boys have been

mostly ignored, in part because they left few personal records like autobiographies and

first-person periodical articles. As a general rule, their lives and future were

circumscribed by narrow class expectations, both assumed from within the class and

imposed from without. They worked at jobs that were tedious, tenuous and dangerous,

and most of them lived in circumstances that were marginal at best. Especially after the

education reforms of the 1860s and 1870s, individuals could move from group to group

within the lower class, but though the class borders between working and lower middle

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were permeable to some extent—education allowed boys to enter into certain lower

middle-class occupations—few ever achieved what would have been recognized by

Victorian society as middle-class status.12 They shared a similar elementary education (at

best through the equivalent of three standards in the sixties, perhaps up to five standards

in the seventies, six in the eighties), a similar background (their parents were laborers,

artisans, clerks, teachers, working people, or paupers), and similar aspirations: a safe,

regular wage high enough to buy food, arrange for a dry, warm, healthy home, and clothe

a family, with a few bob for the Friendly society, the bookseller (and probably the

bookmaker), and a few more for St. Monday’s ale. They lived in a violent society, where

an industrial accident, a robber, a street fight, or a careless drunk could either kill them or

incapacitate them for economic survival. A little good luck could mean a cottage; a little

bad luck could mean the workhouse. This was the class that provided most of the

enlisted men and non-commissioned officers for the late Victorian Army.

The boys in this study are, for the most part, English boys. Finding any continuity

and consistency, indeed, finding any shared experiences, among English boys from

London, Manchester, and the farms of Yorkshire is difficult enough. Finding any among

English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh lower-class boys who for the most part didn’t share a

common school system, religion, even language, is next to impossible.

This study will work backwards. In examining the lives of lower-class boys of

the mid-Victorian generation, I will be looking particularly for experiences, attitudes,

expectations—what I call artifacts—that might have shaped their reaction to the victory

over the Mahdists. Initially, I will provide an outline of the reality of the British Army in

the eighties and nineties, when boys of the Warrior Generation enlisted. I will also

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generalize on what the Army meant to them, to the members of their fathers’ generation,

and to the middle class. I will then examine the Sudan campaign of 1896-98, and

describe the public celebrations following the victory at Omdurman. The last four

chapters will examine how boys of the Warrior Generation lived from 1860-1885: what

happened in school, at work, and at home; how they spent their leisure time; especially

what they read and what they commonly interacted with. Throughout this examination I

will be looking for artifacts that contributed to their view of the Army; to war in general;

to aggression, violence, competition, and conflict; and yes, to the Sudan campaign.

The Army and the Warrior Generation

As noted above, the lower class provided most of the rank and file of the British

Army out on the imperial frontiers, providing (paradoxically I would think, at least for

the middle class), the “British manhood [that] would bring civilization to the hinterlands

of the world.”13 By the 1890s, the most common middle-class attitude toward the rank

and file of the Army was expressed best in the dispatches written by middle-class combat

correspondents for middle-class newspapers and periodicals. Much of the perception of

the common soldier was rooted in a middle-class attitude best described as sentimental

paternalism. The sentimental part allowed middle-class journalists to describe the

common soldier in terms that the public wanted to hear. By the 1890s, the middle-class

public wanted a soldier who exhibited the middle-class values of the ideal British man:

brave, calm, cool under fire, decisive, etc., courteous to women and the weak, and most

of all, devoted to Queen and Country. In fact, the entirety of the lower classes should

have the same deep devotion (Gilbert and Sullivan spoofed the view at the end of

Penzance, with the lower-class Pirates surrendering because of their deep loyalty to

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queen and country—“In Queen Victoria’s Name”). The paternalistic part regularly

appeared in articles about soldiers as being somewhat childlike, in need of discipline and

leadership which they could receive from their betters—in other words, like the family,

the class system had its children (the lower classes), and its father figures (middle- and

upper-class men). Thus, the Regular Army, overwhelmingly lower class in its makeup

but middle and upper class in its leadership and values, mimicked the family in its

structure.

Despite numerous periodical articles (e.g, articles appearing in periodicals written

by and for the middle classes and above) criticizing Army organization, Army weapons,

and Army leadership, and decrying the Army’s inability to attract qualified recruits, and

insisting that England was on the brink of military disaster unless serious reforms were

instituted, young lower-class men enlisted in various military branches in increasing

numbers through the last half of the century. While the Regular Army struggled to meet

enlistment quotas (even after the Cardwell reforms in the 1870s),14 the adjunct services

(Volunteers, Reserves, Militia, Yeoman) proved somewhat more attractive to these men

in large part because these services provided a reasonably good experience that fit a

lower-class ideal of what constituted a real man’s work (and by the way the young men

could parade in snazzy uniforms with their mates in front of friends and family in their

home towns). While middle-class journalists worried that the lower class was inherently

hostile to uniformed service, and that the only recruits that could be gotten (and that by

recruiting sergeant trickery) were the dregs of the pauper class, young lower-class men

regularly enlisted in sufficient numbers to keep both the Regular Army (barely) and the

adjunct services (comfortably) up to strength. Desertion, regularly cited by journalists as

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a problem in the Regular Army, held at a constant rate (between 2 and 3% of the active

forces through the last forty years of the century) and was rarely a problem among

regiments stationed abroad, especially those experiencing regular combat. And

incidentally, many deserters actually rejoined their regiments after a period of

contemplation or, more commonly, of sobering up. This study will show that the military

was such a common part of lower-class life in the middle- to late-Victorian period that

enlistment was hardly seen by many young lower-class men as a giant step into the

unknown; rather, it was simply one more option in a tightly restricted set of work choices

for a young man. The older generation entertained a far different set of attitudes toward

the Regular Army, as I shall describe in Chapter Two, but attitudes among the young men

themselves were evolving.

Lower-class men from the Warrior Generation could and did view the Army

with a truly divided mind. They knew from their fathers and from common knowledge,

and maybe from personal experience, that many of the men who joined the Army were a

hard-drinking, hard-smoking, whoring, profane, indecent, coarse, brutal, bullying, rude

lot who would have been an embarrassment to their mothers if they’d had any mothers.

