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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
THE HISTORY
OF CHILDHOOD
THE BOY-MAN, MASCULINITY

AND IMMATURITY IN THE LONG
NINETEENTH CENTURY
PETE NEWBON
Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood
Series Editors
George Rousseau
University of Oxford, UK
Laurence Brockliss
University of Oxford, UK
Aims of the Series
Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood is the first of its kind to
historicise childhood in the English-speaking world; at present no histor-
ical series on children/childhood exists, despite burgeoning areas within
Child Studies. The series aims to act both as a forum for publishing
works in the history of childhood and a mechanism for consolidating the
identity and attraction of the new discipline.
Editorial Board
Matthew Grenby (Newcastle)
Colin Heywood (Nottingham)
Heather Montgomery (Open)
Hugh Morrison (Otago)
Anja Müller (Siegen, Germany)
Sïan Pooley (Magdalen, Oxford)
Patrick Joseph Ryan (King’s University College at Western University, Canada)
Karen Vallgårda (Copenhagen)
Lucy Underwood (Warwick)
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14586
Pete Newbon
The Boy-Man,
Masculinity and
Immaturity in the
Long Nineteenth
Century
Pete Newbon
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood

ISBN 978-1-137-40813-6 ISBN 978-1-137-40814-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40814-3
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For Rachel
Acknowledgements
The Boy-Man grew from my doctoral thesis, and I am grateful to the

fellows of King’s College Cambridge (especially Bill Burgwinkle) for

generous postgraduate funding. I could not have written this mono-
graph without sabbatical research leave from Northumbria University. In
the course of my research, I drew upon the facilities of various librar-
ies and archives, and therefore thank the staff of the following institu-
tions for their helpful assistance: the Cambridge University Library,
King’s College Library, St. John’s College Library, the libraries of the
English Faculty, History Faculty and Divinity Faculty at the University
of Cambridge, the British Library, Northumbria University Library, York
University Library and the New York Public Library.
I cannot begin to thank Philip Connell, my doctoral supervisor, for
his kindness, encouragement, interest and diligence over the years. He
is a gentle and sensitive teacher and an inspirational scholar. As my thesis
advisor, Stephen Logan has had an invaluable influence upon my writing
and research. I would like to thank him for his enthusiasm, patience and
generosity. As an external examiner, Tim Fulford gave frank and critical
advice that was very useful in clarifying this project at its inception.
There are far too many scholars to thank for their assistance in cre-
ating The Boy-Man. Neil Vickers was kind enough to help me develop
my thinking about Coleridge as a father. I am particularly indebted
to Lamb readers, who demonstrated the height of Elian friend-
ship by taking me under their wings: in particular, Jane Aaron, David
Higgins, Felicity James and Simon Hull. Hugh Cunningham lent warm
vii
viii Acknowledgements
support to my historiographical research into childhood as a discourse.

Dr. Rowan Williams was most helpful in corresponding with me con-
cerning theology and childhood. Daniel Cook was generosity personified
in sharing his expertise on Chatterton. Laura Kirkley White was char-
acteristically enthusiastic in discussing Rousseau’s childlike sensibility.
Stephen Burley illuminated Hazlitt’s rakish character for me. I am deeply
indebted to the influence, scholarship and support of John Tosh, Joanne
Bailey and Heather Ellis, as I try to make my own contribution to the
history of masculinity. Jeffrey Cox, Fred Burwick and David Francis
Taylor could not have been more helpful in orientating me in the culture
of eighteenth-century pantomime. John Gardner’s advice was crucial in
my understanding of childish jokes in the culture of 1820s radicalism.
Similarly, Greg Dart enhanced my perception of the core subject of cock-
neyism. I am thankful to Simon Kövesi for sharing his work on Lamb
and circles of playful wit. Alan Richardson was kind enough to discuss
Romantic childhood with me in Grasmere in 2011. From the outset,
Nick Roe’s support for this book was profoundly encouraging. My spe-
cial thanks go to David Stewart for his enthusiasm for this project and his
patient, critical commentary towards numerous preliminary drafts.
My sincere thanks go to George Rousseau and Laurence Brockliss for
accepting this monograph in their academic series and to the editorial
staff at Palgrave Macmillan.
I feel particularly proud and thankful to have been a member of
King’s College and the English Faculty at Cambridge between 2003 and
2011. Over the course of those years, my critical scholarship improved
immeasurably, and largely through the many and important intellectual
friendships I have found. My thanks go to Ruth Abbott, Leona Archer,
Peter De Bolla, Sarah Cain, Louis Caron, Jamie Castell, Christopher
Cotton, Lucy Cogan, Daniel Cook, Mina Gorji, David Hillman, Emrys
Jones, Ewan Jones, Laura Kirkley White, Lawrence Klein, Gareth Nellis,
Joshua Newton, Fred Parker, Aurélie Petiot, Charlotte Roberts, Gabriel
Roberts, Liz Rush, David Francis Taylor, Stefan Uhlig, Ross Wilson,
Amelia Worsley and Nicky Zeeman.
I am grateful to my colleagues at Northumbria University from whom
I have drawn great support, especially Katherine Baxter, Paul Frazer,
Claudine Van Hensbergen, David Walker and Leigh Wetherall Dickson.
I am deeply grateful to my parents, Sue and Ian, and to my sister
Anna, for their love, and for everything they have done for me.
Acknowledgements ix
This book was written and researched while raising my three daugh-
ters, Molly, Martha, and Esme—all little cockneys and limber elves.
I thank them for reminding me of what it is to be a child, while teaching
me what it is to be a father.
Above all, I thank Rachel Hewitt for her love, and this book is dedi-
cated to her.
Contents
1 Introduction: Too Much of the Boy-Man 1
2 Self-Incurred Immaturity 27
3 Literary Origins: Sterne, Rousseau, Chatterton and

Wordsworth 53
4 Namby-Pamby Wordsworth 83
5 The Marks of Infancy Were Burned into Him 109
6 Little Johnny Keats: A Boy of Pretty Abilities 149
7 Lamb and the Age of Cant: Jokes, Puns and Nonsense 177
8 Hartley Coleridge and the Muscular Christians 203
9 Pantomime and the Politics of Play 231
10 The Dark Interpreter: De Quincey and the Legacy

of Wordsworthian Childhood 263
xi
xii Contents
11 Farewell to Skimpole: Romantic Boy-Men and Canonical

Occlusion 285
Bibliography 315
Index 353
Abbreviations
Ainger The Letters of Charles Lamb, Newly Arranged in Two

Volumes, with Additions, ed. Alfred Ainger (London:
Macmillan, 1904)
BL Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or,
Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions,
ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (London:
Routledge, 1983)
CL Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, 6 Vols., ed. Earl Leslie Griggs
(Oxford: OUP, 1956)
CN The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 8 Vols., ed.
Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge, 1957–2002)
Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, ed. J.M. Cohen
(London: Penguin, 1958)
E William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William
Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982)
Elia Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia, ed. Phillip Lopate (Iowa:
Sightline, 2003)
Émile Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile; ou, De L’Éducation,
edited and translated Allan Bloom (London: Penguin,
1979)
Essays and Marginalia Hartley Coleridge, Essays and Marginalia, 2 Vols., ed.
Derwent Coleridge (London, 1851)
Excursion William Wordsworth, The Excursion, eds. Sally Bushell,
James A. Butler, and Michael C. Jaye; with the
xiii
xiv Abbreviations
assistance of David García (Ithaca and London: Cornell

University Press, 2007)
EY William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth, The
Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1787–
1805), ed. Ernest De Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon,
1935)
HCL Hartley Coleridge, Letters of Hartley Coleridge, ed.
Grace Evelyn Griggs and Earl Leslie Griggs (London:
OUP, 1936)
HCP Derwent Coleridge, Poems by Hartley Coleridge: With a
Memoir of His Life by His Brother, Volume I, (London:
Edward Moxon, 1851)
Heroes Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The
Heroic in History (Fairford: Echo Library, 2007)
JKL John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821,
ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 Vols. (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958)
LB William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The
Lyrical Ballads: The Text of the 1798 Edition with the
Additional 1800 Poems and the Prefaces, ed. R.L. Brett
and A.R. Jones (London, 1963)
Lectures 1795 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1795 on Politics and
Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1971)
LS Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. Reginald J.
White (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972)
Marrs Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb, The Letters of Charles
and Mary Ann Lamb, 3 Vols., ed. Edwin W. Marrs Jr.
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975)
MY William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Letters of
William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed.
Ernest De Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937)
Prelude William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850,
eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephen
Gill (London: Norton, 1979)
RC William Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage; and, The
Pedlar, ed. James Butler (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1979)
Some Thoughts John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education:
And, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, eds., Ruth W.
Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996)
Abbreviations xv
SP William Wordsworth, The Salisbury Plain Poems, ed.

