Nineteenth-century Children Research Articles

Enterprising Youth: Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature. Ser. Children's Literature and Culture. Edited by Monika Elbert. New York: Routledge, 2008. xxiv + 284 pages. USD 135.00 (hardback).

<i>Enterprising Youth: Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature</i>. Ser. Children's Literature and Culture. Edited by Monika Elbert. New York: Routledge, 2008. xxiv + 284 pages. USD 135.00 (hardback).

The Family in English Children's Literature , and: The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal (review)

The Family in English Children's Literature , and: The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal (review)

Puzzling Empire: Early Puzzles and Dissected Maps as Imperial Heuristics

An archival study of nineteenth-century children’s dissected maps and puzzles, this article places puzzles alongside children’s geography textbooks and adventure fiction within an imperial context. The article evaluates the puzzle pieces, boxes, and possible methods of assembly, speculating on the effects of such play on child players’ imperial consciousness.

Enterprising youth: social values and acculturation in nineteenth-century American children's literature

Enterprising youth: social values and acculturation in nineteenth-century American children's literature

Performing Working Boys: the Representation of Child Labour on the Pre- and Early Victorian Stage

During the early years of the nineteenth century children laboured in factories, down mines, up chimneys, at sea – and in the theatre. In this article, David Haldane Lawrence discusses the portrayal of child labour in the drama of the 1830s and 1840s, concentrating on five plays: The Factory Girl, The Factory Boy, The Dumb Man (or Boy) of Manchester, The Climbing Boy, and The Cabin Boy, whose child heroes extricate themselves from appalling conditions to confront their villainous oppressors, and through coincidental circumstances are elevated to a higher social position. But the realities of child labour are not fully portrayed on the stage, and the working boys of the period remain idealized figures. Here, a comparison is made between this idealization and the actual working conditions of child labourers. The theatricality inherent in the stage representation of child labour is further enhanced by the fact that the leading ‘boy roles’ were usually played by women, and the performances of the cross-dressed specialists in ‘boy roles’ is also discussed, as is the influence on ‘factory boy’ drama of socially relevant fiction, particularly Frances Trollope's novel about child labour, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong the Factory Boy, published in 1840.

Childhood, Power, and “Symbolic Plenitude”

Childhood, Power, and “Symbolic Plenitude” Richard Flynn The articles in this issue concern themselves with what Leslie Frost, in her article "Shadows of War," calls "children's symbolic plenitude." Frost's assertion that children and the concept of childhood may be employed in the service of ideologies ranging from the leftist to the fascist is not surprising. However, the nature of this symbolism and the ideological uses to which it is put are both slippery and subject to social and historical forces. The authors in this issue understand the intensity of our investment in childhood as a symbolic center and recognize childhood as a site for enacting both our idealism and disciplinary practices, often simultaneously—and usually uneasily. Ken Parille's "'What Our Boys Are Reading'" reveals the limitations of our received view of boys' reading as reinforcing "notions of male authority and privilege," in contrast to the disciplinary function of girls' reading. By examining Lydia Sigourney's writings about boyhood literacy alongside her biography of her son, Andrew, who died at the age of nineteen, Parille investigates Sigourney's critique of the "harmful norms" of "boyhood masculinity" perpetuated by the idea of "heroic imitation" in antebellum literary culture. Parille demonstrates that Sigourney's insistence that reading should cultivate boys' "domestic virtues" is echoed in later fiction for boys, such as Francis Forrester's Dick Duncan. Modern critics' tendency to divide nineteenth-century children's literature into "boys' books" (Twain) and "girls' books" (Alcott) obscures the complexity of both boys' reading and authors' attitudes toward the young. By questioning our reliance on "familiar classification of authors . . . by gender or perceived literary seriousness," Parille asks us to re-examine our "long-held beliefs" about boyhood. Daniel Greenstone presents a witty and cogent account of the ways in which Ian Falconer's Olivia books comment on the "unfulfilled promises of feminism." Greenstone reads Falconer as a satirist and social critic of contemporary gender relations, suggesting that the career of Gloria Steinem is emblematic of the ways in which feminism as a political movement has been subsumed (some might [End Page 1] say co-opted) by parenting styles that put the child at the center of a (largely upper-middle-class) world. In "The Sow in the House" Greenstone argues that the raising of a "fully actualized child" occurs mostly at the mother's expense, since it is usually she and not her husband who does most of the parenting, even in our more "enlightened" times. It is not surprising that Steinem praises Olivia's "self-esteem" in her jacket blurb for the book since the pop-psych Steinem—the "self-help feminist" author of the problematic Revolution from Within—has almost entirely supplanted the feminist who believed in political action. Making the child the center of the universe—a star like Olivia—often happens at the expense of the mother's autonomy. And as Greenstone notes, since Falconer has no plans to allow the six-year-old, "bratty and willful" Olivia to mature, we are not privy in the fiction to the results of such childrearing techniques, even as in real life the costs of "helicopter parenting" are becoming annoyingly clear. Perhaps the roots of Olivia's need to be center stage may become apparent when we turn to Joe Sutliff Sanders's examination of the changing role of sympathy in orphan girl novels. Sympathy, which Sanders describes as an "emotion . . . made up of a potent concoction of guilt, affection, and admiration," is depicted as "centrifugal" in novels such as What Katy Did and Uncle Tom's Cabin in which the weak characters use their position as the "heart of the house" to change the powerful. But while "radiat[ing] influence outward constitutes a kind of power, it does not alter the subservient status of the child." As the emphasis shifts from the centrifugal to the centripetal in Progressive Era novels like Pollyanna, the weaker character, rather than acting as a moral influence, becomes the recipient of adult attention. Having spread the glad game before her car accident, Pollyanna is now able to receive and "consum[e] the fruits of her labor: adult attention." In "'Saving the World Before Bedtime,'" Lisa Hager...

