among them the robinsonnade or castaway tale, share features with domestic fiction, since the central question in adventures such as Frederick Marryat’s Masterman Ready (1841) is how family and national values may survive in an alien setting. In the nineteenth century, both sea stories and robinsonnades frequently advanced an imperialist ethos, which helps to explain these forms’ affinities with other developmental, morally didactic fiction: if home and school were the principal venues for planting the seeds of virtue and strong character, empire was where the shoots were to thrive.
Yet not all adventures focus on protagonists’ development or readers’ moral improvement. Often, the central issue is not how the hero reaches maturity but how a goal external to the self is gained, be it succeeding in a military campaign, surviving against difficult odds, finding treasure, exploring new terrain, or surmounting some other challenge. The immediate ancestor of many Victorian adventure stories is the travelogue designed to acquaint readers with a distant land. As Shih-Wen Chen has noted, novels such as William Dalton’s The Wolf Boy of China (1857), an unusual instance of a mid nineteenth-century British work with a mixed-race hero who “seems to have inherited the positive traits of both” his bloodlines, combine thrilling plots with a fact-heavy approach to setting: Chen writes that “Dalton guides readers through China as if it was a large museum exhibition” (2013, pp. 40, 34).
Once drama began to dominate over informational value, stories of imperial adventure often reached a dual (and implicitly masculine) audience of children and adults. When Treasure Island was initially serialized in the children’s magazine Young Folks, for instance, young readers were unenthusiastic; published as a novel targeting a wider age range, it sold tens of thousands of copies. Among its adult readers was H. Rider Haggard, who, on a bet with his brother, produced his own best seller, King Solomon’s Mines (1885), the first of a string of works by this author that were as likely to be read by men as by boys. American adventure stories often made their own address to prospective builders of empire; writing as “Oliver Optic” (among other pseudonyms), the prolific William Taylor Adams penned such series as All Over the World and Young America Abroad, in addition to series dealing with adventures in the army and navy and series involving travel by yacht, steamer, and train. Meanwhile, British penny dreadfuls and their American equivalent, dime novels, catered primarily to working-class boys seeking sensation rather than uplift. Edward Lytton Wheeler’s popular Deadwood Dick series (1877–1897) is representative; it features a handsome young outlaw “notorious […] for his coolness, courage and audacity” (p. 25), as the series opener, Deadwood Dick, the Prince of the Road, puts it.
While many adventure stories targeted adolescent and adult male readers, younger children and girls also had their adventure fiction. Some of this fiction employed fantastic protagonists: a sentient goat in the case of Frances Trego Montgomery’s Billy Whiskers series (1902–1920, subsequently continued by other authors), dolls in Florence Kate Upton’s Golliwogg series (1895–1909, told in verse), a cat in Bessie Rayner Parkes’s The History of Our Cat, Aspasia (1856), and so on. As Marilynn Olson (2000) and Monica Flegel (2016) have separately argued, nonhuman protagonists expanded the possibilities for transgressive content. Much as Deadwood Dick is irresistible to women and Haggard’s heroes traverse sexualized African landscapes, the Golliwogg and his doll friend Sarah Jane enjoy what Olson calls a “rather grown-up relation” (p. 84), and Flegel argues that cat and dog adventures “offered opportunities for authors to educate children about romantic love and sexual relations” (p. 121).
If one method of tailoring adventure to girls or younger children was to marry it to fantasy, another was to set it in the past. History was an approved part of schoolgirls’ curriculum; thus historical fiction could be presented as educational in ways that Treasure Island or Haggard’s works – to say nothing of the Deadwood Dick series – could not. While historical fiction for boys, such as the writings of G.A. Henty, often focuses on military campaigns or (as in Howard Pyle’s 1883 The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood) on masculine derring-do of a paramilitary sort, nineteenth-century historical fiction for girls is typically more interested in family and religion, extending the preoccupations of the Victorian domestic novel into the past. Yonge, for instance, a committed Tractarian, wrote many novels with medieval or Reformation settings, while the first two published works by her acolyte Christabel Coleridge, the miniature book Giftie the Changeling (1868) and the full-length Lady Betty (1869), take place respectively in the reign of Henry VIII and in the eighteenth century but reflect equally mid-Victorian values where girlhood is concerned. Both were originally written for the manuscript magazine The Barnacle, produced by and privately circulated among the group of genteel teenagers and young women mentored by Yonge, a point that suggests the extent to which both reading and writing historical fiction was approved by even the most careful preceptors. Across the Atlantic, before publishing Elsie Dinsmore with Dodd, Mead, Finley produced nine works with the Presbyterian Publications Board, including Marion Harvie: A Tale of Persecution in the Seventeenth Century (1857) and Annandale: A Story of the Times of the Covenanters (1858). Both boys’ and girls’ historical fiction thus projected the gender ideals of the present into adventures that were simultaneously exciting and considered educationally valuable by adults.
Genres: Fantasy
But the struggle between instruction and delight was at its fiercest in fantasy. Throughout the nineteenth century, fantasy wavered between the didactic and the subversive – sometimes even in the same text. Sinclair’s “Uncle David’s Nonsensical Story about Giants and Fairies,” for instance, an interpolated tale in Holiday House, preaches industry and temperance while slyly undercutting its own earnestness. Similarly, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), lampoons didacticism through parody and associates instruction with savagery, yet the novel begins and ends on a sentimental note, drawing the reader’s attention to the sanctity of childhood as a hallowed destination for “pilgrim[s],” as the introductory poem puts it.
As Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn (2016) – among others – observe, fairy tales, which initially addressed a multigenerational audience, were appropriated as children’s literature from the mid eighteenth century forward; The Governess is one of many early texts to incorporate literary fairy tales for didactic purposes. (Fielding instructs readers in reading fantasy not “to let the Notion of Giants or Magic dwell upon your Minds; for by a Giant is meant no more than a Man of great Power; and the magic Fillet round the Head of the Statue was only intended to teach you, that by the Assistance of Patience you may overcome all Difficulties” [2005, p. 86].) Traditional and literary fairy tales were used to teach lessons from teetotalism, as in George Cruikshank’s 1854 Fairy Library, to environmentalism, as in John Ruskin’s 1850 The King of the Golden River, to Christian Darwinism, as in Charles Kingsley’s 1863 The Water-Babies and George MacDonald’s 1883 The Princess and Curdie. Simultaneously, such texts often implicitly critique Victorian society; when at the end of The Princess and Curdie the city of Gwyntystorm falls into the abyss, victim of its citizens’ lust for gold, the warning for readers is clear. Significantly, MacDonald is chastising adults, not the child reader. Such moments make didacticism’s subversive potential apparent in a way that some eighteenth-century children’s writers would certainly have disapproved of.
Spurred by an awareness of the flaws of the adult world, some Golden Age writers were drawn to fantasy as a place where they could not merely commune with children but temporarily become honorary children themselves, a state implicitly deemed superior to adulthood. Carroll, J.M. Barrie, Ruskin, and Kenneth Grahame have all struck biographers as men who found the demands of adult life (particularly adult sexuality) difficult, while Nesbit has been portrayed as a kind of permanent girl, partly because she sometimes makes cameo appearances in this guise in her children’s fiction. Yet Golden Age fantasy is by no means exclusively escapist – or, for that matter, exclusively aimed at children. As with other genres of its moment, its readiness to engage, in ways both humorous and trenchant, with significant questions and social controversies from child labor (The Water-Babies) to woman suffrage (The
