Mediating Identities in Eighteenth-Century England

Public Negotiations, Literary Discourses, Topography

Isabel Karremann, Anja Müller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351918855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria para la literatura comparada

Through case studies from diverse fields of cultural studies, this collection examines how different constructions of identity were mediated in England during the long eighteenth century. While the concept of identity has received much critical attention, the question of how identities were mediated usually remains implicit. This volume engages in a critical discussion of the connection between historically specific categories of identity determined by class, gender, nationality, religion, political factions and age, and the media available at the time, including novels, newspapers, trial reports, images and the theatre. Representative case studies are the arrival of children's literature as a genre, the creation of masculine citizenship in Defoe's novels, the performance of gendered and national identities by the actress Kitty Clive or in plays by Henry Fielding and Richard Sheridan, fashion and the public sphere, the emergence of the Whig and Tory parties, the radical culture of the 1790s, and visual representations of domestic and imperial landscape. Recognizing the proliferation of identities in the epoch, these essays explore the ways in which different media determined constructions of identity and were in turn shaped by them.

Chapter 1
Identifying an Age-Specific English Literature for Children

Anja Müller

Defining Children’s Literature

Harvey Darton’s pioneering monograph Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life opens with the following definition: ‘By “children’s books” I mean printed works produced ostensibly to give children spontaneous pleasure, and not primarily to teach them, nor solely to make them good, nor to keep them profitably quiet’ (1). Darton’s exclusive treatment of non-didactic material as the quintessential prototype of children’s literature¹ still reverberates through most twentieth-century definitions of the genre. Sheila Egoff, for example, suggests ‘that the aim of children’s writing be delight not edification; that its attributes be the eternal childlike qualities of wonder; simplicity, laughter and warmth; and that in the worldwide realm of children’s books, the literature be kept inside, the sociology and pedagogy out’ (quoted in Lesnik-Oberstein, 25).² In addition to this apparent levity, Perry Nodelman also insists on the covert depths of children’s literature and on its subversive potential: ‘These texts can be easily and effortlessly heard or read, but once read, they continue to develop significance, importance, complexity, to echo ever outward and inward. These are texts that resonate’ (2).

Despite Nodelman’s emphasis on the pleasant character of children’s literature, his inclusion of a didactic intention qualifies Darton’s rigid split between didacticism and entertainment. For certain, children’s literature is rarely merely an entertaining or aesthetic enterprise; it has always been suffused with ideologies. Definitions of children’s literature insisting on the genre’s appeal to children’s playfulness or on their capability of subversive readings can be referred to a liberal humanist concept of the child that can hardly betray its debts to Romanticism. Obviously, definitions of children’s literature depend on concepts of childhood. Hence, if twentieth-century definitions of children’s literature take the concept of the child evolving in the wake of Romanticism for granted, this entails considerable problems for an appropriate assessment of any literature for children that was published at a time when the category of childhood was conceptualized differently. Percy Muir’s monograph English Children’s Books, 1600 to 1900 accordingly entitles the chapters on children’s literature before the eighteenth century the ‘pre-historic’ age, and he only has disparaging and dismissive comments for those writers whose works do not correspond to the pleasure principle.³

However, childhood is no ‘invention’ or discovery of the late eighteenth century, even if studies written in the wake of Philippe Ariès’s seminal History of Childhood tend to continue this myth. Numerous historians of childhood have meanwhile assessed the varying notions of the concept from antiquity to the present.⁴ In my own Framing Childhood, I argue that during the eighteenth century different competing concepts of childhood existed side by side. Emerging as a literary genre during precisely this period, children’s literature was one of the sites where competing notions of childhood were negotiated. Rather than merely reflecting existing notions of childhood, I suggest that children’s literature functions as a mediating instance, presenting, negotiating, and proliferating concepts of childhood by claiming to represent the character and needs of a particular age group. As a consequence, both ‘children’ and ‘literature’ are regarded as contingent categories; both are cultural constructs, the conceptualizations of which have undergone significant changes in the course of history.

A very influential portion of eighteenth-century concepts of childhood were closely linked with the values and needs of the rising middle class.⁵ Childhood, accordingly, was constructed around the need for forming future English middle-class citizens and their spouses. Conceiving children as blank pages and as potentially reasonable beings in need of cognitive and, especially, moral formation so as to render them capable of forming their own judgements, eighteenth-century discourses of childhood said less about what children were and more about what kind of children were needed to reproduce a certain set of values. Besides, the insistence on various lacks of childhood (for example, a lack of physical strength, rational judgement, power, or insight) simultaneously demarcated the borderlines to a middle-class, middle-age adult norm, which disposed of all the qualities childhood was said to lack. In other words, concepts of childhood were deployed to define an adult norm ex negativo.

