Abstract
This chapter re-situates theories of mind at the heart of the nineteenth century’s distinctive literary and cultural responses to death and the dead by examining attempts to bring about social reform through reshaping how children learned about death and the dead. It shows how educational writers drew upon theories of association psychology to develop a belief that, by policing representations of the dead in the nation’s schoolrooms and nurseries, it would be possible to banish demoralising fears and superstitions about death to the pre-nineteenth-century past, and thus to guarantee continuing social progress throughout the nineteenth century. Questions of what and how the young learn about death and the dead were therefore deemed to be of crucial importance in determining their later attitudes to mortality as adults. This chapter begins by discussing how nineteenth-century writers and readers rejected inherited modes of representing death that emphasised bodily dissolution, gloom, and terror, such as those found in Graveyard poetry. It then considers why educators believed that they might reshape individual and cultural attitudes to mortality through the careful superintendence of what children saw, heard, and read about the dead, by examining pedagogical textbooks, domestic advice manuals, and accounts of childhood by Elizabeth Hamilton and Edmund Gosse, among others. It concludes by examining the role played by Wordsworth’s poem ‘We Are Seven’ in this reformatory process, tracking its journey from the poetic margins of Lyrical Ballads to its position as a schoolroom and nursery staple, committed to memory by generations of young Victorians.
A simple child, dear brother Jim,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
Wordsworth, ‘We Are Seven’
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Notes
- 1.
Cairns Craig, Association and the Literary Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 6.
- 2.
Sarah Winter, The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read With Charles Dickens (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 33.
- 3.
See, in addition to the texts cited elsewhere in this chapter, Gregory Tate, The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Tyson Stolte, ‘“And Graves Give Up their Dead”: The Old Curiosity Shop, Victorian Psychology, and the Nature of the Future Life’, Victorian Literature and Culture 42 (2014), 187–207; William Hatherell, ‘“Words and Things”: Locke, Hartley and the Associationist Context for the Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, Romanticism: The Journal of Romantic Culture and Criticism 12.3 (2006), 223–235.
- 4.
Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 139.
- 5.
This is a relatively early reference to the ‘graveyard poets’ as a group. As Eric Parisot has recently pointed out, scholarly attempts to taxonomise the sub-genre of graveyard poetry have been hampered by the contradictory impulses which suggest, at one extreme, that there are only four ‘graveyard poems’ proper (including, of course, Gosse’s party-piece, ‘The Grave’) and, at the other, that a vast host of popular verse on similar themes (life’s transience, death’s inevitability, and the consolations of religious belief) cannot sensibly be excluded from any ‘graveyard school’ canon. So although these particular poems by Young and Porteus do not haunt the graveyard in quite the same way as ‘The Grave’—or, indeed, as Young’s own ‘Night Thoughts’ (1742)—they can still be linked to what remains ‘an indefinite literary grouping at best, unstable in configuration and subject to literary dispute’ (Eric Parisot, ‘The Historicity of Reading Graveyard Poetry’, in Experiments in Genre in Eighteenth-Century Literature ed. Sandro Jung, (Ghent: Academia Press, 2011), 86). Indeed, the fact that the poems had been bound together suggests that they were associated with each other by readers long before the term ‘graveyard poets’ was ever coined. For a dissenting view on the possibility of classifying any of these texts under the ‘graveyard’ heading, see Cheryl Wanko, ‘The Making of a Minor Poet: Edward Young and Literary Taxonomy’, English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 72.4 (1991), 355–367.
- 6.
Edward Young, ‘A Poem on the Last Day’, in The Works of the Reverend Edward Young Vol. 1 (London, 1774), I: 23–30. Gosse quotes the opening four lines of this passage in Father and Son (140), but I have provided a longer extract here in order to give a more detailed impression of what Gosse was reading.
- 7.
For more on eighteenth-century death culture, see Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 366–367.
- 8.
Robert Blair, ‘The Grave’, in The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer ed. by Rev. George Gilfillan (London: Cassell Petter and Galpin, 1878), 133–156 (l. 5). Subsequent references will be made by line number in the text.
