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Due to the significant work of gender scholars over the last two generations, we have a more complex understanding of the different expectations facing men and women, boys and girls, during the late-nineteenth century in the United States. That work was amplified by historians and sociologists such as Harvey J. Graff in Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (1995) and Stephen Mintz in Huck's Raft (2004), who documented how childhoods were multiple and different due to enslavement, factory labor, abandonment, orphanhood, or the particularities of regional experience. In the work of literary scholars, however, analyses of American boyhood of the postbellum nineteenth century have been dominated by examinations of the semi-autobiographical "bad boy" books written by Aldrich, Twain, Howells, Tarkington, Garland, and others. In Being a Boy Again: Autobiography and the American Boy Book (1994), Marcia Jacobson usefully distinguishes between boy books and stories for boys in order to establish the generic conventions associated with the former. Despite this useful distinction, many subsequent scholars return to these semi-autobiographical accounts of boyhood, further establishing the cultural dominance of the "bad boy" in the discussion of nineteenth-century boyhood. As Ken Parille notes, "Critics often use these texts as representative of literary production for and about boys throughout the century" (xv). Similarly, Kenneth Kidd posits that these same postbellum texts provide the "familiar literary topoi that establish 'the boy' as a normative subject: Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, the Bad Boy, the boy-savage, the 'real boy,' the 'Lost Boy,' the 'boy wonder'" shape thinking about boyhood into the late-twentieth century (2). Both Parille and Kidd begin their own analyses with reference to the "bad boy" model in order to carve out an arena for their own studies: Parille's of fictional texts, domestic advice manuals, and educational theory that illustrated or served as methods of disciplining boys, and Kidd's of the ways in which "boyology" and the popular feral tale framed boyhood in the twentieth century. Despite the different trajectories of their studies, both scholars rest on the foundation of a depiction of childhood developed out of the "bad boy" books.
In this essay, I return to the postbellum period during which the "bad boy" books were created in order to bring to light the other models of boyhood circulating...