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 timeâStory was suffering from the same fever that had recently claimed the life of her six-year-old brotherâbut the long weeks of her convalescence were brightened by visits from William Thackeray. He would sit at Storyâs bedside and read chapters from his manuscript-in-progress: a comic Christmas book titled The Rose and the Ring. Years later, after Thackerayâs 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 deathâan 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. Doyleâs scene rehearses the adult-child relationships we often assume to be the origins of childrenâs 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 Thackerayâs 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 Storyâs father William Wetmore Story, remembers her as âthe little convalescent girlâ who listened to the âimmortal workâ as âthe great author sat on the edge her bedâ (286). Lilian Whiting, in The Golden Road (1918), waxes sentimental about âEdie,â the âlittle maid of sixâ who possessed such enviable memories of the âgreat novelist,â a man who eventually gifted her the bound manuscript: âa sumptuous volume, bound in rich Venetian red, with roses and rings in gold decorating the cover, and her own name also in golden lettersââa story bequeathed to Story (108â9).
An overdetermined story, perhaps. U. C. Knoepflmacher argues that over time the storytelling scene between Thackeray and Story transformed into a âsentimental mythâ that âexaggerated the regressiveness of The Rose and the Ring by converting Edith into [its] exclusive recipient.â Knoepflmacher contends that situating Thackerayâs âFireside Pantomime for Great and Small Childrenâ completely within the childlike space of Storyâs sickroom ignores that the Christmas book itself resists such isolation, not only because the tale ânever lingers in a childhood Edenâ (suggesting instead that âgrowth is allâ) but also because Story herself remembers Thackeray as a mediator between the âsequestered spaceâ of her sickroom and the bustling city outside (Ventures 85). I agree that the anecdote, and particularly Doyleâs 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 auditorâs active role in the moment of narration. This is indeed a âsentimental mythââa tale told and retold that elides certain details in service to well-worn ideas of adulthood, childhood, and authorshipâand we should reinterpret Thackerayâs narration to question these powerful paradigms of child listener and adult narrator.
For example, many of the romanticized accounts of Thackerayâs visits excerpt Storyâs own recollections of those evenings, which were published in Cornhill in 1911 under her married name, Marchesa Peruzzi deâ Medici, as âThackeray, My Childhoodâs Friend.â However, subsequent writers excerpt selectively, with an eye toward constructing the pleasing vignette of adult listener and child teller. Storyâs description of Thackerayâs 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 âa little fragile child just coming back to life,â she also describes herself as a happy and active participant in Thackerayâs storytelling. Thackeray, after reading a chapter from his manuscript, would discuss with his young listener âthe people in the storyâ who, Story notes, âwere real people to me and to him.â Sometimes he would say, âNow you must tell me a little story to amuse me.â Story notes, âI 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.â All these drawings were lost but one: a sketch entitled âZackeray Hubs and his foxtree teapotâ (178â79). Even this remaining title suggests how Storyâs nonsensical imagination inspired Thackerayâs pen. At these moments, Story was drawing material from the adult worldâusing existing narratives âthat [she] had heardâ and even creating a character whose first name, Zackeray, resembles the last name of her visitorâand 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 âRoman English colonyâ where Thackeray and his daughters took up lodgings, Gordon Ray notes, was âa center of juvenile amusementâ (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 Thackerayâs pseudonymous narrator, M. A. Titmarsh, responds to the demands of a large family of âyoung peopleâ and their governess, Miss Bunch, to compose a history for a set of humorous sketches (2â3). The influence of the young listeners extends beyond their participation in intergenerational play and their demand for a story. Between the partyâs Twelfth Night celebrations and the textâs publication in 1854, Thackeray adapted the Italian manuscript âto fit the story told for Edith Story and his daughters to the Christmas book pattern,â 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 Thackerayâs 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 originatedââif these children are pleased, thought I, why should not others be amused also?