Acts of possession: collecting in America

The success of internet auction sites like e-Bay and the cult status of public television's Antiques Roadshow attest to the continued popularity of collecting in American culture. The thriving market for mass-produced collectibles confirms that consumption patterns are imbued with layers of cultural significance-meanings largely determined within the realm of the marketplace. Acts of Possession investigates the ways cultural meanings of collections have evolved and yet remained surprisingly unchanged throughout American history. Drawing upon the body of theoretical work on collecting, the contributors investigate how, what, and why Americans have collected and why they are attracted to certain objects, exploring the inherent meanings behind systems of organization and display. Essays consider the meanings of Thomas Jefferson's Indian Hall at Monticello; the pedagogical theories behind nineteenth-century children's cabinets of curiosities; collections of Native American artifacts; and the ability of the owners of dollhouses to construct meaning within the context of Victorian ideals of domesticity. The authors also consider some darker aspects of collecting-hoarding, fetishism, and compulsive behavior-scrutinizing collections of racist memorabilia and fascist propaganda. The final essay posits the serial killer as a collector, an investigation into the dangerous objectification of humans themselves. Focusing on individual as opposed to museum collections, the contributors employ the methodology of several disciplines, including American studies, history, art history, and museum studies.

New heroes (and villains) for old? Conflicts in nineteenth-century French children‘s literature

New heroes (and villains) for old? Conflicts in nineteenth-century French children‘s literature

Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity by U. C. Knoepflmacher (review)

