Between Generations

Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children's Literature

Victoria Ford Smith

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781496813381
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Winner of the Children's Literature Association's 2019 Book Award Between Generations is a multidisciplinary volume that reframes children as powerful forces in the production of their own literature and culture by uncovering a tradition of creative, collaborative partnerships between adults and children in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. The intergenerational collaborations documented here provide the foundations for some of the most popular Victorian literature for children, from Margaret Gatty's Aunt Judy's Tales to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Examining the publication histories of both canonical and lesser-known Golden Age texts reveals that children collaborated with adult authors as active listeners, coauthors, critics, illustrators, and even small-scale publishers. These literary collaborations were part of a growing interest in child agency evident in cultural, social, and scientific discourses of the time. Between Generations puts these creative partnerships in conversation with collaborations in other fields, including child study, educational policy, library history, and toy culture. Taken together, these collaborations illuminate how Victorians used new critical approaches to childhood to theorize young people as viable social actors. Smith's work not only recognizes Victorian children as literary collaborators but also interrogates how those creative partnerships reflect and influence adult-child relationships in the world beyond books. Between Generations breaks the critical impasse that understands children's literature and children themselves as products of adult desire and revises common constructions of childhood that frequently and often errantly resign the young to passivity or powerlessness.

CHAPTER ONE

Active Listeners

Child Auditors as Creative Collaborators

In the winter of 1854, the young Edith Story, staying in Rome with her family, fell ill. It was a tense time—Story was suffering from the same fever that had recently claimed the life of her six-year-old brother—but the long weeks of her convalescence were brightened by visits from William Thackeray. He would sit at Story’s bedside and read chapters from his manuscript-in-progress: a comic Christmas book titled The Rose and the Ring. Years later, after Thackeray’s death, artist Richard Doyle commemorated this storytelling scene in a woodcut. His illustration depicts Story reclined on a sickbed, eyes closed, her rest so complete it suggests death—an interpretation supported by the bunch of flowers she clutches in her hands and the sepulchral domes of Rome outside her window. Thackeray, on the other hand, is alert, leaning eagerly forward in his bedside chair as he pauses to decipher the tiny handwriting on the pages clutched in his hand. Doyle’s scene rehearses the adult-child relationships we often assume to be the origins of children’s literature: the adult author crafting a tale for a passively listening, even dreaming, child audience. The familiarity of that adult-child pairing is reproduced in later accounts of Thackeray’s relationship with Story, which dwell upon the frailty of the young girl and the genius of the author. For example, Henry James, in his 1903 biography of Story’s father William Wetmore Story, remembers her as “the little convalescent girl” who listened to the “immortal work” as “the great author sat on the edge her bed” (286). Lilian Whiting, in The Golden Road (1918), waxes sentimental about “Edie,” the “little maid of six” who possessed such enviable memories of the “great novelist,” a man who eventually gifted her the bound manuscript: “a sumptuous volume, bound in rich Venetian red, with roses and rings in gold decorating the cover, and her own name also in golden letters”—a story bequeathed to Story (108–9).

An overdetermined story, perhaps. U. C. Knoepflmacher argues that over time the storytelling scene between Thackeray and Story transformed into a “sentimental myth” that “exaggerated the regressiveness of The Rose and the Ring by converting Edith into [its] exclusive recipient.” Knoepflmacher contends that situating Thackeray’s “Fireside Pantomime for Great and Small Children” completely within the childlike space of Story’s sickroom ignores that the Christmas book itself resists such isolation, not only because the tale “never lingers in a childhood Eden” (suggesting instead that “growth is all”) but also because Story herself remembers Thackeray as a mediator between the “sequestered space” of her sickroom and the bustling city outside (Ventures 85). I agree that the anecdote, and particularly Doyle’s illustration of Thackeray and Story, misrepresents The Rose and the Ring and its authorship, and like Knoepflmacher I am interested in troubling the purportedly firm boundaries between the worlds of adult and child. However, I dispute not the way this origin story inflects our understanding of Thackeray alone but instead its facile depiction of the storytelling moment shared by the author and the child. Characterizing Thackeray as an engaged teller and Story as a passive listener obscures the child auditor’s active role in the moment of narration. This is indeed a “sentimental myth”—a tale told and retold that elides certain details in service to well-worn ideas of adulthood, childhood, and authorship—and we should reinterpret Thackeray’s narration to question these powerful paradigms of child listener and adult narrator.