- 9.
Gosse, 139.
- 10.
Robert Pattison, The Child Figure in English Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978), 112.
- 11.
Washington Irving, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (Philadelphia, 1829), Vol. 1, 228.
- 12.
Isaac D’Israeli, ‘The Book of Death’, in A Second Series of Curiosities of Literature (London: John Murray, 1824), Vol. 2, 297. Emphasis original.
- 13.
Isaac D’Israeli, ‘History of the Skeleton of Death’, in A Second Series of Curiosities of Literature London: John Murray, 1824), Vol. 2., 298–315 (p. 311).
- 14.
D’Israeli’s claim is demonstrably false, and seems to elide epicureanism with all of ancient culture.
- 15.
See Chap. 3, above.
- 16.
Priestley’s 1775 edition of Observations on Man helped popularise Hartley’s work, but also excised from it the most speculative theories of vibration, which he felt were scientifically unsustainable. For more on Priestley’s associationism, see Cairns Craig, Associationism and the Literary Imagination, pp. 20–24.
- 17.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 111. Coleridge’s rejection of Hartleian associationism is often cited as a foundational moment in the development of a distinctly Romantic aesthetics. Indeed, theories of association have been identified as being both fundamental to the development of Romanticism and antithetical to its emphasis on the world-making imagination. Cairns Craig has offered the most sustained defence of the compatibility of associationism with the theories of imagination that were central to the Romantic project.
- 18.
Martin Kallich, The Association of Critical Ideas and Theory in Eighteenth-Century England (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 66.
- 19.
Tyson Stolte, ‘“What is Natural in Me”: David Copperfield, Faculty Psychology, and the Association of Ideas’, Victorian Review 36.1 (2010), 57.
- 20.
Sarah Winter, p. 13. See also Nicholas Dames, ‘“The withering of the Individual”: Psychology in the Victorian Novel’, in A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Francis O’Gorman (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 94.
- 21.
See, for example, Stephen Bygrave, Uses of Education: Readings in Enlightenment in England (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2009), 146–181; Ruth Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England, 1760–1860 (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 33–52; Anne Stott, ‘Evangelicalism and Enlightenment: The Educational Agenda of Hannah More’, in Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices, ed. Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin (Farnham and Burlington, VA: Ashgate, 2009), 41–57.
- 22.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 5th Ed (London, 1706), 281.
- 23.
David Hartley, Observations on Man 4th ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1801), 60.
- 24.
James Mill, ‘Education’, in Political Writings ed. Terence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 139.
- 25.
‘Education’, in Supplement to the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, IV (1824), 14.
- 26.
Winter, Pleasures of Memory, 58.
- 27.
Elizabeth Gargano, Reading Victorian Schoolrooms: Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 12.
- 28.
Elizabeth Hamilton, Letters on Education (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1801), iv.
- 29.
Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman, Women and Education, 1800–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 44.
- 30.
Jane Rendall, ‘“Elementary principles of Education”: Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth and the Uses of Common Sense Philosophy’, History of European Ideas, 39.5 (2013), 616. Hamilton’s politics have recently been reassessed as her critical reputation improves. Janice Farrar Thaddeus offers a particularly nuanced reading of Hamilton’s politics, identifying her as a writer who combined conservatism and radicalism in ways that render the binary oppositions favoured in so many accounts of the period useless. She links this political ambiguity to the comparative lack of interest in Hamilton’s works. Claire Grogan has recently expanded upon this observation in a full-length study of her politics. See Janice Farrar Thaddeus, ‘Elizabeth Hamilton’s Domestic Politics’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 23 (1994): 265–284; Claire Grogan, Politics and Genre in the Works of Elizabeth Hamilton, 1756–1816 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). See also M. O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 27.
- 31.
Elizabeth Hamilton, pp. xiii–xiv.
- 32.
Dugald Stewart, The Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man in The Works of Dugald Stewart (Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown, 1829), Vol. 5: 529.
- 33.
Stewart, The Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man, 530.
- 34.
Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (London: 1792), 388.
- 35.
Stewart, The Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man, 530.
- 36.