Stephen Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1975)
Suspiria Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, ed. Grevel
Lindop (Oxford, 1996)
TS Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandy, ed. Ian Campbell Ross (Oxford: OUP, 2000)
TV William Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes, and Other
Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1983)
Watchman Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. Lewis
Patton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970)
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Too Much of the Boy-Man
Modern Immaturity
On 9 June 2009, the world was rocked by the news of the death of the
music virtuoso Michael Jackson, who died following an overdose of
sleeping pills administered by his personal physician. Although on the
verge of an attempted ‘come back’, the former king of pop music had,
for over a decade, lived as a recluse under a cloud of scandal and oppro-
brium. Raised as a musical prodigy in a strict, sometimes abusive, sexu-
ally repressive Jehovah’s Witness family, the child Jackson first appeared
on stage in the 1970s, under the spotlight at the tender age of seven as
the lead singer of the family band, The Jackson Five. Later, throughout
the 1980s and 1990s, through his combination of dynamic pop music,
unique singing voice, inimitable dancing and remarkable showmanship,
Jackson trailblazed his way to become the world’s most famous musician.
Yet this transition from precocious child star, to androgynous youthful
sex symbol was fraught with inner turmoil and public controversy.1 His
album HIStory (1995) featured a self-portrait on the cover sleeve titled
‘Childhood’, depicting Jackson as a boy, curled in a corner in an atti-
tude of frightened misery.2 One of the most remarkable—if not to say
infamous—aspects of Jackson’s tortured character was his obsessive iden-
tification with the eponymous hero of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911).
As Jackson’s biographer Joseph Vogel observes, this was manifested most
ostentatiously in his luxury ranch, which he fittingly named ‘Neverland’:
© The Author(s) 2019 1

P. Newbon, The Boy-Man, Masculinity and Immaturity in the Long
Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40814-3_1
2 P. NEWBON
Neverland was a child’s paradise: There was a C.P. Huntington-style

train (similar to the one at Disneyland) that circled around much of the
grounds. There were tepees and forts and barricades for water balloon
fights. There was an amusement park complete with bumper cars, a fly-
ing ride, and a large Ferris wheel; a recreation building and an arcade; and
a five-acre lake with a bridge crossing over it and a waterfall. A zoo held
giraffes, and deer, zebras and llamas, lions and chimpanzees…There were
statues of blissful children everywhere…3
Yet underlying this whimsical idyll was a darker aspect to Jackson’s fixa-
tion. Following the release of Dangerous (1991), allegations of rape and
child abuse began to circulate. These culminated in 1993 with a deluge
of allegations, which fundamentally rendered him unviable as a main-
stream entertainer.4 A New York Post headline of the time encapsulated
the public ambiguity over Jackson: ‘Peter Pan or Pervert?’5 Furthermore,
his increasingly unusual appearance as a consequence of his addiction to
plastic surgery—his body dysmorphia exemplifying his endless quest for
an eternally boyish face—and his publicly known dependence upon nar-
cotics and painkillers, made him evermore grotesque and ‘other’ under
the media gaze.6 Jackson’s death in 2009 evinced a complicated melange
of regret that the world had lost so powerful a musical star, with a form
of morbid fascination. As the queer theorist James R. Kincaid provoca-
tively expresses it:
Had Michael Jackson not existed, we would have been forced to invent
him, which is, of course, what we did…The hounding of Michael Jackson
is a spectacular case in point. Michael Jackson, to whose music we have
sent our children and our soft-drink companies with record piles of dollars,
is superchild and now super-child-molester.7
A cursory glance at contemporary Western culture corroborates this

much of Kincaid’s assertion: that Jackson was the most consummate,
flamboyant and celebrated expression of a form of adult immaturity that
has become increasingly commonplace. Since the 1960s, modern soci-
eties have seen the unparalleled sociological phenomenon of the cult of
youth. This is manifest in twenty-first-century American and European
culture, with the unprecedented conflation of adult and childhood forms
of entertainment, dress, reading matter, films, pastimes and subcultures.
Such a convergence has been a cause of social anxiety by commenta-
tors on both the Left and Right of the political spectrum. In 1983, the
1 INTRODUCTION: TOO MUCH OF THE BOY-MAN 3
psychiatrist Dan Kiley’s The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never
Grown Up presented the condition of Barrie’s hero as a form of debili-
tating mental pathology (albeit one that never achieved inclusion in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). On the Left, the
polemicist firebrand Neil Postman argued that modern, secular capital-
ism was eroding the distinctions between childhood and adulthood. In
his The Disappearance of Childhood (1994), Postman’s chief concern was
the sexualisation and excessive exposure of children to commercial soci-
ety. These, he argued, were effectively destroying the category of child-
hood as it had historically been understood.8 Since publishing, various
sociologists have cast sceptical doubt upon Postman’s thesis that such
recent innovations as television and video games augur the ‘loss’ or ‘end’
of childhood. Instead, they argue that modern defenders of childhood,
like Postman, overly essentialise the historical separateness of adults and
children.9 Yet a corollary of Postman’s argument is that, in tandem with
the accelerated maturation of children in modern societies, the state of
adulthood has been allowed to regress into self-incurred, perpetuated
immaturity—what he terms the ‘adult-child’.10
More recently, the historian Gary Cross excoriates a society in which
adult men across all tiers of society are devoted to the childlikeness of
modern hedonism—fixated with computer games and television culture
at the expense of personal, social and financial responsibility.11 Cross
attributes such failures of modern manhood to social transformations
of the twentieth century such as the decline of the patriarchal domes-
tic model, the increased material pleasurability of childhood and the
lure of modern consumer capitalism12: ‘The culture of the boy-man
today is less a stage of life than a lifestyle, less a transition from child-
hood to adulthood than a decision to live like a teen “forever”’.13 On
the political Right, the libertarian sociologist Frank Furedi argues that
the modern higher education system in Britain is betraying the legacy
of the Enlightenment through the ‘infantilisation’ of adults. For Furedi,
this is manifested through the oversimplification of academic learning
and the supposed mollycoddling of students, sheltering them from dis-
turbing subject matter.14 These disparate testimonies describe contempo-
rary perpetuated immaturity—especially male immaturity—as though it
were a novel phenomenon. Perhaps this is so, in terms of its social per-
vasiveness. But cultural anxieties about self-incurred immaturity, whether
as a moral foible, a pathological deviation, or perhaps—especially—as a
mark of idiosyncratic genius, is far from a singularly modern proclivity.
4 P. NEWBON
The Possibilities of Not Growing Up

This is a literary historical study of the relationship between authorial iden-
tity, masculinity and immaturity. In particular, this book focuses on a series
of dynamics inculcated in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and their
convergence in the nexus that was the period of the French Revolution.
The Boy-Man is an analysis of the lives and works of a loose collective of
Romantic-era writers, all of whom were marked in similar ways by the
impression that they had never grown up. The title for this work derives
from an enigmatic essay titled ‘A Character of the Late Elia, by a Friend’,
which was published in January 1823, and penned by the Romantic essay-
ist Charles Lamb. In this peculiar text, Lamb seems to announce the death
of his nom de plume, the playful ‘Elia’, and delivers a frank—and even
devastating—obituary, emanating from the mouth of ‘Phil-Elia’ (‘the

friend of Elia’):
He had a horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking like anything

important and parochial. He thought that he approached nearer to that
stamp daily. He had a general aversion from being treated like a grave or
respectable character, and kept a wary eye upon the advances of age that
should so entitle him. He herded always, while it was possible, with people
younger than himself. He did not conform to the march of time, but was
dragged along in the procession. His manners lagged behind his years. He
was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never sate gracefully on his
shoulders. The impressions of infancy had burnt into him, and he resented
the impertinence of manhood. These were weaknesses; but such as they
were, they are a key to explicate some of his writings.15
Lamb’s text raises a series of questions. What is to be understood by

the unfamiliar term ‘boy-man’? Is it purely an idiosyncrasy, describing
Lamb solely? Or was it a term with which Lamb’s readers would have
been familiar, which might encompass other similar men? Why does
he describe childhood ‘impressions’ as leaving indelible marks, with
connotations of painful disfiguration? In what sense can ‘manhood’
be considered ‘impertinent’? If these feelings are ‘weaknesses’, why
should Lamb discuss them with such candour and at such length?
And in what way might these foibles function as a ‘key’ to elucidating
his writings?
In pursuing these questions—and exploring the origins and evolu-
tion of the figure of the ‘boy-man’ more broadly—I was instructed by
a provocative, yet strangely overlooked observation made by the early-

twentieth-century literary critic William Empson:
In that age, too, began the doubt as to whether this man or that was
‘grown-up’…Macaulay complains somewhere that in his day a man was
sure to be accused of a child-mind if no doubt could be cast ‘either on
the ability of his intelligence or on the innocence of his character’; now
nobody seems to have said this in the eighteenth century. Before the
Romantic Revival the possibilities of not growing up had never been
exploited so far as to become a subject of popular anxiety.16
Empson’s assertion raises the question of what it means to be

‘grown-up’, and conversely, what would cause one to doubt that some-
one had not matured. His allusion to Macaulay suggests that a category
of men (and it is significant here that the focus is solely upon men),
who were to be distinguished from the mentally infirm and crimi-
nally devious, might best be taxonomised as having a ‘child-mind’. For
Empson, the emergence of this distinct type is causally connected with
the ‘Romantic Revival’, in a manner unfamiliar to previous decades. And
he leaves open some ambiguity: by ‘exploited’, does he mean in a crea-
tive and artistic sense, or with pejorative moral connotations? It is also
left unclear precisely how and why this exploitation generated ‘popular
anxiety’.
This is a book about adult male writers of the long nineteenth cen-
tury, who were characterised by immaturity. The Boy-Man narrates the
evolution of these childlike writers, arguing that the development of
this literary type was conditioned by an intricate web of changing struc-
tural and cultural dynamics. I argue that in the midst of the European
Enlightenment a series of counter-Enlightenment discourses promoted
the idea that retaining childlike qualities was, in some way, superior to
adulthood. A central tenet of my thesis is that the Romantic era wit-
nessed the most vibrant apotheosis of the boy-man in the ‘Republic of
Letters’. This was facilitated by a coalescence of factors: firstly, the ref-
ormation of masculinity in the wake of the French Revolution; secondly,
the increasing separation of the public and domestic spheres; and finally,
the particular celebration of childhood at the heart of literary Romantic
culture.
More especially, this is a book about Empson’s enigmatic sub-
jects who had, however variously, failed to grow-up. In addition to the
6 P. NEWBON
self-described ‘boy-man’ Charles Lamb, my candidates include: the rad-

ical journalist and poet James Henry Leigh Hunt; his one-time protégé,
the poet John Keats; Thomas De Quincey, the essayist and ‘opium eater’;
Hartley Coleridge, the poet and eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge;
and the poet, cartoonist, printer and editor, Thomas Hood. In the course
of their careers, these writers styled themselves—and were marked by
their peers—as characterised by forms of childlikeness. Moreover, another
fundamental claim of this book is that, far from being isolated eccentrics,
these boy-men formed part of an idiosyncratic collective in late Georgian
literary society, as an offshoot of the phenomenon of ‘cockneyism’. Not
only do I argue that the Romantic era saw a concentrated explosion of
boy-men writers, to a hitherto unknown degree, but that these men lived
and wrote in dialogue with one another as ‘grown-up children’.
The Boy-Man in Neverland

