The Boy: What Will He Become?

In chapter II of his more or less autobiographical book Over Seventy (1957) Wodehouse comments on the financial vicissitudes of his household during his formative years, which cast a shadow of doubt over his chances of getting a university education:

The result was that during my schooldays my future was always uncertain. The Boy: What Will He Become? was a question that received a different answer almost daily.

At least twice in his novels Wodehouse put the same question in the lips of two of his heroes. The first is Psmith:

"Are you the Bully, the Pride of the School, or the Boy who is Led Astray and takes to Drink in Chapter Sixteen?"
"The last, for choice," said Mike, "but I've only just arrived, so I don't know."
"The boy—what will he become? Are you new here, too, then?"
"Yes! Why, are you new?"

The Lost Lambs, ch. III (1908; Mike, ch. XXXII)

The second is Jimmy Crocker:

"The boy, what will he become?" he said. He turned the pages. "How about an Auditor? What do you think of that?"
"Do you think you could audit?"
"That I could not say till I had tried. I might turn out to be very good at it. How about an Adjuster?"

Piccadilly Jim, ch. VIII (1917)

R. McCrum adopted the phrase as the title of chapter 2 of Wodehouse: A Life, devoted to the years 1894-1900. It is especially appropriate because, while not so familiar today, or even when Over Seventy was published, it was firmly engraved in everyone's minds during the Victorian years to which Wodehouse applied it. In this post I will attempt to reconstruct its origin and history up to the end of the 19th century.

* * *

The story begins with an article titled "The Influence of Morality or Immorality on the Countenance," published on April 17, 1852 in The Popular Educator (Vol. I No. 3). It was illustrated with a double sequence of successive stages in the life of a child, one showing how he would grow up if he received a proper education, and the other what happened if he didn't, in answer to the fundamental question "What will he become?":

(According to the article, the drawing was taken "from a popular French publication," which I haven't been able to trace. A farbourg, a footnote tells us, is a low suburb of a city, such as Paris.)

The article took a stance in the millennia-old nature-nurture debate, which boils down to whether one's character is determined by birth or by education. In this case it took the form of an opposition between two 19th century disciplines demoted today to the rank of pseudosciences: phrenology, which predicted mental traits from the shape of a person's skull, and physiognomy, which assessed a person's character from their appearance: "without depreciating the facts on which it is professedly based, we confess that we have a more profound faith in the doctrine of physiognomy." The two series of drawings clearly depict the same child in two very different possible futures, always with the same cranial structure from the phrenologist's viewpoint, but revealing to the physiognomist the impact of environment on his development:

Carefully examine the above engraving. Look at the head and face of the child represented in the first figure. Who can divine what that young intelligence will become in the future of his life? Is there anything in his features to indicate that he will act a conspicuous part on the great wide stage of this world? Or is he to sink in the scale of intelligent being, till he takes on the mere animal nature, or what is still worse, till he become the very personification of vice and sin? Even in the outlines of the infant countenance there may be the index of the future man. These outlines will become more marked and definite in the boy amid the studies and pursuits of the school. The period of boyhood is one of wondrous development; and if this were but carefully watched, the foundation might in many cases be laid for the erection of a true manly nobility; and that undermined, on which moral evil would otherwise rear her temple of darkness and impurity. Look at the eye, nose, and mouth of the boy as he is at school, or as he is located in one of the faubourgs of Paris, and who does not perceive, from the very contour of the countenance, that his destiny will very much depend on the influences by which he may be surrounded?

This was in line with the ideals and goals of John Cassell, founder of the Cassell & Co. publishing house which produced The Popular Educator: "He was a social reformer who recognised the importance of education in improving the life of the working class, and whose many publications, both magazines and books, brought learning and culture to the masses" (Wikipedia). The Educator was essentially an encyclopedia in weekly installments. The number that included our article contained lessons in Latin, Arithmetic, Botany, English Grammar, French, Physiology and Biography.

The Educator was an editorial success, and when it started to be reissued in the 1860s the engraving was redrawn and used in advertisements and posters. The caption accompanying the first drawing became "The Child—What will he become" and the rest varied slightly. Note that the French context was removed:

Ad in Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper, May 17, 1862

Ad in The Literary World, September 22, 1876

From S. Nowell-Smith, The House of Cassell, 1848-1958, p. 62 we learn that these posters were the work of a publicity manager called J. H. Puttock, and that new drawing was by Fred Barnard.

