Economies of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Australia: Catherine Helen Spence’s Short Fiction for Children

Abstract

In her long-running annual column for the Adelaide Observer, ‘Gossip about Children’s Books’, Australian writer and social reformer, Catherine Helen Spence, maintained that ‘the enjoyment of a good story’ was key to a good education. Literature and education were, for Spence, inextricably intertwined and mutually reinforcing and the fate of the South Australian colony in which she lived was dependent, she argued, on its young citizens receiving a decent education. While Spence’s successive critics and biographers have well documented her advocacy of education, children’s social welfare and women’s emancipation, little attention has been focused on Spence’s literature for children. This essay will argue that Spence’s didactic short stories for the young bring together these interconnected strands of Spence’s more public activism and are significantly influenced by the pedagogic thinking of late eighteenth-century British and Irish educationists, such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Maria Edgeworth. Moreover, this essay will further suggest that Spence's short stories significantly prefigure the critically acknowledged turn in Australian's children's literature to domestic urban realism and family saga in the 1890s and early 1900s. It will utilise as its central focus Spence’s short stories for children in Adelaide Observer published throughout the 1880s, as well as her two short stories for Australia's first homegrown school reader, The Children's Hour, published in 1889 and 1890. These stories, this essay will illustrate, explicitly develop an economic sub-narrative that positions their child readers (particularly their female child readers) as active participants in consumer culture and, potentially, a force for the collective economic good of the South Australian colony for which Spence worked so hard.