YES,31, 200o YES,31, 200o mentioned the fact that the RuskinMay Queen ceremony (seep. I25) recentlytook the formof crowning a (black)May King. May it catch on in Virginia. UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK MALCOLM HARDMAN Ventures intoChildland.Victorians, FairyTales,andFemininity.By U. C. KNOEPFLMACHER. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. I998. xxi + 444 pp. $35; ?27.95. U. C. Knoepflmacheris a well-knownname in children'sliteraturecriticismas well as in the area of Victorian literature,and with thisbook he announces his ambitious claim that 'I may well have produced the most comprehensivehistory(literaryand cultural)yet writtenabout the so-called golden age of children'sliterature'(pp. xiixiii ).Knoepflmacher'sprojectisto examine sevenauthors,John Ruskin,Thackeray, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll,Jean Ingelow, ChristinaRossetti, and Juliana Horatia Ewing, and their writings from the early I850s to the early I87os. He particularlywishesto arguethattheirworksfor childrenare determinedby issuesof gender and the relationshipsbetween fantasy,as a genre, and gender. Knoepflmacher's main framework is biographical, which he feels he needs to defend somewhat against 'poststructuralistliterary critics, who distance the text from the author by insistingon the impersonalityof all writing' (p. xiv), in the two very shortsectionson theory and methodology in the whole book (in the 'prefaceof sorts'and in the 'epilogue').He writes,then, that 'sinceI never look at biographyas being in any way independent of culture and history, and since my biographical forays always allow the instability and incompleteness of any author's ostensible design, I hope that you will not be too put off by my occasional probings into adult and child selves' (p. xiv). But, as his own comment, apparently inadvertently, reveals, these 'biographicalforays' have extensive consequences for his argument that Knoepflmacherseems unaware of. The most importantand pervasiveresultis the positing of unproblematic 'adult' and 'child' selves, as well as assuming a relatively straightforwardcategory of 'femininity'as being constituted by the selfevidently female (either in the texts or in the biographies). The outcome is that Knoepflmacher'sreadingsof his chosen texts,particularlyin thefirstseven chapters, are largelyproduced by, and in the service of, his 'biographicalforays'.Biography, moreover, here effaces much of the very 'culture' and 'history' Knoepflmacher himselfseems so anxious to capture,forpositingunproblematic'childselves'entails the creation of a consistent, trans-historical, and trans-cultural identity. Knoepflmacherfollowsthispath (stillfavouredin most children'sliteraturestudies) in the established way: some twentieth-century psychologists and psychoanalysts (Jessica Benjamin, Nancy Chodorow, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, and Donald Winnicott) are drafted in, apparently at random, to validate assertionsabout this 'child'. With respect to gender, too, an inadequate theorization of 'femininity', and its production by biography, lead to the first seven chapters of the book consisting primarily of thematic examinations of texts used to confirm and amplify psychobiographical speculations about boys separated too early from their mothers and seeking female 'complements'. The problems about the 'child' and the 'feminine' are maintained too by the fact that Knoepflmacher in this (lengthy) book does not mention, orengage with, criticswho have raisedimportantchallengesand questions about his field: Claudia Nelson's study of gender in nineteenth-century children's fiction, BoysWillBe Girls:TheFeminine EthicandBritishChildren's Fiction,I857-I9I7 (New Brunswick,NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), for instance, or Jacqueline mentioned the fact that the RuskinMay Queen ceremony (seep. I25) recentlytook the formof crowning a (black)May King. May it catch on in Virginia. UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK MALCOLM HARDMAN Ventures intoChildland.Victorians, FairyTales,andFemininity.By U. C. KNOEPFLMACHER. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. I998. xxi + 444 pp. $35; ?27.95. U. C. Knoepflmacheris a well-knownname in children'sliteraturecriticismas well as in the area of Victorian literature,and with thisbook he announces his ambitious claim that 'I may well have produced the most comprehensivehistory(literaryand cultural)yet writtenabout the so-called golden age of children'sliterature'(pp. xiixiii ).Knoepflmacher'sprojectisto examine sevenauthors,John Ruskin,Thackeray, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll,Jean Ingelow, ChristinaRossetti, and Juliana Horatia Ewing, and their writings from the early I850s to the early I87os. He particularlywishesto arguethattheirworksfor childrenare determinedby issuesof gender and the relationshipsbetween fantasy,as a genre, and gender. Knoepflmacher's main framework is biographical, which he feels he needs to defend somewhat against 'poststructuralistliterary critics, who distance the text from the author by insistingon the impersonalityof all writing' (p. xiv), in the two very shortsectionson...

