Children’s Literature in the Long 19th Century

Catherine Butler, Ann Alston, Catherine Butler, Ann Alston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367356736
• eBook ISBN: 9781000681406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

In this collection the multidimensional story of children's literature in the formative period of the long nineteenth century is illuminated, questioned, and, in some respects, rewritten.

Children's literature might be characterised as the love-child of the Enlightenment and the Romantic movements, and much of its history over the long nineteenth century shows it being defined, shaped, and co-opted by a variety of agents, each of whom has their own ambitions for it and for its child readership. Is children's literature primarily a way of educating children in the principles of reason and morality? A celebration of the Rousseauesque child? A source of pleasure and entertainment? Women, both as writers and as nurturers involved at an intimate and daily level with the raising of children, recognised early and often very explicitly the multiple capacities of literature to provide entertainment, useful information, moral education and social training, and the occasionally conflicting nature of these functions.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's Writing.

THE BRITISH RECEPTION OF GENLIS’S ADÈLE ET THÉODORE, PRECEPTIVE FICTION AND THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF HANDMADE LITERACIES

Donelle Ruwe

ABSTRACT

Madame de Genlis’s Adéle et Théodore played a pivotal role in the development of the novel of education and its distinctive protagonist type, the powerful educating heroine. Genlis also had a lasting impact on the popularization and professionalization of handmade literacies, or hand-crafted children’s texts that are made for specific children within an intimate, domestic setting. Genlis’s particular contribution to the discourse of handmade literacies in Adelaide and Theodore is to turn a mother’s handmade literacies into mass-produced commodities. She not only describes how to create these items, she turns them into bestselling books. Genlis’s impressive and semi-autobiographical female heroine, the Baroness d’Almane, had a powerful impact on female British education writers such as Clara Reeve, Sarah Trimmer, and Anna Barbauld, who, in turn, mass-marketed their own literacy works and pedagogical fictions.

I am now reading Adelaide and Theodore, as it ought to be read; which, I confess, I did not before; I discover a thousand beauties which I had overlooked, or but slightly observed. I aspire to imitate Madame d’Almane, wherever she is imitable; there are some parts of her character that are above my reach, and out of my power. I honour and revere the author of this book.¹

Adèle et Théodore, ou Lettres sur l’éducation (1782) by Stéphanie-Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Auban, Comtesse de Genlis, was the most imitated pedagogical novel of its day in England.² The novel’s compelling portrayal of a powerful female educator, its detailed descriptions of educational activities, and its woman-friendly cosmopolitanism found an enthusiastic audience.³ Adèle et Théodore (translated Adelaide and Theodore) went through fourteen editions in multiple languages in its first four years, and it was serialized before 1790 in both the Universal Magazine and The Lady’s Magazine.⁴ The year that the novel was published, Richard Lovell Edgeworth had his fourteen-year-old daughter Maria translate it into English, and Genlis’s particular brand of Enlightenment feminism, which emphasized intellectual learning as well as socially acceptable female behavior, forever shaped Maria Edgeworth’s pedagogical writings.⁵ Adelaide and Theodore was a source text for Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1805) and Ann Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest (1791).⁶ Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse compares Mrs. Weston to Genlis’s heroine. Anna Barbauld admired Genlis’s “system of education, the whole of which is given in action” with “infinite ingenuity in the various illustrative incidents.”⁷ Clara Reeve described Genlis’s educational program as “the most perfect of any” in Plans of Education (1794), an epistolary work loosely based on Adelaide and Theodore.⁸ Adelaide O’Keeffe’s Dudley (1819) was modeled directly after Genlis’s work, and when O’Keeffe’s novel was translated into French, it was retitled Dudley et Claudy, perhaps to evoke the boy and girl names of Adèle et Théodore.⁹ Genlis authored two multivolume collections associated with the novel, one of plays and one of tales, and Elizabeth Inchbald adapted one of the plays for Covent Garden in 1788.¹⁰

Adelaide and Theodore; or Letters on Education, Containing All the Principles Relative to Three Different Plans of Education; to that of Princes, and to Those of Young Persons of Both Sexes (trans. 1784) is a semi-autobiographical account of Genlis’s work as a governess in the 1770s and 1780s. Genlis grew up in relative poverty. Her beauty, charm, intelligence, and ability to perform as a harpist in the salons of wealthy relations enabled her to marry into the highest circles of French aristocracy. In 1772 she began an affair with the duc de Chartres, later duc d’Orléans, who was known during the Revolution as the regicide republican Philippe Egalité. She advanced within the duc de Chartres’s household, becoming his daughters’ governess and later head tutor to his sons, one of whom was the future king, Louis-Philippe. Genlis took her work seriously. She removed to the convent of Bellechasse with her daughters and the d’Orléans children and initiated a demanding educational regime. Her students learned multiple languages as well as classical subjects, accomplishments, and physical trades (as recommended in Rousseau’s Emile) such as carpentry, masonry, and blacksmithing. By all accounts, Genlis was indefatigable. She spent twelve to fourteen hours each day writing, monitoring her charges’ progress, supervising their tutors, and consuming every treatise on education available. Her alter-ego, the educating heroine the Baroness d’Almane from Adelaide and Theodore, is no less busy. The Baroness writes dramas and stories, researches educational approaches, speaks several languages, and plays the harp and harpsichord. Whether or not all mothers are as driven as Genlis and the Baroness matters less than the novel’s overwhelming confidence that women can and should be intellectually productive.