And while the older generation may have celebrated Army victories in Africa and Asia,

for the most part they did not seem to have anything like a divided mind. They stood

along parade routes and applauded winners, but for the most part they simply saw

enlistment in the Army as akin to joining a band of pirates and road agents, cutthroats and

thieves. But the young men could view the Army with some sympathy, wrought in part

from their knowledge of men who had enlisted, in part from a romantic sense that maybe,

just maybe, the Army could pluck them from their grueling existence and deposit them in

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some exotic somewhere else, where people would look up to them, or fight them, or do

something other than just ignore them. The Army could provide the necessities of life,

and some consistency in their expectations. It could take them away from their

precarious existence and provide them something meaningful to do. It might provide a

sweetheart; it would likely provide natives to be superior to if one got sent off to India,

which by the 1880s was likely. It could provide romance, or at least, a steady job. It

could provide a sense of belonging, of living and working with other lads like

themselves. As Edward Gosling points out, soldiers themselves said that a large part of

its attractiveness was that it provided them the opportunity to fight and win glory (both

core values to lower-class boys).15 On the other side of the divided mind was the rational

part, the part that recognized the reality that was the Army, shorn of romantic vestiges of

grieving mothers and sweethearts and natives filled with adulation. Or

menace…whatever. The reality was that soldiers lived in barracks that were not much

different in quality from many slum dwellings, and they ate poorly and got paid poorly.

And a whole lot of the soldiers in your barracks were going to be drunkards,

blasphemers, and the kind of people your Mother warned you about. Soldiering, all

things considered, was still a lousy way to make a living. All this talk about our heroic

defense of “English freedom” obviously didn’t apply to us, who have NONE. Dying

young was still pretty stupid.

For lower-class young men, life was pretty much black and white. There were

survivors and there were losers.16 In many cases, the contest for survivors and losers was

a physical contest, a literal fight, and as I will show in Chapter Five, lower-class young

men admired the winners of a fight (see the class adulation for Tom Sayers for example).

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Actually, young working-class men admired both tough guys (who were the soldiers who

could knock hell out of their weight in Russians) and smart guys (who saw through the

middle-class sentiment and cant and knew the real score). For every working-class kid

who sang McDermott’s War Song in full throat in his local music hall, there was another

one, or possibly the same one, who sang Herbert Campbell’s parody (See Chapter Five).

For those lower-class boys in the ranks, letters home exhibited a deep loyalty to friends,

class, and roots; a sense of superiority (lower-class men could now be superior) over

“natives”; and a tremendous sense of patriotism for the abstraction of “Old England.”

In the boys’ adventure magazines (which many of these boys devoured) and

probably in boys’ minds in general, the adventures that the Army experienced—

particularly the Army in the empire, but also the Army in the great nineteenth-century

wars with Napoleon and in the Crimea (with maybe the Indian Mutiny thrown in)—

morphed into adventure, period. The Army was a common enough element in lower-

class culture that it really became another jumping off point for adventure. But the Army

upped the ante because it could claim more “Queen and Country” than the typical

adventure story, which relied on Britishness as an emotional stimulant and signifier. And

for the readers who weren’t going to Canada or Fiji any time soon, the Army provided a

realistic portal to adventure.

In schools, in church, in their play, conflict (which obviously would include

military conflict) played a significant role in the lives of lower-class boys. They grew up

in a culture that accepted physical force as the proper and inevitable method for reaching

a desirable conclusion, which is a roundabout way of saying the one of their common

experiences was being beaten by their parents to make them behave, being beaten by

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their schoolmasters to make them learn, being beaten by the establishment to keep them

in their place, being beaten by older boys and outsiders just for the hell of it, and fighting

to establish their own physical or psychological turf. Thus, the ability to absorb pain and

the ability to fight were both highly respected qualities among lower-class boys. Boys

admired successful fighters, whether pub fighters or prize fighters like the Little Wonder,

Tom Sayers, whose funeral drew over 100,000 mostly lower-class mourners in 1865.17

Their pleasure activities were also tied closely to physical prowess, whether it was

racing, climbing, swimming, birdsnesting, or reading adventure tales in Young Men of

Great Britain. Fairs, wakes, school and church prize days, and Friendly Society

celebrations invariably involved competitions ranging from foot races to wrestling

matches. The heroes of their literature—from midshipmen and schoolboys to Giles

Evergreen and Strongbow, Boy Chief of the Delawares—invariably embodied superior

physical skills and triumphed in their physical competitions.

Imperialism, and Militarism, Nationalism, Patriotism, Racism, Darwinism, Romanticism,

Christianity…Securitism?

One of the great issues of national concern in the last quarter of the nineteenth

century had to do with the Empire, because for many in the middle and upper classes in

England the Empire defined England either for better or worse. And since the middle of

the nineteenth century the concepts of militarism, nationalism, patriotism, racism,

Darwinism, romanticism, Christianity, and a few others have been intertwined with

imperialism and with each other, and often been substituted one for the other. Each

concept is fraught with political overtones; to the self-proclaimed patriot, patriotism is

the ultimate virtue; to his opponent, it is the last refuge of a scoundrel. A nationalist

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claims also to be a patriot; a nationalist may also, again to his opponent, be someone who

believes in a government of uncontrolled power and uncontrolled aggression against

other countries, and thus an anti-democrat masquerading as a patriotic nationalist, and

thus no true patriot at all. Late Victorian imperialists comprehended both patriots and

nationalists, seeing themselves as defenders of a steadily enlarging Empire that brought

honor to England. The anti-Imperialists, the Little Englanders, of the 1890s, most of

whom believed in not extending the Empire, and many of whom believed that it was in

England’s interest to contract the Empire, were convinced that they were the good

nationalists, and the Liberal Imperialists typified by Lord Roseberry, Prime Minister

Salisbury, and Cecil Rhodes were the bad, dedicated as they were to selling out

traditional English values (and the entire English treasury) and weakening both the

economic and moral fiber of the country for the satisfaction of seeing most of the map of

the world tinted red. And the militarist…well, the “good” militarists only wanted an

Army that could protect Great Britain and her colonies, and the Army could maybe be a

little larger, or a little better supported, than the current one. The “bad” militarists wanted

a big enough Army “to do the job,” and to achieve that, England would require a military

establishment like those in France and Germany. They wanted the military to be the first

answer to any national or international conflict, and hang the idea of diplomacy. They

wanted everyone to experience military service so that everyone would know what

sacrifice for country (patriotism) was all about. Thus, among other things they supported

universal military conscription.

