Focusing on works by George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, Alice Crossley expounds on the emergence of adolescence in the mid-Victorian period as a distinct form of experience. Adolescence, Crossley shows, appears as a discrete category of identity that draws on but is nonetheless distinguishable from other masculine types such as the father, the man of letters, or the soldier. Important more as a stage of psychological awareness and maturation than as a period of biological youth, Crossley argues that the plasticity of male adolescence provides Meredith, Thackeray, and...