The Soldier-Boy

The Soldier Boy is a work by Charles Lewis Hind, the English art critic, editor, and writer who lived from 1862 to 1927 and who was a substantial figure in the late Victorian and Edwardian English art journalism and book publishing world. Hind edited the Pall Mall Budget and the Academy magazine, two of the major London literary and artistic weeklies of the period, and produced substantial writing on art, on contemporary literary and cultural figures, and on various other subjects across his long career.

Hind’s most influential work was probably his art criticism, which appeared in various of the major English magazines and which contributed substantially to the developing English engagement with contemporary continental European art across the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. He was an early supporter of various of the Impressionist and Post Impressionist painters whose work was just beginning to find serious English critical attention during the years he was active, and his various books on contemporary art helped introduce English readers to figures who would later become substantial in the English art world.

The Soldier Boy belongs to Hind’s broader literary output. The title suggests subject matter related to a young soldier, possibly with the early twentieth century or First World War setting that would have been substantially current when Hind was producing his later work. The First World War produced substantial literature on the experience of young soldiers, and Hind would have been working in the substantial broader English literary engagement with the war that occupied much of English writing during the war years and the decade following.

Hind’s particular position as an established London art critic and editor gave him substantial standing in the broader English literary world. His writing characteristically combined the kind of refined literary sensibility that his art critical work had developed with substantial attention to the actual social and historical situations that his various subjects presented. The Soldier Boy likely brings this combined literary and observational approach to its particular subject matter.

The book is of interest now to readers of early twentieth century English literary writing on the soldier experience and to specialists in the broader Charles Lewis Hind literary catalogue. It pairs naturally with his other writings and with the substantial broader English literature of the period.