22

We have a considerable library of studies covering each of these concepts. The

following overview is not intended to do more than to offer a working thumbnail sketch

of the important “isms” associated with militarism and the military:

1. nationalism, which emphasized both the identification of individuals with a discrete

cultural, political, geographical entity, and the superiority of that entity over all other

such entities. As we will see in Chapter Four, for boys of the Warrior Generation,

nationalism was introduced in their schools (especially in geography texts) in the form of

English Exceptionalism, the idea that the English were blessed by God as the greatest

nation (race, people) on earth. Nationalism generally manifested itself among those

people who (as just noted) perceived themselves as part of the larger state, and thus

required that people be acquainted with the appropriate cultural values and the

appropriate geographies. This is not to imply that all such people will automatically be

nationalists; classic nationalism requires that the nationalist not simply celebrate the

superiority of his or her state, but celebrate it aggressively, and celebrate its superiority

over all other states. As the term was used at the end of the nineteenth century, it almost

invariably referred to a conservative right-wing ideology that exalted “the nation-state as

the pinnacle of political organization and demand[ed] loyalty from its citizens,”18 and

was “keen to brandish the national flag against foreigners, liberals and socialists in favour

of that aggressive expansion of their own state… .”19 Certainly lower-class men were not

immune to some of the symptoms of nationalism. Whether or not they were classic

nationalists is one question that this study will investigate.

2. patriotism, which was usually inseparable from nationalism. In its most common late

nineteenth-century usage, patriotism and nationalism were almost interchangeable terms,

23

and indeed Eric Hobsbawm argues that “nationalism and patriotism” were in fact one

ideology, and it was an ideology taken over by the political right.20 Barbara Ehrenreich

associates patriotism with both nationalism and the military, and asserts that the primal

power of both patriotism and nationalism over a people springs from their invariable

association with war.21 However, the emergence of an aggressive, blindly obedient form

of patriotism as a significant movement at the end of the nineteenth century on the

continent and among some in the British middle classes sparked an equally powerful

thoughtful, liberal patriotism among a significant group of opinion-makers, newspaper

editors, politicians, and academics who appealed to Samuel Johnson’s classic dictum that

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”22 Patriotic enthusiasm certainly had its

moments with the Warrior Generation—particularly among the men serving in regiments

stationed outside of the United Kingdom—but as we will see it is hard to argue that those

men succumbed to blind obedience to authority for any consistent length of time.

3. militarism, which in its simplest form is a romantic, sentimental admiration for the

military (at the end of the century, the military almost invariably meant the Army). In the

twentieth century militarism became inseparably associated with right wing regimes that

conducted foreign policy through war. At the end of the nineteenth century militarism

encompassed the heightened emotional reaction to uniforms, weaponry, parades, martial

music, and stories about war heroes. For the committed militarist the military could do

no wrong. In a militaristic society the military is above criticism and, as Margaret

Macmillan says, “military values such as discipline, order, self-sacrifice and obedience”

permeate civilian values.23 Other military values—deference, punctuality, cleanliness,

industry, teamwork—were simultaneously values of the late-nineteenth-century

24

capitalist/ industrial society, and at times it is difficult to tease out the industrial values

from the militaristic values. In its extreme form—jingoism—militarism becomes little

more than large-scale bullying (which I will show later was also an integral part of

Warrior Generation boys’ lives). Ehrenreich cites as one precondition for the mass

emotional attachment to the military “an organized media to engage the citizens’

attention.”24 That media can help the ordinary citizen “share the soldier’s exalted sense

of being part of something larger than themselves,” and thus, vicariously, every citizen

becomes (if he chooses to be) part of the Army.25 The Warrior Generation certainly

shared this sense of pride and excitement and as we shall see they joined military units in

unprecedented numbers. But whether their affinity for fighting translated into joining the

regular Army to impose Britain’s political will on other people is tough to prove.

4. racism, which, like nationalism, permeated the entire discourse of Britain and its

relative place in the world. Racism had many manifestations, and itself is a slippery term

to capture. The Victorians used race interchangeably with nationality, culture, color;

British writers could cite the Polish race and the Red Indian race and the Celtic race in

the same paragraph. What race allowed was a “scientific” classification of all the peoples

of the world, a classification that, following the Great Chain of Being, also allowed the

classifier to rank each class. Thus, the protestant Anglo Saxon inevitably rose to the top

of such rankings, because, observably, Anglo Saxons and other “Germanic Races” had

authored virtually all “material progress” in the world. In most ethnographies, Hottentots

and Australian bushmen ranked at the bottom, having produced nothing of value for

humanity. British racial superiority especially over darker peoples was closely allied

with English Exceptionalism, and it was assumed that the British should be able to treat

25

other races in whatever way they saw fit, including taking their territory, punishing them

for perceived insults, and crushing a potentially dangerous border enemy. In Small Wars,

Their Principles and Practice, Major C. E. Callwell assumed general agreement on the

part of the readers of his tactical handbook that civilized people (British and mainly

northern Europeans) had both a right and a responsibility to occupy the territory of

savages and barbarous races and force them to understand the benefits of western

civilization.26. As we shall see later in this study, English racial superiority over every

other race, nationality, religion, and whatever else might be thrown into the pot that

constitutes “race” was a given in textbooks, reading material, and popular culture. Some

reference to the English “race” and a variety of other “races” was common to the reading

material devoured by lower-class boys and men.

5. Darwinism (evolution)—which in a cultural context many saw as simply another

manifestation of the Great Chain of Being—was invariably cited as both proof of English

superiority and justification for the Empire and the colonies. While the religious

establishment debated the Biblical implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the mass

culture adopted the concept of “survival of the fittest” without question. In fact, in a

curious sort of inversion, the argument was regularly advanced that since survival of the

fittest was obviously and demonstrably nature’s law, and nature sprang from God,

survival of the fittest must be God’s law and the civilized world (Europe, the United

States, the British dominions) must clearly have God’s mandate to rule over the rest of

the world. Darwin’s theory of evolution was cited not only as scientific proof that such

rankings were legitimate, but also as a scientific explanation for why the “fittest,” the

Germanic races, must inevitably rule over (and in some cases, “allow to die out”) lesser

26

races.27 As with racism, a form of Darwinism was embedded in lower-class culture, in

school texts, church activities, reading material, games, and other activities.

6. Christianity, which to some extent constituted an imperialism of its own, as well as

contributing to support of the British Empire. Evangelicals particularly saw it as their

duty to save heathen souls; evangelicals and liberals saw it as their duty to extend the

benefits of a superior civilization to the less fortunate. The Empire provided evangelical

missionaries the opportunity to seek converts among the heathens more efficiently (and

more safely) than if they had been forced to preach beyond contact with home. Most

denominations supported a missionary effort, and their missionaries returned to England

regularly to raise both awareness and funds for furthering their efforts to spread the

gospel. In doing so, they created an imagined, contradictory world beyond England’s

shores of wicked, idolatrous heathens, of poor benighted heathens, of heathen slaves and

heathen masters and helpless heathens “in need of help that could only come from white

liberals in England.”28 A typical RTS tract described a “Native” South Sea Islander who

heard a missionary thus:

The poor man felt the tidings to be so wonderful that he was completely

overwhelmed. He burst into a flood of tears; and then, after hearing more from

the missionary, more about the great love of God in the gift of His Son Jesus, he

retired to meditate on it in secret. The precious words, through the power of the

Holy Spirit, went home to his heart; he became a sincere believer in the Lord

Jesus Christ; while he lived he faithfully served Him; and when he died he was

upheld by the comforts and promises of the glorious gospel.29

27

While official Christianity often differed substantially from the government on much of

the Imperial venture, those same people supported imperial extension for the suppression

of slavery, for example, which had long been a Nonconformist cause.30 Thus,

Abolitionism, closely associated with Christianity, might also be considered an “ism” that

was integral with the imperial enterprise. Certainly it is important to remember that the

Sudan fuse was lit when Gordon was sent to Khartoum in part to suppress the Sudan

slave trade.

