University of Strathclyde

Department of
English Studies
Glasgow G1 1XH
0141-552 4400

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Lecture Three: Rousseau and Romanticism

1. Origins of modern conceptions of childhood:

The modern “discovery of childhood” can be traced back to the thirteenth century, but begins to grow significantly noticeable only by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; the eighteenth century in England sees what J.H. Plumb calls the “new world of children” in full flower, with games, toys, books, and apparel designed specifically for children becoming increasingly available, at least among the middle and upper classes. (Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832 (CUP, 1994), pp.8-9)

The notion of the child, not simply as distinct, but as somehow unique, qualitatively different from (and in some senses superior to) the adult becomes prominent only with Rousseau’s Emile (1762), and it is to a large extent through Romantic literature that childhood has gained the central position it continues to hold in the Western cultural tradition. (Richardson, p.9)

2. Rousseau, Emile: or, On Education (Paris, 1762); philosophical novel/educational treatise:

Nature wants children to be children before being men. If we want to pervert this order, we shall produce precocious fruits which will be immature and insipid and will not be long in rotting. We shall have young doctors [docteurs – learned men] and old children. Childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling which are proper to it. Nothing is less sensible than to want to substitute ours for theirs, and I would like as little to insist that a ten-year-old be five feet tall as that he possess judgment. (Emile, edited and translated by Allan Bloom (Basic Books, 1979), p.90).

2.1 Children's education/reading:

if nature gives the child's brain the suppleness that fits it to receive all sorts of impressions, it is not in order to engrave on this brain the names of kings, dates, terms of heraldry, globes and geography, and all those words without any sense for the child's age, ... with which his sad and sterile childhood is burdened. ... The kind of memory a child can have does not, without his studying books, for this reason remain idle. Everything he sees, everything he hears strikes him, and he remembers it. He keeps in himself a record of the actions and speeches of men, and all that surrounds him is the book in which, without thinking about it, he continually enriches his memory while waiting for his judgment to be able to profit from it. (Emile, p.112)

How can people be so blinded as to call fables the morality of children? They do not think about how the apologue [fable], in giving enjoyment to children, deceives them; ... Fables can instruct men, but the naked truth has to be told to children. ... I say that a child does not understand the fables he is made to learn, because, no matter what effort is made to simplify them, the instruction that one wants to draw from them compels the introduction of ideas he cannot grasp; and because poetry's very skill at making them easier for him to retain makes them difficult for him to conceive, so that one buys delight at the expense of clarity. (Emile, pp.112-13)

Since we absolutely must have books, there exists one [Robinson Crusoe] which, to my taste, provides the most felicitous treatise on natural education. This book will be the first that my Emile will read. For a long time it will alone compose his whole library, and it will always hold a distinguished place there. (Emile, p.184)

This novel, disencumbered of all its rigmarole, beginning with Robinson's shipwreck near his island and ending with the arrival of the ship which comes to take him from it, will be both Emile's entertainment and instruction throughout the period which is dealt with here. ... I want him to learn in detail, not from books but from things, all that must be known in such a situation; I want him to think he is Robinson himself, to see himself dressed in skins, wearing a large cap, carrying a large saber and all the rest of the character's grotesque equipment (Emile, p.185).

I want [Emile] constantly to be busy with his mansion, his goats, his plantations; ... I want him to worry about the measures to take if this or that were lacking to him; to examine his hero's conduct; to investigate whether he omitted anything, whether there was nothing to do better; to note Robinson's failings attentively; and to profit from them so as not to fall into them himself in such a situation. ... What a resource this folly would be for a skilful man who knew how to engender it solely for the sake of taking advantage of it. The child, in a hurry to set up a storehouse for his island, will be more ardent for learning than is his master for teaching. (Emile, p.185)

3. New kinds of children, new kinds of children's literature.
3.1 Locke and Rousseau distrusted books; yet new kinds of children's literature developed by their followers:

Thomas Day, Sandford and Merton (in three parts, 1783-1789).

Jacques-Henri Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie (1788).

3.2 Attempt to convey 'practical education' through children's books:

Authors like Day and [John] Aikin, who were swayed by Rousseau’s arguments but nevertheless wished to help redeem the children’s book, compromised by writing fictions about direct experience of the object world, featuring active child protagonists through whom the reader would vicariously live and learn. Richard Edgeworth reduces this practice to a maxim in an 1814 preface to Early Lessons: ‘Action! Action! Whether in morals or science, the thing to be taught should seem to arise from the circumstance, in which the little persons of the drama are placed’ (Richardson, p.132).