Stewart, Elements, 387.
- 37.
Rendall, ‘Elementary Principles’, 619. Hamilton would later become close friends with Stewart and his circle. Stewart wrote to her in 1801, praising Letters on Education and inviting her to visit him in Edinburgh. She took him up on the offer in order to obtain ‘the advantage of literary conversation, in a very chosen circle of society’ and ‘much improvement, even from the casual hints of such a man as Mr. S—’. See Elizabeth Benger, Memoirs of the Late Mrs Elizabeth Hamilton, with a Selection from her Correspondence, and Other Unpublished Writings (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Browne, 1818): vol. 2. 49.
- 38.
Elizabeth Hamilton, Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, 6th ed. (London: 1818), 23.
- 39.
Hamilton, Letters on Education, 4.
- 40.
Maria Edgeworth, ‘Mrs Elizabeth Hamilton’, The Times, 5 October 1816, 3.
- 41.
Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education (London: 1801), vol. 3, 140.
- 42.
Hamilton, Letters on Education, 110; 40.
- 43.
Lesley Ginsberg, ‘Race and Romantic Pedagogies in the Works of Lydia Maria Child’, in Romantic Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: National and Transatlantic Contexts, ed. Monika M. Elbert and Lesley Ginsberg (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015), 137–154.
- 44.
Lydia Maria Child, On the Management and Education of Children (London: John W. Parker, 1835), 73.
- 45.
See, for example, The Moral, intellectual, and Physical Training of the Young explained, illustrated, and enforced. Being a new edition of Mrs. Child’s Mother’s Book (Glasgow: W. R. McPhun, 1856).
- 46.
For a good, scholarly account of the Hydesville events, see David Chapin, Exploring Other Worlds: Margaret Fox, Elisha Kent Kane, and the Antebellum Culture of Curiosity (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 31–54.
- 47.
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1873), 148.
- 48.
Michelle Faubert, Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 161.
- 49.
Faubert identifies Thomas Brown as the ultimate example of this tendency. Brown worked with Stewart at Edinburgh University, before eventually succeeding him as Professor of Moral Philosophy, and was deeply influenced by his colleague’s associationist theories. He was also an astonishingly productive poet, and his combination of these two roles illustrates how ‘the associationist-poet can encourage the reader to follow his ethical directions without even appearing to give advice’ (Rhyming Reason, 161). Brown was explicit about his intervention in moral education, arguing that the poet fashions ‘our conduct even when we are not conscious that we are obeying him’. See Thomas Brown, ‘Preface’, The Paradise of Coquettes (Edinburgh: John Murray, 1814), xxxv.
- 50.
See Gosse, Father and Son, 142.
- 51.
Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romantics and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 164.
- 52.
Philip Connell, ‘How to Popularize Wordsworth’, in Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain ed. Philip Connell and Nigel Leask (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 276.
- 53.
There is also an implied class division between the poem’s interlocutors, as Heather Glen has recently pointed out, arguing that ‘Wordsworth’s sharp sense of the close relation between social knowledge and power is writ large in this little poem’. Heather Glen, ‘We Are Seven in the 1790s’, in Grasmere 2012: Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference (Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks, 2012), 26.
- 54.
Karen Sánchez-Eppler, ‘Decomposing: Wordsworth’s Poetry of Epitaph and English Burial Reform’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 42.4 (1988), 421. In Chap. 2, above, I discussed the frequency with which Wordsworth lingers over narratives of rural depopulation in Lyrical Ballads, and there is another here, although it is seldom noted. The adult’s focus on eliminating the dead from reckonings of the social, and the reader’s desire to grasp something about Wordsworth’s attitude to death, occlude a more troubling fact: the loss of six young members of a rural community. It is a tale of demographic collapse, which yet again indicates Wordsworth’s concern that the future of such places, and of their distinctive cultures, looked dangerously fragile.
- 55.