7. romanticism, which permeated the culture particularly through the late-century

explosion of printed materials. From the adventure stories in boys’ magazines that

described boys’ heroic deeds in faraway lands to the newspaper and magazine press’s

colorful reporting of the same, the frontiers of empire became a site for heroic deeds to be

done in picturesque settings by romantic, English, male heroes. John Springhall reminds

us that imperialism was inextricably bound up with both heroism and the romanticism

that formed the ideal Englishman.31 Newspaper publishers and editors were well aware

of the fact that war and adventure sold papers; the little wars of the empire did wonders

for circulation of the illustrated papers in particular. While the lower-class reading

public may not have been specifically imperial minded, it was certainly hero minded, and

it was through heroic and adventurous illustrations that publishers sought popular support

(e.g. buyers of their product). Illustrated newspaper sales during particularly rousing,

eventful campaigns against the Zulus, Egyptians, Afghans, Mahdists, and a host of others

seemed to some to indicate broad support for the Imperial project; for others it merely

indicated a hunger for more Imperial adventure stories. Newspaper artists

28

helped to sustain popular support for the ‘little wars’ of the late Victorian Army

and supplied the second-hand adventure and romance which was an integral part

of the imperialist mood that gripped the British public and their rulers towards the

end of the nineteenth century. In their work can be found all the qualities—hero

worship, sensational glory, adventure and the sporting spirit—which John Hobson

identified as responsible for imperialism’s successful appeal to the imagination of

the late Victorian mass reading public.32

Of course, while lower-class readers would not have had more than a passing

acquaintance with the middle-class illustrated papers like the Illustrated London News,

Graphic, or Black and White, they did have the Penny Illustrated Paper, and illustrations

were a major feature of the boys’ adventure magazines. While the artists were

undoubtedly appealing to the mass reading public’s imagination, and as Springhall

eloquently points out, their paintings were undoubtedly stimulated by the artists’ own

imperial impulse, I suggest that it was the romantic adventure that was portrayed, not

imperialism, doing the appealing to many of the viewers, especially those in the lower

class.

8. finally, an invented term, securitism, which describes various arguments in favor of

Empire based on the contribution of the Empire to the security of the metropole. Some

militarist imperialists argued that national security depended on an empire, and pointed

with pride and confidence to the detachments parading for the Queen in the Diamond

Jubilee:

Canadian Hussars and Mounties…Giant Maoris, New Zealand Mounted Troops,

the Jamaica Artillery, the Royal Nigerian Constabulary, Negroes from the West

29

Indies, British Guiana and Sierra Leone, the Cape Mounted Rifles, New South

Wales Lancers, the Trinidad Light Horse and Zaptiehs from Cyprus, the Borneo

Dyak Police, ‘Upstanding Sikhs, tiny little Malays, Chinese with a white basin

turned upside down on their heads,’ grinning Houssas from the Gold Coast and

perhaps best of all, the turbaned and bearded Lancers of the Indian Empire,

‘terrible and beautiful to behold.’ 33

The urge to security was “an emotion which often clothed itself in economic arguments,

often in pseudo-Darwinian racialist arguments, often in a historicist appeal to the ‘world-

historical’ process, whatever that might mean.”34 Other “securitists” argued that the

empire provided economic security, social security (the “excess” lower classes could

emigrate instead of staying at home and fomenting labor troubles), and international

security. In the community of nations, said some, bigger was better: the larger the

empire, the more respect (read also “fear”) the empire commanded, and the more it was

respected and feared, the more it could throw its weight around. And finally, there was

the argument that traders and business men out in uncivilized territory needed security,

and that security could only be provided by the Army (this argument neatly conflated the

Christian extension of the benefits of a superior civilization, which includes law and

order—with securitism). The result of that argument, of course, was what was

recognized in the latter part of the nineteenth century as creeping colonialism. The

imperializing force brought the rule of law, as meted out by the Army, to provide

protection for colonizer and colonized alike. The Army was invariably necessary to set

up a rule of law, especially in tribal territories with no central political agency, or to

maintain a rule of law palatable to the most powerful local imperial force, which often

30

meant defeating the local political agency in battle. To H. L. Wesseling, Imperialism is

invariably practiced in a context of war, either at its establishment or during its

maintenance. No matter who established a colony—Britain, Germany, the Netherlands—

or for whatever reason, the military was always involved simply because at some point

(generally at the colony’s establishment, but often later in its history) some agency will

arise that will cause disruption in the peaceful operation of daily life and the military will

be called on to restore order (security). And, he reminds us, “Colonial conquerors came

to stay. Their aim was the permanent and total subjection of the population, or, in other

words, the establishment of a lasting peace.”35 Or in still other words, permanent

security. Lower-class young men may not have ascribed to the larger arguments of

securitism, but they certainly understood that when families were attacked, whether by

Red Indians or Zulus, military protection of some kind was essential, and the British

Army was the most obvious provider of said protection.

And of course, scholars have identified all kinds of combinations of the above:

romantic nationalism, nationalist racism, patriotic militarism. In War, the Army, and

Victorian Literature John Peck discusses Christian militarism which, he argues,

refashioned the old Wellingtonian professional Army military code “into a moral and

religious cause.”36

The voices expressing their fealty to these “isms,” by the way, were not just from

the metropole; the colonies, too, demanded that their views be heard, and the colonies

confused the conversation even more. In his examination of the growth of the influence

of imperialism, nationalism, patriotism, and social Darwinism and racism and yes,

securitism, across the empire, biographer Craig Stockings says that the British concept of

31

imperialism “refers to a type of Empire-wide nationalism, or even patriotism, shared

between Britain and the self-governing colonies.”37 He adds:

The rise of the imperial idea in the late-Victorian Empire included, and

was to some degree stimulated by, a rise in military consciousness. This was,

again, a consequence of feelings of increased external threat mixed with popular

and romantic sentiment. From the 1870s the Victorian army was constantly

involved in colonial conflicts and, with some notable exceptions such as

Isandlwana in Zululand (1879) and Majuba Hill in Natal (1881) it was most often

victorious. Popular heroes like Wolseley, Roberts and even Gordon found fame

as protectors of the Empire and the imperial ideal. Extensive press and popular

coverage of military affairs and adventures reflected the influence of rising

imperialism and associated cultural drivers.38

And here is an example of the further mixing of these concepts: Stockings

assumes that the popular interest in the military meant a popular support of the empire.

