Literature's Children

The Critical Child and the Art of Idealization

Louise Joy

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781350178243
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781472577207
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A 2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Literature's Children offers a new way of thinking about how literature for children functions didactically. It analyzes the nature of the practical critical activity which the child reader carries out, emphasizing what the child does to the text rather than what he or she receives from it. Through close readings of a range of works for children which have shaped our understanding of what children's literature entails, including works by Isaac Watts, John Newbery, Kate Greenaway, E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame, J.R.R. Tolkien and Malcolm Saville, it demonstrates how the critical child resists the processes of idealization in operation in and through such texts. Bringing into dialogue ideas from literary theory and the philosophy of education, drawing in particular on the work of the philosopher John Dewey, it provides a compelling new account of the complex relations between literary aesthetics and literary didacticism.

1

Eighteenth-century children’s poetry and the complexity of the child’s mind

Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715) was not the first volume of poems written expressly for children, but it was the first successful one to make the case that something peculiar might be achieved by addressing children through poetic form, and that in order to effectively meet the needs and capacities of a young audience, poetry needed to be shaped with those needs and capacities in mind. By the end of the eighteenth century, Watts’s volume had gone through at least fourteen editions, and, as Harvey Darton points out, by the end of the nineteenth century, several of the poems within it had suffered the ‘misfortune’ of ‘being recited by children in public, year in, year out, to the mortification of the reciters and the weariness of the audience’ (1982, p. 109). Over the course of the eighteenth century, then, poetry that was specially written or adapted for young people came to occupy a central place in the child’s life of the mind. By 1745, the notion that children ought to be conversant with the principles of poetry had become such an established one that John Newbery dedicated an entire volume of his series, Circle of the Sciences (1745–6), to the business of introducing young readers to excerpts of poetry and equipping them with strategies for understanding them. The pre-eminent place that adults aspired for poetry to have in children’s culture can be construed from the fact that there are no equivalent volumes in the Circle of the Sciences series devoted to other species of literature, reflecting the engrained view of poetry’s aesthetic and moral superiority to prose or drama. As John Dennis wrote in The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701), ‘Poetry . . . is more passionate and sensual than prose,’ a belief which endured throughout the period, despite concerted attempts to establish the aesthetic and moral credentials of the novel (p. 24). But Newbery’s tacit prioritization of poetry over prose also indicates a widespread supposition that the child reader is capable of carrying out, indeed, desires to carry out, sophisticated critical activity. For it was also widely believed in the eighteenth century that whereas prose is self-explanatory, poetry does not readily yield itself to the reader, and it can only be understood, or at least only understood correctly, after initiation. This is apparent in the use of ‘Easy’ in the titles both of Newbery’s volume, Poetry Made Familiar and Easy, and Watts’s Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children, wherein the emphasis placed on accessibility alerts us to the perceived difficulty of this art form for its intended audience. Careful examination of how these two seminal figures in the evolution of children’s literature, Isaac Watts and John Newbery, manipulated subject matter and form in order to render poetry simultaneously accessible to and stimulating for the child reader provides us with a means of viewing some of the period’s most prominent ideas about children’s literary critical capacities, and reflecting on the centrality and nature of the role established during the period for the critical child.

In the Preface to Divine Songs, Watts proclaims, ‘I have endeavoured to sink the language to the level of a child’s understanding, and yet to keep it (if possible) above contempt’ (1716, p. 6). This visual metaphor of height and depth implies a scale in which, as the word ‘contempt’ drives home, simplicity is aligned with intellectual poverty on the one hand and complexity aligned with intellectual prowess on the other. In this respect, Watts perpetuates a customary belief in the child’s ignorance as a gap that must be filled. The influence of John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) in the early decades of the eighteenth century had weakened the dominance of the Puritan view of the child’s ignorance as a sign of immorality and ungodliness, seen in the catechism, Milk for Babes (1646) by the New England reformer, John Cotton: ‘Qu. How doth the Ministery of the Law bring you towards Christ? A. By bringing me to know my sinne, and the wrath of God against me for it’ (p. 7). Nonetheless, even in Locke’s more liberal account of knowledge, ignorance carries with it the weight of shame, albeit in the secularized political sense that it signifies social redundancy rather than moral perdition. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke argues that ‘[c]‌uriosity in children . . . is but an appetite after knowledge, and therefore ought to be encouraged in them, not only as a good sign, but as the great instrument nature has provided to remove that ignorance they were born with, and which, without this busy inquisitiveness, will make them dull and useless creatures’ (2007, p. 93). To prevent such psychological and social waste, and to foster instead a ‘sound mind in a sound body’ (p. 25), is the primary stated aim of Locke’s educational treatise. Watts’s deployment of ‘easy language’ thus seeks to tread a delicate path between acknowledging the Lockean belief in children’s native desire for intellectual stimulation and the consequent need for literary material to challenge children into readiness to negotiate complexity, while at the same time accepting that the cognitive needs of the preliterate or newly literate are such that they require material devoid of unnecessary complication.

