The Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction Ruth Anne Thompson (bio) Bratton, J. S. The Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction. New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1981. "If you would in fact have a literature of saints, first of all have a nation of them." Although John Henry Newman wrote that in 1852, the authors of children's fiction in the nineteenth century scarcely agreed. In The Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction, J. S. Bratton details their struggles to reverse the procedure and produce saints through literature. The book succeeds on two levels: first, as an effective piece of scholarship; and second, as a cautionary tale of what children's fiction once was and ought not to be again. Bratton's purpose is to describe and evaluate the formulae of didactic fiction that dominated the field in the Victorian age, the first era to develop a concept of childhood as a state apart. Examining lists of works distributed through schools as rewards for attendance and behavior, she offers detailed summaries of plots and themes, encapsulated biographies of authors, and some collation of motifs and evaluation of quality. Contending that the humanistic tradition of literary criticism "offers no effective approach to the material," she presents what is essentially a sociology of literature, covering with thoroughness, if not always with originality, the writers, publishers and purchasers of children's fiction. By checking publishers' catalogs, school records, and even dedications in flyleaves of the books themselves, she has come up with a representative sampling of the works and authors which were popular with the adults who bought books for children. The new literacy of the Victorians, fostered by growing educational legislation, was closely connected to Bible study and the Sunday school movement. Children of the poor were to be engaged in saving their souls, and were to be kept out of mischief on the one day each week that they were free from their labors. The deserving poor needed to be rewarded for making the effort to better themselves, while at the same time they needed to be protected from the temptations and seductions of the printed word. The Religious Tract Society and the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, fueled by the fires of evangelicalism in the early years of the century, took on the burden of supplying uplifting moral tales for young readers. By 1818 they had printed from twenty-five to thirty million copies of such works, which were often distributed, like the chapbooks they were meant to replace, through the networks of ballad sellers. These "cheap but gorgeous" Sunday school prizes are divided by Bratton into three major classifications: evangelical works, books for boys, and books for girls. The motifs that characterized the earliest works, conversions, deathbed scenes, and infant piety, were taken from the common stock of popular literature rather than from "high culture." Many writers were women, often spinsters of indifferent education, who found that writing such tales produced a genteel and socially acceptable source of income, while at the same time they satisfied the evangelical call for benevolent works outside the home. By the fourth decade of the century, the stories began to carry a social as well as a religious message. Not only were the young to be convinced of innate sinfulness, they were also to be socialized into prescribed roles, partly to maintain the status quo in a society which was undergoing, most uneasily, a radical transformation. As Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism percolated through Victorian sensibilities, the evangelical emphasis on the hero-soul engaged in a dramatic life-death struggle with the powers of darkness gave way before more immediate concerns and practical considerations. A growing focus on the lower orders as mere instruments in the lives of their betters appeared in books like The Little Servant Maids, which reflected the chilling anonymity imposed on the individual by wiping out the most primary sense of identity: "Mrs. Sewell, thinking fine names unsuitable for little servant maids living in a tradesman's family, always called [them] Mary." Commercial publishers quickly recognized the economic potential of the children's market, and after mid-century, when the domination of sectarian groups began to...