At some point it crossed the Atlantic. In Ballou's Monthly Magazine for April 1979 we find an article "Various Phases of Life" that is mostly copied from the Educator. The source is not credited: Ballou's is one of the many American periodicals that took advantage of the lack of protection for foreign material which so infuriated Charles Dickens. (In fact, I have come across one of James Payn's stories in Ballou's under a fictitious author's name.) The illustration is new:

The scientific literature of the time also took notice of the poster. In The Monthly Journal of Science for September 1879 an article "The Criminal Law of the Future" on the role of heredity in the development of criminal tendencies alluded to it in these terms:

we may ask if external influences, moral or social, can modify the conduct and character of the individual, what is our right to assume—as the author just quoted evidently does—that their effects must cease with his death, and fail to reach his posterity? Everyone has seen a series of parallel portraits entitled "The Child; what will he become?" Can we suppose that the diverse agencies which have moulded the one into intelligence, refinement, and integrity, but have warped the other into ignorance, vice, and brutality, will leave their descendants equal and similar, the minds of both groups being tabula rasa as easily open to good as to bad impressions? Unless we can grant this monstrous postulate we must, "vulgar" as it may seem, recognise heredity as an important factor in the generation of conduct and character.

In 1885 a humorous picture by Frank Dadd was presented at the yearly exhibition of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, bearing the title "The Boy—What will he become?" which is the final form of the phrase as we encounter in Wodehouse. It portrays a father taking his son to a phrenologist to have the boy's cranium measured:

The parent is awed by the scientific man's jargon but tries to conceal his ignorance; the crank looks superciliously from a lofty position; and the boy just wants to be somewhere else, the sulk on his face denouncing the idiocy of the whole situation (my interpretation). The picture was praised in several art journals, and got a cartoon in Punch, May 30, 1885:

I believe Dadd's painting is satirical in intent, but that didn't stop the advocates of phrenology using it to promote their practice:

Ad in Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1889

Another pictorial derivative is found in The Girl's Own Paper, October 6, 1894 with the title "The Child:—How will she develop?", too large to reproduce here. As could be expected, it contemplates not only education but a number of other desirable virtues in a lady of the age.

But it was the posters that lived for decades in popular memory, and most likely what Wodehouse had in mind when he quoted the phrase. References to them appear continuously from the 1870s onward in literature, journalism, comic strips etc., and start declining in the 1920s, when they usually take the form "like in those old posters."

Reviewing even only the most creative of these in the 20th century escapes the limits of this post about the origins of the phrase, but we could mention a 1934 one-act play of that title by Harold Brighouse that can be read here, and one very late allusion which brings us close to Over Seventy. In Punch for November 22, 1950 a report of a discussion in Parliament of the recently founded Council of Europe and its future prospects makes the following comparison:

But what struck the unbiased onlooker most was that the unfortunate infant's future seemed very unclear and uncertain. For neither side seemed to have any great faith in its ability to rise above difficulties to come. It was all rather like one of those old "The Child—What Will he Become?" charts, only with both life-courses more than a bit cloudy and unpromising.

* * *

Such, then, is the history of our phrase, at least up until the time it was applicable to Wodehouse and his early characters.

One last reflection: the three occurrences in the Wodehouse canon are equally unfamiliar to a 21st century reader, but in context they are slightly different. In The Lost Lambs and Piccadilly Jim the author could count on his public recognizing the phrase, either from their own experience or from repeated contemporary references. In Over Seventy the passage was more of an nostalgic evocation of a bygone era, conjuring up a memory which only those above a certain age would share.

Jimmy Pitt, Spike Mullins and Ulysses

There is a curious symmetry between the first and last chapters of Wodehouse's A Gentleman of Leisure (The Intrusion of Jimmy in the US). At the beginning of the novel Arthur Mifflin sums up Jimmy Pitt's life thus:

"Jimmy's had a queer life," said Mifflin. "He's been pretty nearly everything in his time. Did you know he was on the stage before he took up newspaper work? Only in touring companies, I believe. He got tired of it, and dropped it. That’s always been his trouble. He wouldn't settle down to anything. He studied Law at the 'Varsity, but he never kept it up. After he left the stage he moved all over the States without a cent, picking up any odd job he could get. He was a waiter once for a couple of days, but they sacked him for breaking plates. Then he got a job in a jeweller's shop. I believe he’s a bit of an expert on jewels. And another time he made a hundred dollars by staying three rounds against Kid Brady, when the Kid was touring the country after he got the championship away from Jimmy Garwin. The Kid was offering a hundred to anyone who could last three rounds with him. Jimmy did it on his head. He was the best amateur of his weight I ever saw. The Kid wanted him to take up scrapping seriously. But Jimmy wouldn't have stuck to anything long enough in those days. He's one of the gipsies of the world. He was never really happy unless he was on the move, and he doesn’t seem to have altered since he came into his money."
"Well, he can afford to keep on the move now," said Raikes. "I wish I——"
"Did you ever hear about Jimmy and——" Mifflin was beginning, when the Odyssey of Jimmy Pitt was interrupted by the opening of the door and the entrance of Ulysses in person.

