romantic parts of the British Empire, extended and reinforced familiarity with the form
and imperialistic values of the adventure genre which had developed from the middle of
the century. ‘Dr Jim of South Africa,’ for example, which appeared in Pluck in 1896,
actually featured Dr Jameson, the instigator of the notorious Jameson Raid into the
Transvaal in 1895, in a plot similar to many boys’ adventure stories of the previous forty
years.
The GenreWhat were the characteristics of the boys’ adventure story as it developed in the
nineteenth century? How were they shaped by individual writers, such as Stevenson,
and how were they developed in the twentieth century?
The most important feature of the genre is its combination of the extraordinary and
the probable, for if the events in a story are too mundane, they fail to excite, but a
sequence of completely extraordinary events fails to be credible. Whether an adventure
story deals with shipwrecks or heroic battles, the events have to seem to arise naturally
from the context of the story to retain the young reader’s confidence. The remarkable
adventures that H.Rider Haggard (1856–1925) describes in King Solomon’s Mines (1885)
are carefully led up to step by step, the illusion of reality being created by the narrator’s
low-key introduction of himself, his quasi-scholarly footnotes about the African
vegetation and wild life, and his modest unwillingness to make any dramatic claims
about his own part in the treasure hunt. The unfolding of more and more extraordinary
events is done so gradually and skilfully as to suspend (or at least reduce) the reader’s
sense of disbelief.
This sense of the probable is usually achieved by choosing as hero a normal and
identifiable teenage boy, generally from a respectable but not particularly wealthy home.
Peter Lefroy, the 15-year-old son of a clergyman in Kingston’s Peter the Whaler, is a
typical example. Neither particularly clever nor stupid, the hero has plenty of common
sense and that spirit often called ‘pluck’. Under the influence of evangelism, the heroes
of the early books are apt to be rather pious at times (in the novels of Marryat and
Ballantyne, for example), but, though the hero is always keen to do what is right, by the
beginning of the twentieth century he is often portrayed in more secular and fiercely
nationalistic terms, like Yorke Harberton in Henty’s With Roberts to Pretoria (1902), who
is introduced as
a good specimen of the class by which Britain has been built up, her colonies
formed and her battlefields won—a class in point of energy, fearlessness, the spirit
of adventure, and a readiness to face and overcome all difficulties, unmatched in the
world.The beginning of the story usually depicts the young hero in a minor crisis which reveals
an early glimpse of his pluck. Charley Kennedy demonstrates his spirit with a display of
horse-breaking in Ballantyne’s The Young Fur Traders and David Balfour shows his
courage in dealing with his Uncle Ebenezer at the beginning of Stevenson’s Kidnapped
(1886).
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