Children's Literature

The boys' magazine Chums carried on the spines of its bound annual volumes from 1893 to 1908 an illustration of two soldiers, one standing firing a revolver, the other kneeling. The soldiers were holding hands. A source and explanation for this image can be found in Chums itself, where in volume 2 (1893-94), the frontispiece is a more explicit version of the same scene (fig. 1). Here the two soldiers, clearly officers, are defending themselves in a fight to the death. The erect figure, his foot braced against a rock, fires at a horde of natives, dimly seen waving spears in the background. His sword is in his right hand. His companion has collapsed, stricken, and leans his head on the other's thigh. The caption of this picture is "Chums."

A tiny unit in the vast myth of Empire, this illustration has a dramatic and immediate meaning. The officers in their "Last Stand" offer a complex sign of imperial manhood. Manhood consists in fighting, fighting means dying, dying is sanctified by brotherhood. Courage, loyalty, duty, and patriotism are given iconographic form as the discourse of last stands is invoked in the magazine: a dusty spot in the desert, a unit ambushed on the frontier, the fortuitous but ironic meeting of old school friends—or enemies—water gone, ammunition expended, horses killed, the murderous natives closing in, the last thoughts of school, queen, and country as the assegais fall. Yet there will be a happy ending: in the code of the boys' adventure story a rescue is possible. Somewhere in the background of this visual narrative lies the ethos of the imperial task, resistance to the spear-waving natives, to those forces of barbarism for whose suppression or benefit the sacrifice is made.

It is my intention in this article to examine the use of illustrations in Chums, both historical and fictional. My thesis is that by repetition and emphasis, a vocabulary of patriotic images was developed and exploited, which for a generation of British males dramatized the myth of Empire. The primary motifs of these illustrations [End Page 31]

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defined manhood, race, and individual action: manhood shown in the heroics of courageous soldiers or brave frontiersmen; lessons of race demonstrated by the examples of barbarous natives or uncivilized Dutchmen; and the complicated relationship between choice and duty set forth as an insistent expectation that the wars of school led to the games of war. A close relationship was established between the world of boys and the world of men.

Previous studies have concentrated on the fiction of the boys' magazines, and on the imperial message of such writers as G. A. Henty (Turnbaugh; James; Dunae, "Boys' Literature"); my focus here will be on the visual rather than the narrative, and specifically on the ways in which one magazine exploited an iconography of power. The patriotic illustrations as a whole provide an example of the ways in which ideology is translated into an accessible though complex code. The ethos is almost exclusively masculinewomen are noticeable only by their absence. Glory, strength, and violence are made dramatic and meaningful, yet rendered innocent by boyish high spirits. The program is the social reproduction of aggressive virility.