The figure of the ‘boy-man’ is by no means an unknown entity to the
disciplines of cultural history, critical theory and literary scholarship.
In particular, the late Victorian and pre-War Edwardian eras—mark-
ing the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of children’s literature—provided a cul-
tural hothouse for a remarkable concentration of children’s writers
characterised by unrelinquished boyishness.17 There have been some
outstanding works of scholarship in this field. U. C. Knoepflamcher’s
Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales and Femininity (1998)
broached the confused gender identities of male authors of children’s fic-
tion.18 This focus was also pursued, extended and finessed in Catherine
Robson’s Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian
Gentleman (2001).19 More recently, Marah Gubar offers a sophisticated
revision of the ‘Golden Age’ of children’s literature.20 And Adrienne
Gavin and Andrew Humphries present an engaging collection addressing
the child-fixation of Edwardian fiction.21 In contrast to their Romantic-
era counterparts, Victorian and Edwardian boy-men are still household
names. Authors such as Edward Lear, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better
known as Lewis Carroll), J.M. Barrie and even the more austere Robert
Baden-Powell—the originator of the Boy Scout Movement—are the
best-known embodiments of the grown-up child. In many respects, these
disparate men had many qualities in common with their precursors in
the Romantic period. In general, these writers suffered seminal experi-
ences of childhood trauma, usually through the early loss of a parent, or
through neglect.22 They were often born into lower middle-class fami-
lies with precarious finances. In childhood, boy-men tended to manifest
prodigious talent, especially in literature and the arts. Frequently, these
man-childs were abnormally small, afflicted by some debilitating illness,
disability or disfigurement, or some mental impediment.23 In adulthood,
such men might exhibit sexual irregularity, either through an aversion to
women, repressed homosexuality or paedophilic tendencies.24 Socially,
many of these individuals were uncomfortable in, and poorly suited to
circles characterised by nineteenth-century norms of manly behaviour.25
While often intellectually precocious, they tended towards introversion
and nostalgia for lost, Edenic childhood.
The boy-men of the Victorian and Edwardian ‘Golden Age’ were
inextricably defined by their identities as authors who wrote about
childhood for children. Their other identities and professions notwith-
standing, their outpourings for the children’s marketplace proved their
ultimate cultural monument. Fans of Lear were often surprised to dis-
cover he was an established landscape artist, with some international
standing.26 Friends noted, with some amusement, the remarkable dis-
parity between Dodgson the Oxford don and mathematician, and Lewis
Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland (1865) and The Hunting
of the Snark (1876).27 And while Barrie was the author of a variety of
Edwardian plays, composed for exclusively adult audiences, such works
have been thoroughly eclipsed by his immortal boy.28 Their definitive
yet distinctive works of the ‘Golden Age’ and fin de siècle are character-
ised by certain shared, recurrent themes and motifs. The child protago-
nists leave behind the world of adult rules, realities and responsibilities,
for fabulous, unpredictable paracosms of high adventure and anarchic
nonsense. In these fantastical realms, the regulations of grown-up exist-
ence are not merely suspended, but actively overturned and subverted
to light satiric effect. These wonderlands present refuges for the queer
and nonconforming, where conventional order is disrupted by chaotic
age inversion. In the cases of Carroll’s Alice, and Barrie’s Darling chil-
dren, the tales are marked by denouement, with the return to reality.29
But for Lear’s ‘Owl and the Pussycat’, ‘Jumblies’ and ‘The Nutcrackers
and Sugar-Tongs’, or Barrie’s Peter Pan himself, there is no return—
only further escapism into Neverland.30 Indeed, in Henry De Vere
Stacpoole’s ‘robinsonade’ The Blue Lagoon (1908), the family of chil-
dren marooned on a desert island are later discovered to have consumed
‘never wake up berries’ and have sunk into unending sleep.31
8 P. NEWBON
There are numerous facets of comparison and strands of continu-

ity between Romantic and Victorian boy-men. Yet a foundational argu-
ment of this study is that the differences in the cultural milieus they
inhabited worked to engender profoundly different sorts of writing and
divergent conceptions of authorial identity. The boy-men that prolifer-
ated in the post-Revolutionary firmament wrote for adult audiences,
and only engaged in the marketplace of children’s literature as some-
thing of a secondary reflex. It is true that Charles Lamb—alongside his
sister Mary—were amongst the most popular children’s authors of the
Regency period. (Hartley Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey only ven-
tured sketches towards children’s literature.) Yet where Alice and Peter
were, unequivocally, Carroll’s and Barrie’s greatest cultural accom-
plishments, this is not the case for Lamb and his Tales from Shakespeare
(1807) or Ulysses (1808). There is also a powerful distinction between
Lamb’s alter-ego ‘Elia’, and Dodgson’s Latinate ‘Lewis Carroll’. Carroll
became a means of partitioning Dodgson from his professional self, as an
authorial conduit for fantasy writing. Conversely, Elia manifested Lamb’s
explicit conflation of his child and adult selves, and became a subject for
public scrutiny as a means to better comprehend the ‘boy-man’.32 Both
sets of writers used their texts to satirical and political ends. But non-
sense writers like Lear and Carroll deploy specifically children’s nonsense
in order to draw out teasing scorn for adult convention.33 Conversely,
Romantic boy-men confounded the distinction between childish and
mature personae and idioms in their adult writings, as part of a pene-
trating critique of nineteenth-century Christian manliness, and bourgeois
culture. Lear, Carroll and Barrie all adopted a whimsical avuncular per-
sona in their writings. This had already been popularised in the 1820s by
both Lamb and Hartley. But this easeful, confidential tone belies the cul-
tural pressures under which the post-Revolutionary generation of writers
laboured—tensions attenuated for later writers. Despite their commer-
cial success and cultural acclaim, the later nineteenth-century boy-men
lacked the immediacy of political engagement that Regency boy-men
enjoyed. In publications like Hunt’s The Reflector and The Examiner, and
in the liberal London Magazine, boy-men engaged adults about contem-
porary issues. And while nostalgic, idealised regression into childhood
reverie often presented a form of sanctuary from the adult world, this
never amounted to the retreat into Neverland.
The Boy-Man is a revisionist literary historical account of the geneal-
ogy of the boy-man, from his origins in the nexus of discourses of the
eighteenth century to his ungainly apotheosis as a political, literary agent

of the Romantic era. It is an attempt to restructure the narrative of this
unusual history. Such a venture is necessary, in part, precisely because of
the successful literary and cultural criticism in the field of the nineteenth
century, which has delineated such a powerful account of the emer-
gence of child-men of the Victorian world. An important, recent study is
Claudia Nelson’s Precocious Children & Childish Adults (2012). Nelson
blends cultural history with literary scholarship in tracing the dynamics
of ‘age inversion’ throughout the Victorian nineteenth century, subvert-
ing the normative representation of men and women, boys and girls.34
Her study proceeds from the 1830s onwards and takes the view that, for
the Romantic generation of writers, age inversion was solely a source of
delight and enthusiasm, rather than anxiety and apprehension.35 This is
epitomised by Nelson’s commentary upon Hartley Coleridge’s anthol-
ogy Poems (1833), where she states that:
…the child-man tends to be a less problematic figure in the 1830s than

in the 1890s [which] reflects the lingering influence of Romantic writers,
who were apt to celebrate “the carrying on of the freshness and feelings of
childhood into the powers of manhood” as a mark of genius rather than of
trouble…36
Yet, as I hope to demonstrate throughout The Boy-Man, this neat

demarcation of a wilfully naïve Romanticism and a canny Victorianism
will not hold. Even in the midst of Hartley’s celebrated childhood,
many members of the Wordsworth-circle expressed grave doubts
about this most unusual child. Moreover, Hartley’s was by no means
the only Romantic expression of grown-up childhood. Furthermore,
the vitriol heaped upon figures like Hunt, Keats and Lamb by the
reactionary press and literary establishment, belie this narrative of
blithe acceptance of age inversion in the early nineteenth century. In
her account Nelson highlights the important countervailing role of
disciplinary Victorian moralists in castigating adult immaturity. These
included: ‘Carlyle, Ruskin, Samuel Smiles, Dinah Mulock Craik,
Charlotte Yonge’ as ‘[t]he development of a new conception of the
child is necessarily accompanied by a new conception of the grownup’,
replete with ‘responsibility, respectability, earnestness, stability, seri-
ousness’.37 Here, my analysis coincides with Nelson’s— especially
with regard to Thomas Carlyle. And yet this disciplinary process had
10 P. NEWBON
begun far earlier, through the legacy of post-Revolutionary anti-