In order to examine children’s literature before 1789, it is useful to start from more general definitions of children’s literature than those mentioned above, and to consider that such definitions may vary depending on whether one looks at the market, at the intended readership, at aesthetic qualities, or at the function of the texts. Murray Knowles and Kirsten Malmkjaer’s suggestion – to declare as children’s literature what is put on the list as such by the publisher (1) – may appear simplistic, yet it takes into account the important eighteenth-century development that children’s literature became part of a burgeoning business and a flourishing literary market. In a similar vein, I shall embark from the very general assumption that children’s literature is any literature written and published for children. I shall assume that, by targeting a particular age group through a certain choice of topic and form, children’s literature contributes to the identification of this age group, distinguishing it from others and mediating the concomitant concept of childhood at the same time.

In order to assess the construction of an age-specific literature for children, it is important to scrutinize where children’s literature was positioned and how it positioned itself within the field of eighteenth-century literature. Gauging the distinction of children’s literature from other genres will help to assess the age-specific features attributed to children’s literature.⁶ In this context, my essay is indebted to Christoph Reinfandt, who uses a systems theory approach to reconsider the emergence of the novel in the eighteenth century. According to Reinfandt, the eighteenth-century novel employs a literary code that distinguishes between texts that are ‘entertaining’ or ‘not entertaining’, or – this is Reinfandt’s preferred binary opposition – between texts that are ‘interesting’ or ‘not interesting’. Reinfandt explains very convincingly that it was crucial for the development of the novel that the genre increasingly insisted on its freedom from extra-literary legitimation (such as purposefulness or didacticism), accentuating instead inner-literary or intra-systemic references (for example, to literary tradition) as well as expressive functions.

In what follows, I will explore the encoding of children’s literature that established the identity of this emerging genre within the field of eighteenth-century literature. By tracing the distinctions of children’s literature from other literary genres that had been given to children as reading matter, I shall examine the features that came to be treated as age-specific and will relate them to concomitant eighteenth-century concepts of childhood. By doing so, I intend to show how changing conceptualizations of identity categories (here, the age group ‘children’) occur in interdependence with changes in the traditional modes of mediation, sometimes resulting in the formation of new genres or in redefinitions of old ones.

Excluding and Transforming the Supernatural: Fables, Chapbooks, and Fairy Tales

When Isaac Bickerstaff tells the readers of The Tatler that he ‘perceived [his godson] a great historian in Aesop’s Fables’, but that the boy ‘frankly declared […] his mind, “that he did not delight in that learning, because he did not believe that [the Fables] were true’” (Tatler 95, 17 November 1709, in Steele 1987, II.93), he hints at two important aspects concerning the relationship of fables, children, and children’s literature in the eighteenth century. For one thing, fables were perceived as the quintessential reading material for children, perhaps the only appropriate reading matter for this age group available at the time (see, for instance, Locke 2000, 212–13).⁷ Eleanor Fenn’s The Female Guardian (1784) praises the fable for its moral reformatory effects that result from direct interaction between the child reader and the text (10). Other texts for children adapt the structural conventions of the fable; for example, The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1766), where some episodes are followed by a ‘Reflection’, interrupting the narrative flow to address the reader directly. For Percy Muir, the almost effortless integration of the fable into the genre of children’s literature results from children’s cognitive capacities as well as from the fact that fables apparently appealed to the adults who bought the books to educate their offspring.

Fables are ideal reading for small children, whose solemn anthropomorphism meets the talking animals half way […]. Above all, fables have the indispensable feature of make-believe […]. Finally, the intensely moral nature of these fables should not be overlooked. Whether the moral tale is repugnant to children or not it has been a persistent feature of books intended for their reading until well into our own day, and the stories of one of the most prolific and popular writers for children to-day exude morals in every line. (24)