However, although he claims that idea of imperialism was “mass and popular” in late-

Victorian culture in both the metropole and the colonies, he fails to engage with the

overwhelming volume of data that indicate that the lower classes had no clue about the

Empire. Their interest, such as it was, was in the romance and glamour of the British

Army beating up on lower orders of humans rather than the glory of an ever-expanding

Empire.

Undoubtedly some of these isms resonated with some of the lower classes.

Regular chapel-goers, for example, supported their missionaries’ efforts abroad, at least

to the extent they could. Lower-class boys of the Warrior Generation certainly believed

32

that they were superior to “Chinamen” or “Niggers,” and Frenchmen; however, since few

of the boys outside of port cities had ever met a Chinaman, their belief in their superiority

had to come from a cultural assumption that was probably as much xenophobia as racism.

But for the most part, while middle-class imperialists—and most imperialists were “a

determined, oligarchically-minded minority” of middle-class men39—looked upon a map

of the world with over a quarter of it colored red and felt a surge of pride, few lower-class

men, if they had even seen such a map, had a sense of what all that red really meant.

Indeed, as John MacKenzie notes, H. G. Wells doubted “that nineteen out of twenty

Englishmen knew as much about their Empire as they did about the Italian Renaissance

or the Argentine Republic.”40 Imperialists of the Primrose League fringe believed that

the Empire somehow made Britain stronger and more respected around the world, and

because they identified themselves with their country, they felt a surge of self-respect.

Yet, as Bernard Porter argues in The Absent-Minded Imperialists: “There is no direct

evidence that this great majority of Britons [the working class] supported the empire,

took an interest in it, or were even aware of it for most of the century.”41 Despite much

of the “evidence” that has been marshaled to prove that Imperialism saturated all facets of

mid to late Victorian society—from school texts to music hall entertainments to Boys

Brigades—the fact is that lower-class boys remained outside the Imperial Project. Again,

as Porter says, the lower classes and the middle and upper classes “did not speak the

same language. …The working classes lived different lives from the imperialist classes.

Their houses, work, education, reading, thinking, feelings, ways of socializing and

organizing—their whole life experience, in other words—made them in effect a separate

country, with almost nothing in common with the higher classes.”42 But if they weren’t

33

imperialists (or militarists), what led them to join the Army, and what impelled them to

pack the streets to celebrate Omdurman? The answer to those two questions lies in the

values that were implicit in lower-class culture, especially those that described what they

held to be most important in their own manliness.

For lower-class young men who hadn’t heard of Roseberry or Rhodes, or likely

Wolseley or Roberts, patriotism, nationalism, and imperialism were simply not part of

their consciousness. Further, it is unlikely that any form of militarism of the German

model was either. As far as imperialism was concerned, despite the best efforts of certain

contemporary writers and organizations to make them so (G. A. Henty and the Primrose

League being the chief examples), few lower-class boys particularly had any concept of

the Empire beyond the certain knowledge that adventure was to be had in Canada, India,

the South Seas, Australia… . In fact, as several contemporary writers noted, few lower-

class boys had a clear concept of what the next neighborhood looked like, never mind the

Empire. As for militarism, what these boys seemed comfortable with was what might be

termed military empathy, a view that was lodged in that part of their divided mind that

saw the military through a romantic lens. The kind of militarism that leaned toward

universal conscription and the militarization of schools and labor was pretty much a non-

starter among all classes in late Victorian England, particularly among the lower classes

who would, after all, have provided the bulk of the conscripts. What I contend is that

many of those boys had evolved an empathetic view of the military, that it was a path to a

romantic, adventurous life that was open to any of them. Anne Summers calls it popular

militarism, and says it was about “fellowship and citizenship, physical exercise and

spiritual exercise, social control and industrial performance. It had not been about

34

fighting, killing, and being blown to pieces…” at least not on our side—maybe on the

brown peoples’ side.43 In the tales of adventure that this generation lived on, the

romantic adventure inherent in the military life helped obscure the less tasteful aspects of

Regular Army life that included harsh discipline, confinement apart from society, and the

real possibility of death or disfigurement, aspects that the tales minimized or ignored. I

will discuss how that happened in Chapter Six, where I examine lower-class boys’

reading habits.

Manliness and the Warrior Generation

These remarks must be prefaced by the reminder that for most Victorian

commentators on manliness, the ideal of manliness was essentially an ideal of middle-

and upper-class Englishness. One of the most outspoken social critics of the late

nineteenth century, Fitzjames Stephens, like almost all of his contemporaries, “explicitly

associated the ‘manly virtues’…with English national character.”44 Thus, for Stephens

and his myriad of contemporaries who preached the virtues of the ideal male to their

Victorian audience, the assumption always was that the ideal male was always an ideal

middle (or upper) class male. More recent studies of Victorian manliness and

masculinity, like studies of Victorian Imperialism, have tended to focus on the middle

and upper classes, probably because of the fact that the primary sources did.45

Stephens’s “Commonplaces on England,” published in the July, 1863 Cornhill,

was representative of a host of articles on the English ideal that appeared in the latter half

of the century in middle-class magazines. He cited the “moral sensibility” stimulated by

British institutions; the respect for “fair play” that stretched from the playing field to the

international political arena; the innate honesty of an Englishman and of his government

35

that far exceeded the honesty of any other nationality. His representative ideal was

confident (“The most solemnly pronounced censure from any foreign country is copied

into English newspapers and produces nothing but a smile half amused and perhaps a

quarter contemptuous. We do not care enough about the opinion of others to take the

trouble to despise it thoroughly.”) proud (“We treat all such things consistently on the

principle that such attacks amuse our critics and cannot by any possibility hurt us. This

sublime and imperturbable pride is very impressive and in its way a very good thing.”)

