‘The Crofton Boys’: a children’s story with a moral message by Harriet Martineau - by Richard Crawford
I picked up my copy of The Crofton Boys (1895) at an Oxfam bookshop in Islington. What first attracted me was the cover – it has an illustration printed on the front that depicts some rather stylishly dressed schoolboys playing games in the school playground. This was clearly an old book – it was first published in 1841 - and the author was Harriet Martineau, a well known Unitarian author. I was curious to know why Martineau, who was best known as a political and philosophical writer, had turned out books for children, and I was interested to find out what sort of children’s fiction she wrote.
The clue is in the cover illustration. It shows a boy of about 8 or 9 sitting astride a wall where he is being pelted with snowballs by three other boys, one of whom is in the act of reaching up to take hold of his leg. Here we have a tense moment from the narrative in which Hugh, the boy on the wall, is being bullied by three older boys for refusing to run errands for them – a typical example of the public school bullying culture of the time (see Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) etc.). When Hugh is pulled off the wall, he dislodges one of the heavy coping stones which falls directly onto his foot and crushes it. From this point on, what has been a fairly cheerful account of boy’s experience of a private prep. school turns gruesome. Hugh’s foot is amputated (without anaesthetic) and he is handicapped for life. Why did Martineau have to put her protagonist through such a harrowing ordeal? Why did she think such a subject fit for a young readership? By all accounts, Martineau had come across a the case of a boy who’s foot was amputated whilst reading Sir Walter Scott’s Life:
“My young readers may perhaps be pleased, when they grow up to read Scott’s Life, to find that there was really a boy who did and bore what is here told. They may also discover hereafter that the same circumstance and conduct have occurred more than once in real life.”
Was she helping her young readers to face up to the horrors that life could throw at them? At the time she was writing her children’s fiction (1839-44), Martineau was seriously ill, suffering from the effects of an ovarian cyst. She hadn’t the strength to write books on serious topics such as Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-4) that had established her reputation, and had decided to try writing lighter material for children at the suggestion of her publisher, Charles Knight, who funded, advertised and produced the books. Knight was closely associated with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), founded in 1827. Knight would have looked for edifying, not entertaining stories[1]. Martineau herself was a woman of high moral principles who had been brought up in a Unitarian family. Her brother James Martineau was Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy and Political Economy in Manchester New College, Oxford - then the principal training college for British Unitarianism. Harriet’s children’s fiction privileged instruction over imagination. It was intended to convey a moral message; but what moral message could be drawn from the amputation of an eight-year old boy’s foot?
It must be remembered that Martineau was an invalid when she wrote ‘The Crofton Boys’. She had lost the ability to walk about freely and was struggling to come to terms with her own incapacity. Perhaps she used her child hero, Hugh, to work out her own response to the loss of free movement. In the story, Hugh’s mother tries to comfort him with a moral message:
“There is great pleasure in the exercise of the body … but this is nothing to the pleasure there is in exercising one’s soul in bearing pain – in finding one’s heart glow with the hope that one is pleasing God.”
The sentiment in this passage owes a great deal to the circumstances in which it was written. In 1841 Martineau believed her life was coming an end and that The Crofton Boys was the last thing she would ever write. She may have written herself into her story as Hugh’s mother to tell him about her own solution to suffering; she had found consolation in the thought that by bearing pain she was somehow pleasing God.
Martineau later wrote of her experience of incapacity in Life in the Sick Room (1844) in which she sees suffering as a route to religious revelation:
“One … tells us we shall never be better, — that we shall continue for long years as we are, or shall sink into deeper disease and death; adding, that pain and disturbance and death are indissolubly linked with the indestructible life of the soul, and supposing that we are willing to be conducted on in this eternal course by Him whose thought and ways are not as ours, — but whose tenderness .... Then how we burst in, and take up the word!”
Poor old Hugh had been set up from the start as a vehicle for Martineau’s moral lecture on finding religious inspiration through long-term incapacity. In The Crofton Boys, Hugh finds a way of coping with his infirmity by cheerfully accepting it as a gift from a God who had “sent him his trial [and] could and would help him to bear it with honour and patience” (Martineau, H. 1895 first pub 1841:156). His reward comes in a final short chapter in which Hugh is packed off to join the Indian Civil Service, a job which Martineau calls an “honourable duty”. It is a happy ending of sorts (if you consider working for the Raj a good career option), but that wasn’t the point of the book. The Crofton Boys was just a way for the publisher, Charles Knight and the author, Harriet Martineau, to preach the value of stoicism, duty and piety to small children.
How children’s literature has changed!
References
Martineau, H. (1841) The Crofton Boys. London: Charles Knight
Martineau, H. (1895) The Crofton Boys. London. John Heywood.
Martineau, H. Life in the Sick Room (1844). London.
Robinson, A. (2002) ‘Playfellows and propaganda: Harriet Martineau's children's writing’. In Women' Writing, 9:3
[1] Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carol’s fantasy story for children, was published in 1865.
This blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It was made by New Unity and Richard Crawford. Find out more: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
