Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786–1914

Tess Cosslett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351896290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

In her reappraisal of canonical works such as Black Beauty, Beautiful Joe, Wind in the Willows, and Peter Rabbit, Tess Cosslett traces how nineteenth-century debates about the human and animal intersected with, or left their mark on, the venerable genre of the animal story written for children. Effortlessly applying a range of critical approaches, from Bakhtinian ideas of the carnivalesque to feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical theory, she raises important questions about the construction of the child reader, the qualifications of the implied author, and the possibilities of children's literature compared with literature written for adults. Perhaps most crucially, Cosslett examines how the issues of animal speech and animal subjectivity were managed, at a time when the possession of language and consciousness had become a vital sign of the difference between humans and animals. Topics of great contemporary concern, such as the relation of the human and the natural, masculine and feminine, child and adult, are investigated within their nineteenth-century contexts, making this an important book for nineteenth-century scholars, children's literature specialists, and historians of science and childhood.

Chapter One

Animals in Eighteenth-Century Children’s Books

The animal story was central to the rise of a separate children’s literature in the eighteenth century, and was intimately linked to the progressive attitudes that prevailed in enlightened educational circles at that time. In order to understand how animal stories became such a staple of children’s fiction, we must look first at the eighteenth-century context in which they arose. This will involve a brief consideration of a number of related topics: Lockean educational theory; the publishing history of children’s books; the preceding traditions on which the earliest children’s books drew; the natural theological context; attitudes to animals and children; ideas of sentimentalism and sensibility; Rousseau’s ideas on education; and finally the many varied appearances of animals (not necessarily talking) in children’s books of the time by writers such as Thomas Day, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld and John Aitkin.

Samuel Pickering confesses he was at first surprised to find eighteenth-century literature for children permeated not by religion, as he had anticipated, but by the ideas and influence of the philosopher John Locke.¹ While Locke too had his predecessors and influences, he can be credited with initiating a liberalisation in the way children were treated, and a new interest in their education and reading matter. In his influential Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke had argued that the mind was formed by the association of ideas through experience. He opposed the concept of innate ideas, and, famously, saw the infant mind as a ‘tabula rasa’, a blank sheet on which ideas and habits could be inscribed. Locke’s arguments were later taken up by more radical thinkers, such as Godwin and Hartley, and the young Wordsworth and Coleridge, but initially they were not seen as threatening to the status quo, and were adopted by orthodox and unorthodox alike. His theories have several consequences for children: childhood becomes very important, as the stage when the mind is most malleable; if there are no innate ideas, children are freed from the notion of original sin; education becomes crucial, and parents have a new responsibility to provide it; children’s reading matter becomes a vital part of the mind-formation process; and it is necessary to amuse and to respect children in order that the proper associations of ideas can be formed. If instruction is linked to pain or force, it will not succeed.

In his Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Locke followed up these implications of his theory, and, interestingly, animals and literature about animals are seen as crucial to children’s development. The only suitable reading matter for children he can find to recommend, is Aesop’s Fables:

When by these gentle ways he begins to be able to read, some easy pleasant Book suited to his Capacity, should be put into his Hands, wherein the entertainment, that he finds, might draw him on, and reward his Pains in Reading, and yet not such as should fill his Head with perfectly useless trumpery, or lay the principles of Vice and Folly. To this purpose, I think, Aesop’s Fables the best, which being Stories apt to delight and entertain a Child, may yet afford useful Reflections to a grown Man. Even better it has pictures –; it will entertain him much the better, and encourage him to read, when it carries the increase of Knowledge with it.²

When Locke comes to consider the best way to learn Latin, he again recommends that ‘the Fables of Aesop, the only Book almost that I know fit for Children, may afford them Matter for this Exercise of writing English, as well as for reading and translating to enter them in the Latin tongue.’³ Locke himself published a version of Aesop, with English and Latin parallel texts.