and independent, some might say smug (Britain is “a nation utterly unmoved by the

praise or blame of others, so long as it is satisfied with its own proceedings.” “To be

utterly unmoved by the reproaches of others, and perfectly indifferent to their

approbation, is an excellent thing.”)46 Other writers mention “simplicity, directness,

concentration, firmness, determination, stability, and strength.”47 Qualities mentioned in

combat dispatches include calmness, dignity, coolness (especially coolness under fire),

steadiness, sternness, patience, “courage, self-assurance, honesty, self-sacrifice, and

group loyalty.”48 And of course, there were all those chivalric values emphasized by the

war reporters, war fiction writers, preachers and politicians, and summarized beautifully

by Allen J. Frantzen in Bloody Good, his comprehensive study of the chivalric ideal and

its place in late Victorian and Edwardian society.49

Walter Houghton’s Victorian Frame of Mind in a way epitomizes the critical

attempt to distill what the Victorians felt were the quintessential qualities of the ideal

man. Houghton focuses on nobility, whose “central characteristic, clearly enough, is self-

sacrifice.” “Noble self-sacrifice,” he says, “is best described by Mary Mitford’s synonym

of self-oblivion. Under the impact of enthusiasm all selfish concern is transcended by

36

ardent devotion to a person or a cause.” This requires “courage and effort; and with

courage goes fortitude under misfortune, defeat, or personal attack. Other noble qualities

are those of pride in its favorable meaning [see Stephen above]: the sense of dignity, self-

respect, and personal honor.”50 For the Victorians, says Houghton,

a real gentleman is a real noble, a man worthy of commanding, upright,

disinterested, capable of exposing himself and even of sacrificing himself for

those whom he leads…what is noble is also ‘grand,’ ‘great,’ or ‘heroic’; and

nobility is often called ‘moral grandeur,’ ‘moral greatness,’ and sometimes

‘heroism.’51

More recent scholars have concentrated on manly qualities such as “energy, will,

straightforwardness and courage…self-discipline…independence,” and “a manly

appearance,”52 and what happens when those ideals are impossible to live up to. A

number of contemporary scholars have claimed that the apparent popularity of the

Aesthetes and Decadents amongst “important people,” the Wilde trial, and the loudly

trumpeted physical degeneration among British men made plain at Boer War recruiting

stations resulted in a gender panic at the end of the century. Anne M. Windholz,

summarizing recent scholarship on the issue, claims that “young men who came of age in

England at the end of the nineteenth century did so as the very nature of masculinity was

being contested in social, economic, and sexual arenas. The ideals of British masculinity

with which many of these youths grew up, traceable to the ‘muscular Christianity’ of

Thomas Arnold and Charles Kingsley decades before, were tested and challenged,

redefined or reinforced….”53

37

There is little evidence that the “nature of masculinity was being contested” in the

lower classes, although as Windholz and others have demonstrated, there is

overwhelming evidence to indicate that the middle-class press was certainly concerned

about lower-class manliness, particularly lower-class physical fitness. I contend that

lower-class men, particularly the men of the Warrior Generation, expressed far fewer

concerns about the nature of masculinity than some contemporary scholars have

apparently claimed in sweeping arguments concerning masculinity panics. Indeed, the

masculine ideal of the lower classes remained stable throughout the century, and there is

little evidence to suggest that the men of the lower classes worried that they and their

brothers were failing to live up to that ideal.54 Much of the focus of this study will be on

what the lower-class boys of the Warrior Generation considered to be the attributes of the

ideal man: physical ability (in dancing, sport, work, and fighting), willingness to defend

his honor (again, usually in a fight), willingness to compete and ability to win (in

everything from gardening to footraces to all-in wrestling), courage, loyalty to the group

(village, neighborhood, football team, regiment), cunning, and so on. Note that fighting

is a common thread here; fighting had been part of lower-class culture for generations.

One of Linda Colley’s primary themes in Britons is that Britain has “a culture that is used

to fighting and has largely defined itself through fighting.”55 By examining this

generation’s shared experiences and assumptions concerning manliness and the ideal

male, and the ideal man’s (the hero’s) relation to the Army (a reflection, no doubt, of this

generation’s self-perceived relation to the Army), we should be able to understand a little

more clearly why the “public” reacted as they did to the news from Omdurman and the

returning heroes.

38

A Word on Sources

As of about sixty years ago neither the periodical press nor autobiographical

material counted for much in examining the history of the lower classes. Harold Perkin

argued for the legitimacy of both in 1981 in his ground-breaking The Structured Crowd,

where he dismissed the quibbles of “supercilious intellectuals” about the value of

autobiographical material. Both the written and oral histories require the historian to

gather as much material as possible, find common attitudes, assess evidence, and use

“creative imagination as well as empathy…to recreate, understand and explain rather than

merely chronicle and record.”56 Raphael Samuel, John Burnett, Standish Meacham, and

Jonathan Rose among others all contributed significantly to our understanding of British

lower-class life through studies that drew heavily on the wealth of autobiographies

published in the twentieth century, and the oral histories residing in the British Library.

In 2010 Jane Humphries published Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial

Revolution, an economic history that “looked at the role of child labour not as

reconstructed from the standard sources with their middle-class standpoint, reformist

purpose, and social control agenda, but as history from below.”57 Humphries too argues

for using autobiographical written and oral material to build legitimately a picture of

child labor—an important part of this study—from the lower-class child’s point of view.

In this study I make extensive use of the materials cited by Perkin and Humphries,

particularly periodicals, autobiographies, and oral histories, as well as traditional

histories, which, despite the middle-class bias attributed to many of them by Perkin and

Humphries, are still useful in completing a comprehensive context for the Warrior

Generation.

39

Another issue to be wary of in using the wealth of Victorian printed materials is

what W. L. Burn called Selective Victorianism. In his seminal 1965 The Age of

Equipoise, he describes Selective Victorianism as a common critical error that springs

from the scholarly desire to prove a point or develop a critical theory rather than examine

an issue. In Burn’s inimitable description, selective Victorianism

has the advantage of being beautifully easy and, as they say, can be played for

hours by young and old. The material is abundant. The society which provides it

is lavishly documented and was of a fecundity which can give every investigator

of ‘patterns’ and ‘trends,’ enough ‘clues’ to follow to last him a lifetime. The

rules are simple. Indeed, there is only one important rule: to determine

beforehand the ‘pattern’ you wish to discover or the ‘trend’ you wish to follow

and then go on to find the evidence for its existence. Of course, the game can be

played for other periods of time and for other countries: selective mediaevalism,

selective Jacobitism, selective Deep Southism have their votaries. But selective

Victorianism has advantages, in the abundance of the material for study and in our

own emotional involvement with it, which make it so much easier to determine

beforehand the ‘patterns’ and ‘trends’ we intend to ‘discover’.58

Much recent literary theory, in particular postcolonial theory, has succumbed to

selective Victorianism; for example, as Erin O’Connor points out when one begins with

the assumption that all literature (or any other artifact) is always a metaphor for, or even

an instance of, “widespread imperialist sentiment,” one will inevitably find enough that

can be defined as imperialism to make that case.59 But even a cursory review of the

scholarship on Imperialism clearly shows that whether or not the lower classes evinced

