Juvenile Nation Youth, Emotions and the Making of the Modern British Citizen, 1880-1914

In the first five months of the Great War, one million men volunteered to fight. Yet by the end of 1915, the British government realized that conscription would be required. Why did so many enlist, and conversely, why so few? Focusing on analyses of widely felt emotions related to moral and domestic duty, Juvenile Nation broaches these questions in new ways. Through juvenile literature and an increasingly influential science of adolescence, Juvenile Nation explores the themes of loyalty, character, temperance, manliness, fatherhood, and religion. In the context of a widespread consensus on the ways to make men out of boys, an informal curriculum of emotional control, key to shaping the future citizenry of Britain and the Empire, is revealed. Juvenile Nation argues that the militaristic fervour of 1914 was an emotional outpouring based on association to family, to community and to Christian cultural continuity. Significantly, the same emotional response explains why so many men did not volunteer, with duty to family and community perhaps thought to have been best carried out at home. This is an important book that tells us much about the emergence of adolescence in modern Britain and the Empire.