Rousseau's Émile and Early Children's Literature (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rousseau's Émile and Early Children's Literature Robert J. Bator (bio) Sylvia W. Patterson . Rousseau's Émile and Early Children's Literature (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1971). Histories of children's literature usually hop through the eighteenth century in a single chapter. Newbery, Day, Edgeworth and a few others are leapfrogged in an impatient effort to get on to that "golden" nineteenth century. To see Patterson pause to search out some of the rarer stuff from the 1700's is pleasurable. That Patterson, limiting herself to the influence of one philosopher on ten English writers in the last twenty years of the century, can come up with a 177-page book demonstrates how rich the period can be. After lengthy summary of Émile, the author painstakingly scrutinizes for Rousseau's influence twenty-one works from: Anna Barbauld and John Aikin, Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, Eleanor Fenn, Dorothy and Mary Jane Kilner, Hannah More, Sarah Trimmer, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Influence is too strong a word. Patterson acknowledges that her intent is to show what Rousseau's ideas were, that major authors knew them, and that some of the ideas crop up in the juvenile works covered. Where direct influence cannot be posited, Patterson wisely suggests that Rousseau's ideas coincide with a given author. Mostly, Patterson demonstrates such parallelism abundantly and credibly. [End Page 238] Thus, when she points out that Rousseau felt the same way that Mary Wollstonecraft did about breast feeding, the reader cannot carp. A few pages later (p. 109) Patterson converts this to "Mary Wollstonecraft follows Rousseau in the idea of the mother nursing her own child." Such overreaching does not clarify but clouds the extent of Rousseau's influence. On Wollstonecraft there is also some omission. Only internal evidence is cited by Patterson to show that Original Stories (1788) exhibits Wollstonecraft's use of Rousseau, yet at least one biographer of Wollstonecraft gives the year and month when she read Émile—and her favorable reaction to it (G. R. Stirling Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft: a Study in Economics and Romance, London: Martin Secker, 1911, p. 74). In summarizing Émile and in illustrating the central irony of Rousseau's disciples writing any books for children, Patterson is admirable. I would fault only the selective vision. What about some apostles of Rousseau who, though French, had a wide English audience? Maria Edgeworth saw Arnaud Berquin's The Children's Friend (England, 1783) as universally popular. She also translated a work of Madame de Genlis to whom one critic attributes more influence in England than Émile. Even accepting the restriction to English authors, one finds the works chosen with a restricted field of vision. Granted that three works by Lady Eleanor Fenn can epitomize the fourteen or so she wrote, why not include Fables in Monosyllables (c. 1783), which Patterson mentions but does not cite even though it contains the first direct quotation from Rousseau in an English children's book? Why omit that and then hunt for parallels to Émile in her other works? One suspects that Fenn's Fables were not accessible to the author. Only eight of the major works traced by Patterson are used in eighteenth-century versions; of the eight only four are first editions. Such versions are admittedly hard to come by, but later editions are likely to be brutally revised the way even Goody Two-Shoes was butchered by nineteenth-century editors. To focus on major authors is a sound way of explicating Rousseau. It might be difficult to grant even nodding attention to what Percy Muir calls the "monstrous regiment" of anonymous and lesser known female writers of the period. One can dispense with Harriet English or Lucy Peacock, but Lucy Pinchard in The Two Cousins (1794) and H. S.'s Anecdotes of Mary (1795) both contain direct quotations from Rousseau. There may be more among the hack writers. Under minor lapses in biography, the reader should know that the Kilners, Mary Jane and Dorothy, were not sisters, as Patterson has them, but sisters-in-law. The notion of Rousseau's influence on juvenile literature which has often been skeletally treated elsewhere has been fleshed out by Patterson...