Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689–1789

Anja Müller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351935920
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Shedding light on an important and neglected topic in childhood studies, Anja Müller interrogates how different concepts of childhood proliferated and were construed in several important eighteenth-century periodicals and satirical prints. Müller focuses on The Tatler, The Spectator, The Guardian, The Female Tatler, and The Female Spectator, arguing that these periodicals contributed significantly to the construction, development, and popularization of childhood concepts that provided the basis for later ideas such as the 'Romantic child'. Informed by the theoretical concept of 'framing', by which certain concepts of childhood are accepted as legitimate while others are excluded, Framing Childhood analyses the textual and graphic constructions of the child's body, educational debates, how the shift from genealogical to affective bonding affected conceptions of parent-child relations, and how prints employed child figures as focalizers in their representations of public scenes. In examining links between text and image, Müller uncovers the role these media played in the genealogy of childhood before the 1790s, offering a re-visioning of the myth that situates the origin of childhood in late eighteenth-century England.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Representing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Prose and Prints

If ‘childhood is very much an issue of our time’ (James et al., 5), then mass media have contributed considerably to creating and proliferating images of childhood, making them part of our cultural identity. Philippe Ariès's seminal study L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime has raised awareness that concepts of childhood are contingent on socio-historical developments. The link between shifting perceptions of childhood and evolving family structures has also informed histories of the family, such as Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, Randolph Trumbach's The Rise of the Egalitarian Family or Edward Shorter's The Making of the Modern Family.¹ The strong focus of these studies on the eighteenth century pays tribute to Ariès's proclamation of a ‘discovery’ of childhood after the latter part of the seventeenth century, which prepared the hidden master-plot of the great narrative that the childhood concept of Western European societies is largely a matter of modern, middle-class, capitalist ideologies.

Meanwhile, Ariès's thesis and its theoretical implications have been widely criticized and revised. A growing number of studies on childhood in the Middle Ages or the early modern period have meticulously elaborated on the childhood concepts of these earlier periods, taking cognizance of their alterity.² Other attempts to trace a continuity of childhood concepts are represented by deMause's grim psychohistory of childhood as a history of child abuse or by Linda Pollock's writings proposing a continuity of parental love and empathy. Whether insisting on difference or continuity, the focus of such revisions is largely on real children in history, as it were, attempting to reconstruct the conditions of childhood experience in the past. The discussion whether the history of childhood concepts is marked by continuity or rupture recalls an observation by historian Naomi Tadmor in her study on eighteenth-century concepts of the family and friendship.³ Tadmor takes issue with both lines of argument, suggesting that they presuppose a common twentieth-century norm, namely the nuclear family (see Tadmor, 1–11). She alternatively proposes gauging the eighteenth-century usage of the term in question and unfolding a differentiated panorama of contextually distinct conceptualizations. Even if my own study does not imitate Tadmor's method, I believe she makes an important point that is equally valid for the study of childhood concepts. The publications I have mentioned above tend to start from a preconceived idea of childhood's supposed true nature emerging in the eighteenth century and having since been established through continuous usage in the media as a norm in Western European societies. This universalized concept assigns to children a special place in a society whose future they represent. Emphasizing as well the physical and rational lacks of childhood, it also endorses an affective imperative in proclaiming that children need special attention, care and protection through private initiative (for example families), public institutions, administrative or legal regulations. Childhood's lacks are not despised, but cherished as tokens of a more immediately natural form of existence with which adults have lost touch. Since most of these ideas are indebted to eighteenth-century thinkers, most notably John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it is hardly surprising that the discovery of such a childhood is located in the period when the concepts evolved that one would recognize as familiar. One should evaluate sociological debates about the changing nature or the loss of childhood at the turn of the millennium from a similar point of view. Neil Postman's lament for the ‘disappearance of childhood’,⁴ for instance, indicates a growing divergence between an accepted norm and social reality; hence, it rather records a transition from one contingent childhood concept to others.

The theoretical and methodological paradigm shifts of the last decades have therefore come to redirect the focus away from enquiries into the alleged true nature of the child to those concerned with the social construction of childhood. The great narrative of childhood, with its implications of universal concepts, is gradually being replaced by a localized view that stresses the variety of childhood concepts depending on particular historical, social, cultural or economic contexts.⁵ Under the impact of post-structuralism, Foucauldian discourse analysis, New Historicism or Cultural Studies, scholars have come to consider childhood no longer as ‘a timeless category, waiting in the wings of history to be discovered’ (Heywood, 20), but as a cultural construct which (adult) societies actively construe in various discourses (for example medicine, law, education, literature, art) for different purposes.⁶ Sociological studies explore the relationship between childhood and the various institutions and surrounding structures that control and shape children's experiences.⁷ Feminism and gender studies have drawn attention to early gendering processes, children's sexuality and the child's body.⁸ Various scholars have investigated times of cultural crisis at different moments in history, claiming that renegotiations of cultural identities frequently entail a reconsideration of childhood concepts also.⁹

Notwithstanding these developments, the greater part of monographs on childhood or children in literature and the visual arts have for a long time subscribed to Peter Coveney's statement that ‘[u]ntil the last decades of the eighteenth century the child did not exist as an important and continuous theme in English literature’ (29). Besides, childhood or the child are still largely discussed as a themes or motifs. It is also worth mentioning that the number of publications on childhood in literature by far exceeds that on children in the visual arts.¹⁰ Looking at the historical range covered by critical studies on childhood in literature and the visual arts, one clearly finds a strong bias towards the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Critics such as Peter Coveney, Reinhard Pattison, Jacqueline Banerjee, Laura Berry, Carolyn Steedman or Anne Higonnet each acknowledge the importance of the eighteenth century in general and Romanticism in particular for the formation of the childhood concepts that they go on to elaborate with respect to nineteenth-century novels or art.¹¹ Even when purposing to trace a comprehensive development of childhood concepts in literature from the early modern period onwards, critical studies tend to skirt the eighteenth century for one reason or other.¹² Such a state of the art certainly owes much to the myth of the discovery of childhood in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, rendering it seemingly obsolete to scrutinize earlier periods; but it is interesting to note that it still perseveres after this myth has been widely revised – even in publications recognizing the significance of the eighteenth century.

