History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children's Literature

Jackie C. Horne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138268319
• eBook ISBN: 9781317121688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How did the 'flat' characters of eighteenth-century children's literature become 'round' by the mid-nineteenth? While previous critics have pointed to literary Romanticism for an explanation, Jackie C. Horne argues that this shift can be better understood by looking to the discipline of history. Eighteenth-century humanism believed the purpose of history was to teach private and public virtue by creating idealized readers to emulate. Eighteenth-century children's literature, with its impossibly perfect protagonists (and its equally imperfect villains) echoes history's exemplar goals. Exemplar history, however, came under increasing pressure during the period, and the resulting changes in historiographical practice - an increased need for reader engagement and the widening of history's purview to include the morals, manners, and material lives of everyday people - find their mirror in changes in fiction for children. Horne situates hitherto neglected Robinsonades, historical novels, and fictionalized histories within the cultural, social, and political contexts of the period to trace the ways in which idealized characters gradually gave way to protagonists who fostered readers' sympathetic engagement. Horne's study will be of interest to specialists in children's literature, the history of education, and book history.

Chapter 1
The Emergence of the Ordinary: Parents and Children on the Deserted Isle

The “Real” of Literary Historians

Most twenty-first-century historians of childhood are careful to note that it is easier to study ideologies of childhood than it is to study the lives of real children of the past. But twentieth-century literary critics writing about the history of children’s literature did not have the informed historical accounts of childhood that we now have today. Thus, like the early historians of childhood, they, too, often looked for signs of the child in the literature of the past based on their own ideas of what they viewed to be a natural, universal understanding of childhood. Whenever they found such a sign, literary historians typically deployed the term “real” or “realistic” to mark its appearance. But what, precisely, did the word “real” mean to such critics? How did they know a “real” child from an unreal one?

Looking closely at the detailed discussions of characters who are granted the title “real” in such histories, we can begin to tease out the assumptions that twentieth-century critics rely on when adjudicating between the “real” and the “unreal.” Surprisingly, what one familiar with accounts of the “inward turn” in adult fiction of the late eighteenth century might assume would be the primary characteristic of “realism” in literature for children of the same period—the introduction of character interiority—is rarely mentioned by critics when discussing the advent of the “real” in books for the young. Perhaps twentieth-century critics, brought up in the wake of E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and its lauding of round characters, simply take interiority so much for granted as a component of the “realistic” that they assume there is no need to focus on it in a critical work. Before moving on to a discussion what critics do focus on when they discuss the real, however, the shift in the depiction of character interiority seems worth articulating. In eighteenth-century texts, child characters rarely have interiority; narrators describe their actions, and give readers definitive explanations for the motives that incite said actions. Character is conveyed through external behavior; a character’s thoughts and emotions are always conveyed secondhand, focalized through the lens of the narrator, if they are mentioned at all by these texts. Such constructions of character are typically labeled “flat” by twentieth-century historians of children’s literature, but we would be more historically accurate if we labeled them “exemplary.” As discussed in the Introduction, such exemplar character construction would have been quite familiar to eighteenth-century readers, both in the fictions and in the histories they read. Thus, the characters that twentieth-century critics would denigrate as being “flat” would not just be expected, but praised, by eighteenth-century readers, for such character construction was central both to historical discourse and to the juvenile novel that shared its purpose of molding moral readers.

The shift from “flat” to “round,” or, writing from a historically-informed point of view, from exemplary to what we might term “ordinary,” began in the late eighteenth century, but did not become the norm until well into the nineteenth. During this period, authors began to construct characters whose importance lies not only in their actions and behaviors, but also in their thoughts and feelings. Fictions for children gradually begin to show readers what is happening inside the heads of their child characters, and to show this directly rather than at one remove. Instead of a (obviously adult) narrator telling us what a child character did, and why a child character did it (she was good, he was bad), readers more often hear the thoughts of the child character directly. In juvenile novels of the early nineteenth century, the inside view is typically subject to comment by a narrator who makes value judgments about character’s thoughts; later in the century, character’s thoughts are more often given directly, with the narrator making an appearance infrequently (typically at the most ideologically fraught moments in a text). Thus, the psychologically “round” character of the child emerges.

