Reading Children in Early Modern Culture

Edel Lamb

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319703589
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319703596
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

This book is a study of children, their books and their reading experiences in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain.  It argues for the importance of reading to early modern childhood and of childhood to early modern reading cultures by drawing together the fields of childhood studies, early modern literature and the history of reading.  Analysing literary representations of children as readers in a range of genres (including ABCs, prayer books, religious narratives, romance, anthologies, school books, drama, translations and autobiography) alongside evidence of the reading experiences of those defined as children in the period, it explores the production of different categories of child readers.  Focusing on the 'good child' reader, the youth as consumer, ways of reading as a boy and as a girl, and the retrospective recollection of childhood reading, it sheds new light on the ways in which childhood and reading were understood and experienced in the period.

© The Author(s) 2018

Edel LambReading Children in Early Modern CultureEarly Modern Literature in Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70359-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Reading Child Readers

Edel Lamb¹

(1)

School of English, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

End Abstract

Children are Bookes; and Bookes men’s children are

In them is stampt the Father’s character.¹

Reading Children in Early Modern Culture is a study of children, their books and their reading experiences in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain. It is about the significance of reading to early modern childhood and of childhood to early modern reading. Children occupied an important role in early modern textual cultures. The proliferation of advice and how-to manuals in the period often specified children and the young as important recipients of advice on how to speak, behave, worship and acquire new skills.² Children were, William Martyn ’s early seventeenth-century equation of children and books suggests, central to the imaginative conceptualization of print culture. Images of print were also at the heart of understanding childhood, with John Earle describing the child as ‘a man in small letter’ in 1628.³ Childhood and youth were often characterized through associations with particular books and reading practices. Margaret Cavendish , for instance, depicts the ‘difference between Youth and Age’ in terms of reading ‘the Horn-book’ and reading an ‘Old Chronicle’ in her Sociable Letters (1664).⁴ Children were also readers, creative ‘users’, consumers and producers of the literature of the period.⁵ Investigating children as readers, this study interrogates the ways in which early modern textual cultures constructed distinct concepts of childhood and impacted on the experience of being a child.⁶ It explores the ways in which early modern childhoods were produced by literacy and reading experiences through an analysis of literary representations of children as readers and of historical evidence of the reading experiences of those defined as ‘children’ in early modern society. It argues that while reading was undoubtedly a formative experience for early modern literate children, it was more significantly constitutive of childhood identities and experiences. Reading Children focuses on how early modern children read: how they were imagined as readers; how they were instructed and advised to read; how, where and when they read and used their books; and how they negotiated childhood through reading. It begins, in this introduction, by asking how we might read these early modern child readers: how were children defined in the period; where is the evidence of their reading practices and experiences located; and how might we in the twenty-first century interpret this evidence of the elusive figure of the early modern child reader, imagined and historical?

Imagining the Child as Reader

One early modern book that was directed in part at children as readers and that addresses their early encounters with literary cultures gestures towards the manifold connections between children and texts in the period. William Hornby’s Hornbyes Hornbook (1622) subjects the reading practices of early modern children to comic scrutiny through its satirical account of formative youthful encounters with the hornbook . The hornbook , a page of text mounted on wood containing the alphabet, sample syllables and the Lord’s prayer, was commonly used by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century boys and girls from diverse social backgrounds in learning how to read.⁷ It is the book that characterizes the young in Cavendish ’s formulation. It was often the first and, according to Hornby’s text, the most important book of early modern childhood. Hornbyes Hornbook provides an overview of the benefits of the hornbook for all alongside a tale of the author’s own schoolboy experiences at St Peterborough Free School to offer humorous insight into ‘How schollers do begin, and how they grow’.⁸ Hornby aligns the processes of learning to read with the early stages of life, although he admits that this literacy is not always achieved in childhood. Describing the hornbook as ‘first Arts Nurse’, he figures the book as an alternative to the physical nourishment provided by nurses or mothers, contributing to the prevalent image of texts as substitute parents in the period.⁹ Hornby thus depicts reading as a crucial formative experience, here facilitating movement of the early modern male child out of the feminized spaces of infancy though reading and learning.¹⁰ He implies that use of the hornbook is essential before progressing to other educational texts, identified as the primer , psalter, Bible , Latin ABC, ‘Pueriles’, Cato, Cicero, Ovid, Corderius’ Dialogues, Terence and Horace (B3v–B4r), and ultimately to the sciences, arts and law or all ‘the worlds knowledge’ (Br). In this representation, the hornbook instigates a transformation from the illiterate infant to the professional adult male through reading. Hornbyes Hornbook implies that it is by learning to read and through repeated reading experiences that children become adult in early modern culture.