ââand 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 childrenâs 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 Thackerayâs 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 textâs potential to generate intergenerational partnerships. Thackerayâs 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 Storyâs recollections, Jamesâs biography, the preface to The Rose and the Ring, and the other materials that comprise the textâs composition narrative. Descriptions of the storyâs origins recognize, refer to, and sometimes subvert the culturally familiar figures of the storytelling adult and circle of young listenersâstock 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 textâs origin stories recall these familiar figures so explicitly, it seems inevitable that Thackerayâs Titmarsh befriends not just any governess in the preface to his story, but Miss Bunch: a figure who, as Knoepflmacher notes, is ânamed after the traditional Dame Bunchâ (Ventures 99). This detail records Thackerayâs 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 âFire-Side Pantomimeâ of The Rose and the Ring, after all, follows the puppet show of Vanity Fair (1847â1848) and the melodrama of Pendennis (1848â1850). The textâs 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 commodityâa 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 âinvolve collaboration between teller and audience,â encouraging listeners to engage in a conversation with both the adult authorâs 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 taleâs characters are sitting down for a feast when the narrator notes, âYou may be sure they had a very good dinnerâlet every boy or girl think of what he or she likes best, and fancy it on the table.â A footnote suggests that asking children which foods the characters should eat would be âa very pretty gameâ (73â74). The delicacies that appear rely on what listeners âfancyâ; 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 storyâs action ceases, âthat the actors hold their tableau,â 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 Thackerayâs 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 bookâs struggle to operate as both spoken and readâits protean status as dramatic production, narrated tale, and printed text. For example, Frederick Locker-Lampson, in a memorial to the relationship between Thackeray and Storyâthe poem âThe Rose and the Ring, Christmas, 1854, and Christmas, 1863ââshifts 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 âbegs (with a spine vastly supple) / She will study The Rose and the Ringâ (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 âvastly supple,â but Locker-Lampsonâs poem commemorates Thackerayâs 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 âlast and best of his Toysâ but also a âshrine of his glory,â granite and immovable (147). The poem is rife with such ambiguities and contraries. It is both joyful and mournfulâdocumenting what Locker-Lampson calls Storyâs âmirth chequerâd griefââand attempts to narrate the bookâs composition and its plot simultaneously. When Locker-Lampson concludes with the lines âAnd you see thereâs a nice little story / Attached to The Rose and the Ring,â he gestures both to the exploits of the âdroll coupleâ sketched in the manuscriptâs pages and the story of Thackeray and Story themselves (147).
Locker-Lampsonâs 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 Thackerayâs 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 âreduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can existâ (82). Even the careful arrangement of Thackerayâs text cannot conceal the tension between the finality of the published book and what Ong calls the âcontext of give-and-take between real personsâ that characterizes spoken language (79). Thus, while the Morning Chronicle claims that Thackeray âmakes his book speak like a manâ (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 Rousseauâs Ămile (1762), a text that contributed to the association between told tales and childrenâs literature in the Victorian period, and move forward to the fin-de-siĂšcle 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 Grimmsâ preconceptions about childhood and fairy tales as expressed in the materials surrounding their Kinder- und HausmĂ€rchen collections but also English translations of the tales, in particular Edgar Taylorâs 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 childrenâs 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 childâs 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 Ămile (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 readingâin fact, the printed word in generalâhas no place in a childâs 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, âonly attends to what affects his senses,â Rousseau writes, gathering âsense experiencesâ as âthe raw material of thoughtâ (35), and tutors should promote sensory learning exclusively and reject methods that employ books and abstract, cerebral study. âTo 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,â claims Rousseau. âTo learn to think we must therefore exercise our limbs, our senses, and our bodily organs, which are the tools of the intellectâ (107). Reading the world is much more important than reading books, a claim Rousseau formulates in various ways throughout his treatise. Ămileâs âwhole environment is the book from which he unconsciously enriches his memoryâ (90). âLet the senses be the only guide for the first workings of reason,â he writes. âNo book but the worldâ (56).
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