Jacobinism, and the Evangelical revival, with its rigid codes of
Christian Manliness. In this vein, I would add such names as Edmund
Burke, Hannah More, Sarah Trimmer, Francis Jeffrey, John Gibson
Lockhart, John Wilson, Edward Copleston and Thomas Arnold, to
Nelson’s catalogue.
At the opposite end of my chronological spectrum, I am indebted to
the pioneering scholarship of Ann Weirda Rowland in her Romanticism
and Childhood: The Infantilization of Culture (2012), whose study traces
a long eighteenth century. In her exploration of these processes of ‘infan-
tilization’, Rowland pursues a rhetoric of cultural infancy permeating
eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy, poetry, and literary criti-
cism.38 She documents the trajectory of the reception of childish speech
in eighteenth-century aesthetics, shifting from positive enthusiasm to
derogatory hostility.39 My own narrative of the discourse of immatu-
rity in the period of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment is signifi-
cantly influenced by Rowland’s. Yet our approaches to this subject differ.
Rowland is concerned with broad cultural and intellectual discourses,
often at a level of some philosophical abstraction. Conversely, I am inter-
ested to instantiate these dynamics in the tangible lives and writings of
long-eighteenth-century and Romantic-era authors, and in the changing
political behaviour of actual organisations and institutions.
In some respects, The Boy-Man is closest in its periodisation and
its subjects to the work of the literary critic Judith Plotz. Plotz’s
Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (2001) is an original and
important analysis. In particular, Plotz should be credited as one of
the first critics to pursue the concept of the ‘boy-man’ in the lives and
writings of Lamb, De Quincey and Hartley, both systematically, and with
impressive depth. But a fundamental distinction between our attitudes
towards the Romantic boy-men derives from our perspective upon the
New Historicism in Romantic studies. Plotz’s Vocation of Childhood is a
robust critique of Romantic childhood from within the paradigm of the
‘Romantic Ideology’. Pioneers of this school had, throughout the 1980s
and 1990s, rebuked past generations of Romantic readers for aesthetic
idolatry, and complicity in Romantic acts of evasion from the less palat-
able realities of the French Revolution, the casualties of the Napoleonic
Wars and rapid industrialisation. For such New Historicists, Romanticism
manifested a shared predisposition by its practitioners to ‘displace’ mate-
rial reality, in favour of artfully wrought, enticing illusions.40 Developing
upon this premise, Plotz and others perceive the Romantic interest in
children and childhood as a particularly reprehensive expression of this
political bad faith.41 Plotz regards the so-called Romantic Child as a
woven mythology, actually used to distract from the very real horrors
facing the children of the poor: ‘it is no surprise that the Romantic dis-
course managed to produce a glorified solitary essential child at the same
time that it relegated most actual historical children to obscurity’.42 A
natural corollary of Plotz’s premise is that the figure of the Romantic
boy-man is, therefore, especially morally odious and grotesque. To
some degree, I am sympathetic to aspects of Plotz’s argument: there are
irrefutably narcissistic and pathetic elements of grown-up childhood.
Moreover, many of the actions and writings of these unusual men are not
undeserving of censure. Yet my own argument differs in crucial respects
from Plotz’s. Plotz sees the ‘Romantic Child’ and the ‘Romantic boy-
man’ as motivated by a retreat from the fearful tribulations of the French
Revolution. Conversely, throughout this study, I endeavour to illus-
trate how much of the discourse of immaturity was bound-up with this
very political culture. I argue both that the nature of the boy-man is a
product of the political changes to the late Georgian public and domes-
tic spheres, and that boy-men actively drew upon their childlikeness as a
form of political, countercultural subversion.
Queer Boy-Men
The Boy-Man is an interdisciplinary study, synthesising cultural history
and literary historicism.43 The very hybrid nature of the boy-man him-
self as a figure of literary history highlights the necessity of historicising
him in the context of the discourses of both childhood and masculin-
ity. These, as it will become clear, are fraught categories with their own
historiographical difficulties to address. The question of why childhood
became a particularly desirous, idealised form of identity in the minds of
some writers will be broached in both Chapters 2 and 3. But boy-men
were not children, but adults who identified to an abnormal degree with
the seeming virtues of their childhoods. They must, then, be understood
in parallel with the normative discourses of manhood of their era, and
as a somewhat deviant subculture of nineteenth-century masculinity. To
this end, I draw upon certain aspects of Queer Theory in order to inter-
pret the age inversion of the grown-up child, where it subverts conven-
tional gendered and sexual expectations. There has been a disciplinary
12 P. NEWBON
danger of historians deploying the term ‘gender’ solely in their analy-

sis of the study of female identity, tacitly assuming that, as the norm of
human history, masculinity needed no parallel mode of interpretation.44
Yet the historian John Tosh observes that, since the 1980s, history as a
discipline has exchanged the concept of a monolithic ‘masculinity’ for
histories of ‘masculinities’: a complex relationship of plural male identi-
ties possible in a given historical period.45 In collaboration with the bur-
geoning academic fields of Feminism, Queer and Gender Theory, new
movements in the history of masculinities began to expose the fractures
and fault-lines undermining ideals of gestalt male identity and heter-
onormativity.46 Thus, as Heather Ellis observes, histories of masculinities
must be read not only in the dyadic relationship with feminist histories,
but also in the interchanges between different kinds of men.47
This study details the phenomenon of ‘age inversion’ in the long
nineteenth century, both in terms of broad cultural dynamics, and
instantiated in the lives of a select group of male British writers. This
necessitates sustained engagement with biography and autobiography.48
I am indebted to a wealth of literary critical scholarship that has already
engaged with issues of immaturity and age inversion in the lives and
writing of Romantic boy-men. In his ground-breaking The Infection of
Thomas De Quincey (1991), John Barrell drew upon psychobiography
to connect De Quincey’s infant traumas with his nightmarish writings.
In their enlightening studies of Charles Lamb, Gerald Monsman, Jane
Aaron and Simon Hull have variously drawn upon biography, gender
theory and print history, to explicate Lamb’s Elian persona as a ‘boy-
man’.49 Richard Marggraf Turley’s original and insightful Keats’s Boyish
Imagination (2003) makes a case for the merits of Keatsian childishness.
In a wave of new critical interest in Hartley Coleridge, Andrew Keanie
and Nicola Healey have both reviewed the conventional narrative of his
childhood and career in a more positive light. And Sara Lodge’s Thomas
Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry (2007) is a most welcome addition,
illuminating the pathos and humour of an overlooked figure of literary
culture. However, in contrast to these, The Boy-Man is a study of artis-
tic immaturity as a facet of Romantic literary culture. Throughout The
Boy-Man, I am mindful of the danger that the historian Dror Wahrman
describes as the ‘weak collage’. This is where ‘the historian, identifying a
seemingly similar phenomenon in several disparate cultural spheres at the
same historical moment, declares it to be a pattern of historical signifi-
cance’.50 Rather than addressing these writers solely as individuals—and
their expressions of age inversion as mere personal idiosyncrasies—I ana-

lyse Romantic boy-men as a network of friends and associates. In this
vein, I have been influenced by Felicity James’s work on first-generation
Romantic friendship and by Jeffrey N. Cox and Gregory Dart’s influen-
tial and impressive studies of literary cockneyism as a social phenomenon.
Fathers and Ephebes
A central argument of this monograph is that, historically, the criterion
of literary and cultural merit has been inflected by the language and val-
ues of masculinity. The ways in which boy-men perceived themselves, the
ways in which they were read in their context, and the processes whereby
they have been canonically preserved—or marginalised—were influenced
by the extent to which critical readers perceived them as being ‘manly’,
‘mature’, serious and edifying, or, rather, as ‘unmanly’, and therefore
effete, trivial, puerile, trite, nonsensical, or even morally corrosive. This
thesis requires an understanding of the way in which nineteenth- and
twentieth-century cultural criticism was ideologically structured in terms
of a gendered hierarchy. In his work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-
tury masculinities, the historian Matthew McCormack cautions that
these new historical narratives, in this field, run the risk of merely laps-
ing back into traditional, patriarchal accounts of ‘great men’.51 Yet a
focal argument of The Boy-Man is that the subjects of this monograph
have been deemed defective men-of-letters and thus unworthy of the
title ‘great men’. Indeed, a central tenet of my thesis is that while the
emergence of a culture of age inversion in the eighteenth century engen-
dered these unusual writers, parallel, simultaneous mutations in ideol-
ogies of masculinity also worked towards their cultural marginalisation.
As I shall illustrate, such canonical writers as Wordsworth and Keats
were, in their historical context, derided mercilessly for their ‘namby-
pamby’ writings. Conversely, authors like Lamb, Hunt, Hartley, Hood
and De Quincey were all successful, popular authors in the Romantic
era, whose canonical fortunes were victim to a process of relegation.
This, ironically, owed much to the childlike whimsy of their works for
which they had initially been celebrated. Much of this book is con-
cerned with the processes of literary criticism and reception history
which tended to stigmatise the boy-men and their writings, both in
the period of their composition and across subsequent periods. In dis-
cussing the seditious character of ‘cockney’ culture, I draw upon Terry
14 P. NEWBON
Eagleton’s paradigm of a ‘counter-public-sphere’, as a space within the

dominant, hegemonic culture, where subversion could flourish. Yet, as
the cultural conditions of the late Romantic era shifted towards a sterner
Victorian milieu, the politics of play—so characteristic of Regency boy-
men—attenuated when deracinated from its contextual, interpretive
community.52
The boy-man was a product of the confluence of a series of eight-
eenth-century cultural dynamics. These included (but were not limited
to) the discourse of counter-Enlightenment, the impact of the culture
of sensibility upon masculinity, and the pre-Romantic cult of neglected
genius. Correlatively, the cultural marginalisation of the boy-man from
his position of political agency in the Regency public sphere was also the
consequence of changing social currents. This shift in the culture of the
pre-Victorian early nineteenth century was conditioned by the conver-
gence of numerous forces, particularly those of the anti-Jacobin Right,
the Evangelical revival and its corresponding impact upon the discourse of
respectability, and the reconstitution of Christian manliness. In defining
the contours of this genealogical history of the boy-man, I draw upon
Michel Foucault’s concept of the cultural ‘episteme’ and Thomas Kuhn’s
model of the ‘paradigm shift’.53 The constellation of factors that facili-
tated the emergence of boy-men writers in the Romantic era transformed
in the course of epistemic shifts in the 1820s and 1830s. As Paul De Man
observes, our struggle to contextualise Romantic literature derives in part
from our excessive sense of proximity to this period. In reality, it is an era
from which we have, in many respects, become estranged.54 In this vein,
I am influenced by Jon Mee’s critical deployment of this Foucauldian
epistemic model to trace the evolution of a discourse.55 However, when
pursuing a genealogical narrative, one becomes aware that it has become
warped, or obfuscated, by sedimentary layers of cultural accretion, accu-
mulating in following epochs. Therefore, in writing The Boy-Man, I have
at times chosen to shift between a genealogical and an archaeological
mode of analysis—at times to trace a narrative, and at others to show how
that narrative has been amended, or sometimes muted.56
This process of occlusion is manifest in the historical emergence of the
very literary scholarship intended to interpret Romanticism. To a large
extent, what we now term ‘British Romanticism’ reflected the ideolog
ical tendencies and requirements of Victorian canon-builders more than
it did some organically gestalt corpus of writings. Critics and anthologists
of the mid-nineteenth century sought to fashion a secular pantheon of
enduring literary monuments, as a bulwark against the cultural upheavals