Magdi Wahba, in an insightful early analysis of Genlis’s impact on British writers, attributes Genlis’s success to three factors: that she was seen as a strong anti-libertine; that she offered a religious alternative to Rousseauian educational approaches; and that her multi-volume collection of plays for children, Theatre of Education (1779–1780), was an exciting novelty.¹¹ Genlis’s 1785 visit to London was a cause for celebration. Fanny Burney spent a morning with her, Horace Walpole invited Genlis to a luncheon, and Queen Charlotte selected the works of Genlis for the royal library.¹²

My essay explores two specific aspects of Genlis’s early influence on British pedagogical writing. First, I examine the importance of Adelaide and Theodore to the development of the pedagogical novel or “preceptive fiction,” Anna Letitia Barbauld’s term for novels such as Adelaide and Theodore. Next, I explore this novel’s role in promoting the professionalization of handmade literacies. “Handmade literacies,” a term coined by Lissa Paul and Michael Joseph, are children’s texts that are “hand-crafted, lovingly designed, and thoughtfully made,” and, as we shall see, typically made within an intimate, domestic setting.¹³

Genlis and the genre of preceptive fiction

Adelaide and Theodore is an epistolary novel in which the Baron and the Baroness d’Almane write letters about the educational progress of their children to various correspondents who write in turn about their own travails and their children’s progress. The novel begins when the Baron and Baroness leave Paris in order to devote themselves to educating their children, seven-year-old Theodore and six-year-old Adelaide. The Baroness has studied education methods her entire life, and she is ready to apply what she has learned to the raising of her own children and those of her correspondents. For example, the Countess d’Ostalis’s pregnancy allows the Baroness to weigh in on the vexing Enlightenment debate about whether or not women should hire wet nurses. In direct opposition to what she considers to be Rousseau’s ill-advised antipathy towards them, the Baroness finds that wet nurses are indispensable to women with social and familial duties. The adolescent daughter of the loving but frivolous Vicountess de Limours (another correspondent) shows all of the failings of a poor education: Flora is spoiled and coarse, behaves scandalously, and later marries an uncouth man. The Viscountess is determined to do better by her second daughter, and so asks the Baroness’s child-rearing advice. To wit, Adelaide and Theodore contains a full range of educated and educable individuals of both sexes: the Countess d’Ostalis (aged 18 or 19); Flora (aged 14); Theodore (aged 7); Adelaide (aged 6); Constantia (aged 5); twin toddlers; and an infant. By the end of the third volume, the characters have matured, and readers can see for themselves the effectiveness of various education programs.

Pedagogical novels such as Adelaide and Theodore disseminated education theory to the novel-reading public. I use the term pedagogical novel to separate this form from the novel of education, or Bildungsroman. Franco Moretti suggests that the Bildungsroman is actually a synthesizing of two modes of educational writing: the Entwicklungsroman (novel of development, of the subjective unfolding of an individual identity) and Erziehungsroman (a pedagogical novel depicting an objective process, observed from the standpoint of the educator).¹⁴ As other scholars have shown, the Bildungsroman emphasizes ideas of mastery, self-consolidation, and a coherent self-image, and thus it emphasizes specifically masculine models of development.¹⁵ The pedagogical novel, by contrast, offers a strong educating figure as the protagonist, and this figure was often an educating heroine, a new type of female protagonist that indicates the centrality of mothers in eighteenth-century education.¹⁶ What Moretti terms the novel of education is identified more narrowly by Barbauld in “The Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing,” Barbauld’s preface to the fifty-volume collection, The British Novelists (1810). She argues that Emile and Adelaide and Theodore comprise a special genre of novel, “preceptive fictions,” so called because of these novels’ intense focus on the teacher-preceptor’s manipulation of the child’s environment.¹⁷

Pedagogical novels and preceptive fictions use the forward momentum of plot and the process of character development to demonstrate the efficacy of different models of education. The home is a laboratory school, and the mother is a teacher-researcher. The strength of these novels often lies less in their literariness than in their effective modeling of an exemplary home education. Even though the young characters in these novels develop over time, they have a palpably cardboard quality -- characters are put through their paces and introduced to different stimuli to which they respond in varied ways. The adult characters comment on the progress of their charges and analyze the effectiveness of different educational approaches.

In the late eighteenth century, the educational treatise and the pedagogical novel were closely connected. Richard A. Barney, in Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England, notes that Locke’s p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The British Reception of Genlis’s Adèle et Théodore, Preceptive Fiction and the Professionalization of Handmade Literacies
• 2 The Metropolis and Female Citizenship in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life
• 3 Satirical Conservatism in Catherine Ann Dorset’s Papillonades
• 4 “How One Subject Springs Out of Another!”: The Strickland Family and Early Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature
• 5 “Marietza”: An Example of Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Depiction of the “Other” in Her Books for Children
• 6 American Woman: Feminine Speech and the Reformation of National Identity through Female Community in Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl
• 7 The Empire Girl Goes to War: Bessie Marchant’s World War I Fiction
• Index