Becoming adult through reading is a common image in the period, and Hornby’s depiction of reading as part of a scholarly process that produces civic subjects is in line with the aims of many educational programmes. His recommended reading list, which demonstrates the central role of religious material to early literacy instruction, is also exemplary of the reading advocated at grammar schools. Although Hornby also commends his book to maidens, he focuses primarily on the literate schoolboy reading under supervision. The boy , he suggests can learn his ‘A.B.C.’, syllables and vowels from the hornbook, but it is only with the ‘Masters rule’ that he learns ‘how he may put together’ (B2v). The woodcut on the book’s title page reinforces this favoured method of youthful reading in its depiction of the boy leaning against the schoolmaster’s knee and pointing out his letters under the gaze of his teacher.¹¹ This intimate relationship is offered as an alternative to the common violent pedagogy of the period, that Hornby’s text refutes, even though the rod placed on the nearby table serves as a reminder of the threat of corporal punishment in schooling in the period.¹² Through repeated recommendation of how children should read in the visual image and comic rhyme contained in this book, Hornby suggests some common practices of childhood reading. However, he also acknowledges that child readers might appropriate the hornbook for their own ends. The child at petty school, for instance, does not read the hornbook but sees it as an object of ‘sport’ (B2r), using it as a ‘weapon’ (B2r) when he falls out with his school-fellow, as ‘agreeing with their childish yeares’ (B2r). Other children read the book but ‘learne in waste’. They are reprimanded in the warning that this mode of reading produces the ‘Thrid-bare Poet, or the Ballad-maker’ and the drunken ‘Pot-Poet’ (B6v–B7r). The recommendations of parents, educators, employers, religious authorities, printers and authors on what books children should read and on how and where they should read them were widely circulated in educational texts, advice books and conduct manuals and in the prefaces of the books aimed directly at a young readership. Yet Hornby’s comic depiction of books misread and misused reminds us that early modern children were also agents in their own reading, and engaged with textual cultures in independent and often unexpected ways.

Hornbyes Hornbook offers an insight into some of the books, reading spaces and ways of reading associated with early modern childhood, and gestures towards differences in these according to gender and social status. It also represents itself as a book for the young. Dedicated to youthful patrons, Robert Carr , ‘scarce’ in his teens (A4r), the 12-year-old Thomas Grantham and the ‘young’ Rochester Carre (A6r), it claims to be ‘respondent unto youthfull yeares,/Fit for your young dayes and minoritie,/Untill you come to senioritie’ (A3v). Recognizing the young as patrons, readers and potential market, it is one example of the diverse texts that directly address early modern children and youths as a particular category of reader in the period. Hornby compares his ‘tale’ of his own schooldays with romances and histories such as that ‘of valiant Guy’ and ‘the Mirror of Knight-hood’ (B7r–v), which, as this book explores, were widely perceived to be among the books desired by children, although their elders often warned against them. However, he simultaneously identifies an adult readership for his Hornbook, calling on the various professions, judges, justices, lawyers, constables, poets and school masters to remember ‘the seede and graine/Of skill’ (B4v) to which ‘they were first beholden’ (B7r). Hornby exploits the imagery of childhood and early reading experiences, producing a text that simultaneously functions as wry nostalgia for older readers and participates in contemporary debates on education. Hornbyes Hornbook, therefore, like many early modern English books functions as a book for children and a book for adults; as recreational rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Reading Child Readers
• 2. ‘A Good Child Is One that Loves His Book’: Literacy, Religious Instruction and the Child as Reader
• 3. Books for ‘Childish Age’: Youthful Reading Cultures in Early Modern England
• 4. Reading Boyhood: The Books and Reading Practices of Early Modern Schoolboys
• 5. ‘This Girle Hath Spirit’: Rewriting Girlhood Reading
• 6. ‘I Remember When I Began to Read’: Remembering Childhood Reading
• Back Matter