An Ordered Universe

Abstract

As seen in the previous chapter, image may possess the power to shape and confine. The debate between the images of child saint and child sinner had been, in a sense, a manifestation of the much older conflict between the philosophies of Original Innocence and Original Sin. But there were other kinds of images to be found in children’s books of the nineteenth century which were not so much the products of a religious or philosophical system, as the intended producers of a social one. It is these ‘social’ images and the concept of social being that this chapter sets out to examine, and also the beginnings of the development of the inner code of self in place of the exterior definitions so far adopted. It may be argued that the impulse to order, structure and define, traceable within the domain of children’s fiction in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, arose in response to feelings of insecurity and anxiety which were caused by an undermining of the social, economic and religious status quo. There was an impulse to retreat behind the fastnesses of society in order not to be blasted by the winds of desolation and isolation, and for this purpose, society itself had to be made secure. It was with this end in mind that the ethics of usefulness, self-sacrifice and subservience of self to society were implanted in literature both for adults and children, forms of social and moral codification that would offer a sense of stability.