The Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction

J. S. Bratton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317365624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1981. Many of the classics of children's literature were produced in the Victorian period. But Alice in Wonderland and The King of the Golden River were not the books offered to the majority of children of the time. When writing for children began to be taken seriously, it was not as an art, but as an instrument of moral suasion, practical instruction, Christian propaganda or social control.

This book describes and evaluates this body of literature. It places the books in the economic and social contexts of their writing and publication, and considers many of the most prolific writers in detail. It deals with the stories intended to teach the newly-literate poor their social and religious lessons: sensational romances, tales of adventure and military glory, through which the boys were taught the value of self-help and inspired with the ideals of empire; and domestic novels, intended to offer girls a model for the expression of heroism and aspiration within the restricted Victorian woman's world.

1 Introduction: Educational Background and Critical Approaches

DOI: 10.4324/9781315669946-1

It is the business of this book to describe and to attempt to evaluate the flood of fiction for children which was written during the nineteenth century with the intention of conveying moral instruction. It will deal as far as possible with the questions of who wrote such books and why, who published them, who sold and who bought them, whether anyone read them and, if so, what they learnt. Certain preliminaries are necessary for such an investigation, for it is fraught with difficulties of definition and of methods of analysis. If these tales are to be seen in proportion, they must be set against the background of educational and publishing history which gave rise to them; but such a presupposition immediately raises questions about literary evaluation and the nature of appropriate analysis. While it is to be hoped that the methods employed will explain and justify themselves in operation, the problems presented will perhaps be the clearer for being set out in advance, with an indication of the means which have been employed to tackle them.

The concept of childhood, as a special and important state setting the child apart from adults in respects other than this obvious physical inferiority, was one of the fruits of the age of revolutions. ¹ Subsequently millions of books were printed for people who had previously been lucky to get hold of a broadside ballad or a Bible, if they could read at all. For some new readers literacy was the gateway to huge changes, and even for those whose station ensured that they would have been taught to read, the coming of fiction for the young opened pathways for the imagination which had previously been disregarded by educators. With the coming of these changes, however, the experiences of children in reading remained various; books were so numerous partly because education through the printed word was thought of as highly specific, and different books, containing different kinds of information and fiction for moral instruction, were produced for each group of children. By 1850, when the machinery for teaching reading and providing reading matter was already monumentally large, individual experiences of schooling and literature would still differ greatly even for children of the same age and status. Generalisation is made all the more difficult by the fact that for each child the theories, dogmas and attitudes which went to the making of the pattern of education at an organisational level were probably always less important than quite unquantifiable matters such as the personality of a teacher or even a monitor. In 1850, for example, a village girl might have attended the Church-controlled National school from the age of six to thirteen, with long gaps in which she stayed at home to tend her mother or younger children, to help with the harvest, or do any other temporary, paid work in the fields; at school she would have spent her time in a class of mixed ages reading from a few ancient primers, or a Testament, and doing a great deal of mending and sewing for the lady of the manor. She would probably have gone to the Church Sunday school and learnt her catechism, attended church services with her class, and even stayed on at Sunday school after she went into service, if she was employed near enough to home. There would not be much inducement for her to stay unless getting a good character reference depended upon it. During her schooling she might have received two or three sixpenny prize books, published by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, (SPCK), but since her attendance was poor, she might have nothing but a Bible on leaving day. At the same period a boy in Stockport might have spent a much shorter time in a day school, going to work in a factory at the age of nine, but attending the Stockport Sunday schools, and experiencing the elaborate orderliness and efficiency of thousands of scholars marshalled by the sounding of bells from ABC to Bible study and on to arithmetic and even training as a teacher. He would have looked to the school as his way out: in immediate terms, offering him the chance to parade with a banner on anniversary day and stand up and receive his handsome prize, to go into the country on a train and feast in an aristocratic garden; in the longer term, his teacher would have attended at his bedside as he passed over to a better world, or found him a post as he attempted to progress in this one. If such satisfactions seemed tame, he could defect to the socialist or Owenite Sunday school, and make a different use of his acquired skills.

