Abstract
Charlotte Smith's first three books for children—Rural Walks (1795), Rambles Farther (1796), and Minor Morals (1798)—offer multiple portraits of both authoritative mother teachers and dying mothers. With the tension between these two types of mothers, Smith constructs an argument for collaborative motherhood, or networks of surrogate mothers who nurture daughters at two crucial stages: just before adolescence and just before marriage. While other late eighteenth-century authors of didactic children's literature also portray maternal pedagogues and dead mothers, Smith's emphasis on a model of surrogate motherhood that crosses both class and generational boundaries is unusual. In proposing collaborative motherhood as a strategy for surviving the trauma of patriarchy, Smith also reformulates the role of the mother as a culturally valuable, learned (rather than “natural”) occupation crucial to both the nurturance of children and the transmission of knowledge to them.
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