Such a shift toward interiority in the construction of character in fiction for children aligns quite neatly with the actual and ideological shifts in childhood that eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe witnessed. A similar “inward turn” occurred in novels for adults at the end of the eighteenth century, a turn that has been much commented on by literary critics. But for historians of children’s literature, this shift toward interiority is so taken for granted that it is rarely discussed directly. Many point to it indirectly, by denigrating the didactic tendencies and “preachy and wearisome passages” of pre-Victorian children’s literature (Townsend 44). More common are passages that equate the “real” not with interiority, but with a particular kind of action, one that would in earlier literature for children be held up as a negative example of the exemplary: bad behavior. For example, in his discussion of Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), John Townsend opines “… although virtuous friend Alice is a bloodless figure, human nature breaks in, in the shape of a bad girl, Nancy, who says it is no use trying to teach her to be good” (60); in his later discussion of Alcott’s Little Women (1868), he writes, “Already that is not the real Jo; the Jo we remember is the one who does … unladylike things. … Little Women marks … an increased truth-to-life in domestic stories, with children seen as people rather than examples of good and bad” (Townsend 62).

Again, as they did with signs of the “real,” other historians see this shift toward bad behavior in juvenile literature occurring earlier than does Townsend. Jackson points to 1839’s Holiday House—“it introduced a sprightliness in its young characters, most notably Laura Graham, who with her brother, Harry, tumbles regularly into mischief” (232)—while Avery and Kinnell point even earlier, noting of Mary Ann Kilner’s The Adventures of a Pincushion (ca. 1780), “Charlotte’s violent and entirely understandable reaction” to an argument with her sister over toys “is shown much more as the natural outcome of a squabble than as the kind of wicked or aberrant behaviour frowned upon by Puritan writers. … This is a normal children’s quarrel which takes full account of natural aggression and stubbornness” (54). Behaving badly, whether in 1868 or 1780, seems to be the defining mark of the “normal,” “natural,” or “realistic” for historians of children’s literature.

But bad behavior itself cannot function as the sole marker of the realistic child, for bad children also commonly appeared in eighteenth-century texts. Child characters in both eighteenth- and in nineteenth-century fiction behave poorly: they argue, yell, cause damage to property, hit, punch, pull hair, and speak rudely to their adult caretakers. What marks the true difference between the exemplar characters of earlier literature and the “real” characters of literature in the newer vein is not only the way that their protagonists act, but also how the adults around those children react to their behavior. Take, for example, Avery and Kinnell’s description of an early Maria Edgeworth novel: “Less tolerable is the hero of Frank (1801), just enough of a real boy to show an insatiable curiosity about his surroundings, but painfully accommodating to his tiresome parents” (56). A second change is required in order for a text to qualify as “realistic,” such critics imply, a change not in the child characters, but rather in the characters of those “tiresome parents”: adults within these texts must react differently to the misbehavior of their fictional children. When praising the “real,” historians focus less on the remarkable shift from outside to inside, as do critics of adult literature, than they do on the shift in how the outside was perceived and valued.

Butts calls attention to this difference in his discussion of the actions of the children in Sinclair’s Holiday House, a book often termed the first Victorian children’s novel: “their grandmother and uncle are remarkably forgiving. … The degree of toleration shown towards the children is truly astonishing … the gentle humor of Uncle David, when the children organize a disastrous tea-party or damage a table, is unexpectedly appealing” (“Beginnings” 83). Butts echoes Jackson’s earlier comments about the book, in which she numbers the adults’ changing reactions to the misbehavior of the children, as one of the novel’s key innovations (232, 236). While critics such as Myers, and Avery and Kinnell, remark on the “realistic” actions of their child protagonists, they fail to discuss a concurrent sympathetic re action on the part of the adults in the texts they examine, suggesting that this second characteristic of the “real” comes later in the period than does the first.

It is not only the adult characters within the novels that register a shift in response to child behavior; the authors who create them and the narrators who tell their stories have also changed how they respond. For example, Townsend notes of Frederick Marryat’s 1836 novel, “The most likable aspect of Mr Midshipman Easy is the presentation of the hero: the author mocks Jack Easy’s youthful waywardness but at the same time sympathizes with it” (45). Similarly, Darton links the appearance of the “charming and lenient old grandmother” and the “nice funny uncle David” within Holiday House to the author who created them: Catherine Sinclair “knew and understood real children … and that in her own mind … she reconciled her staid primness in adult conduct with her complete abandonment of all constraint for the young” (220, 221).