As well as recommending Aesop, Locke also links this reading matter to the treatment of actual animals. A passage in his Letters to Edward Clarke on Education (1684–91) laments children’s cruelty to animals, and suggests ways of preventing it:

One thing I have observed in children, that when they have got possession of any poor creature, they are apt to use it ill, and they often torment and treat ill very young birds, butterflies, and such other poor things, which they get into their power, and that with a seeming of pleasure. This, I think, should be watched in them, and if they incline to any such cruelty they should be taught the contrary usage. For the custom of tormenting and killing of beasts will by degrees harden their minds even towards men, and they who accustom themselves to delight in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind … I cannot but commend both the kindness and prudence of a mother I know, who was wont always to indulge her daughters when any of them desired dogs, squirrels, birds, or any such things, as young girls use to be delighted with. But then, when they had them, they must be sure to keep them well, and look well after them, that they want nothing, or were not ill-used.⁴

Here Locke uses what becomes a standard eighteenth-century argument against cruelty to animals: that it will lead on to cruelty to men. Animals provide a testing ground for benevolence and humanity. This passage in Locke is immediately followed by another recommendation of Aesop as reading matter, making the link between animal fable and animals in the real world which is so much in evidence in texts like Fenn’s Fables and Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories (see pp. 37–39 below).

Why did Locke recommend Aesop so strongly? It seems that stories about animals, as natural beings, are to be preferred to superstitious fairy-tales, even if the animals do talk. The Fables also carry acceptable and useful morals about human life, combining instruction and delight. Locke, like many of the eighteenth-century writers for children, notes that children delight in animals, without speculating on why this might be so. Aesop was very popular – perhaps just because there was so little other reading matter for children. There were twenty-six English editions between 1647 and 1700.⁵ Mary Jackson and David Whitley have traced the history of Aesops in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, noting an increased adaptation to a child audience.⁶ As well as Locke’s version, there is one by Samuel Richardson (1739), which Whitley calls ‘a remarkable contribution to the emerging tradition of writing for children in its own terms’, in the way it develops ‘the potential of the fable to speak for and about children’, by emphasising values of playfulness and curiosity in the morals drawn from the Fables.⁷ Whitley also reminds us of the political uses to which the Fables were put by different translators and editors: as we will see, political implications are not absent in later animal stories for children. Jackson remarks on the existence of many ‘multipurpose’ books, ‘for example, pictorial Aesops that are also language texts; emblem works that might have been used as encyclopaedic books of knowledge’.⁸ This kind of heterogeneity is also very characteristic of later animal stories for children.

Jackson also points here to other traditional genres that contributed to the children’s animal story: emblem books and bestiaries. Though the animals in these books do not talk, they are imbued with moral and religious meanings. The emblem books used pictures of animals to convey moral and religious allegories. They rest on a belief in the divine meanings encoded in natural phenomena: ‘an Emblem is but a silent parable … what are the heavens, the earth, nay, every creature, but Hieroglyphics and Emblems of his glory?’ asks an address to the reader in a 1777 edition of Frances Quarles’ Emblems Divine and Moral (1635). The editor worries about ‘the pious education of youth’ in an ‘age of dissipation and levity’.⁹ He clearly expects his book to be read by the young. Quarles was republished in the nineteenth century too, and influenced Margaret Gatty’s Parables from Nature which I will be discussing in Chapter Four. Bestiaries were medieval forerunners of natural histories, consisting of ‘illustrated catalogues or compendia of actual and fabulous beasts’.¹⁰ Their purpose was not scientific description or categorisation, but a mixture of allegorical and fabulous information about each beast. Early natural histories imitated their form, and, according to Harriet Ritvo, still retained a tendency to describe the animals morally as well as scientifically, concentrating on their usefulness to man (evidence of Divine Providence), and their hierarchical relationships (evidence for the Divine ordering of human hierarchies). Interestingly, one of the first books published specifically for children by Thomas Boreman was A Description of Three Hundred Animals (1730). Both the emblem book and the bestiary emphasise illustration; pictures of animals are also given a new, secular purpose by Locke, as a reading and writing aid: ‘as soon as he [the child] begins to spell, as many Pictures of Animals should be got him, as can be found, with the printed names to them.’¹¹ Alphabet books, as well as natural histories, made great use of animal illustrations: the humorous results of this are seen in Maria Edgeworth’s story ‘The Bee and the Cow’ (1814), where a little girl confuses these two beasts, because the illustration for ‘B’ in her alphabet book was a Bull.¹²