wrought by political reform, industrial capitalism and market economics,
and a series of crises in Christian faith.57 As Susan Wolfson observes, this
canonising process often blithely overlooked the fragmentary and con-
tradictory elements characteristic of much Romantic writing, in favour
of an illusorily monolithic unity.58 Moreover, as Edward Said observed,
the production of a distinct and hegemonic culture is necessarily con-
structed upon an opposition to the alterity of ‘other’ writers and texts,
which must be excluded from the policed parameters of the canon.59
Despite being an ardent champion of Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold
(the son of Thomas Arnold, who looms large in this volume)—one of
the most influential cultural critics of the Victorian era, complained of a
certain jejune inadequacy of the Romantic generation as a whole, who
‘did not know enough’ and who should have ‘read more books’.60 In his
essay ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864), Arnold
describes the purpose of critical inquiry as the endeavour to ‘make the
best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere;
to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light’.61 The
ludic, irreverent milieu of boy-mannish cockneyism jars somewhat with
this earnest critical endeavour for ‘the best that is thought and known’.
The later aesthetic and critical dominance of T. S. Eliot in Britain and
America in the first half of the twentieth century injected yet a more
series tone to literary culture.62 Eliot’s tastes were always for the ‘objec-
tivity’ and ‘impersonality’ of the Neoclassical over the egotism of the
Romantic.63 In his conservative—yet dynamic—theory of the canon,
Eliot envisages an elite, hierarchical pantheon, whose monuments sub-
tly shift in harmonious relationship with one another, seamlessly synthe-
sising the new without rupture.64 In this delicate interplay of tradition
and experiment, the cardinal virtue was the discipline of ‘depersonalisa-
tion’: the illumination of art through the diminution of the personality
of the author.65 In contrast to Romantic egotism, for Eliot poetry must
be the escape from personality.66 Indeed, he contrasts—with scorn—the
‘adolescent’ poet seeking to impress with personality, with the ‘mature’
disinterested poet.67 Similarly, Eliot dislikes the spirit of post-Romantic
criticism that encourages critics to listen to their own ‘inner voice[s]’,
and childishly, irresponsibly ‘[do] as one likes’.68 In his late essay ‘What
Is a Classic?’ (1944), Eliot even more explicitly defines his understand-
ing of great literature as an opposition between ‘maturity’ and imma-
turity.69 For Eliot, the ‘classic’ can only occur ‘when a civilisation is
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NATIVE OF BILUCHISTAN.
Although we gather from the records of Western nations these

indications of products coming from the archipelago in the earliest
ages, yet we have no information in regard to the time that the Hindu
traders, who sailed eastward from India and purchased these
valuable articles, succeeded in planting their own religion among
those distant nations. The annals of both the Malay and Javanese
are evidently fanciful, and are generally considered unreliable for any
date previous to the introduction of Mohammedanism. Simple
chronological lists are found in Java, which refer as far back as a. d.
78; but Mr. Crawfurd says that “they are incontestable fabrications,
often differing widely from each other, and containing gaps of whole
centuries.”
The people who came from India on these early voyages were
probably of the same Talagu or Telugu nation as those now called by
the Malays “Klings” or “Kalings,” a word evidently derived from
Kalinga, the Sanscrit name for the northern part of the coast of
Coromandel. They have always continued to trade with the
peninsula, and I met them on the coast of Sumatra. Barbosa, who
saw them at Malacca when the Portuguese first arrived at that city,
thus describes them:[5] “There are many great merchants here, Moor
as well as Gentile strangers, but chiefly of the Chetis, who are of the
Coromandel coast, and have large ships, which they call giunchi”
(junks). Unlike the irregular winds that must have greatly
discouraged the early Greeks and Phœnicians from long voyages
over the Euxine and the Mediterranean, the steady monsoons of the
Bay of Bengal invited those people out to sea, and by their regular
changes promised to bring them within a year safely back to their
homes.
The United States steamship Iroquois was then lying in the roads,
and our consular agent at this port invited Captain Rodgers, our
consul from Batavia, who was there on business, and myself, to take
a ride with him out to a sugar-plantation that was under his care. In
those hot countries it is the custom to start early on pleasure
excursions, in order to avoid the scorching heat of the noonday sun.
We were therefore astir at six. Our friend had obtained a large post-
coach giving ample room for four persons, but, like all such carriages
in Java, it was so heavy and clumsy that both the driver and a
footman, who was perched up in a high box behind, had to
constantly lash our four little ponies to keep them up to even a
moderate rate of speed. Our ride of ten miles was over a well-graded
road, beautifully shaded for most of the way with tamarind-trees.
Parallel with the carriage-roads, in Java, there is always one for
buffaloes and carts, and in this manner the former are almost always
kept in prime order. Such a great double highway begins at Angir, on
the Strait of Sunda, and extends throughout the whole length of the
island to Banyuwangi, on the Strait of Bali. It passes near Bantam
and Batavia, and thence along the low lands near the north coast to
Cheribon and Samarang, thence south of Mount Japara and so
eastward. This, I was informed, was made by Marshal Daendals,
who governed Java under the French rule in 1809. There is also a
military road from Samarang to Surakarta and Jokyokarta, where the
two native princes now reside. Java also enjoys a very complete
system of telegraphic communication. On the 23d of October, 1856,
the first line, between Batavia (Weltevreden) and Buitenzorg, was
finished. Immediately after, it was so rapidly extended that, in 1859,
1,670 English miles were completed. A telegraphic cable was also
laid in that year from Batavia up the Straits of Banca and Rhio to
Singapore; but, unfortunately, it was broken in a short time, probably
by the anchor of some vessel in those shallow straits. After it had
been repaired it was immediately broken a second time, and in 1861
the enterprise was given up, but now they are laying another cable
across the Strait of Sunda, from Angir to the district of Lampong;
thence it will extend up the west coast to Bencoolen and Padang,
and, passing across the Padang plateau, through Fort de Rock and
Paya Kombo, come to the Strait of Malacca, and be laid directly
across to Singapore.
These Javanese ponies go well on a level or down-hill, but when
the road becomes steep they frequently stop altogether. In the hilly
parts of Java, therefore, the natives are obliged to fasten their
buffaloes to your carriage, and you must patiently wait for those
sluggish animals to take you up to the crest of the elevation.
Our road that morning led over a low country, which was devoted
wholly to rice and sugar-cane. Some of these rice-fields stretched
away on either hand as far as the eye could see, and appeared as
boundless as the ocean. Numbers of natives were scattered through
these wide fields, selecting out the ripened blades, which their
religion requires them to cut off one by one. It appears an endless
task thus to gather in all the blades over a wide plain. These are
clipped off near the top, and the rice in this state, with the hull still on,
is called “paddy.” The remaining part of the stalks is left in the fields
to enrich the soil. After each crop the ground is spaded or dug up
with a large hoe, or ploughed with a buffalo, and afterward harrowed
with a huge rake; and to aid in breaking up the clods, water to the
depth of four or five inches is let in. This is retained by dikes which
cross the fields at right angles, dividing them up into little beds from
fifty to one hundred feet square. The seed is sown thickly in small
plats at the beginning of the rainy monsoon. When the plants are
four or five inches high they are transferred to the larger beds, which
are still kept overflowed for some time. They come to maturity about
this time (June 14th), the first part of the eastern monsoon, or dry
season. Such low lands that can be thus flooded are called sawas.
Although the Javanese have built magnificent temples, they have
never invented or adopted any apparatus that has come into
common use for raising water for their rice-fields, not even the
simple means employed by the ancient Egyptians along the hill, and
which the slabs from the palaces at Nineveh show us were also used
along the Euphrates.
Only one crop is usually taken from the soil each year, unless the
fields can be readily irrigated. Manure is rarely or never used, and
yet the sawas appear as fertile as ever. The sugar-cane, however,
quickly exhausts the soil. One cause of this probably is that the
whole of every cane is taken from the field except the top and root,
while only the upper part of the rice-stalks are carried away, and the
rest is burned or allowed to decay on the ground. On this account
only one-third of a plantation is devoted to its culture at any one time,
the remaining two-thirds being planted with rice, for the sustenance
of the natives that work on that plantation. These crops are kept
rotating so that the same fields are liable to an extra drain from
sugar-cane only once in three years. On each plantation is a village
of Javanese, and several of these villages are under the immediate
management of a controleur. It is his duty to see that a certain
number of natives are at work every day, that they prepare the
ground, and put in the seed at the proper season, and take due care
of it till harvest-time.[6]
The name of the plantation we were to see was “Seroenie.” As we
neared it, several long, low, white buildings came into view, and two
or three high chimneys, pouring out dense volumes of black smoke.
By the road was a dwelling-house, and the “fabrik” was in the rear.
The canes are cut in the field and bound into bundles, each
containing twenty-five. They are then hauled to the factory in clumsy,
two-wheeled carts called pedatis, with a yoke of sapis. On this
plantation alone there are two hundred such carts. The mode
adopted here of obtaining the sugar from the cane is the same as in
our country. It is partially clarified by pouring over it, while yet in the
earthen pots in which it cools and crystallizes, a quantity of clay,
mixed with water, to the consistency of cream. The water, filtering
through, washes the crystals and makes the sugar, which up to this
time is of a dark brown, almost as white as if it had been refined.
This simple process is said to have been introduced by some one
who noticed that wherever the birds stepped on the brown sugar with
their muddy feet, in those places it became strangely white. After all
the sugar has been obtained that is possible, the cheap and impure
molasses that drains off is fermented with a small quantity of rice.
Palm-wine is then added, and from this mixture is distilled the liquor
known as “arrack,” which consequently differs little from rum. It is
considered, and no doubt rightly, the most destructive stimulant that
can be placed in the human stomach, in these hot regions. From
Java large quantities are shipped to the cold regions of Sweden and
Norway, where, if it is as injurious, its manufacturers are, at least, not
obliged to witness its poisonous effects.
After the sugar has been dried in the sun it is packed in large
cylindrical baskets of bamboo, and is ready to be taken to market
and shipped abroad.[7]
Three species of the sugar-cane are recognized by botanists: the
Saccharum sinensis of China; the Saccharum officinarum of India,
which was introduced by the Arabs into Southern Europe, and
thence transported to our own country[8] and the West Indies; and
the Saccharum violaceum of Tahiti, of which the cane of the Malay
Archipelago is probably only a variety. This view of the last species is
strengthened by the similarity of the names for it in Malaysia and
Polynesia. The Malays call it tabu; the inhabitants of the Philippines,
tubu; the Kayans of Borneo, turo; the natives of Floris, between Java
and Timur, and of Tongatabu, in Polynesia, tau; the people of Tahiti
and the Marquesas, to; and the Sandwich Islanders, ko.
It is either a native of the archipelago or was introduced in the
remotest times. The Malays used to cultivate it then as they do now,
not for the purpose of making sugar, but for its sweet juice, and great
quantities of it are seen at this time of year in all the markets, usually
cut up into short pieces and the outer layers or rind removed. These
people appear also to have been wholly ignorant of the mode of
making sugar from it, and all the sugar, or more properly molasses,
that was used, was obtained then as it is now in the Eastern islands,
namely, by boiling down the sap of the gomuti-palm (Borassus
gomuti).[9]
Sugar from cane was first brought to Europe by the Arabs, who, as
we know from the Chinese annals, frequently visited Canpu, a port
on Hanchow Bay, a short distance south of Shanghai. Dioscorides,
who lived in the early part of the first century, appears to be the
earliest writer in the West who has mentioned it. He calls it
saccharon, and says that “in consistence it was like salt.” Pliny, who
lived a little later in the same century, thus describes the article seen
in the Roman markets in his day: “Saccharon is a honey which forms
on reeds, white like gum, which crumbles under the teeth, and of
which the largest pieces are of the size of a filbert.” (Book xii., chap.
8.)
This is a perfect description of the sugar or rock-candy that I found
the Chinese manufacturing over the southern and central parts of
China during my long journeyings through that empire, and at the
same time it is not in the least applicable to the dark-brown, crushed
sugar made in India.
CHAPTER III.
THE FLORA AND FAUNA OF THE TROPICAL
EAST.
June 15th.—At 8 a. m. we left our anchorage off Surabaya, and

