Children’s Literature and Capitalism: Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain, 1850–1914 by Christopher Parkes (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Children’s Literature and Capitalism: Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain, 1850–1914 by Christopher Parkes Johanna Denzin (bio) Christopher Parkes. Children’s Literature and Capitalism: Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain, 1850–1914. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Christopher Parkes, in Children’s Literature and Capitalism: Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain, 1850–1914, argues that by the end of Britain’s first industrial revolution, the figure of the child had emerged as a victim of industrialization, and that this image embodied an inherent criticism and by extension threat to capitalism. Parkes contends that to address this threat, the depiction of children within children’s literature attempted to redefine and equate the spirit of childhood with the spirit of capitalism (1). More specifically, the child’s innate curiosity and creativity were presented as synonymous with adult entrepreneurship. The image of the child was coopted as a miniature industrialist, and the child was now seen as a willing participant in the larger capitalistic market. Any child who failed in transforming his or her own life into economic and social success, had simply failed in exhibiting sufficient curiosity and creativity—or sufficient capitalist spirit. Parkes’s central point of investigation, then, is not how capitalism influenced children, but rather how children influenced capitalism itself. As Parkes points out, the idea of linking personal initiative and economic success (or moral salvation) was not a new idea, but rather was an idea already embedded in the evangelical Protestant tradition. As early as Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs for Children (1715), children were expected to perform useful labor as a protection against idleness that led to moral weakness (3). The picture of children victimized by industrialism emerged in the writing of the Romantics, who linked the purity and sanctity of the natural world with the innocence of children (2). As factories and urban blight destroyed the rural landscape, children were enslaved as powerless laborers. It is this image of the child as a destitute waif that threatened the complacent societal acceptance of industrialism and the child’s role in the capitalist marketplace. [End Page 419] Parkes locates an important push for the reconceptualization of the child as a nascent capitalistic worker in the pedagogical work of Maria Edgeworth and her Essays on Practical Education (1801). Edgeworth stressed the need to provide children with educational experiences and toys that mimicked adult jobs and thus trained children for their life occupations. Parkes sees this identification of childhood with an apprenticeship for adulthood as an important link in re-envisioning the child as an actual participant in the market (4). Parkes also turns to the work of Samuel Smiles, who argued in Men and of Invention and Industry (1884) and Life and Labour (1887) that the Victorian age of invention was really the result of the ingenuity of childhood creativity. Smiles believed that children had the inherent ability to transform their material circumstances and achieve a social mobility that would allow them to transcend poverty and social class (6). In addition, Parkes examines the way that youth employment during the first half of the nineteenth century was framed as a way to address the perceived societal threat of the “youth problem” (11). Through employment as clerks and apprentices, young people were indoctrinated into a fixed capitalist system. The danger of this system was that young people essentially became bureaucratic slaves, locked into dead-end jobs that never offered social or financial advancement. To offset the potential criticism of this system, young adult fiction from the time period suggested that with ingenuity and creativity it was possible to break free from the rigid class system and transcend the traditional social and economic barriers. Thus, clerks or apprentices who never advanced beyond menial work had only themselves to blame; the system itself was not at fault (13–14). To develop his thesis, Parkes analyzes a group of texts from 1850–1917. He initially turns to Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1861), and suggests that in Dickens’s novels, legitimate businesses and careers needed to be tied to the moral center of the family unit (a Victorian ideal), although this connection between family and...