Anyone who has read a Dickens novel, particularly Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, is familiar with the popular depiction of working-class youth culture in 19th-century England as a breeding ground for antisocial behavior.

In his new book, Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire (Routledge, 2005), Pitt faculty member Troy Boone analyzes how working-class English children were represented in what he calls Victorian and Edwardian “imperialist literature”—Boy Scout publications, Salvation Army tracts, juvenile adventure novels like H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886)—and recounts attempts to “save” these children from the urban morass and make them productive citizens of the British Empire.

Boone’s surprising conclusion: Contrary to popular myth, these young Brits were not so easily manipulated and tended not to cooperate with the middle class’ attempts to enlist them into England’s imperial enterprise.

“The really fun part of writing the book was looking at the ways that working-class young people resisted all of those attempts” to co-opt them, says Boone, an assistant professor of English.

During the 19th century, Boone notes, a series of educational reform acts led to free schooling in England and Wales. At the same time, the practice of requiring children to play sports trickled down from Britain’s so-called “public” schools (which were actually private schools, like Eton and Harrow, attended almost exclusively by children of the privileged classes) to working-class schools.

The notion, for boys, was that imparting sporting values would encourage teamwork and male bonding and teach the Empire’s future soldiers and administrators how to lead—or, in the case of working-class males, how to follow—their fellows. “Numerous writers whom I cite in the book made the observation that if you can teach working-class children to follow orders on the football field, they will know how to follow orders when they wind up in the factory or the army,” says Boone.

Extracurricular activities provided by scouting, the YMCA, and the Salvation Army during the Victorian and Edwardian years were consciously aimed at improving nationalist values among working-class youth, he adds.

Among the working-class Britons Boone writes about in Youth of Darkest England is Robert Roberts, who grew up in Manchester in the early 20th century. In his autobiography, titled The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Penguin Books, 1990), Roberts recalled quitting the Boy Scouts after finding that the organization was more about protomilitary drilling than about camping and other outdoor adventuring.

“Roberts writes this book in late middle age, but he’s reflecting on his childhood, and it seems to me a record of a perfectly conscious political decision on the part of a working-class young person not to be subjected to these institutions that middle-class people invented for [the working class’] supposed benefit,” says Boone. “I try to offer evidence from working-class people who recorded what it was like to go to a Salvation Army or Boy Scout meeting at the turn of the 20th century in compiling a case for the fact that however much Robert Baden-Powell intended the Boy Scouts to perform a certain function, that’s an intention that doesn’t necessarily match up with the reality of what happened.”

Boone cites a 1930s study by an organization called Mass Observation, which interviewed people, including those who were children or teens in the late 19th century, about participation in scouting. The researchers found that the vast majority of people who joined the Boy Scouts were middle class and upwardly mobile lower-middle-class people, not from the working class, and that those who continued as scouts into their late teenage years were overwhelmingly middle class.

“Anybody who knows the origins of scouting knows that it is thoroughly associated with the imperialistic goals of Robert Baden-Powell and like-minded youth experts,” Boone says. “There is an assumption that since scouting was designed to do that, and scouting is a household word, then it must have achieved that effect.” But, as the Mass Observation researchers found, the truth was that “working-class people tended not to join and didn’t stay” in the Boy Scouts, Boone points out.

“I’m arguing against a wholesale notion of an easily manipulated working class,” the Pitt professor says.