Abstract
The eighteenth century has long been regarded as a watershed period in the history of both childhood and children’s literature. It saw the rapid growth of a specialized text industry addressing young readers, and at the same time, the child became increasingly visible and important in a range of ‘adult’ discourses. Philippe Ariès’s now more than a half-century-old assertion that the child, as differentiated subject with its own needs and material culture, did not exist in Europe before the seventeenth century has rightly and usefully been critiqued, as has J. H. Plumb’s famous celebration of a ‘new world of children’ in the eighteenth century. Yet the fact remains that, certainly and most notably within the more privileged segments of English society, experiences of childhood for many changed significantly in the period this volume considers, as did the ways in—and extent to—which the child circulated within literary culture.
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Notes
- 1.
Debates over whether or not the ‘origins’ of children’s literature can be found in eighteenth-century England have been, at least to my mind, resolved satisfactorily enough that a short note should suffice here. It is certainly very likely that children have been reading something for as long as there have been reading materials—if perhaps not ‘ever since there were children,’ as Seth Lerer has claimed (Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008], 1). However, as Matthew Grenby has argued, it is not until the eighteenth century that a self-consciously aware genre for child readers gained widespread recognition: ‘a set of texts specifically commissioned, written and marketed for the use of the young’ (The Child Reader, 1700–1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 4.
- 2.
See Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (Trans. Robert Baldick, New York: Vintage Books, 1962). Medieval scholars in particular have taken issue with, and gone to considerable lengths to disprove, Ariès’s claim that ‘in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist’ (125). See, for example, Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven: Yale UP, 2003) and Sally Crawford, Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England (Stroud, UK: Allan Sutton, 1999).
- 3.
See Plumb, ‘The New World of Children in Eighteenth-Century England’ (Past and Present 67.1 (1975): 64–95). Ludmilla Jordanova, in ‘New Worlds for Children in the Eighteenth Century: Problems of Historical Interpretation’ (History of the Human Sciences 3.1 (1990): 69–83), takes Plumb to task for an overly rosy view of the period’s childhood that elides the experiences of the majority of children for whom the rich new material culture Plumb describes was not accessible.
- 4.
The demographic, economic, and print culture expansions I mention here have been thoroughly documented by many historians; Morag Styles and Evelyn Arizpe offer a particularly useful short summary related specifically to juvenile reading and publishing in Reading Lessons from the Eighteenth Century: Mothers, Children and Texts (Shenstone: Pied Piper Publishing Ltd., 2006); see esp. Chap. 2, ‘The Changing World of Books and Reading in the Eighteenth Century.’
- 5.
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and Emile (1762) are of course the most famous and influential examples. There were many more that followed, however; these include Mary Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education: With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (1790), Joseph Priestley’s Miscellaneous Observations Relating to Education (1778), and Erasmus Darwin’s A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools (1797).
- 6.
A few examples by notable physicians of the period include: William Buchan’s Advice to Mothers on the Subject of Their Own Health, Strength, and Beauty of Their Offspring (1803); William Cadogan’s An Essay upon Nursing, and the Management of Children, from Their Birth to Three Years of Age (1748); and Thomas Beddoes’s A Guide for Self-Preservation, and Parental Affection (1793).
- 7.
See Rowland’s Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), a study she describes as a ‘rhetorical history of childhood’ in which she charts how ‘new ideas of childhood made possible new ways of thinking about language, literature, history and culture’ (11).
- 8.
Adrienne E. Gavin, ‘The Child in British Literature: An Introduction,’ The Child in British Literature: Literary Constructions of Childhood, Medieval to Contemporary (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2012), 3.
- 9.
Plumb’s account subscribes largely to a historical model of steady improvement, while Lloyd deMause, in The History of Childhood (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974), posits a ‘psychohistorical’ trajectory of increasing parental empathy resulting in incremental improvements to the lives of children. David Rudd has observed that histories of children’s books also tended to follow this ‘humanist’ and ‘presentist’ ethos until the intervention of poststructuralism in children’s literature scholarship; see ‘The Development of Children’s Literature’ in The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature (ed. David Rudd, Abingdon: Routledge, 2010): 3–13.
- 10.
Peter Hunt, Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, 61). For a useful discussion of Hunt’s assertion, see M. O. Grenby, Children’s Literature (2nd Edition, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 2–3.
- 11.
Matthey Grenby, ‘Bibliography,’ International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (2nd edition, vol. 1, Peter Hunt, ed., Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 203.
- 12.
See Isaac Kramnick’s ‘Children’s Literature and Bourgeois Ideology: Observations on Culture and Industrial Capitalism in the Later Eighteenth Century’ (Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 12 [1983]: 11–44) and Alan Richardson’s Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); one of the most influential of Mitzi Myers’s many contributions is ‘Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children’s Books’ (Children’s Literature 14 [1986]: 31–56); using a variety of documents, including children’s marginalia in their books, Grenby explores the child’s experience of reading in The Child Reader.
- 13.
See, for example, Anna Mae Duane’s Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010) and Courtney Weikle-Mills’s Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640–1868 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).
- 14.
Lamb famously referred to Barbauld and her peers as ‘those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child’ (The Life, Letters, and Writings of Charles Lamb, 6 vols., ed. Percy Fitzgerald [1876; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1971], I: 421). Wordsworth offers a lengthy lament for the child trained in rational pedagogy in Book V of The Prelude.
- 15.
Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore, ‘Little Differences: Children, Their Books, and Culture in the Study of Early Modern Europe,’ Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3.
- 16.
Ibid., 10.
- 17.
Kimberley Reynolds, Children’s Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4.
- 18.
Brian Sutton-Smith, ‘The Psychology of Childlore: The Triviality Barrier,’ Western Folklore 29.1 (1970): 1–8. Sutton-Smith remarks on how all things connected to childhood—play, imagination, irrationality—are relegated to the realm of the ‘unserious.’
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O’Malley, A. (2018). Introduction: Eighteenth-Century Childhoods and Literary Cultures. In: O'Malley, A. (eds) Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods. Literary Cultures and Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94737-2_1
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