steamed down the Madura Strait for Macassar, the capital of
Celebes. Along the shores of the strait were many villages of
fishermen, and bamboo weirs extending out to a distance of five or
six miles from both the Java and Madura shores, and showing well
how shallow the water must be so far from land. During the forenoon
it was nearly calm, but the motion of the steamer supplied a pleasant
air. In the afternoon the wind rose to a light breeze from the east. At
noon we passed Pulo Kambing (“Goat Island”), a small, low coral
island off the south coast of Madura. Near by was a fleet of small
fishing-boats, each containing two men, who were only protected
from the broiling sun by a hat and a narrow cloth about the loins.
These boats and other larger ones farther out to sea were extremely
narrow, and provided with outriggers.
Madura receives its name from a Hindu legend, which makes it the
abode of the demigod, Baladewa. It has but one mountain-range,
and that crosses it from north to south. It is, therefore, not well
watered, and unsuitable for raising rice; and many of its people have
been obliged to migrate to the adjoining fertile shores of Java. The
coffee-tree is raised on this island, but the land is best adapted for
pasturage of the sapi, which is similar in its habits to our own neat-
cattle, and never wallows in mires and morasses like the buffalo. In
the mountains on the western part of Java, a wild species, the
banteng (Bos sondaicus), is still found. It is not regarded as the
source of the sapi, but a fertile cross is obtained from the two, and
this intermediate breed is said to be the one used on Bali and
Lombok. The sapi is found on all the islands to and including Timur,
on Borneo, Celebes, and the Spice Islands, and has been introduced
into the Philippines since their discovery, and now lives in a wild
state on Luzon, just as the cattle of the pampas in South America,
which have also descended from the domesticated breeds imported
by the Spaniards.
On the eastern end of the island, which is quite low, great
quantities of salt are obtained by evaporating water in “pans,” or
small areas enclosed with low dikes, like rice-fields. It is also
manufactured in a similar manner at several places on the north
coast of Java and on the western shore of Luzon, in the province of
Pangasinan. Generally the coasts of the islands throughout the
archipelago are either too high, or so low as to form merely muddy
morasses, which are mostly covered with a dense growth of
mangroves. In some places on the south coast of Java, sea-water is
sprinkled over sand. When this water has evaporated, the process is
repeated. The sand is then gathered, and water filtered through it
and evaporated by artificial heat. In Borneo, and among some of the
Philippines, marine plants are burned, and the lye made from their
ashes is evaporated for the sake of the salt contained in the
residuum. All through the interior, and among the mountains, houses
are built for storing it, and officials are appointed to dispose of it to
the natives. The quantity yearly manufactured for the government at
all the various places is about 40,000 koyangs, or 80,000 tons; but it
is not allowed to be shipped and used until it is five years old, and a
supply of 200,000 koyangs, or 400,000 tons, is therefore constantly
kept on hand. It is deposited in the government store-houses by
individuals at one-third of a guilder per picul. It is then transported
and sold at a great profit by the government, which monopolizes the
traffic in this necessary condiment, and obtains a large portion of its
revenue in this manner.[10]
In the afternoon we were abreast the high Tenger (i. e., wide or
spacious) mountains. Here is the famous “Sandy Sea,” a strange
thing on an island covered with such luxuriant vegetation as
everywhere appears in Java. To reach it one has to climb an old
volcano to a height of about 7,500 feet above the sea, when he
suddenly finds himself on the rim of an old crater of an irregular
elliptical form, with a minor axis of three and a half and a major axis
of four and a half miles. It is the largest crater in Java, and one of the
largest in the world. Its bottom is a level floor of sand, which in some
places is drifted by the wind like the sea, and is properly named in
Malay the Laut Pasar, or “Sandy Sea.” From this sandy floor rise four
cones, where the eruptive force has successively found vent for a
time, the greatest being evidently the oldest, and the smallest the
present active Bromo, or Brama, from the Sanscrit Brama, the god of
fire. The position and relation of this Bromo, as compared to the
surrounding crater, is entirely analogous to those that exist between
Vesuvius and Monte Somma. The outer walls of this old mountain
are of trachytic lava, and Dr. Junghuhn thinks its history may be
summed up thus: first, a period when the trachyte was formed; this
was followed by a period of trachytic lavas, then of obsidian; fourth,
of obsidian and pumice-stone; fifth, the sand period, during which an
enormous quantity of sand was thrown out, and the present sandy
floor formed with the cones rising from it; and sixth, the present ash-
period, during which only fine ashes are thrown out from time to
time, and steam and sulphurous acid gas are constantly emitted.
The earliest descriptions of this crater represent it nearly as it is
seen at the present day; but great eruptions, similar to the one
supposed to have occurred, have been witnessed by Europeans
since they first came to Java. In the year 1772 the volcano
Papandayang, which is near the south coast of Java, and about in
Long. 108° E., threw out such an immense quantity of scoriæ and
ashes, that Dr. Junghuhn thinks a layer nearly fifty feet thick was
spread over an area within a radius of seven miles; and yet all this
was thrown out during a single night. Forty native villages were
buried beneath it, and about three thousand souls are supposed to
have perished between this single setting and rising of the sun. Dr.
Horsfield, who drew up an account of this terrible phenomenon from
the stories of the natives, wrongly supposed that “an extent of
ground, of the mountain and its environs, fifteen miles long, and full
six broad, was by this commotion swallowed up within the bowels of
the earth.”
On the 8th of July, 1822, Mount Galunggong, an old volcano, but a
few miles northeast of Papandayang, suffered a far more terrible and
destructive eruption. At noon on that day not a cloud could be seen
in the sky. The wild beasts gladly sought the friendly shades of the
dense forest; the hum of myriads of insects was hushed, and not a
sound was to be heard over the highly-cultivated declivities of this
mountain, or over the rich adjoining plain, but the dull creaking of
some native cart drawn by the sluggish buffalo. The natives, under
shelter of their rude huts, were giving themselves up to indolent
repose, when suddenly a frightful thundering was heard in the earth;
and from the top of this old volcano a dark, dense mass was seen
rising higher and higher into the air, and spreading itself out over the
clear sky with such an appalling rapidity that in a few moments the
whole landscape was shrouded in the darkness of night.
Through this thick darkness flashes of lightning gleamed in a
hundred lines, and many natives were instantly struck down to the
earth by stones falling from the sky. Then a deluge of hot water and
flowing mud rose over the rim of the old crater, and poured down the
mountain-sides, sweeping away trees and beasts and human bodies
in its seething mass. At the same moment, stones and ashes and
sand were projected to an enormous height into the air, and, as they
fell, destroyed nearly every thing within a radius of more than twenty
miles. A few villages, that were situated on high hills on the lower
declivities of the mountain, strangely escaped the surrounding
destruction by being above the streams of hot water and flowing
mud, while most of the stones and ashes and sand that were thrown
out passed completely over them, and destroyed many villages that
were farther removed from the centre of this great eruption.
The thundering was first heard at half-past one o’clock. At four the
extreme violence of the eruption was past; at five the sky began to
grow clear once more, and the same sun that at noon had shed his
life-giving light over this rich landscape, at evening was casting his
rays over the same spot then changed into a scene of utter
desolation. A second eruption followed within five days, and by that
time more than twenty thousand persons had lost their lives.
When the mountain could be ascended, a great valley was found,
which Dr. Junghuhn considers analogous to the “Val del Bove” on
the flanks of Ætna, except that a great depression among these
movable materials could not have such high, precipitous walls as are
seen in that deep gulf. This eruption was quite like that of
Papandayang, except that there was a lake in the bottom of this
crater which supplied the hot water and the mud, while all the
materials thrown out by the former volcano were in a dry state. In a
similar way it is supposed the great crater and the “Sandy Sea” of
the Tenger Mountains were formed in ancient times. On these
Tenger Mountains live a peculiar people, who speak a dialect of the
Javanese, and, despite the zealous efforts of the Mohammedan
priests, still retain their ancient Hindu religion.
In the evening, fires appeared on the hills near the sea. This was
the last we saw of Java, which, though but one-sixth of the area of
Borneo, and one-third that of Sumatra, is by far the most important
island in the archipelago. It is to the East Indies what Cuba is to the
West Indies. In each there is a great central chain of mountains.
Both shores of Cuba are opposite small bodies of water, and are
continuously low and swampy for miles, but in Java only the north
coast borders on a small sea. This shore is low, but the southern
coast, on the margin of the wide Indian Ocean that stretches away to
the Antarctic lands, is high and bold, an exception which is in
accordance with the rule that the higher elevations are opposite the
greater oceans, or, more properly, that they stand along the borders
of the ocean-beds or greatest depressions on the surface of our
globe. In Java, where the coast is rocky, the rocks are hard volcanic
basalts and trachytes, which resist the action of the sea, and the
shore-line is therefore quite regular; but in Cuba there is a fringing of
soft coral rock, which the waves quickly wear away into hundreds of
little projecting headlands and bays, and on the map the island has a
ragged border. In its geological structure, Cuba, with its central axis
of mica slates, granitic rocks, serpentines, and marbles, has a more
perfect analogue in Sumatra; for in Java the mountains, instead of
being formed by elevations of preëxisting strata, are merely heaps of
scoriæ, ashes, sand, and rock, once fluid, which have all been
ejected out of separate and distinct vents. The area of Java is
estimated at 38,250 square geographical miles; that of Cuba at
about 45,000. The length of Java is 575 geographical or 666 statute
miles; that of Cuba 750 statute miles. But while the total population
of Cuba is estimated only at a million and a half, the total population
of Java and Madura is now (1865), according to official statements,
13,917,368.[11] In 1755, after fifteen years of civil war, the total
population of Java and Madura was but 2,001,911. In a single
century, therefore, it has increased more than sixfold. This is one of
the beneficial effects of a government that can put down rebellions
and all internal wars, and encourage industry. In Cuba, of a total
area of thirty million acres, it was estimated, in 1857, that only
48,572 were under cultivation, or, including pasturage, 218,161
acres. In Java and Madura, last year (1864), the cultivated fields and
the groves of cocoa-nut palms covered an area of 2,437,037 acres.
In Cuba, from 1853 to 1858, the yearly exports were from
27,000,000 to 32,000,000 of dollars, and the imports of about the
same value. In Java, last year, the imports amounted to 66,846,412
guilders (26,738,565 dollars); and the exports to the enormous sum
of 123,094,798 guilders (49,237,919 dollars). During 1864 twenty-
four ships arrived from the United States, of 12,610 tons’ capacity,
and three sailed for our country, of a united capacity of 2,258 tons.
[12]
Both of these great islands abound in forests, that yield large