Watts reconciles, at least in part, the possible tension between these competing demands through his recognition that ‘language’ cannot be reduced to mere diction. He appreciates that since a child’s vocabulary is less extensive than an adult’s, poetry for children needs to favour terminology already familiar to the child. That this practice has in the centuries since become a customary feature of writing for children should not obscure its innovativeness in 1715. Watts was not responsible for inaugurating it. John Bunyan, for example, whose A Book for Boys and Girls, or Country Rhymes for Children (1686) went through nine editions by 1724, had made some attempts to temper his mode of address to his young readership through the incorporation of lines which refer in simple terms to instantly recognizable natural phenomena: ‘This pretty Bird, oh! how she flies and sings!’ (p. 11). But lines such as these are interspersed with lines elsewhere whose comprehension requires a secure grasp of subtle theological nomenclature: ‘The fallen Candles to us intimate,/The bulk of God’s Elect in their lapst state’ (p. 51). Likewise, James Janeway’s prose A Token for Children (1676) intermittently ventriloquizes distinctively childish voices, but the polysyllabic circumlocutions he attributes to his juvenile characters belie the adult machinations behind the scenes: ‘O Mother . . . it is not any particular Sin of Omission or Commission, that sticks so close to my Conscience, as the Sin of my nature’ (p. 6). By comparison, the vocabulary that Watts selects for his child audience is more consistently and calculatedly pared down, so much so that in the decades following the publication of Divine Songs, Watts came to emblematize this practice. John Wesley, in his Preface to the 1790 edition of his brother, Charles’s, Hymns for Children (1763), in which he attempts to defend Charles’s sophisticated phraseology, therefore refers back to Watts to set up a counterpoint. Watts, he complains, neglected to teach his readers because he adjusted language to the demands of children rather than requiring children to meet the demands of language: ‘There are two ways of writing or speaking to children,’ John Wesley writes; ‘the one is, to let ourselves down to them; the other, to lift them up to us. Dr. Watts has wrote [sic] in the former way . . . leaving [children] as he found them’ (qtd. in Clapp-Itnyre, 2016, p. 61). Similarly, Watts is the implicit target when Anna Laetitia Barbauld in her Preface to Hymns in Prose (1781) claims that it is an assault on poetry to adapt it to the child’s ear, insisting that prose is a more suitable form for young readers until their cognitive skills are sufficiently developed to enable appreciation of ambiguity. What all of these accounts share in common is a belief that children find it simpler to deal in vocabulary that is already within their purview. At stake is a difference of opinion concerning the pedagogical (and, implicitly, the aesthetical and moral) advantages of catering to, versus resisting, the child’s ease. More directly to return to the terms set up in the Introduction, the extent to which the reader should be given the freedom independently to arrive at their interpretation of the text – should be given the opportunity to be a critical child – is the pressing problem which preoccupies poets for children.