40

anything like imperialistic attitudes is, at the very least, in dispute. Since J. A Hobson’s

Psychology of Jingoism in 1901, Victorian scholars have confidently asserted that the

lower classes were Imperialist; were led to Imperialism but were not, themselves,

Imperialists; were Nationalists but not Imperialists; were Militarists, but not Imperialists;

were neither Militarists nor Imperialists, but supported the Army out of class solidarity;

and on and on. Some scholars have proceeded as I have done to examine lower-class

culture for class attitudes, but even doing that can lead to something of a tangled ball of

contradictions. As John M. MacKenzie suggests, we cannot even agree on what

constitutes an artifact of class culture, never mind what constitutes militarism (or

imperialism, or the other “isms”: “The culture of the people is usually located in the pub,

the club, the football ground, the dog track, and other areas of popular sports and

pastimes,” he says. “But not even all of these can be described as a culture made by and

for the people. One of the characteristics of the later nineteenth century was the manner

in which many aspects of working-class culture came to be controlled, aimed at rather

than created by the people.”60 But on the other hand, if the lower classes embraced a

game, an art form, a leisure activity, or an attitude, does the origin matter? The power

structure can control only to a point; if, for example, the lower class shifted its embrace

from one leisure activity to another—from cricket, say, to football—then there is little

that the cricket power structure would be able to do to direct the lower classes back to

cricket. To take a pair of modern examples, all the “power structure” controlling world

soccer has yet to penetrate the US market in any depth, and the American embrace of

their own brand of football has yet to translate itself to the rest of the world, despite the

efforts of some of the richest, most powerful men in the world to force the issue. Thus, at

41

some point it becomes imperative that we believe that the people of a class (or any

identifiable group from neighborhood to nation) can articulate their attitudes for

themselves, and if their articulations be contradictory, then we may conclude that their

attitudes probably are contradictory as well.

This study begins with an overview of the Army’s place in the imagination of

lower-class boys. It proceeds with an overview of the Sudan Campaign of 1896-98 and

the cultural sensation focused on the British Army that followed the final victory at

Omdurman. In the chapters that follow, I examine lower-class family lives, because

obviously attitudes toward the Army particularly would to some extent be absorbed by

boys through their family, and work, since in the first years of this study many lower-

class boys were expected to be working to support the family from the age of eight or

even younger (the Army, of course, provided work that could be contrasted with, say, a

job in the mines or at the looms). I examine the schools from about 1870, when this

generation started their schooling at about age four or five, to 1895, when the latter end of

the generation that began its existence around 1865 was completing formal schooling (the

implication is that a new generation was beginning school in 1890 and encountering ever-

increasing differences in school organization, expectations, even texts from the years

before). I examine their play and entertainments, where again, the military had a

presence that provided, if nothing else, familiarity with martial uniforms: regimental band

concerts, parades, expositions at places like Belle Vue Gardens and the Crystal Palace,

and music hall turns. And, since this is the first generation to be affected by the various

Education Acts leading to the Act of 1870 that ultimately required universal elementary

42

education and led to widespread, if not exactly universal, literacy, I examine their reading

material.

These important aspects—school, work, play, entertainment, family, church,

reading material—of their daily lives will describe the lower-class boys’ culture for the

generation 1865-1885. It will show that the culture was steeped in gloomy economic and

class realities, in conflict and competition, in romantic escapism, and in a double vision, a

divided mind, if you will, of the reality of life in the lower classes and the imagination’s

possibilities of something better. It will focus on the generation’s rapidly changing view

of the military in general, and the Army in particular, from something that was a negative

space, not well known, not well understood, to a positive space at least in the abstract

(e.g. not necessarily a place where I might go, but a place where others might go and not

be shunned). The conclusion will be that the generation’s attitude toward the Army in the

late 1890s was not in fact militaristic, was certainly not imperialistic, and for the most

part not jingoistic in the narrowest sense. Instead, it was an attitude of acceptance of the

military as one part of the adventure that the generation sought as an antidote to the

grinding hopelessness of lower-class life.

1 Peter Harrington, “Images and Perceptions: Visualising the Sudan Campaign,” in

Sudan, the Reconquest Reappraised, ed. Edward M. Spiers (London: Frank Cass,

1998), pp. 82-101.

43

2 See Andrew Griffith, The New Journalism, the New Imperialism, and the Fiction of

Empire, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

3 Edward M. Spiers, Engines for Empire: The Victorian Army and Its Use of Railways

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).

4 Interestingly, Marie Lloyd headlined that night, and got nary a mention.

5 Granted, the middle-class press treated Kitchener and his fellow officers as the “prime

actors,” but it seems fair to designate the men who stared down 60,000 charging

Mahdists from the flimsy defenses of some mimosa bushes as equally (or in my

judgement) more important to the eventual outcome of the battle.

6 The typical subdivisions were artisans, laborers, and paupers, but laborers could be

subdivided into day laborers and skilled workers. Artisans and laboring families

divided themselves into respectables (those who engaged in regular work, lived

within their means, stayed out of trouble, maintained family integrity and

solvency, were clean, deferential, and wore class-appropriate clothing) and roughs

(those who celebrated strength, earning power, generosity, and sheer dare-

devilry). See among many others Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum, Salford Life

in the First Quarter of the Century, (London: Pelican Books, 1978); Harold

Perkin, “The Condescension of Posterity,’ The Recent Historiography of the

English Working Class,” Social Science History 3, 1 (1978): 87–101; and Ross

McKibbin, “Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?” English Historical

Review, 99, 391 (April, 1984): 297-331.

7 Edward M. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army, 1868-1902 (Manchester, Manchester

University Press, 1992), 130.

44

8 In fact, I contend that every generation of boys has its own culture, sharing some

attitudes and values with other generations and creating some that are uniquely

their own.

9 It is something of a truism that people live not one, but several lives, and are different

people in each life. Thus, a boy is a different person at home than he is at play or

school or work

10 In “Winston Churchill, the Morning Post, and the End of Imperial Romance,”

Victorian Periodicals Review 46 (Summer 2013): 163-183, Andrew Griffith

explores the connection with what he calls the New Imperialism and the victory at

Omdurman. He extends that investigation in The New Journalism, the New

Imperialism, and the Fiction of Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

His contention is that the anti-romantic nature of the massacre of thousands of

Mahdists by well-armed British troops initiated a split between the new

journalists and the New Imperialists who would be forced to promote the Imperial

project without recourse to the romantic narratives of the new journalists.

