This book traces the evolution of a distinct type of man of letters, defined by his immaturity and childlikeness: the boy-man. Pete Newbon argues that such a literary figure emerged at the confluence of the idealisation of childhood with a crisis of masculinity in the early nineteenth century. This study narrates the genealogy of the boy-man. The boy-man derives from a nexus of discourses in the mid-eighteenth century: cultural primitivism, the culture of sensibility, and the cult of premature genius. Boy-men proliferated with an unprecedented concentration and dynamism in the Romantic period. Yet in the late nineteenth century, boy-men were increasingly estranged from the public-sphere and literary canon.