This changed, however, when the unrealistic convention of talking animals caused fables to be ranked with the fairy tale and the chapbook. By the final decades of the eighteenth century, these genres had come to be regarded as highly problematic for young readers because they were deemed incompatible with the goal to raise children rationally. Zohar Shavit perceives ‘the beginning of official books for children’ (416) in a distinctive generic opposition between chapbooks and children’s literature. According to Mary Jackson, this opposition found support in the notoriously bad moral reputation of the chapbooks being associated with ‘smut’ or ‘profligate and shiftless conduct’ (67). Andrew O’Malley relates this distinction to middle-class ideology, yet, drawing on Raymond Williams, he also reveals a ‘residue of plebeian [chapbook] culture’ (19) in the children’s literature of the mid-eighteenth century, especially in the publications of John Newbery. In the appearance of the new children’s books, duodecimo volumes that were produced rather cheaply and often with recycled woodcuts, material traces of the chapbook are readily visible. Most authors remained anonymous, and title pages sometimes alluded to chapbook characters. These children’s books thus pretended to belong to a communal tradition, simultaneously trying to establish a new, distinct, age-specific reader community. The rags-to-riches stories of poor but virtuous children like Goody Two-Shoes or her brother Tommy (who, through their moral virtues and economic skills, are rewarded with the notorious coach-and-six) reflect plebeian and middle-class fantasies of social mobility, projecting them onto the generation that might be able to fulfil these wishes. Under the impact of the French Revolution, such messages were frequently perceived as threats. Accordingly, Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts emulated chapbooks in their material appearance, but, while striving to reform plebeian moral economy, they also favoured a fixed social structure. In all these hybrid forms, the identity of children’s literature as a genre in relation or opposition to the chapbook was defined through extra-literary references to what were supposed to be essential features of childhood. Hence, the inclusion of the chapbook format in children’s literature necessitated a transformation of the genre according to its usefulness for moral instruction and socialization corresponding to the norms and conventions of a particular class.

As far as fairy tales are concerned, Jack Zipes describes the transformation of the folk tale, which was inclusive of all ages and classes, into the literary fairy tale by endowing the latter with ‘mores, values, and manners so that children and adults would become civilized according to the social code of that time’ (3). This process was partly an import from France, where standards for civility were set for the most of Europe and where this transformation had already taken place in the tales of the Countess d’Aulnoy and Charles and Pierre Perrault (see Muir, 36 and Zipes, 9). Acceptable literary ‘fairy tales for children were no different from the rest of the literature (fables, primers, picture books, sermons, didactic stories, etc.) that conveyed a model of the exemplary child that was to be borne in mind while reading’ (Zipes, 9). In originally English texts (for example, Sarah Fielding’s The Governess of 1749), this transformation was achieved by adding a moral and/or by apologizing in the preface for telling such an ostensibly ‘untrue’ work of fiction. The fairy tale could therefore only become a legitimate part of children’s literature by asserting extra-literary references, such as a moral message or a reflection on its own fictional character.

Returning to the fable, one notices that, after a long period of untroubled inclusion as legitimate reading matter for children, the fable’s status as a subgenre of children’s literature was challenged in the eighteenth century. It is interesting to note that both the legitimation and the exclusion of the fable were indicated by references to the literary system. While a lack of realism was used as an argument for exclusion, the venerable canonical Aesopian tradition was belaboured to legitimate at least fable elements in children’s literature of the 1780s and 1790s.⁸ The result is a tension between a legitimate didactic function (that is, legitimation through extra-literary reference) and an illegitimate literary form, which creates paradoxical situations in the writings of authors like Eleanor Fenn, Sarah Trimmer, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld: all advocate a simultaneously truthful and moral literature for children, and yet all frequently refer to fable traditions (for instance, in Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories [1786]). Mary Jackson explains the reservations of these authors about fabulous fictions by citing their own Puritan or Evangelical backgrounds, which may account for their suspicion ‘of all fictions and metaphors. Because they confused the literal with the Truth they profoundly mistrusted the imagination, a fear magnified where children were concerned’ (Jackson, 137). This religiously motivated resentment found additional support from educational discourses based on Rousseauan principles.⁹ If the fable was eventually not discarded – as is witnessed, for instance, in the popular Fabulous Histories by Sarah Trimmer, a stout advocate of the ‘truth under fiction’ precept – this inclusion was justified by referring to the function of the texts, their purposefulness and didacticism.

The temporary exclusion of the fable, the chapbook, and the fairy tale from the legitimate reading matter for children in the eighteenth century owes much to the concept of the rational child, who was supposed to learn to distinguish truth from falsity in order to be educated into a responsible citizen capable of rational judgements. According to Henry Home, Lord Kames, fascination of the supernatural belongs to an ‘infancy of taste’ (I.115) and thus to an inferior state of development. By expelling supernatural elements from children’s books or accommodating them for didactic purposes, eighteenth-century children’s literature mediates the concept of the rational child, presenting and proposing it to child readers while asserting to the adult world that it does not intend to keep its young readers on a...