With respect to eighteenth-century English literature, there have been attempts to align the representation of childhood with the emergence of the middle class or with the development of a national identity.¹³ The general focus of publications on eighteenth-century childhood remains, however, directed towards the second half of the century. The idea that the publication of Rousseau's Emile and its reception in England are a watershed for English conceptualizations of childhood underlies, for instance, the general argument of Ala Alryyes's monograph on the child's story as an ‘original subject’ for the symbolic constructions of the nation and the novel.¹⁴ Similarly, Patricia Meyer Spacks and W.B. Carnochan focus solely on Romantic texts in their lectures on eighteenth-century childhood. In a hitherto unpublished PhD thesis, Judith Burdan intends to unearth how childhood is represented in novels from Defoe's Colonel Jack to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in order to counter the idea of the Romantic invention of childhood. Nevertheless, by concluding that, whereas the earlier novels consider childhood something to be overcome, the later ones ascertain childhood's significance for adulthood, she seems to support the idea of a Rousseauan watershed rather than to upset it.

Apart from such general accounts, most studies on topics pertaining to childhood in eighteenth-century literature concentrate on two major issues – education and the family – and incorporate their statements on childhood into these larger frameworks without making it their first and foremost concern.¹⁵ The textual basis of the studies largely consists of novels. Daniel Defoe's writings,¹⁶ Tom Jones, Pamela, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy or Evelina feature most prominently in this context; they are also in the focus of most articles dealing with childhood and literature in the eighteenth century. There is also an increasing body of publications on the children's literature of the period.¹⁷ Eighteenth-century periodicals, on the other hand, have hardly been investigated for their contribution to creating and implementing notions of childhood, with the exception of an article on father–child relations by Shawn Lisa Maurer and a chapter in the monograph by T.G.A Nelson, who erroneously supposes that periodicals offer ‘more direct and unmediated commentaries on and representations of, real society’ (15) and thus ‘reflect reality’ (33). In a similar vein, Lawrence Stone uses periodicals among the documents for his seminal monograph on the history of the family. Given the importance of eighteenth-century periodicals for the formation of social norms and strategies of distinction,¹⁸ it is high time that these texts were considered in their function as printed mass media for the construction of childhood. A similar deficiency can be observed for the assessment of childhood in eighteenth-century visual arts: all significant contributions to the topic have so far concentrated on painting, with the exception of David Kunzle's article on children in William Hogarth's prints.¹⁹ So far, there has not been a single monograph devoted to the representation of children or childhood in popular prints of the eighteenth century.

The present volume seeks to close these gaps with regard to this important textual and visual material, looking in particular at these hitherto widely neglected printed sources. By exploring how the increased concern with childhood in eighteenth-century England manifests itself in the visual and verbal print material of the period, I shall examine how periodicals and satirical prints represented, discussed, proliferated and popularized different concepts of childhood in the hundred years between the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution.²⁰ The phrase ‘framing childhood’ betrays my inclination to an approach that conceives of childhood as a construct and is therefore less interested in the character of this construct as such, but looks into the processes generating the respective concepts. My main emphasis lies in the question of how different childhood concepts were construed and proliferated by eighteenth-century print media, and how these media presented the respective concepts in connection with other discourses in a way that eventually contributed to generating such a powerful, effective and pervasive notion of the child.

Considering the thematic focus of this study, I deploy a rather broad definition of childhood. This follows not only from the absence of a preconceived idea about the essential nature of the child, but also from the very basic question of the life span designated by the term. With respect to age boundaries, I define childhood as the period from birth (or conception even) to marriage or to the achievement of majority. Against the objection that such a sweeping definition assimilates infancy to youth, thus mingling two stages of life which ought perhaps to be distinguished from each other, I argue that neither was there a coherent, definite lexical distinction of age groups in the eighteenth century, nor was such a distinction reflected in the cultural practices of the period. Dealing with eighteenth-century culture therefore requires such broadness, because the terms ‘child’ or ‘childhood’ were applied to life stages of varying length, and the duration of childhood depended on the discourse within which the term was used.²¹ Childhood as an age of both sexual and moral innocence, for example, was commonly believed to end around seven.²² Marriage – and thus independence from the parental household – was legally possible for girls of fourteen and boys of sixteen. More generally, children were legally dependent on their parents’ wills until the age of discretion, that is, twenty-one.²³ In addition, the eighteenth century witnessed a general tendency towards prolonging childhood. This dynamic character of the borderlines of the life stages resists a fixed definition of childhood in terms of duration (see Austin). The material discussed here, accordingly, varies with respect to the age of the children concerned. The care of newborn babies will be assessed, as well as the relationships between parents and children who have reached the age of discretion. What is decisive for me here is the relational aspect by which someone acquires the status of a child in a periodical or print. Since this status is sometimes even given to adults (for example, in satirical prints), I will conveniently use the term ‘child figure’ when discussing those characters whose position is identified as that of a child but who would not be classified as such if only their biological age were considered. In brief, I will understand childhood not as a biological stage in the develo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689–1789
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Representing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Prose and Prints
• 2 Fashioning Children's Bodies
• 3 Framing Children's Minds
• 4 Family Matters
• 5 Public Children
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index