Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America by Patricia Crain

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America by Patricia Crain MicKenzie Fasteland (bio) Patricia Crain. Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America. U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. Patricia Crain's Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America constructs an impressive history exploring the ideological underpinnings of literacy development in the United States, a practice she argues promised children both the opportunity for property acquisition (of themselves, of books) and escape (from themselves [End Page 152] into a book). If children were the property of their parents—or in the case of enslaved children, their owners—literacy provided one method for gaining the cultural and financial capital required for independence. Simultaneously, early children's literature promoted the affective bonds between adults and children, thereby ensuring what Courtney Weikle-Mills calls the "transfer of children's affectionate feelings, through education, from their parents to the law" (43) Although literacy nominally promised self-possession, its promise was highly conditional upon the child's race. Laws banned enslaved children from learning to read and write, whereas Christian missionaries used the promise of ownership to perpetuate the cultural genocide of Native populations by "acculturating them to white property customs" (7). After the Civil War, images of the "reading child" illustrated an alternative privilege offered to middle-class white children: the option to escape oneself. If reading became a site of pleasure for middle-class children, the sight of children reading and writing provided adults nostalgic access to their own childhood selves, leading to what Crain calls the "medial child" in the late nineteenth century, a figure that she argues "often functions as a residual and conserving and at the same time emergent and creative means of accessing the 'interiorised self' (in Carolyn Steedman's term) of modernity" (8–9). Crain creates a vast network of archival and literary sites stretching from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries, and her inclusive approach situates her scholarship at the intersection of book history, literary analysis, and histories of childhood. She begins with two chapters examining the divergent trajectories of two canonical children's texts, Goody Two Shoes and "The Children in the Woods." The former provides one of the earliest links between literacy and cultural capital, as Goody's nigh-magical ability to read and write, and in turn, instruct others using her wooden alphabet, provides her (and by extension, disenfranchised populations) a radical new route to prosperity, one outside lines of inheritance that cannot be lost; however, later adaptations would lose this revolutionary spirit, transforming Goody's "economic bildung" into a fairy tale suited more for promoting reading absorption instead of agency (29). In contrast, Crain traces the near 400-year history of "The Children in the Woods" from adult ballad to cherished children's tale to excavate the imagined child reader so central to the development of children's literature. Despite its dark subject—a dispute resulting in the death of two children—the ballad became popular because the genre's orality allowed eighteenth-century collectors and children's publishers to imagine a child audience listening to and learning from their literary peers' experience. While as much a product of nostalgia as a burgeoning literary market, this hypothetical child reader demonstrates that "what makes children's literature possible is adult consciousness of childhood as a privileged time and space [End Page 153] that's been lost . . . and yet remains indefinitely accessible to adult memory and imagination through the medium of literature and the practices of literacy" (53). And yet, if Goody promised equality (at least in its early iteration), later adaptations of "The Children in the Woods" began to carve out childhood as a haven only for white children. Here, Crain begins to develop one of her most crucial interventions, which she continues throughout her third and fourth chapters: how literacy instruction, practice, and ideology upheld colonialism and white supremacy in the United States. Her third chapter explains how missionaries indoctrinated Cherokee children in white property practices by teaching literacy through the Lancaster pedagogical system. In contrast to the slow reveries of white, middle-class reading...