As Jenny Holt persuasively demonstrates in Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels of school life were deeply engaged in wide-ranging and weighty discussions on citizenship and the future of the British nation. Holt's study is thoroughly researched and admirably comprehensive; she traces the evolution of ideas about male adolescence and examines an impressive range of novels, from the classic to the now-forgotten, putting them in the context of lively ongoing debates about morality, politics, citizenship, imperialism, crime, Darwinism, health, eugenics, and more.

The novels in question focus almost exclusively on life in the elite public schools that educated the sons of Britain's privileged classes, boys destined to inherit the reins of power in the nation and empire. Holt makes a strong case that novels such as Thomas Hughes's enormously popular Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) were part of the effort to mold such boys into men who would be effective and morally upright public leaders, bold and independent in thought and action, willing to renounce narrow selfish ends, and able to assume positions of command. However, she shows that some authors were sensitive to the broader class basis of their readership and, fearful of emerging labor militancy, also sought to incorporate a more passive, obedient model of masculinity aimed at working-class readers. The conflict between the didactic messages deemed appropriate for each class was also reflected in an uneasy balance in the plots of some novels between an impulse to reform and acceptance of the status quo.

As Holt demonstrates, novels of school life were so engaged with multiple national discourses that, despite the authors' obvious intentions to influence readers, they sometimes failed to deliver a coherent message. For example, in Eric (1858), one of the most widely read novels, F. W. Farrar veers between incompatible outlooks: an evangelical theology of redemption expressed through the narrator and a social Darwinism that hopelessly embeds the protagonist's flaws in his very nature. Although his later works hold out hope of creative liberal education as a way to resist the inherent badness of boyish nature, the citizen that emerges is inward looking rather than a participant in the world. Farrar, whose works were widely read among working-class boys, thus presents them with a model of civic subjecthood that is essentially religious, not political.

Many authors and commentators on adolescence took a racial evolutionary approach, seeing boyhood as akin to savagery and male adolescence as a positive threat to civic society. As Holt shows, debates about discipline and punishment—for which public school novels were a significant forum—reflected differences over the extent to which adolescents were driven by animal impulses or capable of developing rational thought. Was the time-honored tradition of flogging the only way to curb the violence and incipient criminality of adolescent boys? Or were innovative approaches based on molding the minds of boys more effective? Following the 1860 Hopley case, in which a teacher beat a boy to death for his failure to learn, opposition to corporal punishment started to emerge. For example, Eton School Days (1864), by Bracebridge Hemyng, proposes rational dialogue as an effective and democratic alternative, with the hero taking a principled stand against corporal punishment as an affront to his rights as a citizen. Most authors and commentators continued to believe in the benefits of flogging but debated whether it should be administered by teachers or (as in many public schools) by senior students. Hughes was among those who defended the latter as a central feature of the principle of self-government that prepared boys of the elite for their future governing responsibilities, while a growing number became anxious to increase adult supervision and concentrate all punitive power in adult hands.

By the turn of the century, the rise of eugenics, the need for strong fearless men to expand and defend the Empire, and alarm about the poor physical state of military recruits had roused public concern about the supposed degeneration of British manhood. This mood fueled an obsession with sports and fitness in public schools—and in public school novels—that threatened to eclipse other elements of education. Robert Massie Freeman's Steady and Strong (1891), for example, is preoccupied with the exercises and exemplary physical development of its hero, while it demonizes the intelligent but unathletic editor of the school paper.

The very comprehensiveness of this volume (one of its strongest points) leads to challenges of organization, which are not always met; some chapters cover so many issues and so many fiction and nonfiction texts that the central points become obscured. And Holt's argumentation regarding literary texts is occasionally weak. (For example, she uses the title character of Tom Brown's Schooldays as an example of Hughes's promotion of fatherliness, but the schoolmate to whom Tom supposedly acts as “father” is, in significant ways, Tom's mentor.) But these flaws do not materially detract from the overall value of the work. Referring to the manifold influences at play in the novels she studies, Holt writes that “the public school novel emerged as what could be described as a heteroglossic patchwork of voices and influences that portrayed adolescent subjectivity in some very contradictory ways” (58). Scholars of childhood, children's literature, education, and nineteenth-century intellectual history will welcome her efforts to explain that patchwork and elucidate its contradictions.