For example, many of the romanticized accounts of Thackeray’s visits excerpt Story’s own recollections of those evenings, which were published in Cornhill in 1911 under her married name, Marchesa Peruzzi de’ Medici, as “Thackeray, My Childhood’s Friend.” However, subsequent writers excerpt selectively, with an eye toward constructing the pleasing vignette of adult listener and child teller. Story’s description of Thackeray’s bedside readings in fact challenges the picture of meek young girl and the benevolent author presented by Doyle and others. While she concedes that she was “a little fragile child just coming back to life,” she also describes herself as a happy and active participant in Thackeray’s storytelling. Thackeray, after reading a chapter from his manuscript, would discuss with his young listener “the people in the story” who, Story notes, “were real people to me and to him.” Sometimes he would say, “Now you must tell me a little story to amuse me.” Story notes, “I tried my best to recall something that he would like, that I had heard, or invent a little tale. At these times he would sit by the table and draw some illustrations of what I was telling him, in pen and ink.” All these drawings were lost but one: a sketch entitled “Zackeray Hubs and his foxtree teapot” (178–79). Even this remaining title suggests how Story’s nonsensical imagination inspired Thackeray’s pen. At these moments, Story was drawing material from the adult world—using existing narratives “that [she] had heard” and even creating a character whose first name, Zackeray, resembles the last name of her visitor—and reinterpreting that material into fodder for a collaboration with Thackeray, their evenings transformed into a creative partnership between adult artist and child storyteller.

We also know that Story was not the only young person who contributed to the origins of The Rose and the Ring. Thackeray wrote his pantomime to entertain his daughters Anny and Minny, then sixteen and thirteen, and a group of their friends, who persuaded him to write a story to accompany the Twelfth Night characters he had drawn for their amusement. Such entertainments were not unusual. The “Roman English colony” where Thackeray and his daughters took up lodgings, Gordon Ray notes, was “a center of juvenile amusement” (Introduction v), raucous with games shared by adults and the young people staying there: storytelling by Hans Christian Andersen, for example, and a musical Pied Piper parade of children led by Robert Browning himself (James, William 286). The Twelfth Night games and the story that grew from them are fictionalized in the preface to the published Rose and the Ring, in which Thackeray’s pseudonymous narrator, M. A. Titmarsh, responds to the demands of a large family of “young people” and their governess, Miss Bunch, to compose a history for a set of humorous sketches (2–3). The influence of the young listeners extends beyond their participation in intergenerational play and their demand for a story. Between the party’s Twelfth Night celebrations and the text’s publication in 1854, Thackeray adapted the Italian manuscript “to fit the story told for Edith Story and his daughters to the Christmas book pattern,” and Anny and Minny were tasked with copying out a draft of these revisions in an effort to preserve the original manuscript intact (Ray, Introduction viii). The resulting published text promises that the intergenerational collaborations modeled by Thackeray’s partnerships with this series of young people will continue. The narrator ends the preface reflecting on how others, aided by the published book, might reproduce the storytelling scene where the tale originated—“if these children are pleased, thought I, why should not others be amused also?”—and the title page illustration, which Thackeray added during revisions, visualizes one such future telling, depicting a hearth surrounded by a narrating older woman and listeners of all ages, including a contemplative boy who directs his reverie toward smoky silhouettes of characters in the fire (2).