11 The “Warrior Generation” label is both a borrowing from and an homage to Michael

Paris’s important Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture,

1850-1980 (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), and Lawrence James’s somewhat

later Warrior Race: A History of the British at War (New York: St. Martin’s,

2001). References to both will appear throughout this study.

12Agricultural laborers could move to town and become shop boys; cotton mill laborers

could aspire to some of the highly skilled loom jobs; some clerks even eventually

became shop owners; and many sons of laborers who excelled in school became

45

teachers (see Chapter Four). However, most Victorian commentators warned

those people on the lower fringes of the middle class, especially tradesmen,

artisans, and elementary school teachers, not to consider themselves “better than

they were” (eg, not to consider themselves middle class). However, some boys

did in fact move into the middle class, as an examination of a number of

biographies (see below) indicates.

13 Anne M. Windholz, “An Emigrant and a Gentleman: Imperial Masculinity, British

Magazines, and the Colony That Got Away,” Victorian Studies 42 (Summer,

1999): 631.

14 I’ll discuss the Cardwell reforms in more detail in the next chapter. Briefly, Edward

Cardwell, the Secretary for War, introduced a number of reforms to make the

Regular Army more attractive to recruits, reforms that included shorter enlistment

times, less time overseas, and better treatment of enlisted men.

15 Edward Gosling, “Tommy Atkins, War Office Reform and the Social and Cultural

Presence of the Late-Victorian Army in Britain, c. 1868-1899, Research thesis

(University of Plymouth, 2016).

16 John Burnett said “There is a sense of patient resignation to the facts of life, the feeling

that human existence is a struggle, and that survival is an end in itself,” in John

Burnett, ed. Useful Toil, Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to

the 1920s (New York: Routledge, 1994), 14.

17 See Chris Brooks, “Burying Tom Sayers: Heroism, Class and the Victorian Cemetery,”

Victorian Society Annual (1989): 4-20.

46

18Steve Attridge, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture, Civil

and Military Worlds (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 5.

19Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (New York: Vintage, 1989), 253.

20 Ibid., 144.

21 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, Origins and History of the Passions of War (New

York: Henry Holt, 1997), 196-99.

22 Life of Johnson, Friday, 7 April 1775, “Johnson suddenly uttered, in a strong

determined tone, an apophthegm, at which many will start: ‘Patriotism is the last

refuge of a scoundrel.’ But let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and

generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all

ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest.” Many liberal patriots

perceived the right-wing patriots as just such opportunists.

23 Margaret Macmillan, The War that Ended Peace (New York: Random House, 2014),

274.

24 Ehrenreich, 198.

25 Ibid., 199.

26 Charles E. Callwell, Small Wars, Their Principles and Practice (London: HM

Stationery Office, 1896).

27 The Victorians and race is a topic that has been heavily explored, especially in the last

two decades. A wide-ranging discussion is contained in Shearer West, ed., The

Victorians and Race (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996).

28 Jeffrey Cox, “Were Victorian Nonconformists the Worst Imperialists of All?”

Victorian Studies 46 (Winter, 2004): 252.

47

29 “Let Me Hear Those Words Again,” Every Week 538 (London, RTS, nd), 2.

30 See especially Howard Temperley, “Epilogue,” in British Antislavery 1833-1870

(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972).

31 John Springhall, “’Up Guards and at Them!’ British Imperialism and Popular Art,

1880-1914,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John M. MacKenzie

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 49-50.

32 Ibid., 69.

33 Debrett’s Queen Victoria’s Jubilees, 1887&1897, compiled by Caroline Chapman &

Paul Raben (New York: Viking Press, 1977), no page numbers, but quote is from

the second page of the chapter “The Diamond Jubilee of 1897.”

34 D. C. Watt, Frank Spencer, Neville Brown, A History of the World in the Twentieth

Century (New York: Morrow, 1968), 35.

35 J. A. DeMoor and Henk L. Wesseling, ed., Imperialism and War (Leiden: Leiden

University Press, 1989), 5.

36 John Peck, War, the Army and Victorian Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press,

1998), 73.

37 Craig Stockings, Britannia’s Shield: Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Hutton and Late-

Victorian Imperial Defence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 6.

38 Stockings, 7.

39 Watt, Spencer, Brown, 34.

40 John M. MacKenzie, “Introduction,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John M.

MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 7.

48

41 Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists, Empire, Society, and Culture in

Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 115.

42 Ibid., 224.

43 Anne Summers, “Militarism in Britain before the Great War,” History Workshop 2

(Autumn 1976): 121.

44 Julia Stapleton, “James Fitzjames Stephen: Liberalism, Patriotism, and English

Liberty,” Victorian Studies 41 (Winter 1998): 245.

45 In Masculinity and the New Imperialism, Bradley Deane argues that by the end of the

century the middle-class ideal of masculinity had evolved to closely match the

lower-class ideal that emphasized violence, lawlessness, competition, and public

displays of physical prowess. See Bradley Deane, Masculinity and the New

Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 (New

York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

46 James Fitzjames Stephens, “Commonplaces on England,” Cornhill 8 (July 1863): 90.

47 Quoted from the Carnarvon and Denbigh Herald in John C. Ellis, “Reconciling the

Celt: British National Identity, Empire, and the 1911 Investiture of the Prince of

Wales,” Journal of British Studies 37 (October 1998): 411.

48 Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share, 3d Edition (New York: Longman, 1996), 44.

49 Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2004).

50 Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1957), 282.

51 Ibid., 282-3.

49

52 John Tosh, A Man’s Place (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 119.

53Windholz, 631.

54 Indeed, though the rent boys in the sensational Cleveland Street Case were lower-class

boys, the focus was primarily on the upper-class gents who purchased their

services.

55 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1992), 9

56 Harold Perkin, The Structured Crowd, Essays in English Social History (Sussex:

Harvester Press, 1981), 181.

57 Jane Humphries, “Childhood and child labour in the British industrial revolution,”

Economic History Review 66, no. 2 (2013): 395.

58 W. L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 36.

59 Erin O’Connor, “Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism,” Victorian Studies 45

(Winter, 2003): 217-46. Both Patrick Brantlinger and Deirdre David responded to

O’Connor in VS 46 (Autumn 2003), but both spoke primarily to O’Connor’s

“passionate polemic” (David, p. 106) rather than her argument itself.

60 MacKenzie, “Introduction,” 9.