Nineteenth-Century Children's Satire and the Ambivalent Reader

Abstract

Nineteenth-Century Children's Satire and the Ambivalent Reader Alan Richardson (bio) Satire is initially hard to place in the history of children's literature because little or no place has been made for it. Most accounts of the development of British children's literature from its emergence in the middle of the eighteenth century to its "golden age" in the Victorian period describe a happy shift from primarily didactic works to primarily imaginative ones: from reason to fantasy, from instruction to delight, from the moral tale to the fairy tale. According to this frankly progressive model (most recently articulated by Geoffrey Summerfield in his study Fantasy and Reason), children's literature had to be liberated from its early dominance by rationalists and Christian moralists, in order for the wiser age of Victorian fantasy, with its "more open imagination" (Pickering 4), to blossom from the fairy tale revival of the earlier nineteenth century. I have argued elsewhere that this model does not adequately reflect the extent to which fairy tales were (to borrow Jack Zipes's term) "bourgeoisified" (29) in order to become accepted as reading fit for children, a process through which the distinction between didactic and fantastic often breaks down, as in the moral or moralized fairy tale characteristic of the period (Richardson). But this model also obscures—or keeps from becoming articulated—certain latent assumptions underlying both didactic and much fantastic children's literature as well, assumptions rooted in the fundamentally new conception of childhood which emerged along with (and helped make possible) the children's publishing industry. It is in analyzing the resistance not to children's fairy tales but to children's satire, a resistance left out of histories of children's literature, that our own cultural assumptions regarding children and their books—which we inherit from eighteenth-century moralists and nineteenth-century fantasists alike—can be called into question. Both the moral tale and the children's fairy tale, for example, share an underlying assumption that the child reader is not to make independent moral evaluations. In the moral tale, a child protagonist may be required to make a moral judgment, but it is always made clear to the child reader (usually through a [End Page 122] controlling parental figure) which course of action is the correct one. And even when the child is not explicitly instructed in the morality of its age and class, the fiction can be seen as taking place in a fundamentally amoral fictional world. That is, in the cases in which literary fairy tales for children do not simply (like more frankly didactic literature) reflect the social morality of the day—as Wilhelm Grimm assured readers of the revised Kinder- und Hausmärchen they would (Tatar 217)—they can be seen as essentially irrelevant to discussions of social morality altogether. This is the brunt of Coleridge's famous response to the complaint of Anna Barbauld (a relatively enlightened didactic writer for children herself) that the Rime of the Ancient Mariner "had no moral": "It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Night's tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant because one of the dates had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son" (405). Whether, like Nicholas Tucker, we view the world of fairy tales as a "morally-charged universe" (76) or, like Coleridge, as a morally empty space where questions of value become meaningless, the fairy tale exacts no more complicated an ethical response from the child reader than does the moral tale. Satire, on the other hand, as the "literary genre most implicated in historical and social particulars" (Howes 217), deals almost by definition with the revaluation of social values, and children's satire, unlike children's fantasy, found no early defenders among the Romantics or elsewhere. In fact, advocates of imaginative literature for children could make common ground with didactic writers in attacking satirical works intended for or made available to children. The tacit notion that children should remain morally naive...