‘Advice […] by one as insignificant as a MOUSE’: Human and Non-human Infancy in Eighteenth-Century Moral Animal Tales

Höing, Anja

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8_8

Anja Höing³

235 Accesses

Abstract

The author examines the role of animal characters in eighteenth-century and Romantic-period moral tales for children, concentrating on a selection of stories by Dorothy Kilner and Sarah Trimmer which either feature an animal narrator or are focalised through an animal character. Such tales take their point of departure, Höing argues, in a sense of the ontological closeness of animal and infant, of their shared lack of adult rationality. Hence, the animal characters are used in these stories as both a metaphor for and a metonym of the child reader, whose moral education requires them to identify with but also to transcend the pre-rational animal protagonist. The narrative structures of these tales, in Höing’s analysis, therefore combine both an Enlightenment view of infancy as a limited developmental stage with an emergent Romantic valorisation of the sensibility and sympathy of infancy.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 84.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Softcover Book: USD 109.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 109.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
Roderick McGillis, ‘Irony and Performance: The Romantic Child’, in Adrienne Gavin (ed.), The Child in British Literature (London: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 101–15 (114, 105).
2.
Ann Wierda Rowland, ‘Learned Pigs and Literate Children: Becoming Human in Eighteenth-Century Literary Cultures’, in Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, ed. Andrew O’Malley (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 99–115 (101, 103, 113).
3.
Tess Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786-1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 39.
4.
Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2002), p. 7.
5.
Cosslett, Talking Animals, 41.
6.
David Rudd, The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature (London, New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 237; M. O. Grenby, ‘“A Conservative Woman Doing Radical Things”: Sarah Trimmer and The Guardian of Education’, in Culturing the Child, 1690–1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers, ed. Donelle Ruwe (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2005), p. 137.
7.
Cosslett, Talking Animals, 49.
8.
Jane Spencer, ‘Creating Animal Experience in Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33/4 (2010), pp. 469–86 (470, 472).
9.
John Berger, About Looking (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1980), p. 10.
10.
Berger , About Looking, p. 2. Berger himself concedes that ‘nostalgia towards animals was an 18th century invention’, thus placing the nostalgia for the thing lost before the moment he pinpoints as the one at which the loss allegedly occurred. See About Looking, p. 10.
11.
Berger, About Looking, p. 2.
12.
Equating the animal with historic cultures is a frequent device in late twentieth-century talking animal stories, such as Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972). In Adams’s rabbit story, the narrator directly compares the animal protagonists to primitive humans.
Richard Adams, Watership Down (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 169.
13.
Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd, ‘Introduction: Into the Wild’, in Wild Things. Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism, ed. Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), p. 5.
14.
Dobrin and Kidd, ‘Into the Wild’, p. 5. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia: or, a New System of Education (Dublin, 1779), p. 103.
15.
Dobrin and Kidd, ‘Into the Wild’, p. 6.
16.
Thomas Kullmann, ‘Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale and the Myth of Childhood Innocence’, Poetica 46, 3/4 (2014), pp. 317–330 (329).
17.
Rousseau, Emilius, p. 103.
18.
Dobrin and Kidd, ‘Into the Wild’, p. 6.; Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. xv.
19.
Karen Coats, ‘Fantasy’, in The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, ed. David Rudd (London, New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 78.
20.
Coats, ‘Fantasy’, pp. 78–9.
21.
Sarah Trimmer, Fabulous Histories Designed for the Instruction of Children, Respecting their Treatment of Animals (London, 1798), pp. vii, ii.
22.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. vii.
23.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. vii.
24.
Cosslett, Talking Animals, 37.
25.
Coats, ‘Fantasy’, p. 79; Rudd, Companion to Children’s Literature, p. 237.
26.
Dobrin and Kidd, ‘Into the Wild’, p. 6.
27.
Cosslett, Talking Animals, p. 19.
28.
Anja Höing, Reading Divine Nature: Religion and Nature in English Animal Stories (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2017), p. 96.
29.
Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast (Urbana: Illinois Paperback, 2001), p. 136.
30.
John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. John W. and Jean S. Yolton. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 105.
31.
René Descartes, Discourse on the Method and the Mediations (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 73; Lori Gruen, Ethics and Animals – An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 3.
32.
Rousseau, Emilius, p. 103.
33.
Dobrin and Kidd, ‘Into the Wild’, p. 6; Locke, Some Thoughts, 138.
34.
Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child (London, New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 11–12.