There were other widely dissimilar experiences. A London child of the period might well have got no schooling at all, or have played an expert game of milking a series of ragged schools and philanthropic organisations of the benefits they offered to tempt him with, departing from each with pennies, soup, blankets and boots, and learning to read from the shop windows and roadside theatre bills; the son of a small tradesman in the Midlands might have sat in line under a monitor’s eye and chanted hard facts, his whole energies absorbed in beating his neighbour to a higher place and winning tickets and medals, and reporting his progress nightly to his father, who was paying for it all. While these children struggled on, their betters were also schooled in new ways; farmers’ daughters acquired obnoxious manners and bad French in tiny boarding schools, the sons of gentlemen studied and worshipped earnestly under the successors to Dr Arnold, while families who were committed to Evangelical ideals or to those of Rousseau kept their many children about them and read improving tales about death and Resurrection, or looked on while they learnt to turn a lathe and take cold baths. Two decades later, after the Acts of the early 1870s dictated that all children should be educated to a certain level, the actual experience no doubt still differed greatly between the rural National school run on the old lines and still dominated by the vicar and the squire’s ladies, the brand new London Board school staffed by hard-working teachers trained up from the schools themselves, and the Liverpool Industrial school which captured homeless children and treated them like convicted criminals, refusing to let even the inspectors see them alone. Gentlemen’s sons were by this time falling into the grip of public school curricula framed around the primacy of compulsory games; their sisters, if they were lucky, had escaped from haphazard governesses and become customers of the Girls’ Public Day School Trust, founded in 1872. ² For all of these children books were being written throughout the century which were supposed to suit their level of literacy, their stations in life and their expectations of the future, and to reflect their present experience so as to mould through their response to it their moral and social attitudes. The books respond very closely, therefore, to the varieties and changes in educational provision throughout the century; and the most important aspects of education from this point of view must therefore be borne in mind when attempting to understand the development of children’s fiction, while we may look to the books to enrich our understanding of the aims of education, and so of Victorian society.

In the first half of the nineteenth century the most important educational changes to bear in mind were in the teaching of children under the age of eleven or twelve, and particularly in the elementary education of those who might previously have had little or no tuition outside their families or their work. The revolution in consciousness of the child took place alongside industrial and social revolutions which also focused on his potential as an instrument of change; a sudden urgency, therefore, came to the consideration of education. Around the turn of the nineteenth century many different people felt an unprecedented concern for children, especially those of the poor. A huge and rapidly growing army of new citizens who should shape the nation’s future were suddenly brought to everyone’s notice, as they rioted about the streets in the intervals of their work in the factories and mines. In 1805 this awareness reached the highest possible level, and George III pronounced that ‘It is my wish that every poor child in my dominions should be taught to read the Bible.’ Previously every child’s teaching had been a parental responsibility, with each family training its members to take on the occupations which membership of that family destined them for, whether it was international diplomacy or straw-plaiting. Now this system, for a long time less than effective at any level, had obviously failed in respect of the lower orders. Schooling had to be provided for children at work outside their families, with their need for new skills and, more important, the likelihood of their imbibing new ideas about themselves and society. ³

The first wave of schooling for these children was the Sunday school movement. Its importance for almost three-quarters of a century cannot be too strongly stressed; for the poor child who read and took in ideas, it was probably a stronger influence than any other attempt at education during the period. The reason for teaching on Sundays was at first simply that children were workers, in some areas often the main wage-earners for a family, and so had no other free time. The conscious desire to teach them was, however, religious in its origins, an aspect of the Evangelical revival which affected English life profoundly in the period from about 1780 onwards. There was always, therefore, a potential conflict between the desire to educate, the pupil’s desire to be educated, and the religious motive of the education, directing and chanelling the instruction; but there was no disagreement about the first objective, that of reading. Protestantism is based on Bible study and therefore upon literacy; to save one’s soul, one needs to read. It was also strongly felt by many of the ladies and gentlemen who are regarded as the founders of the Sunday school movement, men like Robert Raikes of Gloucester, that the real believer must also testify to conversion by converting others, and that a good method was to teach the malleable children who were to be found everywhere in a heathen state. Indeed, as has been recently pointed out, ‘educational humanitarian work became a form of cultural definition for some of the middle classes, an activity akin to participation in a literary and philosophical, anti-slave trade or prison reform society’. ⁴ Far more teachers in Sunday schools, however, were working men or women who were earnest Christians and who gave up their only free day to help their neighbours’ children. In many places, especially the industrial towns of the north of England, the Sunday schools became centres of working-class life and the focus of the powerful Victorian drive for self-help and self-improvement. ⁵

The effectiveness of Sunday school teaching undoubtedly owed much to the sense of purpose with which it was undertaken, and all later writers within the movement stressed their religious motivation; the Sunday School Union Report of 1861, for example, states that ‘the Sunday school … has for its object the evangelizing the mind of the rising generation’. W.H. Groser called the teaching of reading and writing a ‘drudgery’ which had to be undertaken before the main business could be approached. ⁶ The obligation to teach reading first was nevertheless taken entirely seriously, and reading was probably better taught because it was a means to an end, for which an imperfect or pretended understanding would not suffice. The independence of the volunteer teachers and their pupils alarmed many churchmen, who believed with some justification that they were a bridgehead for lay invasion of priestly authority. The schools were indeed often centres of religious feeling, and there are many reports of fervent piety and even mass conversions during periods of strong Evangelical revivalism; but for many pupils, and also for some of their instructors, the main objective was education, first in the reading of the Bible, and then in writing, arithmetic, and any other available subjects.

The strength of the inducement offered to working children through the opportunity of learning to read and write was very great. The first Sunday schools spread like wildfire across the country. Reliable figures are not to be had, but the optimism inspired in the founders can be judged by Raikes’s claim that there were 250,000 children in Sunday schools by 1787. Overall numbers continued to rise until after the end of the century. When Queen Victoria died ‘2 millions of Sunday Scholars’ sent a wreath to her funeral, and there were 22 million of them scattered across the Empire. ⁷ However, the proportion of the child population of Britain attending Sunday school dropped after about 1880, when compulsory elementary education and a proliferation of other youth organisations began to take over some of the Sunday schools’ functions. This led to urgent reassessments of their role: religious teaching for all children, not simply the poorest, was now said to be their aim and, increasingly, secular activities were used to reinforce the community life of the school, spreading their moral effect into social areas so that the ethos penetrated and affected, in theory, the whole outlook of the participants. In this process literature played its part alongside Bible reading circles, picnics, cricket teams and lantern slide lectures. ⁸

Many other new schools were founded as various groups perceived the challenge and potential influence of education. Old-established day schools, which were often no more than child-minding establishments where old or infirm persons earned a few pence, were no longer felt to be sufficient by any parent who could possibly afford to give his child a better start in the race for progress and self-improvement. By public subscription, Church patronage or philanthropy, new school systems were set up. Children at the bottom of the scale, below even the working patrons of the Sunday schools, were drawn into ragged schools, patronised from 1843 by Lord Shaftesbury. Most planners of the reformation of society included schooling: there were Owenite Sunday schools and infant classes, and Benthamite projects for the technical and business training of the rising generation of industrial entrepreneurs. These schemes impinged upon the established bastions of education and contributed to the reformation of all schools and colleges, eventually affecting even Oxford and Cambridge. In the first decades of the century, however, the fiercest competition was over the elementary education of the children of the poor.

In 1811 the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church took over the schooling previously managed by the SPCK, and embarked on massive expansion; in 1812, the school enterprises which had been begun by Joseph Lancaster were reorganised into the less powerful British and Foreign School Society, under non-conformist control. These societies, working in competition, operated similar monitorial systems of teaching, which seemed to offer the same advantages as the newly-established factory system, mass-producing scholars cheaply and efficiently; competitive rote-learning under the instruction of an older child does not seem to have been as effective as the personal instruction of the Sunday schools, and the system was soon modified or neglected, especially in county schools. The inefficiency of most day-schooling, and the resentment which was fostered by the fact that it gave the established church a near-monopoly of influence outside large towns, eventually led to a gradual and reluctant state takeover.