Finally, the responses of the new fictional parents and authors/narrators to childhood misbehavior requires a far different response from readers of the books in which they appear. The appearance of such adult presences marks a significant shift in how young readers were intended to respond to the characters within their texts. Rather than see them as exemplary figures, ideals towards which they, imperfect human beings as they are, could strive to emulate but could never actually completely embody, readers were now being asked to identify with the characters in their texts, to construct a bond through sympathy with what is now being constructed as “natural,” rather than evil, misbehavior. The biggest shift in the construction of character in children’s literature of the early nineteenth century, then, may be less the creation of fictional interiority per se, than a specific interiority marked by the child’s “natural” inclination to misbehave, a textual interiority that simultaneously constructs a readerly interiority that “sympathizes with it” as does the narrator of Mr Midshipman Easy.

In eighteenth-century juvenile fictions, adults typically fear fictional children who misbehave—they signal a failure of parenting, the intrusion of sin, a threat to stable society. Unsurprisingly, then, authors of such fictions often craft untimely deaths for their “evil” misbehaving characters, as a punishment for the threat they pose. But by the Victorian period, misbehavior is far more likely to be seen as natural, forgivable, even, I would argue, amusing and pleasurable—if it is kept within strict boundaries.1

The Emergence of the Ordinary

The mischievous literary child did not emerge, fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Instead, the shift from the exemplary to the ordinary proceeded in fits and starts, with some narrators condemning the new construction even while they depicted its actions with sympathy, others embracing it but tempering its threat through the addition of sentimental discourse, and still others rejecting it altogether. Some literary historians suggest that this new construction enters through the back door as it were, through publishers’ appropriation of denigrated folk and fairy tale material, previously deemed worthy of only chapbook publication aimed at the plebian class. The characters in such tales, while constructed just as “flatly” as the characters in earlier moral tales, do behave in ways that often make misbehavior appealing. Yet if the shift had its birth pangs in the realm of the fairy tale, its development is to be traced more clearly in novels written for genteel children in the experimental period of the opening decades of the nineteenth century. We can find its roots in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century domestic tales, as Mitzi Myers has argued, but its first shoots and leaves would have to emerge in quite a different setting—not in the familiar domestic or moral tale setting of house and home, but rather in a place that attempts to create a hybrid of the fantastic and the domestic—the deserted island of the robinsonade.

The deserted island proves a perfect setting in which authors can explore and experiment with this new construction of the ordinary, mischievous child and of the tolerant, playful adult. Free from the judgment of society and peers, the deserted island, like the Lockean child, provides a blank slate upon which authors can imagine and inscribe different versions of parenthood and adulthood. In this chapter, I will explore the ways in which writers of juvenile robinsonades during the opening decades of the nineteenth century began to experiment with depicting non-ideal child characters, and discovered a concomitant need to craft parent characters who viewed the behavior of such children as natural rather than sinful. In particular, I will explore the rise of emotion in these books. The novelty of such child figures often stems from the depiction of their emotions, rather than just their behavior. Previous historians suggest that in depicting child protagonists who feel, and who often feel emotions which, under a Puritan vision of childhood, would be considered signs of inherent evil—fear, anxiety, anger, desire—nineteenth-century writers for children liberated the child from the heavy didactic hand of its moral tale predecessors. But, as I will argue, writers who deployed non-ideal constructions of childhood were still centrally concerned with exemplarity; they simply changed the means by which they hoped to achieve it. By making their child protagonists less ideal, more “ordinary,” juvenile writers believed they would create a sense of identification in their readers, an identification which would in turn foster a stronger reader desire to accept the text’s moral messages than the older, ideal model could in a period increasingly characterized by the importance of sympathetic engagement with the other.

