Imperial Boys and Men of Letters

This chapter examines the Roman influences upon the muscular Christian virtue and hardy imperialist outlooks which sit at the heart of much Victorian schoolboy fiction including Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and Kipling’s Stalky and Co. (1899). It then examines more closely constructions of an equivalent intellectual—or literary—masculinity embodied in the Man of Letters, whose identity, like those of his cousins the muscular Christian and the Victorian imperialist, is also derived from classical exemplars, but whose manliness is encoded more subtly, even metatextually, into works like Kipling’s Stalky. It argues that the refiguration of writing as a heroic act equivalent, and even superior to fighting, held a particular appeal for Victorian culture which perceived itself to have a uniquely modern relationship with the written word.