“Make a man of him”

The expression “Make a man of him” names a corrupt model of masculine education in which indulgence, vice, and defiance are treated as signs of a boy’s proper development. In Helen Huntingdon’s account, the phrase is no harmless toast to maturity: it gives social permission to teach her son the very habits she is trying to prevent, and makes his growing misconduct an amusement for the adults around him.

The phrase in its domestic setting

In the household at Grassdale, Helen’s foremost anxiety is her son, whose father and father’s friends encourage the beginnings of vice and instruct him in whatever bad habits he can acquire. Helen sums up their attitude with the expression “Make a man of him,” describing it as one of their staple amusements. The wording turns a supposed educational aim into a shared joke: the men present harmful conduct as preparation for manhood rather than as behavior requiring correction.

Helen tries to keep the child with her or in the nursery and gives Rachel particular instructions not to let him come down to dessert while the gentlemen are there. Her plan is immediately overruled by Arthur Huntingdon, who refuses to leave the boy secluded with his nurse and mother. The phrase thus belongs to a struggle over who controls the child’s education. It is backed not simply by an idea about boys, but by the father’s authority to countermand the mother’s safeguards.

What the lesson teaches

Once brought down in the evenings, the child imitates the adults in specific ways: he learns to tipple wine like his father, swear like Mr. Hattersley, and insist on having his own way “like a man.” When Helen tries to stop him, he sends her away with language learned in the same company. The education encoded by the expression is therefore practical and repetitive: the child watches, copies, and receives approval for behavior that adults have modeled for him.

The scene exposes the distance between the men’s claim to be making a man of the boy and the actual content of their instruction. Their idea of manhood is enacted through drinking, profanity, and disregard for his mother, while their laughter rewards the performance. The phrase disguises an adult failure of responsibility as a positive developmental project, allowing harmful conduct to pass as an ordinary, even entertaining, part of a boy’s upbringing.

Laughter and maternal alarm

The child’s imitation delights the company. His roguish innocence and small voice make his behavior peculiarly piquant and irresistibly droll to the men, and his performance can set the table laughing. Yet the comedy deepens Helen’s distress: the adults find entertaining what she sees as evidence that their influence is already taking hold.

The child’s response to Helen makes that division especially clear. When his bright blue eye rests on her, its light briefly disappears; concerned by her failure to laugh, he asks her to laugh and urges his father to make her do so. The moment shows how the household’s amusement has become a demand that Helen accept its values. Her refusal to join in marks her as the solitary witness to the harm beneath the entertainment, while the child himself has begun to understand her sorrow without yet understanding its cause.

A gendered theory of education

The phrase resonates with Helen’s earlier challenge to Gilbert Markham’s argument about virtue and temptation. Gilbert questions whether a boy becomes virtuous by resisting temptation or by never encountering it. Helen answers that the logic is not applied equally to girls: girls are expected to be tenderly nurtured and guarded from knowledge of evil, while boys are permitted to encounter forbidden things as though experience itself strengthens them. She rejects this double standard, arguing that both sexes should benefit from others’ experience and from higher precepts, so they can refuse evil and choose good without being taught by transgression.

“Make a man of him” dramatizes the practice that Helen’s argument opposes. The phrase makes exposure to vice sound like sound instruction, precisely the assumption she disputes. Her concern is not that a boy must be kept ignorant of every difficulty, but that deliberate exposure to wrongdoing is being mistaken for moral strength. The contrast also gives the phrase its force beyond this one household: it reveals how gender norms can authorize different standards of conduct and then label the boy’s resulting behavior education.

Consequences and narrative significance

The boy’s learned habits are not presented as an unchangeable nature. Later, Helen reports that breaking him of the bad language taught by his father has been difficult but is nearly accomplished. She has also succeeded in giving him an absolute disgust for intoxicating liquor, using a small quantity of tartar-emetic in each glass of wine he was permitted to have. The subsequent result reverses the earlier lesson: instead of wine serving as a pleasurable sign of masculine adulthood, its repeated unpleasant consequences make the child weary of it.

That reversal clarifies the stakes of the expression. The men’s indulgent education is not merely comic, because it risks shaping the child’s habits; Helen’s corrective care, in turn, requires sustained effort against the example and authority of his father and friends. The phrase condenses the conflict between these competing influences, and the episode makes visible the novel’s broader criticism of a culture that excuses boys’ exposure to vice while treating women’s attempts to protect and educate them as spoiling or weakness.