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The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls
by Rosemary Davidson and Sarah Vine

One of the publishing triumphs of last year, The Dangerous Book for Boys, with immaculate timing tapped into a rich vein that combined nostalgia with exasperation at the seemingly unstoppable advance of Nanny State, with her stifling regime of risk assessment and avoidance. It followed a long line of similar books stretching back over 200 years. In fact its objectives were identical to those of the authors of The Boy’s
Own Book of Sports and Pastimes (c. 1840), which was

an attempt to enable those who had the guardianship of youth to present their young protégés, in the form of a Holiday or Birth-day present, with a concentration of all that usually delights them, in a form more amusing and instructive to the juvenile mind than the cheap trash on which their hoarded shillings had been more usually expended.

For ‘cheap trash’ substitute ‘computer games’ — plus ça change. . .The further back one goes, the more robust the advice. One early 19th-century book I had as a child taught the boys in loving detail how to ‘contrive an earthquake’. The fine details elude me, but I remember being frustrated in the attempts by my inability to locate ‘a quantity of iron filings’.

Girls, on the whole, have fared less well. The heyday of these books, between 1890 and 1920, found them poised on the brink of new freedoms, not always welcomed by their parents. One mother, writing home from India to her daughter, who had expressed a desire to join the newly formed Girl Guides, lamented:

But why do you have to ‘smile and whistle under all difficulties’? Excessive whistling will give you muscular mannish lips and quite possibly a moustache.