Aaron Fogel has recently linked the poem to the census debates of the late 1790s, and argues convincingly for both ‘We Are Seven’ and Crabbe’s The Parish Register as example of ‘anti-census’ verse, which ‘drive beyond or work against current operating assumptions about enumeration, and…expose the aesthetics of what we take to be non-aesthetic counting procedures’. Aaron Fogel, ‘Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven” and Crabbe’s The Parish Register: Poetry and Anti-Census’, Studies in Romanticism 48.1 (2009), 24. See also Hollis Robins, ‘“We Are Seven” and the First British Census’, English Language Notes 48.2 (2010), 201–213; and James M. Garrett, Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 13–42.
- 56.
A wonderful discussion of the significance of the poem’s striking reliance on counting can be found in Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime, 164–69.
- 57.
Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 43.
- 58.
Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature Man and Society in the Experimental Poetry, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 196. Bewell argues that Wordsworth’s belief in the similarities between children and savage peoples allows him ‘to transfer to childhood the modes of inquiry that had traditionally focused on native life’, particularly in regard to primitive notions of death’ (212). Other critics have similarly explored the significance of Wordsworth’s interest in the near anthropological study of different cultures in an attempt to explain the child’s significance. More recently, Maureen N. McLane has argued that the poem illustrates ‘almost too perfectly the difference and gap between the civilized (or modern, or philosophical, or dialectical) mind and that of primitive thought’, Maureen N. McLane, Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 57.
- 59.
Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, 197.
- 60.
Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), 24–5.
- 61.
Wordsworth, ‘Essays Upon Epitaphs’, 50.
- 62.
Kurt Fosso, Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 5.
- 63.
Donelle Ruwe, British Children’s Poetry in the Romantic Era: Verse, Riddle, and Rhyme (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014). As Ruwe demonstrates, these anthologies tended to reinforce a male canon by excluding works written for children, which were disproportionately penned by female poets.
- 64.
British Critic, 22 (August, 1803), pp. 207–208 (p. 207).
- 65.
Monthly Magazine, or British Register, 53 (June, 1822), 476.
- 66.
William Burdon, Materials for Thinking (Newcastle: 1806), 262. Burdon actually advocates allowing children over the age of 12 or 13 free access to any printed material, believing that if ‘they have been properly educated’, then they ‘may read without danger, for nothing strengthens the judgement like exercise’ (261). This proper education, of course, involves the careful superintendence of the associations that they form in infancy and early childhood.
- 67.
W. Burdon, Poetry for Children (Newcastle Upon Tyne, 1805)[no page number].
- 68.
Natalie M Houston touches on the role played by such texts in the development of children’s literature in ‘Anthologies and the Making of the Canon’, in A Companion to Victorian Poetry ed. by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 361–377.
- 69.
See N. Stephen Bauer, ‘Wordsworth and the Early Anthologies’, The Library 27.1 (1972), 37–45.
- 70.
William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 743–4.
- 71.
‘Select English Poetry, Designed for the use of Schools, and Young Persons in General’. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 13.145 (1846): 62.
- 72.
‘The Children’s Garland’, The Spectator 1751, 11 January 1862, 21.
- 73.
Maria Jewsbury, ‘Selections from the Poems of William Wordsworth, chiefly for the Use of Schools and Young Persons’, The Athenaeum, June 25, 1831, 404.
- 74.
Vicesimus Knox, Elegant Extracts, or Useful and Entertaining Pieces of Poetry, Selected for the Improvement of Youth in Speaking, Reading, Thinking, Composing (Dublin: 1789), i. Knox published further editions containing Blair’s ‘The Grave’ in 1785, 1789, 1791, 1796, 1801, 1803, 1805, 1809, and 1816.
- 75.
See Elegant Extracts, or Useful and Entertaining Passages from the Best English Authors and Translations; Principally designed for the Use of Young Persons. Originally Compiled by the Rev. Vicesimus Knox D.D.. A New Edition, Embellished with Elegant Engravings. Prepared by James G. Percival, 6 vols (Boston: Samuel Walker, 1826), Vol. 6, 253.
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McAllister, D. (2018). Death in the Schoolroom: Associationist Education and Children’s Poetry Books. In: Imagining the Dead in British Literature and Culture, 1790–1848. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97731-7_4
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