While Boreman may have published his natural history for children in 1730, credit is usually given to John Newbery for initiating the children’s book trade, when he published A Little Pretty Pocket Book in 1744. Newbery’s shop was ‘at the corner of St Paul’s Churchyard’, and a whole string of successors (F. Newbery, E. Newbery, J. Harris, Griffith and Farran) lay claim to the well-known address on the title pages of children’s books well into the nineteenth century. The Pocket Book was a miscellany for children, which included several verse fables. Its motto was ‘Delectando monemus’ – we instruct by delighting, a very Lockean sentiment. Later, Newbery also published his own version of Aesop, Fables in Verse for the Improvement of the Young and the Old; by Abraham Aesop, Esqu. To which are added, Fables in Verse and Prose; with the Conversation of Birds and Beasts, At their several Meetings, Routs, and Assemblies; by Woglog the great Giant (1758). The title alone gives a flavour of the enticing playfulness of Newbery’s productions, while the Preface promises ‘virtue and instruction’.¹³ Nor did Newbery neglect the natural history, publishing in 1752 his Pretty Book of Pictures for Little Masters and Misses; or, Little Tommy Trip’s History of Birds and Beasts.

Several reasons have been put forward for Newbery’s success. The eighteenth-century family had become increasingly child-centred, and parents began to invest more, emotionally and financially, in their children. J. H. Plumb comments that children had become ‘luxury objects’, and ‘superior pets’ – an interesting metaphor in this context.¹⁴ At the same time, an ideology of social aspiration and betterment fuelled the desire to educate one’s children out of their class. Locke’s ideas chimed in with this ideology, emphasising the potentially transformative effect of children’s reading. Newbery’s stories often involve social advancement through education – his most famous production, The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765), is written for those ‘Who from a State of Rags and Care, /And having Shoes but half a Pair; /Their Fortune and their Fame would fix, /And gallop in a Coach and Six.’ The title of John Harris’s later (1808) Alphabet of Goody Two-Shoes, by learning of which she soon got rich, makes the point more crudely. The message would not only be popular with purchasers, it would also encourage them to buy more books. All this was happening in an age of increasing consumerism and commercialisation. Children’s books became another commodity to be purchased and consumed.

The canny way in which Newbery articulated these trends in his books can be seen in Goody Two-Shoes, which makes use of talking animals to further its project. The poor orphaned Margery Two-Shoes gains success and popularity through teaching the village children in her schoolroom. Eventually she marries a rich man. Animals, talking and otherwise, function in her story as a classroom aid, encouraging both play and instruction. They are also used to inculcate a message of kindness, to teach facts about animal instinct, to demystify ghost-stories and superstitions, to demonstrate God’s goodness, and to provide Biblical instruction. Like Dickon, in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s much later Secret Garden, Margery has a whole menagerie of pets: Ralph the raven, Tom the pigeon, Billy the lamb and Jumper the dog. A typical playtime involves the children ‘all running about the school, and diverting themselves with the birds and the lamb’. But Ralph and Tom are also instrumental in the teaching of reading. Margery teaches Ralph ‘to speak, to spell, and to read’, and it is he who lays out the capital letters of the alphabet, which are then reproduced in the text as an aid to the child reader. Tom the pigeon takes care of the small letters – he has been taught ‘to spell and read, though not to talk, and he performed all those extraordinary things which are recorded of the famous bird that was sometime since advertised in the Haymarket’.¹⁵ It is clear here that the birds’ ability to ‘talk’ or ‘read’ is to be seen as a performing trick, not a fiction or fable. At the same time, these performing animals effective...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• General Editors’ Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Animals in Eighteenth-Century Children’s Books
• 2 Fabulous Histories and Papillonades
• 3 Animal Autobiography
• 4 Parables and Fairy-tales
• 5 Wild Animal Stories
• 6 Arcadias?
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index