Changing Agendas

Abstract

Changing Agendas Ruth B. Bottigheimer (bio) Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic: Children's Literature in England from Its Beginnings to 1839, by Mary V. Jackson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Frances Fairchild and Margery Meanwell inhabit the pages of Mary Jackson's study, along with Goody Two-Shoes and Primrose Prettyface. In prose with a bite, Jackson pithily characterizes authors of seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century English children's literature who, like Sarah Trimmer, viewed their world "through a lens ground between the stones of religious and social orthodoxy" (132). This observation follows from and is amply demonstrated by Jackson's thesis, that children's literature was rooted in the conditions and imperatives of the adult world, and its corollary, that children's literature was regarded as a tool to shape the young to the needs of the adult world (xi). Some years ago Geoffrey Summerfield's Fantasy and Reason: Children's Literature in the Eighteenth Century (University of Georgia Press, 1984) covered much the same ground. Summerfield's emphasis on the lives of children's literature authors complements Jackson's study, but his tone differs profoundly from Jackson's, for his work reflected and incorporated the newly awakened awareness of the 1970s about the socializing intent of children's literature, against which he reacted with acerbic criticism. Three major clusters of literature for children dominate Jackson's analysis: those works that express John Locke's vision of the child; those that incorporate Rousseau's views; and those occasioned by the French Revolution and Terror. At a stroke, Jackson suggests, John Locke's thoughts on human understanding erased original sin from the pedagogical imperative by declaring the child's mind to be a blank slate. Hard on its heels, charity and Sunday schools developed in England and introduced forms of reading material that incorporated and implicitly expounded Locke's vision of the growing child. In Jackson's view, Enlightenment concepts thus entered English awareness simultaneously from two directions: [End Page 162] from the top down via intellectuals and from the bottom up through children's literature, like that used in charity and Sunday schools. Effective agents of instruction, the schools of the Sunday School Movement had 23,421 pupils in 1,327 schools in 1723, numbers that continued to grow for the next eighty years. Enough has been written about Rousseau's Emile to last a lifetime, but far too little attention has been paid to his enraging creation Sophie, whose education was designed to produce the perfect wife for Emile. Jackson redresses that omission and in the process pinpoints the eighteenth-century moment in which children's literature became gender-specific. In an insightful discussion (96-99) of humor and irony, "license, freedom, an entitlement of sorts" (96), she concludes that girls were soon to lose this entitlement, as their idealized literary counterparts became the earthly angels their readers were supposed to imitate (139), in part, at least, modeling themselves on Rousseau's ideal, Sophie (149ff.). Not all doors closed on docile maidens, however, for society rewarded Sophie-clones with highborn husbands, at least in tales about Primrose Prettyface and her mid- to late-eighteenth-century English ilk. But the French Revolution and the Terror that followed put an end to plots with poor-but-worthy children rewarded with "estate and esteem," for an intractable conservatism within the middle classes produced a new literature for English children designed to maintain class distinctions and to restrain class crossovers like those that had benefited poor Primrose Prettyface. Charity and Sunday school education had fostered a "growing conviction of the rights of the individual among the lower-middle classes and artisans" (169), a conviction suddenly perceived as bloodily dangerous when tumbrels lumbered toward Parisian guillotines. Hence, from the 1790s onward, Jackson asserts, artists and literary figures joined the conservative middle classes and the recently liberal aristocracy in favoring a new direction for the content of children's books. "Many attitudes and ideals that had flourished in trade books during the freewheeling transitional years were now suspect as potential seeds of revolution. The books of Newbery and his colleagues from 1740 to 1765, and socioeconomic developments between 1750 and 1785, had...