Scouting for Boys Robert Baden-Powell Oxford University Press, 382pp, £12.99 ISBN 0192805479

God knows what Robert Baden-Powell would have thought of my Scout troop, but I doubt it was quite the sort of thing this Boer war hero had in mind when he founded the venerable institution. We drank beer and smoked, and our rough-and-tumble games had a distinctly sadomasochistic flavour. The other local troops looked down on us, and if our parents had known what we got up to, they would have stopped us going and we would have got up to far worse elsewhere. I was the only child of an absent father, and this shambolic Scout troop was the best bit of male bonding I ever had.

The first edition of Scouting for Boys, republished by Oxford University Press, reads like a letter from a lost world. Its innocence, idealism and ingenuity are humbling to behold, even saddening. This autobiographical almanac is an intriguing insight into the contradic- tory world-view of Edwardian England: liberal and conservative; militarist and pacifist; nationalist and internationalist; passionate about the supposedly civilising benefits of the British empire, but full of admiration for the so-called primitive cultures that it had colonised.

However, its phenomenal popularity makes the book a historic event in its own right. Until the Second World War, its English-language sales were bettered only by the Bible, and in 1948, 40 years after it was first published, it still sold 50,000 copies in Britain alone. Yet the movement that it inspired dwarfs even these facts. Today there are 350 million Scouts, across almost every country in the world.

Lord Baden-Powell did found a religion, of a kind. With its rituals and moral codes, scouting is a guide for living. This scouting bible was inspired by Baden-Powell's experiences as garrison commander of Mafeking, a South African town besieged by the Boers. With the help of his juvenile militia, Mafeking held out, and Baden-Powell's scouts became the feel-good story of the war. After the slaughter of the First World War, he made the book less gung-ho and Anglocentric, but this edition retains the friendly but authoritarian tone of a recruiting sergeant, enlisting volunteers for a righteous crusade.

Yet even in the original 1908 edition, Baden-Powell's remit was far broader than defence of the realm. He shared (and helped to shape) the patriotic prejudices of his day, but his abiding beliefs are in good sportsmanship and fair play. His book is also a self-help manual for teenage boys (despite the subsequent success of the Girl Guides, women barely get a look-in), and his dire warnings about the perils of masturbation, cut by his original publisher, are restored to their former glory in this edition. But not all of Baden-Powell's ideas are so out of tune with modern thinking. His eulogies to fitness, common sense and positive thinking are sensible (if fairly obvious) and some of his opinions are positively progressive - his religious tolerance, his environmentalism, his disapproval of watching football (as opposed to playing it), even his admonishments about eating too much meat.

Elleke Boehmer's erudite introduction makes you wish she would get around to writing a full-length biography of the first Chief Scout. As befits a professor of colonial and post-colonial literature, she does not ignore Baden-Powell's supremacist sentiments, or the racial controversies of his military career, but although she notes his literary (and martial) aberrations, her assessment is far more thoughtful than most post-colonial critiques. Baden-Powell borrows from all sorts of sources (he is especially fond of Rudyard Kipling and Sherlock Holmes). For Boehmer, the book is full of conflicting ideologies, from social Darwinism to primitivism, and from medieval chivalry to noble savagery.

Sadly, today's Scout handbook mentions Baden-Powell only in its introduction, and I don't recall learning an awful lot about the saviour of Mafeking, not even in the 1970s. Nevertheless, having finally read Scouting for Boys, I suspect he might not have taken such a dim view of our dissolute Scout troop after all. OK, so we hardly ever tied a knot, or did a fraction of the other backwoods stuff he talks about, but despite the fags, lager, wanking and adolescent horseplay we were still all lads together, enjoying a rigorous outdoor life just as he advised.

Is Scouting for Boys a book for boys about how to become a man, wonders Boehmer, or is it a manual for men about how to remain a child? After all, as she reminds us, Baden-Powell's favourite book was not some stirring tale of Boer war heroism but Peter Pan.

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