I offer this brief publication history of The Rose and the Ring as a case study. This text, like many touchstones in Victorian children’s literature, emerged as a collaboration between adults and children, although this reading of its construction and initial reception is often obscured by popular representations of Thackeray’s storytelling. The genesis of the text is distributed among a series of real and imagined child and adult storytellers, listeners, illustrators, and editors. Thackeray and subsequent generations of publishers, narrators, and listeners preserve the text’s potential to generate intergenerational partnerships. Thackeray’s pantomime, then, is a rich example of the hybrid intergenerational collaborations I describe in my introduction: partnerships grounded in relationships between adults and children that are both real and fictionalized, described using language associated with powerful cultural constructions of childhood. The documents that surround The Rose and the Ring indeed depict the material, real-life conditions in which Thackeray and others created this story. However, representations of those collaborations are refracted and transformed through Story’s recollections, James’s biography, the preface to The Rose and the Ring, and the other materials that comprise the text’s composition narrative. Descriptions of the story’s origins recognize, refer to, and sometimes subvert the culturally familiar figures of the storytelling adult and circle of young listeners—stock characters that nineteenth-century authors return to ritualistically and that tap into assumptions that associate children with passivity and orality and adults with narrative authority. Because the text’s origin stories recall these familiar figures so explicitly, it seems inevitable that Thackeray’s Titmarsh befriends not just any governess in the preface to his story, but Miss Bunch: a figure who, as Knoepflmacher notes, is “named after the traditional Dame Bunch” (Ventures 99). This detail records Thackeray’s self-conscious indebtedness to prominent cultural narratives about childhood, storytelling, and oral culture. The origins of The Rose and the Ring are both a reality and an imagined tableau.

That suggestion of theatricality is signature Thackeray. The “Fire-Side Pantomime” of The Rose and the Ring, after all, follows the puppet show of Vanity Fair (1847–1848) and the melodrama of Pendennis (1848–1850). The text’s multiple composition narratives not only foreground the performed narrative of The Rose and the Ring but also privilege it over the final, printed product. The tale loses something in its transformation from holiday entertainment to ink-and-paper commodity—a deterioration that is most evident within the nineteen chapters and accompanying illustrations of the text itself. The book strains to reproduce the dynamic relationship between storyteller and auditor enjoyed by those first, intimate audiences. Joan Stevens identifies several moments in which the text and illustrations “involve collaboration between teller and audience,” encouraging listeners to engage in a conversation with both the adult author’s text and, assumedly, with the adult reading the tale aloud. She points out a moment where Thackeray provides instructions, directed at the individual narrating, to solicit the participation of listening children. The tale’s characters are sitting down for a feast when the narrator notes, “You may be sure they had a very good dinner—let every boy or girl think of what he or she likes best, and fancy it on the table.” A footnote suggests that asking children which foods the characters should eat would be “a very pretty game” (73–74). The delicacies that appear rely on what listeners “fancy”; Thackeray does not provide a menu. This collaboration, however, is fragile, as it depends on the insertion of images at precise moments in the text. The first edition of the published book suggests, through the inclusion of a woodcut, that the story’s action ceases, “that the actors hold their tableau,” while the children make up their minds as to the nature of the feast (Stevens 14). However, editions of The Rose and the Ring published after Thackeray’s death often dramatically changed the number and placement of illustrations and therefore undermine his crafted interplay between text and image, between reader and audience.

Many recognized the book’s struggle to operate as both spoken and read—its protean status as dramatic production, narrated tale, and printed text. For example, Frederick Locker-Lampson, in a memorial to the relationship between Thackeray and Story—the poem “The Rose and the Ring, Christmas, 1854, and Christmas, 1863”—shifts uneasily from references to the oral storytelling moment to the printed tale.¹ During most of the poem, Locker-Lampson refers to the printed text. However, at the end of the second stanza, at the very heart of the poem, he describes a meeting between Thackeray and Story, in which Thackeray “begs (with a spine vastly supple) / She will study The Rose and the Ring” (146). The spine here belongs not only to the book but also to Thackeray, an ambiguity that underscores the story as it originated in the physical body of the storyteller. As part of Thackeray, the tale was “vastly supple,” but Locker-Lampson’s poem commemorates Thackeray’s death, and the tale the now-adult Story holds has lost its narrative flexibility. Locker-Lampson not only calls The Rose and the Ring the “last and best of his Toys” but also a “shrine of his glory,” granite and immovable (147). The poem is rife with such ambiguities and contraries. It is both joyful and mournful—documenting what Locker-Lampson calls Story’s “mirth chequer’d grief”—and attempts to narrate the book’s composition and its plot simultaneously. When Locker-Lampson concludes with the lines “And you see there’s a nice little story / Attached to The Rose and the Ring,” he gestures both to the exploits of the “droll couple” sketched in the manuscript’s pages and the story of Thackeray and Story themselves (147).

