"Mistress of Infantine Language": Lady Ellenor Fenn, Her Set of Toys, and the "Education of Each Moment

Abstract

"Mistress of Infantine Language":Lady Ellenor Fenn, Her Set of Toys, and the "Education of Each Moment Andrea Immel (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Fenn's rational dame in her schoolroom. From Fenn, A Spelling Book (London: J. Harris, 1805). Cotsen Children's Collection, Princeton University Library. Lady Ellenor Fenn (1743-1813), better known during her lifetime under the pseudonyms Mrs. Lovechild and Mrs. Teachwell, is usually characterized in critical histories and reference books on children's literature as a prolific but well-intentioned hack who had little influence on later writers. Some critics allow that Fenn had a lively style, an observant eye, and an ability to write to the level of her intended audience, but everyone agrees that these strengths do not quite compensate for her lack of imagination, her tendency to moralize, and her apparent willingness to produce works conforming to her publisher Marshall's commercial formulas.1 After reading commentary by modern scholars on Lady Fenn, one comes away with the impression that she has been grudgingly included because she belongs to that group of late eighteenth-century writers for children that Percy Muir dubbed "a monstrous regiment of women" (Muir 82). Yet their contemporaries writing for the two leading eighteenth-century review journals, the Monthly and the Critical, present these women's accomplishments in quite a different light. For example, the respected dissenting divine and educator William Enfield observes in his article on Edgeworth's Parent's Assistant that writers for children are now considered citizens of the republic of letters: "It is not [End Page 215] now deemed an unworthy employment for writers of the most distinguished abilities, to draw up instructive and amusing books even for children. . . . At present, writers of the first order do not feel themselves degraded by employing their talents in this way; and the public is well inclined to bestow due praise on such useful exertions" (MR 21, ser. 2 [Sept. 1796]: 89). Another reviewer says in a notice of Mrs. Trimmer's Footsteps (1786) that the growing body of elementary works for children constitutes "one of the most important, though not the most brilliant, among the literary improvements of the present age. . . . This province, humble as it may seem, requires more than ordinary talents" (CR 62 [1786]: 152). Contemporary reviewers praised Lady Fenn as one of those authors like Anna Letitia Barbauld, Sarah Trimmer, and Maria Edgeworth who had the special gifts needed to write for very young readers.2 In a thoughtful review of Fenn's Parsing Lessons for the Monthly, Jabez Hirons writes that she "designs well; her method is amusing; and she has already, we are told, had the satisfaction of finding that her labours have been acceptable" (MR 28, ser. 2 [1799]: 334). The reputations of all four women were in eclipse by the end of the nineteenth century, but Fenn is the only major member of the "monstrous regiment" whose work critics have yet to reexamine. The most obvious explanation is that the majority of her works were out of print by the mid-nineteenth century.3 Another more pertinent reason may be that much of her oeuvre falls outside the purview of children's literature scholarship: Fenn's most successful books were not fiction but readers, grammars, and introductions to natural history for small children. Ironically, modern critics have not judged her by the titles contemporaries valued most highly, but rather by the handful of imaginative works written early in her career—genres to which she never returned.4 On the other hand, it may be that Fenn's achievements as a writer for children have been misunderstood rather than underestimated. Her long career coincides with the late eighteenth-century boom in the production of children's books and toys, but scholars have never noticed that by the 1790s she had become quite as interested in designing educational toys as in writing books.5 Unfortunately, fewer of the era's toys have survived than its books; as a result, it has been difficult to reappraise Fenn's career because almost all of her various "schemes for teaching" are known only from publishers' advertisements [End Page 216] or...