(Most of the episodes alluded to will have a bearing of some kind in the course of the novel.) In the final scene Jimmy, having won te girl and reached journey's end, is seeing off Spike Mullins, the red-headed burglar, at Southampton:

"It’s a pity you're so set on going, Spike. Why not change your mind and stop?"
For a moment Spike looked wistful. Then his countenance resumed its woodenness. "Dere ain't no use for me dis side, boss," he said. "New York's de spot. Youse don't want none of me now you’re married."
...
"It seems to me that you're the only one of us who doesn't end happily, Spike. I'm married. McEachern's butted into society so deep that it would take an excavating party with dynamite to get him out of it. Molly—well, Molly's made a bad bargain, but I hope she won't regret it. We're all going some, except you. You're going out on the old trail again—which begins in Third Avenue and ends in Sing Sing. Why tear yourself away, Spike?"
Spike concentrated his gaze on a weedy young emigrant in a blue jersey, who was having his eye examined by the overworked doctor, and seemed to be resenting it.
"Dere's nuttin' doin' dis side, boss," he said at length. "I want to get busy."
"Ulysses Mullins!" said Jimmy, looking at him curiously. "I know the feeling. There's only one cure. I sketched it out for you once, but I doubt if you’ll ever take it. You don't think a lot of women, do you? You're the rugged bachelor."
"Goils——!" began Spike comprehensively, and abandoned the topic without dilating on it further.

So, Jimmy at the outset was compared to Ulysses (Odysseus), the hero whose adventures on land and sea are the subject of Homer's Odyssey. In the Greek poem Odysseus, after the Trojan war is over, spends ten long years returning home, travelling against his will from one part of the Mediterranean to the other; "many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted." In the end he comes back to his home Ithaca and his wife Penelope. Jimmy for his part acquires a wife and settles down presumably to a life of married bliss; no more travellin for him.

At the conclusion of the novel it is Spike who becomes "Ulysses Mullins," unable to stay put in one place. Jimmy warns him that the path he is choosing "ends in Sing Sing," and speaking from experience ("I know the feeling") tells him that the only cure is to find a woman's love. Spike dismisses the idea. He has higher ends in mind: "I'm goin' to sit in at anodder game dis time—politics, boss. A fr'en' of a mug what I knows has gotten a pull. He'll find me a job."

We hear nothing of Jimmy's future in this epilogue, because it is all about Spike. Very appropiately the last image we see is a stray ray of sun filtering through the clouds and falling on the ship, and "it shone on a red head." There is more than a suggestion that here begin the Adventures of Spike, most likely to end, despite Jimmy's warning, in wedding bells. Whether Wodehouse actually intended to write a continuation, or we are only meant to imagine it, is anyone's guess. The fact is that A Gentleman of Leisure ends where it began, with a hero whom wanderlust spurs to be always on the move.

So now he must depart again
and start again his gondola,
for ever still a messenger,
a passenger, a tarrier,
a-roving as a feather does,
a weather-driven mariner.

* * *

It ought to be mentioned that the association of Ulysses with the overwhelming urge to travel is not at all a Homeric trait. The hero of the Greek epic, very sensibly, is driven by home-sickness, and asks for nothing more than to be allowed to get back to his island and rule his people. The problem is that early on he made an enemy of the sea-god Poseidon, never a wise move when your only way back is by sea.

But Ulysses is the paradigm of the changing hero. Already in Homer we meet contrasting aspects of his character, and as writers over the millenia went back to his figure he became a villain, a politician, a sophist, a Stoic model, a romantic hero, a Christian saint, a Christian sinner, an ordinary 20th century Dubliner, and the list goes on. One could write a whole book about the many incarnations of Ulysses throuhout history, if W. B. Stanford hadn't done it already. From his classic study The Ulysses Theme (2nd. ed., 1963, p. 202) we learn that

no ancient author seems to have portrayed Ulysses as a victim of mere wanderlust: his reasons for leaving Ithaca again were political, religious, or economic, rather than psychological—that is, as far as one can judge from the scanty references that survive. It was Dante who revolutionized the interpretation of Ulysses's final fate by presenting him as a man possessed by an irresistible desire for knowledge and experience of the unknown world. This conception of an outward-bound, home-deserting hero inspired some remarkable modern presentations of Ulysses.

Dante's Ulysses says, in Canto XXVI of the Inferno (transl. J. R. Sibbald):

No softness for my son, nor reverence sad
For my old father, nor the love I owed
Penelope with which to make her glad,
Could quench the ardour that within me glowed
A full experience of the world to gain—
Of human vice and worth. But I abroad
Launched out upon the high and open main
With but one bark and but the little band
Which ne’er deserted me.

But in English letters the epitome of the wandering hero is Tennyson's 1833 poem Ulysses:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Jimmy Pitt and Spike Mullins belong in this branch of the Ulysses tradition, and if a direct source of inspiration is required Tennyson's poem will always be the safest bet.