The first meagre grant to schools was made in 1833. The commitment of funds led to the demand for public accountability, and thus to the establishment of the Inspectorate; this in turn led to dissatisfaction with the standard of existing provision, and so to the Elementary Education Act of 1870 which set up the Board schools. In the closing decades of the century a pattern of compulsory, free and essentially secular state education was built up from this basis. The teaching provided inevitably had a moral element, and also an element of social control in a wider sense, but the articulation of this through religious teaching and its relation to the operations of philanthropy were subsumed in new social requirements and ideas. One element in the change was that the close links between literacy and morality, basic education and social control which had led to the development of children’s literature in the early part of the century were either broken or redirected in a way which is clearly reflected in childrens’ fiction.

These books were given a formal and often very prominent place in the schemes of education operated by the various organisations. From the earliest days of the Sunday school movement goods had been distributed to the children: Raikes gave money to those in need, and the schools continued to be used as channels for philanthropic benevolence, partly because it was felt that they selected the deserving poor who were trying to improve themselves. Early tracts about Sunday scholars, for example Mrs Sherwood’s The Little Sunday School Child’s Reward, stress material benefits – in this story a little girl is given a new set of clothes so that she will be presentable enough to go to the school. This mere benevolence was rapidly organised in most schools into a reward system to induce and maintain attendance and good behaviour, and as such had to establish less costly but still attractive ways of marking approbation. Printed material was the obvious choice, since the children came to the school to learn to read. The second volume of the Sunday School Repository ⁹ reprints from the minutes of the quarterly meeting of the Sunday School Union the question, ‘What system of rewards is best adapted to Sunday schools?’ The answer suggested is the presentation of reward tickets, which the child collected and then exchanged for a tract or saved up for a larger book. This remained a popular system for many years, despite the misgivings which were already being voiced in 1815 about the barter and trading (as practised by Tom Sawyer and his friends) to which it could lead.

In the 1815 debate speakers stressed the danger of exchanging tickets for cash, or for objects begetting pride, such as medals and ribbons, especially on Sundays, which amounted to Sabbath-breaking. One speaker deplored the whole idea of rewards as ‘a very great evil’, and thought it just as bad if it was based on examinations rather than simple attendance and behaviour; his own system was to reward Sunday attendance by admission to evening classes in useful subjects like writing and cyphering. These remained the spectrum of Sunday school attitudes and possibilities for most of the century, and the reward book accordingly came to occupy an increasing place in the system, especially as counter-attractions multiplied and the day schools invalidated the Sunday schools’ primary inducement, that of learning to read and write.

The National schools also gave books to their scholars. The National Society found it necessary to debate and resolve upon prize systems in the 1850s since, according to a letter from Nash Stephenson read at an 1857 meeting, ‘a network of secular and latitudinarian prize-schemes is fast covering the country’. ¹⁰ These were often complicated sets of rules involving achievement in school-work and in examination as well as certificates of attendance and conduct; the certification of results was soon to become a much more vital matter under the Revised Code, but at this stage examination was used to reward children. At first the prizes were Bibles and prayer books, but by 1867 the society’s depositories were distributing the latest juvenile fiction, as published by Thomas Nelson.

When the London School Board, which may be regarded as the pioneer amongst the boards set up by the Act of 1870, began to debate its policies, reward systems were soon launched. They were complicated and employed the power of emulative and competitive instincts in ways which would have shocked the Sunday school organisers in 1815, giving, for example, attendance cards and certificates embossed with the seal of the board in bronze, silver or gilt paper. In 1875 the system was further refined, awarding cards for attendanc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Educational Background and Critical Approaches
• 2. The Development of Juvenile Publishing and Children’s Fiction, 1800–1850
• 3. The Flowering of the Evangelical Tradition
• 4. Books for Boys
• 5. Books for Girls
• 6. The End of the Century: Change and Decay
• Notes and References
• Bibliography
• Index