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.

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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.

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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.