ABOUT THIS BOOK

Writing through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century explores how boyhood was constructed in different creative spaces that reflected the lived experience of young boys through the long eighteenth century—not simply in children’s literature but in novels, poetry, medical advice, criminal broadsides, and automaton exhibitions. The chapters encompass such rituals as breeching, learning to read and write, and going to school. They also consider the lives of boys such as chimney sweeps and convicted criminals, whose bodily labor was considered their only value and who often did not live beyond boyhood. Defined by a variety of tasks, expectations, and objectifications, boys—real, imagined, and sometimes both—were subject to the control of their elders and were used as tools in the cause of civil society, commerce, and empire. This book argues that boys in the long eighteenth century constituted a particular kind of currency, both valuable and expendable—valuable because of gender, expendable because of youth.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Chantel Lavoie is a full professor in the Department of English, Culture, and Communication at the Royal Military College of Canada. Her first monograph was Collecting Women: Poetry and Lives, 1700–1770 (2009). She has also published two collections of verse: Where the Terror Lies (2012) and This Is about Angels, Women, and Men (2021), and her first historical novel, about chimney sweeps in the eighteenth century, is forthcoming. She lives in Kingston, Ontario.

REVIEWS

Lavoie presents an insistent argument for the need to consider boyhood as a category of scholarly exploration. Her book takes seriously the task of not only exploring an under-scrutinized gendered category, boyhood, but also of looking at this category expansively in terms of class, status, and privilege, which can too often be the work we acknowledge we should do, but often within traditional frameworks is work we miss doing.

The author poses a distinct and thorough challenge to this, and explores, through an impressive variety of types and statuses of boys, much needed nuance about the ways boyhood was a complex and varying category of existence, which served a wide range of social and cultural functions, often extending well beyond the borders of a boy’s body (textual or physical).

— Mary Beth Harris, Eighteenth-Century Studies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Time for Boys

1 The Boy in Breeches: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
(1759–1767) Growing into Gender

2 The Boy in School: Ellenor Fenn’s Rhetorical Tools in
School Dialogues, for Boys (1783)

3 The Boy in the Machine: Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s Automaton,
the Writer (1774)

4 The Boy in the Chimney: Sweeps’ Apprentices, Suffering
Bodies, and Jonathan Swift

5 The Boy in the Gallows: Crime, Punishment, Broadsheets,
Afterlives

6 The Boy in the Printing Press: Printer’s Devils and
Upward Mobility

Conclusion

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index