It is clear, though, both from Watts’s Preface to Divine Songs and from the poems themselves that what Watts has in mind by ‘language’ is not merely which words are used but also how these words are used: that is to say, not just diction or the systems within which words function (what Ferdinand de Saussure would later term ‘langue’) but also the forms in, or methods by which, words are uttered (‘parole’) – or to recall John Dewey’s terminology, the ways in which the words function as signs. Watts gauged that poetic form could be customized to render it a sign-system peculiarly apposite for child readers. Believing that the key pedagogical advantage of verse over prose was its memorability – ‘What is learnt in verse is longer retained in memory, and sooner recollected. The like sounds and the like number of syllables exceedingly assist the remembrance’ (Watts, 1716, p. 5) – Watts made a powerful argument for the importance of repetition. Patterning the form such that a feature reappears again and again is, he suggests, a means of embedding a thought into the mind, since together, recursive patterns form a memorable tune (a feature that is foregrounded by his decision to identify these poems for children as songs). Accordingly, the metrical lines used in Divine Songs are strikingly unvaried and hence easy for the child to anticipate. The majority of the stanzas used are quatrains made up of alternating rhyme; most are lines of tetrameter, sometimes alternated with lines of trimeter to comprise common metre, the traditional metre of hymns. This template was taken up as the usual poetic form of choice by Watts’s successors, for example by the anonymous author of Little Master’s Miscellany (1767), by Christopher Smart in Hymns for the Amusement of Children (1771), and even by William Blake in Songs of Innocence (1789). Its close correspondence with ballad metre, the metre of so many popular songs and verses disseminated orally during the period, meant that children would likely already be accustomed to the conventions of the form.¹ Watts hopes that encountering subject matter in a form that can be replayed again and again in the inner ear enables his reader, seemingly inadvertently, to catch hold of the ideas carried by the semantic connotations of the words: ‘it may often happen, that the end of a song running in the mind may be an effectual means to keep off some temptation, or to incline to some duty, when a word of scripture is not upon the thoughts’ (p. 5). Watts’s theory of children’s poetry thus deals in a kind of proto-unconscious, nearly a century before Samuel Taylor Coleridge imported the vocabulary of the unconscious into the English language, musing in his Notebook, ‘there is a self, or consciousness of the day, and an opposing self of the night’ (1957–73, p. 4409). Watts envisages that the trick of the educationalist must be to instil habits of mind without the reader even appearing to notice. Indeed, for the sleight of hand to be successful, the educator must appear to be doing the opposite, performing what today we might call reverse psychology, or what in his 1784 work, Studies in Nature, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, termed ‘contrary effects’: ‘if the nurse wants her child to laugh, she shrowds her head in her apron; upon this the infant becomes serious’ (1796, p. 158). Watts aspires for his language to be ‘easy’, then, in the sense that its ingestion requires a lack of effort – or at least, a lack of conscious effort – on the part of its reader. It is the critical child’s unconscious mind that will be at play.

Watts was not the first to perceive the possibilities inherent in manipulating poetic form to enable the child audience to conceive of the work involved in reading as a form of play. For example, the anonymous author of A Guide for the Child and Youth (1709), identified simply as ‘A Teacher of a Private School’, recognizes that ‘Prayers, Graces, and Instructions’ must be ‘fitted to the Capacity of Children’ if they are to be accessible to their designated audience, and lights upon poetic form as a fertile mode for communication. However, the writing in A Guide for the Child and Youth wears its laboriousness in plain view, resulting in verse that is awkward to read and instantly forgettable. In one poem, the author sets up an anapaestic metre, forcing the word ‘Petition’ into three distinctly separate syllables in a way that causes the word to be articulated unnaturally, with the emphasis on the first syllable:

First in the Morning

When thou dost awake,

To God for his Grace

Thy Petition make. (1–4)

While in so doing, the author maintains metrical consistency, we are compelled to treat the word not as a carrier of semantic meaning but as a series of pulses in order to complete the line. As Alexander Pope mockingly observed in Essay on Criticism, ‘But most by numbers judge a poet’s song; / And smooth or rough, with them is right or wrong’. The flexibility of the author of A Guide for the Child and Youth in relation to the rules of scansion leaves his poetry susceptible to outright rejection. For Watts, though, it was crucial that sound and sense were embroiled in one another in order to enable children to replay the poem to themselves on demand: ‘T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Eighteenth-century children’s poetry and the complexity of the child’s mind
• 2 Laughter and the permission to critique
• 3 On seeing: Kate Greenaway’s Under the Window
• 4 On crying: E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children
• 5 On being (bored): Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows
• 6 On talking: J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit
• 7 On loving: Malcolm Saville’s Lone Pine series
• Coda
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright Page