Abstract: This essay traces the history of the children's books and accompanying paper figures produced by London-based printers S. and J. Fuller in the first decade of the nineteenth century, paying close attention to the entanglement of boyhood, masculinity, race, and imperial ambition in the books featuring boy protagonists. Most Fuller books take a rather obvious instructional approach, offering moral lessons that reinforce patriarchal values and stress the importance of home and Empire. Yet the unique affordances of the paper figures invite readers to entertain other, potentially more fluid, narratives of gender, race, class, and ethnicity, which may have undercut or even nullified the moral messaging of the accompanying text. The essay opens by reading the emergence of the Fuller paper figures alongside the introduction of the toy theatre, querying gendered assumptions about both toys. Then, it zeroes in on two books that showcase the pleasures of performance: Young Albert, The Roscius (1811) and Frank Feignwell's Attempts to Amuse His Friends (1811). Next, it turns to Hubert the Cottage Lad (1812) and Frederick, or the Effects of Disobedience (1816), to analyze two very different visions of boyhood, one aligned with Romantic pastoralism, the other with globetrotting military adventure. The essay concludes by flipping the books' narratives of imperialist white male dominance onto their literal and figurative heads. It considers the extent to which the unique "head swapping" aspect of the Fuller paper figures encourages all who encounter the books to indulge in transgressive play.
Marlis Schweitzer (Thu,) studied this question.