3.3 Lockean view of childhood still dominant in Romantic period - e.g., Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Owen, Mill, and (sometimes) Coleridge and Wordsworth:

by far the most common paradigm that can be abstracted from representations of childhood in the Romantic era, ... is closely related to associationist psychology. It governs the developmental models ... which Godwin inherited from Locke and Hartley, with the child’s mind considered as a blank slate to be inscribed by experience; the infant is often compared to a ‘white paper’ to be written over or to a plastic substance (like wax) to be molded. (Richardson, p.11)

3.4 Rousseau's 'practical education' fused with Lockean ideas about childhood becomes 'progressive', rational (sometimes Christian evangelical) education:

Many of the children’s authors who began publishing in the 1780s – Day, [Anna Letitia] Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth, [Sarah] Trimmer, Wollstonecraft, Ellenor Fenn, John Aikin – were actively involved in education as theorists or teachers, and frequently as both. These author-educators brought to the children’s book a concern with child development and a seriousness of purpose which make works like A Little Pretty Pocket Book and Little Goody Two-Shoes seem intellectually vapid and refreshingly crude by comparison. Improving on Newbery’s trade and plum-cake morality, many authors in this group sought to instruct their child readers in such ‘progressive’ issues as kindness to animals, the anti-slavery cause, charity towards beggars and other unfortunates, respect for hard-working labourers (particularly those content in their station), the Sunday School movement, and toleration for those who are physically different from oneself. (Richardson, p.127)

3.5 'The Augustinian (or ‘traditional Christian’) view of childhood is revived in the Romantic era by some Methodist and Evangelical writers [John Wesley, Hannah More], according to whom the child is born in sin and is by nature willful and in mortal need of discipline' (Richardson, p.11).

3.6 General attack on fairy tales and imaginative fiction:

The traditional fairy tale did not readily find a place, however, in the new literature for children which emerged in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Instead, fairy tales and fantasy in general came under attack from two sides: the rationalist school of education drawing on Locke and Rousseau, and (although with notably less consistency) the Christian moralist critique of children’s fiction which found exponents in writers like Sarah Trimmer and M.M. Sherwood. (Richardson, p.113)

4. Some key texts in these developments and movements:

Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories from Real Life (1788), with engravings by William Blake in 1791 edition; two daughters of wealthy parents, whose education has been shamefully neglected, receive benefits of rational, Protestant education by Mrs Mason.

Anna Letitia Barbauld, Lessons for Children (1788) [elementary reading book], Hymns in Prose for Children (1781) [elementary religious instruction], and (with her brother John Aikin) Evenings at Home (1792-96).

Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education (1798); child-centred theory of children's education, influenced by Locke and Rousseau, among others.

Sarah Trimmer: Fabulous Histories (1786) (later called The History of the Robins) blends Christian piety with 'a sympathy for nature undoubtedly influenced by Jean Jacques Rousseau and Enlightenment values'; Guardian of Education (1802-6) 'perhaps the earliest critical journal of children's literature in English' (Children's Books, p.718).

Hannah More: evangelical Anglican and conservative writer whose Cheap Repository Tracts (1795-97) used chapbook format to instil ideological values among the poor (including their children) to deflect them from radical politics of 1790s; Strictures on Female Education blends these values with views that are not unlike Wollstonecraft's.

5. Romantic views of childhood and children's reading.
5.1 'Natural' childhood important for Romanticism: Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads and first two books of Prelude (1805); Coleridge, 'Frost at Midnight'; 'Rural childhoods with minimal schooling are standard in the radical novels of the 1790s, such as Holcroft’s Adventures of Hugh Trevor or Hays’s Emma Courtney’ (Richardson, p.14).
5.2 ‘Transcendental’ Romantic view: 'the transcendental child is informed by a divine or quasi-divine nature which renders it superior to adults, and the new-born child can be figured as a prophet or angel’ (Richardson, p.11); see Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1807/1815); see Blake, 'To Dr Trusler' (23 August 1799).
5.3 In Prelude, Wordsworth attacks 'rational education' and its product ('infant prodigy'), and celebrates natural childhood and imaginative tales for children:

Oh, give us once again the wishing-cap
Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat
Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood,
And Sabra in the forest with St George! (V, 364-67)

5.4 Romantic movement did encourage such literature for children:

Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales From Shakespeare (1807).

Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales appeared in new versions and editions aimed at children.

Eleanor Sleath's Glenowen (1815); first sustained fantasy fiction for children.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (first German edition 1812); first translated into English by Edgar Taylor (illustrated by George Crookshank) as German Popular Stories in 1823 ('Hansel and Gretel', 'Rumpelstiltskin', 'Snow White', et al); Grimms' project of collecting (and re-writing) folk tales part of German Romantic movement - had counterpart in Britain.

Chapbooks continued to appear in the 1820s and 1830s, featuring traditional folk- and fairy-tales. Writers such as Sir Henry Cole and W.J. Thomas retold these tales in beautifully illustrated volumes for children, thereby rescuing 'much of the material previously relegated to chapbooks, and [restoring] fairy tales and old stories to the children of the middle classes' (Children’s Literature, pp.89-90).

6. Actual experiences of childhood in Romantic period varied according to class:

[Working class children] worked twelve to fifteen hour days in small scale and domestic industries, especially at hand-looms and at lace making, and put in similar hours (under particularly brutal conditions) in mines and collieries. Although factory work was frequently less arduous than other forms of ‘indoor labour’, the long hours at awkward positions nevertheless left child workers as what one observer called a ‘mass of crooked alphabets’. Even the landmark Factory Act of 1819 stipulated only that no child could work in cotton mills or factories under the age of nine. Working-class children too small for employment were often left unattended (as their mothers put in long hours of their own) or fitfully watched, lulled into docility by opiates sold under names like ‘Mrs. Wilkinson’s Soothing Syrup’. (Richardson, p.17)

6.1 Rise of political radicalism in 1790s, hand in hand with rise of politicised working class reading, made literacy and children's literature crucial political issues.
6.2 Writers such as Blake and Wordsworth concerned to represent lives of working-class children; Ann and Jane Taylor, Rural Scenes (1806) and City Scenes; or, A Peep into London for Children (1818), allowed middle class children to ‘peep’ into the lives of poor children.

7. Romantic ‘Poetics of Innocence’ (Richardson, pp.142-53); what kind of reading material is suitable for the innocent child?

The role which children’s narrative sets up for the reader is above all simple and circumscribed; the reader, like the text, is stable, stereotyped, linguistically naive, and contained. The child reader, like the children’s text, is integral and innocent. (Richardson, p.146)

Both the moral tale and the children’s fairy tale ... share an underlying assumption that the child reader is not to make moral evaluations on its own. In the moral tale, the child is taught to regulate its behaviour according to an ethical code clearly established by the author; although the child protagonist may at times be called upon to make an ‘independent’ judgment, it is always made clear to the child reader which choice is the correct one. (Richardson, pp.142-3)

The requirement for simplicity and ‘artlessness’ underwrites any number of formal constraints identified by recent theorists of children’s narrative, from the ‘norm of closure’ which has been called the ‘most strictly observed narrative convention in children’s literature’, to the preference in the ‘most popular’ juvenile books for ‘strong, traditional story lines’ (Richardson, p.145).

8. Variety of Romantic - and non-Romantic - views of childhood in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789, 1794).
8.1 Compare 'Introduction' to Innocence with 'Introduction' to Experience; or 'Infant Joy' with 'Infant Sorrow'.
8.3 Do Songs of Innocence assume a 'poetics of innocence'?
8.4 NB Blake's intertextual critique of Watts' Divine Songs; compare Blake's 'The Little Black Boy' with Watts' 'Praise for Birth and Education in a Christian Land', or Blake's 'London' with Watts' 'Praise for Mercies Spiritual and Temporal':

Whene'er I take my walks abroad,
How many poor I see?
What shall I render to my God
For all his gifts to me?

Not more than others I deserve,
Yet God hath given me more;
For I have food, while others starve,
Or beg from door to door.

How many children in the street
Half naked I behold?
While I am clothed from head to feet,
And cover'd from the cold.

While some poor wretches scarce can tell
Where they may lay their head,
I have a home wherein to dwell,
And rest upon my bed.

While others early learn to swear,
And curse, and lie, and steal,
Lord, I am taught thy name to fear,
And do thy holy will.

Are these thy favours, day by day
To me above the rest?
Then let me love thee more than they,
And try to serve thee best.

See Mary Peace, ed., CW3: Corvey Women Writers on the Web Journal: Special Issue on Romantic-Era Writing for Children, issue 3 (Autumn, 2007).

Top of document