quantities of valuable timber. Java furnishes the indestructible teak,
from which the Malays and Javanese fitted out a fleet of three
hundred vessels that besieged Malacca, two years after it had fallen
into the hands of the Portuguese. In like manner the Spaniards,
between 1724 and 1796, built with timber from the forests of Cuba
an armada that numbered one hundred and fourteen vessels,
carrying more than four thousand guns. From the Cuban forests
come the indestructible lignum-vitæ, and the beautiful mahogany.
Those jungles shelter no wild animals larger than dogs, but these in
Java are the haunts of wild oxen, tigers, one large and two small
species of leopard, the rhinoceros, two wild species of hog, and five
species of weasel. Two of the latter yield musk; and one, the Viverra
musanga, of the size of a cat, is also found in the Philippines. Six
species of deer are found on this island, and two of them, the Cervus
rufa and Cervus mantjac, are sometimes domesticated.[13] The
elephant is not found in Java, though it lives in Sumatra, Borneo, and
the peninsula. Also the wild horse of Sumatra or Celebes does not
exist in Java.
Among the more noticeable birds of Java is a beautiful species of
peacock, the Pavo spicifer. It was represented to me as quite
abundant in some places along the south coast. The natives make
very beautiful cigar-holders from fine strips of its quills. In Sumatra it
is not found, but is represented by an allied species. Of pigeons,
Java has no less than ten species. The web-footed birds are
remarkably few in species and numbers. A single duck, a teal, and
two pelicans, are said to comprise the whole number. The white
heron has already been noticed, and besides this, ten other species
have been described. One of the smallest birds in Java, and yet,
perhaps, the most important, from its great numbers, is the rice-
eater, Fringilla oryzivora, a kind of sparrow. Great flocks of these
birds are continually annoying the Malays as soon as the rice is
nearly grown. The natives have a very simple and effective mode of
driving them away. In the midst of a field a little bamboo house,
sufficient to shelter its occupant from the rain and scorching
sunshine, is perched high up on poles above the rice-stalks. Around
each field are placed rows of tall, flexible stakes, which are
connected together by a string. Many radiating lines of such stakes
extend from the house to those along the borders, and the child or
old person on watch has simply to pull any set of these lines in order
to frighten away the birds from any part of the field. There are seven
species of owls, and when the hooting of one is heard near any
house, many of the natives believe that sickness or some other
misfortune will certainly come to the inmates of that dwelling. Of
eagles and falcons, or kites, eight species are mentioned. One of the
kites is very abundant at all the anchorages, and so tame as to light
on the rigging of a ship quite near where the sailors are working.
When it has caught any offal in its long talons, it does not fly away at
once to a perch to consume the delicious morsel at its leisure, like
many birds of prey, but is so extremely greedy that it tears off pieces
with its beak and swallows them as it slowly sails along in the air.
When we begin to examine the luxuriant flora of these tropical
islands, almost the first tree that we notice by the shore is the tall,
graceful cocoa-nut palm. Occasionally it is found in small clumps, far
from the abode of man, for instead of being reared by his care, it
often comes to maturity alone, and then invites him to take up his
abode beneath its shade, by offering him at the same time its fruit for
food, and its leaves as ample thatching for the only kind of a hut
which he thinks he needs in an unchanging, tropical climate.
As it stands along the shore, it invariably inclines toward its parent,
the sea, for borne on the waves came the nut from which it sprang,
and now fully grown, it seeks to make a due return to its ancestor by
leaning over the shore and dropping into the ocean’s bosom rich
clusters of its golden fruit. Here, buoyed up by a thick husk which is
covered with a water-tight skin, the living kernel safely floats over the
calm and the stormy sea, until some friendly wave casts it high up on
a distant beach. The hot sun then quickly enables it to thrust out its
rootlets into the genial soil of coral sand and fragments of shells, and
in a few years it too is seen tossing its crest of plumes high over the
white surf, which in these sunny climes everywhere forms the margin
of the deep-blue ocean.
When the nut is young, the shell is soft and not separate from the
husk. In a short time it turns from a pale green to a light yellow. The
shell is now formed, and on its inner side is a thin layer, so soft that it
can be cut with a spoon. The natives now call it klapa muda, or the
young cocoa-nut, and they rarely eat it except in this condition. As it
grows older, the exterior becomes of a wood-color, the husk is dry,
and the shell hard and surrounded on the inside with a thick, tough,
oily, and most indigestible layer, popularly known as “the meat” of the
nut. This is the condition in which it is brought to our markets, but the
Malays seldom or never think of eating it in this condition, and only
value it for its oil. To obtain this the nut is broken, and the meat
scraped out with a knife. This pulp is then boiled in a large pan,
when the oil separates, floats on the top, and is skimmed off. This oil
is almost the only substance used for lighting in the East, where far
more lights are kept burning, in proportion to the foreign population,
than in our own temperate zone, notwithstanding our long winter
evenings, it being the custom there for each man to light his house
and veranda very brilliantly every evening; and, if it is a festive
occasion, rows of lamps must be placed throughout his grounds.
The natives also are fond of such display. The common lamp
which they have for burning cocoa-nut oil is nothing but a glass
tumbler. This is partly filled with water, a small quantity of oil is then
poured in, and on this float two small splints that support a piece of
pith in a vertical position for a wick. When the oil is first made, it has
a sweet, rich taste, but in such a hot climate it soon becomes
extremely rancid, and that used for cooking should not be more than
two or three days old. The cool, clear water which the young nuts
contain is a most refreshing drink in those hot climates, far
preferable, according to my taste, to the warm, muddy water usually
found in all low lands within the tropics. Especially can one
appreciate it when, exposed to the burning sun on a low coral island,
he longs for a single draught from the cold sparkling streams among
his native New-England hills. He looks around him and realizes that
he is surrounded by the salt waters of the ocean—then one of his
dark attendants, divining his desire, climbs the smooth trunk of a
lofty palm, and brings down, apparently from the sky, a nectar
delicious enough for the gods.
This tree is of such importance to the natives that the Dutch
officials are required to ascertain as nearly as possible the number of
them in their several districts. In 1861 there were in Java and
Madura nearly twenty millions of these trees, or more than three to
every two natives.
Near the cocoa-nut grows the Pandanus, or “screw-pine,” which
may be correctly described as a trunk with branches at both ends.
There are two species of it widely distributed over the archipelago.
The flowers of one, the P. odoratissimus, are very fragrant and highly
prized among the Malays. In some places mats and baskets are
made from its leaves. Its woody fruit is of a spherical form, from four
to six inches in diameter, and its surface is divided with geometrical
precision by projections of a pointed pyramidal or diamond shape.
On the low lands, back from the shore, where the soil has been
enriched with vegetable mould, the banana thrives. Unlike the
cocoa-nut tree, it is seldom seen where it has not been planted by
the hand of man. The traveller, therefore, who is worn out with his
long wanderings through the thick, almost impassable, jungles,
beholds with delight the long, green, drooping leaves of this tree. He
knows that he is near some native hut where he can find a shelter
from the hot sun, and slake his thirst with the water of the cocoa-nut,
and appease his hunger on bananas and boiled rice, a simple and
literally a frugal meal. Out of the midst of these drooping leaves
hangs down the top of the main stem, with its fruit decreasing in size
to the end. Some near the base are already changing from a dark
green to a bright golden yellow. Those are filled with delicious juices,
and they melt in your mouth like a delicately-flavored cream. Such
bananas as can be purchased in our markets have been so bruised,
and taste so little like this fruit at its home in the tropics, or at least in
the East Indian islands, that they scarcely serve to remind one of
what he has been accustomed to enjoy. The number of the varieties
of bananas and the difference between them is as great as among
apples in our own land.
Botanists call this tree the Musa paradisiaca, for its fruit is so
constantly ripening throughout the year, and is such a common
article of food, that it corresponds well to “the tree that yielded her
fruit every month,” and whose “leaves were for the healing of the
nations.”
Besides these plants, there are also seen on the low lands
Aroideæ, Amaranthaceæ, papilionaceous or leguminous plants, and
poisonous Euphorbiaceæ. The papaw (Carica papaya) thrives
luxuriantly on most soils. The natives are always fond of it, and I
found it a most palatable fruit, but the Europeans in the East
generally consider it a too coarse or common fruit to be placed on
the table. It was evidently introduced by the Portuguese and Spanish
from the West Indies, and the Malay name papaya comes from the
Spanish papayo.
At the height of one thousand feet ferns appear in very
considerable numbers, and here also the useful bamboo grows in
abundance, though it is found all the way down to the level of the
sea. Practically this is a tree, but botanically it is grass, though it
sometimes attains a height of seventy or eighty feet. It is used by the
natives for the walls of their huts. For this purpose it is split open and
pressed out flat, and other perpendicular and horizontal pieces hold
it in place. It is also used for masts, spear-handles, baskets, vessels
of all kinds, and for so many other necessary articles, that it seems
almost indispensable to them. Its outer surface becomes so hard
when partially burned, that it will take a sharp, almost cutting edge,
and the weapons of the natives were probably all made in this
manner previous to the introduction of iron. At the present time
sharpened stakes, ranjaus, of this kind are driven into the ground in
the tall grass surrounding a ladang or garden, so that any native with
naked feet (except the owner) will spear himself in attempting to
approach. I saw one man, on the island of Bum, who had received a
frightful, ragged wound in this way.
Above one thousand feet the palms, bananas, and papilionaceous
plants become fewer, and are replaced by the lofty fig or waringin,
which, with its high top and long branches, rivals the magnificent
palms by the sea-shore. The liquidambar also accompanies the fig.
Orchidaceous plants of the most wonderful forms appear on the
forest-trees, and are fastened to them so closely, that they seem to
be parts of them. Here the ferns also are seen in great variety.
Loranthaceæ and Melanostomaceæ are found in this zone. To this
region belongs the beautiful cotton-wood tree. Its trunk is seldom
more than ten or twelve inches in diameter, and rises up almost
perpendicularly thirty feet. The bark is of a light olive-green, and
remarkably smooth and fair. The limbs shoot out in whorls at right
angles to the trunk, and, as they are separated by a considerable
space, their open foliage is in strong contrast to the dark, dense
jungle out of which they usually rise. They thrive well also along the
banks of rivers. In Java these trees are frequently used as telegraph-
posts—a purpose for which they are admirably adapted on account
of their regularity. Besides, any thing but a living post would quickly
decay in these tropical lands. The fruit is a pod, and the fibrous
substance it yields is quite like cotton. I found it very suitable for
stuffing birds.
Over this region of the fig comes that of oaks and laurels.
Orchidaceous plants and melastomas are more abundant here.
Above five or six thousand feet are Rubiaceæ, heaths, and cone-
bearing trees; and from this region we pass up into one where small
ferns abound, and lichens and mosses cover the rocks and hang
from the trees. The tropical world is now beneath us, and we are in
the temperate zone.
The tops of all those volcanic mountains that are still in a state of
eruption are usually bare; and in others so large a quantity of the
sulphur they produce is washed down their sides by the rains that
the vegetation is frequently destroyed for some distance below their
summits.
One of the great privileges of a residence in the tropics is to enjoy
the delicious fruits of those regions in all their perfection. Of all those
fruits, in my opinion, the mangostin ought unquestionably to be
considered the first. This tree, a Garcinia, is about the size of a pear-
tree. Its Malay name is manggusta, whence our own, but it is more
generally known in the archipelago by the Javanese name manggis.
It flourishes in most of the islands from the south coast of Java to
Mindanao, the southernmost of the Philippines. On the continent it
yields well as far up the Peninsula of Malacca as Bankok, in Siam,
and in the interior to 16° N., but on the coast of the Bay of Bengal
only to 14° N. The attempts to introduce it into India have failed, but
the fruit is sometimes sent from Singapore after it has been carefully
coated with wax to exclude the air. In Ceylon they have only partially
succeeded in cultivating it. All the trials to raise it in the West Indies
have proved unsuccessful, so that this, the best of all tropical fruits,
is never seen on our continent. Its limited geographical range is the
more remarkable, for it is frequently seen flourishing in the East
Indian islands on all kinds of soils, and there is reason to suppose
that it has been introduced into the Philippines within a
comparatively late period, for in 1685 Dampier did not notice it on
Mindanao. The fruit is of a spherical form, and a reddish-brown color.
The outer part is a thick, tough covering containing a white, opaque
centre an inch or more in diameter. This is divided into four or five
parts, each of which usually contains a small seed. This white part
has a slightly-sweet taste, and a rich yet delicate flavor, which is
entirely peculiar to itself. It tastes perhaps more like the white interior
of a checkerberry than any other fruit in our temperate climate. The
thick covering is dried by the natives and used for an astringent.
FRUIT MARKET.
Several fruits claim the second place in this scale. Some
Europeans would place the rambutan next the mangostin, and
others would prefer the mango or the duku. The rambutan
(Nephelium lappaceum) is nearly as large as an apple-tree. The fruit
is globular in form, and an inch or an inch and a half in diameter. The
outside is a bright-red rind, ornamented with coarse, scattered
bristles. Within is a semi-transparent pulp, of a slightly acid taste,
surrounding the seed. This tree, like the durian and the mangostin, is
wholly confined to the archipelago, and its acid fruit is most
refreshing in those hot lands. At Batavia it is so abundant in February
and March, that great quantities almost line the streets in the market
parts of the city, and small boats are seen filled to overflowing with
this bright, strawberry-colored fruit.
The mango-tree (Mangifera indica) is a large, thickly-branching
tree, with bright-green leaves. Its fruit is of an elliptical form, and
contains a flat stone of the same shape. Before it is ripe it is so
keenly acid, that it needs only to be preserved in salt water to be a
nice pickle for the table, especially with the universal curry. As it
ripens, the interior changes from green to white, and then to a bright
yellow. A tough outer skin being removed, there is seen a soft,
almost pulpy, but somewhat fibrous mass within. Some of these
fruits are extremely rich, and quite aromatic, while others have a
sharp smack of turpentine. They even vary greatly in two localities,
which may be but a few miles apart. Rumphius informs us that it was
introduced into the moluccas by the Dutch in 1655. It has also been
introduced into Zanzibar and Madagascar. When the Spaniards first
visited the Philippines it was not noticed, but now it is very common
in those islands, and considerable quantities of it are shipped to
China, where I was frequently assured it was very delicious; but
those who have tasted this or any other tropical fruit from only one
locality are by no means competent judges. At Singapore I found
some very nice ones that had been brought down from Siam. It also
flourishes in India, and Mr. Crawfurd thinks, from the fact that the
Malay and Javanese names are evidently only corruptions of the old
Sanscrit, that it was originally brought into the archipelago from the
continent, and should not be regarded as indigenous.

