The Importance of Ernest

A hundred years ago, Ernest Thompson Seton was a household name in Canada, the United States and many places in Europe, his books bestsellers. One of the inventors of the realistic animal story, he was also a key figure in the Boy Scouts, played a pioneering role in what would later become the environmental movement and took the lead in defending and indeed celebrating Native North American culture. A visionary, he was more in tune with concerns of the early 21st century than the late Victorian world in which he grew up and developed his ideas. Nowadays almost forgotten in Canada and the United States (which became his adopted home), he remains a continuing source of inspiration in parts of Europe, above all in the Czech Republic.

In many countries in the western world, at the end of the 19th century there was growing concern that young people—and particularly boys and young men—were becoming “soft,” “spoiled,” “indifferent to traditional values.” The reasons for...