Locker-Lampson’s poem implies that the creative partnerships enabled by an oral tale erode once the story is reduced to print. The moments of intergenerational collaboration recorded both in the creation and in the content of The Rose and the Ring depend on oral performance, when the narrative is unfixed, infinitely variable, and receptive to revisions according to (and proposed by) perhaps widely dissimilar configurations of audience. While Thackeray’s story may have been successful in recreating the conditions of oral narrative in its first editions, performed stories necessarily undergo fundamental transformations when translated into a written manuscript and, subsequently, a printed text. As Walter Ong argues, the movement from oral to print culture is a “reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist” (82). Even the careful arrangement of Thackeray’s text cannot conceal the tension between the finality of the published book and what Ong calls the “context of give-and-take between real persons” that characterizes spoken language (79). Thus, while the Morning Chronicle claims that Thackeray “makes his book speak like a man” (Ray, Thackeray 98), that speech is necessarily mediated, the transmission of story from teller to listener subject to a series of interferences.²

In what follows, I explore how authors for children attempted to overcome these disadvantages of print and embrace the spontaneous nature of the spoken word both by partnering with children in storyteller-auditor collaborations and by representing those partnerships in their fictions. My first section maps shifting understandings of the relationship between children and language from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. I begin with Rousseau’s Émile (1762), a text that contributed to the association between told tales and children’s literature in the Victorian period, and move forward to the fin-de-siècle and the establishment of the field of Child Study. Scholars involved in this field reiterate, in a scientific register, cultural assumptions about children and oral culture but consider collaborative patterns of adult-child collaboration forged over language-learning in which children transform the linguistic world they share with adults. Associations between children and oral culture are a central concern for fairy-tale collectors, such as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the focus of my second section. I explore not only the Grimms’ preconceptions about childhood and fairy tales as expressed in the materials surrounding their Kinder- und Hausmärchen collections but also English translations of the tales, in particular Edgar Taylor’s German Popular Stories (1823) and Gammer Grethel (1839). These volumes influenced story collections for children published throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, many of which use a storyteller-auditor format or frame story. In the third and final section of this chapter, I examine collections by Mary Molesworth, Mary Cowden Clarke, and Margaret Gatty, paying attention to how storytelling scenes, both the real gatherings that inspired these authors and fictional moments of narration in their texts, were enriched by and facilitated intergenerational collaboration. Children inside and outside these stories, real and imagined, participate as collaborators, transforming narrative through a creative agency based on active listening and critical response. Throughout this chapter, I attend to how visual culture provides clues to how the way Victorians understand representations of oral culture in children’s literature, examining storyteller-auditor relationships in illustrations that highlight the flexibility of the told tale, the collaborations enabled by storytelling, and the connection between narration and the child’s imagination.

EAR-MINDED CHILDREN

Locker-Lampson was not alone in privileging the spoken word over the printed text, and he was certainly not the first to do so. In Émile (1762), Rousseau argues that parents and educators, if guided by careful observations of their charges, will change the way they teach children to negotiate language, both spoken and printed. He notoriously contends that reading—in fact, the printed word in general—has no place in a child’s early curriculum, an unorthodox decision he justifies with his observations of the development and natural learning habits of pre-adolescent children.³ Like Locke, Rousseau insists that children learn primarily through sensory experience. The child, before he learns to reason, “only attends to what affects his senses,” Rousseau writes, gathering “sense experiences” as “the raw material of thought” (35), and tutors should promote sensory learning exclusively and reject methods that employ books and abstract, cerebral study. “To substitute books for [feet, hands, and eyes] does not teach us to reason, it teaches us to use the reason of others rather than our own,” claims Rousseau. “To learn to think we must therefore exercise our limbs, our senses, and our bodily organs, which are the tools of the intellect” (107). Reading the world is much more important than reading books, a claim Rousseau formulates in various ways throughout his treatise. Émile’s “whole environment is the book from which he unconsciously enriches his memory” (90). “Let the senses be the only guide for the first workings of reason,” he writes. “No book but the world” (56).

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