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THE BOY-MAN, MASCULINITY

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948816

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

Image credit: The Blind Fiddler (1806), David Wilkie 1785–1841

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company

The Boy-Man grew from my doctoral thesis, and I am grateful to the

support to my historiographical research into childhood as a discourse.

1 Introduction: Too Much of the Boy-Man 1

3 Literary Origins: Sterne, Rousseau, Chatterton and

5 The Marks of Infancy Were Burned into Him 109

6 Little Johnny Keats: A Boy of Pretty Abilities 149

8 Hartley Coleridge and the Muscular Christians 203

9 Pantomime and the Politics of Play 231

10 The Dark Interpreter: De Quincey and the Legacy

11 Farewell to Skimpole: Romantic Boy-Men and Canonical

Ainger  The Letters of Charles Lamb, Newly Arranged in Two

assistance of David García (Ithaca and London: Cornell

SP William Wordsworth, The Salisbury Plain Poems, ed.

Introduction: Too Much of the Boy-Man

© The Author(s) 2019 1

Neverland was a child’s paradise: There was a C.P. Huntington-style

A cursory glance at contemporary Western culture corroborates this

The Possibilities of Not Growing Up

He had a horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking like anything

Lamb’s text raises a series of questions. What is to be understood by

a provocative, yet strangely overlooked observation made by the early-

Empson’s assertion raises the question of what it means to be

self-described ‘boy-man’ Charles Lamb, my candidates include: the rad-

The Boy-Man in Neverland

There are numerous facets of comparison and strands of continu-

eighteenth century to his ungainly apotheosis as a political, literary agent

…the child-man tends to be a less problematic figure in the 1830s than

Yet, as I hope to demonstrate throughout The Boy-Man, this neat

begun far earlier, through the legacy of post-Revolutionary anti-

danger of historians deploying the term ‘gender’ solely in their analy-

their expressions of age inversion as mere personal idiosyncrasies—I ana-

Eagleton’s paradigm of a ‘counter-public-sphere’, as a space within the

enduring literary monuments, as a bulwark against the cultural upheavals

Although we gather from the records of Western nations these

June 15th.—At 8 a. m. we left our anchorage off Surabaya, and

Both of these great islands abound in forests, that yield large

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