It’s a Boy’s Life:  What Diaries Tell Us About Boys’ Games and Public Spaces 

Abstract 

To represent the work of her sabbatical leave during spring 2021, Dr. Alisa Clapp-Itnyre will present her initial research on 19th-century children's diaries.  For this specific paper, she will explore the games and public opportunities afforded to late-19th century and early-20th century young men, notably in contrast to what many young women of the same time period might have enjoyed.  From Victorian and Edwardian boys in boarding schools to American boys living in frontier communities, she assembles connecting points to what would have been boys’ freedoms —extracurriculars like rugby and skating, and professional opportunities foreshadowing public work. She will also investigate ways in which they, too, were restricted due to age, particularly in the educational setting.  How were young man being trained to become model citizens?  What public spaces could they inhabit and how was their freedom still limited? How does the medium of the diary itself both empower and restrict the dissemination of young men’s emotions and experiences at this time?   

Using about ten diaries she has amassed from both English and American collections, Dr. Clapp-Itnyre will share images from those diaries as she considers the private and public experiences of young boys, c. 1830-1930.   

Biographical Statement 

Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, Ph.D., is the author of Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs: Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel (Ohio UP, 2002), Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood (Ashgate/Routledge, 2016), and is co-editor, with Julie Melnyk of “Perplext in Faith:” Essays on Victorian Beliefs and Doubts (Cambridge Scholars, 2015). She has articles published in Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Poetry, and the forthcoming Victorian Verse: The Prosody of Everyday Life (ed. Behlman and Moy) and Reading Texts in Music and Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century (ed. Weliver and Ellis). She is Professor of English at Indiana University East, Richmond, Indiana, where she teaches Children’s Literature and Victorian literature.