35.
Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 22.
36.
Dobrin and Kidd, ‘Into the Wild’, p. 5.
37.
Later animal stories, from Victorian and Edwardian Britain, would see this child/instinct connection exaggerated into an almost exclusively Rousseauvian representation of children and animals. These stories, such as William Gordon Stables’s (1840–1910) Sable and White (1893) or Richard Jefferies’s (1848–87) Wood Magic (1881), represent the child’s ‘animal instinct’ as universally good and also introduce a universal language allowing human infants to communicate with animals or nature.
38.
Rousseau, Emilius, p. 103.
39.
Dobrin and Kidd, ‘Into the Wild’, p. 6.
40.
Locke, Some Thoughts, p. 172.
41.
Coats, ‘Fantasy’, p. 79; Spencer, ‘Creating Animal Experience’, p. 469.
42.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 20.
43.
Cosslett, Talking Animals, p. 45.
44.
Cosslett, Talking Animals, pp. 20–1.
45.
See Dorothy Kilner, Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (Hamburg: tredition, 2011), p. 44; Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 104.
46.
Cosslett, Talking Animals, p. 45.
47.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, pp. 144, 145, 146.
48.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 147.
49.
Here, one can see how Trimmer’s and Kilner’s stories stand in direct opposition to the male Romantic writers analysed by Plotz, who ‘practice a kind of forcible repatriation of childhood, a patriarchal kidnapping that wrests children away from the female sphere’ (Plotz, Vocation of Childhood, p. xvi).
50.
Geoffrey Summerfield, Fantasy and Reason: Children’s Literature in the Eighteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1984), p. xi.
51.
Berger, About Looking, p. 10.
52.
Trimmer , Fabulous Histories, p. 115. Arguments based on hegemonic dominance and power struggles do also appear in the stories, however: Trimmer, for example, visibly struggles to justify human meat consumption and finally presents the argument that ‘we must eat animals, or they would at length eat us, at least all that would otherwise support us’ (p. 57).
53.
Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 5.
54.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 145.
55.
Kilner, Life and Perambulations, p. 13.
56.
Kilner, Life and Perambulations, p. 14.
57.
Kilner, Life and Perambulations, pp. 13, 14.
58.
See ‘Wildlife Expert Reveals for the First Time Britain’s Top Animal Killers’, Wildwood Trust, March 13, 2012, available at: https://wildwoodtrust.org/wildwood-kent/news/wildlife-expert-reveals-first-time-britain%E2%80%99s-top-animal-killers (last accessed November 2017).
59.
Rousseau, Emilius, p. 114.
60.
In Trimmer’s story this childhood Eden is even literally a garden: the Bensons’ walled-in orchard inhabited by fantastical talking birds.
61.
Kilner, Life and Perambulations, p. 63.
62.
Kilner, Life and Perambulations, pp. 71, 72.
63.
Cosslett, Talking Animals, p. 2.
64.
O’Malley, Making of the Modern Child, p. 11.
65.
Kilner, Life and Perambulations, pp. 72, 71.
66.
Kilner, Life and Perambulations, p. 32.
67.
Kilner, Life and Perambulations, p. 61.
68.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 123.
69.
Kilner, Life and Perambulations, p. 68.
70.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 168.
71.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 49.
72.
William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. J. M. Nosworthy (London: Methuen, 1972), I. vi. 23–41.
73.
Dobrin and Kidd, ‘Into the Wild’, p. 5; Rousseau, Emilius, p. 103.
74.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 172.
75.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 26.
76.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 171.
77.
Maria Nikolajeva, Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 155.
78.
Nikolajeva, Voice and Subjectivity, p. 156.
79.
Cosslett, Talking Animals, p. 45.
80.
Cosslett, Talking Animals, p. 45.
81.
Anja Müller, Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689-1789 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 48.
82.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 134.
83.
Silvia Granata, ‘Talking Animals and the Instruction of Children: Dorothy Kilner’s Rational Brutes’, in Britain and Italy in the Long Eighteenth Century: Literary and Art Theories, ed. Rosamaria Loretelli, Frank O’Gorman (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 181–93 (189).
84.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 170.
85.
Kilner, Life and Perambulations, p. 73.
86.
Nikolajeva, Power, Voice and Subjectivity, p. 156.
87.
Cosslett, Talking Animals, p. 44.
88.
Kilner, Life and Perambulations, p. 43; original emphasis.
89.
Summerfield, Fantasy and Reason, p. xiv.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany
Anja Höing

Authors

Anja Höing
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anja Höing .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

English Studies, Zagreb University, Zagreb, Croatia
Martina Domines Veliki
English Studies, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Cian Duffy

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Höing, A. (2020). ‘Advice […] by one as insignificant as a MOUSE’: Human and Non-human Infancy in Eighteenth-Century Moral Animal Tales. In: Domines Veliki, M., Duffy, C. (eds) Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8_8

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8_8
Published: 30 August 2020
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-50428-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-50429-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics