Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship

’A Scout is a Friend to all’

An amalgam of imperial myth, borrowed tips on health and hygiene, and object lessons in woodcraft, the 1908 text of Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys is the original blueprint and ’self-instructor’ of the Boy Scout Movement. One of the all-time bestsellers in the English-speaking world, this primer of ’yarns and pictures’ constitutes probably the most influential manual for youth ever published. Yet the book is at the same time a roughly composed hodge-podge of jingoist lore and tracker legend, padded with lengthy quotations from adventure fiction and Baden-Powell’s own autobiography, and seamed through with the multiple anxieties of its time: fears of degeneration, concerns about masculinity and self-restraint, and invasion paranoia.

Elleke Boehmer’s edition of Scouting for Boys reprints the original text and illustrations, and her fine introduction investigates a book that has been cited as an authority by militarists and pacifists, capitalists and environmentalists alike.

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Robert Baden-Powell

Elleke Boehmer is the Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and Director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing at Wolfson College. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. A founding figure in the field of colonial and postcolonial literary studies, she is the author, editor, or co-editor of over twenty books, including monographs and novels. Her monographs include Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995/2005), Stories of Women (2005), Indian Arrivals (winner ESSE prize, 2015-16), and Postcolonial Poetics (2018). Her novels include The Shouting in the Dark (co-winner, Olive Schreiner Prize, 2015), and Screens Against the Sky (short-listed David Higham Prize, 1990). Her second collection of short stories, To the Volcano, appeared in 2019.

Robert Baden-Powell was born in 1857 and served in the British Army in India, Afghanistan and, later, West and southern Africa. His extemporising command of the siege of Mafeking during the Anglo-Boer War elevated Baden-Powell to the status of imperial symbol, lone hero of an empire under threat. In Scouting for Boys he mixed his love for the outdoors, and delight in play-acting, together with the games ethic of the Victorian public school, and processed these into a newly minted tradition, Britain’s most successful recreational export of the twentieth century. His prolific production of Scouting texts continued unstinted virtually until his death, in 1941 in Kenya.