Writers also strengthened the motivation to exemplarity by adding emotion to their depiction of their protagonists’ parents. While parents in eighteenth-century juvenile novels had served as dispassionate, rational teachers, parent characters in children’s literature of the opening decades of the nineteenth century gradually begin to display emotions in their interactions with their children. In particular, such characters become humanized through depiction of the pleasure they take in being a parent, in observing and interacting with their children. Intriguingly, only by first granting parents the right to take pleasure in, rather than simply reprimand or teach, their child protagonists can these protagonists be granted textual subjectivity. I am not making a historical argument, pace Philippe Ariès, Lloyd de Mause, and Laurence Stone, that actual parents did not love or take pleasure in their children prior to the nineteenth century; work by historians Linda Pollock, Nicholas Orme, and others convincingly disproves such historical claims. Rather, I am interested in exploring when the idea of parental pleasure first begins to appear in literature intended for children, and what function it serves in the project of fostering exemplarity. The depiction of parental emotion plays a key role in humanizing the parent, and thus, I will argue, strives to make that parent’s authority more acceptable, more appealing, both to the children within the text, and to the children outside it during a historical period in which family affection became increasingly common in real and discursive families.

But texts often suggest ways of reading far different from the intentions of their authors, and the advent of emotion in the depiction of parents and children does not come without anxiety. For if, as John D. Morillo argues in regards to adult literature in the neoclassical and romantic periods, talk about shared, universal feelings, feelings which pointed to a universal human nature, provoked anxiety because of its disturbing potential to level British social distinctions, so too, I would suggest, do emotions have the potential to break down the relationship of authority between parent and child (2–3, 223). Incorporating emotions opened the door to multiple types of child agency, agency simply not available under the older model of ideal exemplarity. The authors who penned such experimental work during this transitional period struggled, I argue, to embrace an emotionally complex construction of the child while warding off the threat to their authority posed by the myriad types of child agency that such a construction grants.

I explore this double tug—towards emotion on one hand, back towards authority on the other—by examining a curiously prevalent subset of the robinsonade genre: stories in which a child spends at least part of his or her time on a deserted island not alone, but in the company of a parent. The deserted island, a place apart from society, presents a safe space for authors to experiment with the potentially volatile, disruptive creation of emotion in their child and parent characters. During their island sojourns, both children and parents learn not just how to behave, but, more importantly, how to feel—how to forge a bond of emotional connection between parent and child. For authors of children’s literature, such bonds ideally function to make parental authority more compelling, and foster a desire in the reader to model his or her own behavior after that of the child who listens to his or her emotionally connected parent within the text. But even while such bonds function to enforce parental (and thus, authorial) authority, they inadvertently open up new possibilities for child agency, particularly in allowing the child to talk, and in some cases, to talk back, to parental authority. In analyzing the texts that follow, I hope to trace the pleasures inherent in both resisting and succumbing to the siren call of parent-child emotion, both for the child within the text, and for the reader without.

The Pleasures of the Patriarchal Father: Emotion and Authority in Johann David Wyss’s The Family Robinson Crusoe (1812–1813, 1814)

Both the earliest and perhaps most famous family robinsonade is that of Johann David Wyss, the eighteenth-century Swiss parson who penned stories of a family shipwrecked together on a deserted island for the entertainment and instruction of his own children. Wyss wrote his collection of stories in the 1790’s, and intended his audience to be his family alone. But his son, Johann Rudolf Wyss, convinced of the utility of the tales, later persuaded his father to allow him to edit and shape them into a novel; the book was published in Zurich in 1812–1813 under the title Der schweizersche Robinson, oder der schiffbrüchige Schweizerprediger und seine Familie. Ein lehrreiches Buch für Kinder und Kinder-Freunde zu Stadt und Land. We know the book today by the title of its second English edition translation, The Swiss Family Robinson. But the novel made its first appearance in English under the title The Family Robinson Crusoe: or, Journal of a Father Shipwrecked, with his Wife and Children, on an Uninhabited Island, published in two volumes in 1814 for the Juvenile Library of M.J. Godwin and Company.2 The book’s popularity led to myriad other transliterations, adaptations, and new translations published in English throughout the nineteenth century3, but to explore the shift from exemplar to ordinary character construction we must return to the book’s first English-language version.

Fig. 1.1 “The first family robinsonade”: the Swiss Family Robinson on the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Setting off on an Exemplary Adventure
• 1 The Emergence of the Ordinary: Parents and Children on the Deserted Isle
• 2 The Failure of the Ordinary: The Function of Death in the Family Robinsonade
• 3 Engaging The Ordinary Reader: Fictionalized History for Children
• 4 “Men in Petticoats” and Girls in Pants: Contesting Ordinary Femininity in Historical Fiction for Girls
• Epilogue: The End of an Adventure?
• Works Cited
• Index