Books Received

Books Received Mark I. West Author Talk. By Leonard Marcus. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. This book features brief interviews with fifteen children's authors, including Judy Blume, Karen Cushman, Russell Freedman, E.L. Konigsburg, Gary Paulsen, Jon Scieszka, and Laurence Yep. Checking Out Nonfiction K-8: Good Choices for Best Learning. By Rosemary A. Bamford and Janice V. Kristo. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon, 2000. Intended for elementary school teachers and librarians, this book provides numerous suggestions on how to evaluate works of nonfiction written for children. Children's Literature: An Anthology 1801-1902. Ed. Peter Hunt. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Arranged chronologically, this anthology of nineteenth-century children's literature includes over 120 poems, stories, and excerpts from novels. All the works represented are from English speaking countries. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. By Roberta Seelinger Trites. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2000. In this thoughtful book, Trites examines how power dynamics are portrayed in young adult literature. Her insights are original, but they are informed by theories espoused by several important literary critics, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. Beacham's Sourcebook for Teaching Young Adult Fiction: Exploring Harry Potter. By Elizabeth D. Schafer. Osprey, FL: Beacham, 2000. This is the first book in a series titled Beacham's Sourcebooks for Teaching Young Adult Fiction. Schafer provides back-ground information about the first three books in the Harry Potter series. The book is divided into twenty chapters, including "Characters and Themes," "Archetypes and Biblical References," and "Magic and Witchcraft." Lesbian and Gay Voices: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to Literature for Children and Young Adults. By Frances Ann Day. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000. In addition to annotating more than 275 titles, Day includes profiles of 16 authors. The Story Performance Handbook. By R. Craig Roney. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001. This practical and clearly organized book includes chapters on "Reading Aloud Picture Books," "Reading Poetry Aloud," and "Sharing Stories Through the Use of Props." U.S. Latino Literature: A Critical Guide for Students and Teachers. Eds. Harold Augenbraum and Margarite Fernández Olmos. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000. Each of the 18 contributors to this book analyzes particular works of Latino literature and makes suggestions on how to incorporate these works in high school and undergraduate literature courses. Although most of the books covered are not intended for children, much of the background information can also be applied to Latino children's literature. [End Page 220] Copyright © 2001 Children's Literature Association

The implications of illegitimacy in late-nineteenth-century Iceland: the relationship between infant mortality and the household position of mothers giving birth to illegitimate children

In his article ‘Premarital sexual permissiveness and illegitimacy in the Nordic Countries’, Richard F. Tomasson discusses high illegitimacy rates in preindustrial Iceland. He points out that during the nineteenth century children born out of wedlock were proportionally more numerous in Iceland than in other European countries. In Tomasson's view high illegitimacy rates in Iceland were due to liberal attitudes towards premarital sex – attitudes that were deeply rooted in traditional Nordic society. In his words, ‘The Ancient Scandinavians accorded women higher status, and along with this went liberal attitudes toward premarital sex relations, illegitimacy, and divorce. Such attitudes often appear to be a concomitant of a high degree of equality between the sexes.’

The Didactic Carnivalesque in Lucy Lane Clifford's "The New Mother"

Lucy Lane Clifford's cautionary tale "The New Mother" has terrified readers since its publication in her 1882 collection of children's stories, Anyhow Stories Moral and Otherwise. 1 Speaking for countless other readers, the children's literature critic Harvey Darton reveals that "Getting on for fifty years after I met her first, I still cannot rid my mind of that fearful creation." 2 "The New Mother" narrates two young girls' rebellious behavior, their subsequent abandonment by their mother, and the final arrival of a monstrous new mother--Clifford's "fearful creation"--with a wooden tail and glass eyes. The few critics who have discussed the story usually interpret it as expressing primal, archetypal fears about the mother and the development of the self: Alison Lurie, for instance, calls "The New Mother" "a classic tale of separation anxiety" related to "the carved wooden images and superstitions of the voodoo cult," while Stephen Prickett writes that the story "clearly draws on something much more archetypal than normal Evangelical zeal." 3 I will argue, however, that Clifford's story goes beyond universal emotions and terrors by being deliberately set within a small village during the closing days of a fair. Clifford employs the fair as a symbol of corruption and disorder that destroys the home through the course of the story. 4 Like John Bunyan's Vanity Fair, carnival, according to Clifford, represents the worldly, the antidomestic, and the material. 5 Most importantly, carnival unleashes powerful forces of subversion, symbolized in the story by a strange, seductive young girl and the terrifying new mother, which are containable only by the story's didactic narrative frame. "The New Mother" demonstrates that the carnivalesque, which Bakhtinians [End Page 727] praise as liberating, in fact has a sinister side. The story nicely illustrates the tradition that Mikhail Bakhtin calls the Romantic grotesque, which transforms the "joyful and triumphant hilarity" of medieval and Renaissance carnival into a vision of "an alien world" in which all is "meaningless, dubious and hostile." 6 Because Clifford clearly employs carnivalesque imagery for monitory purposes, "The New Mother" has much in common with other nineteenth-century children's literature, in which fantasy often serves as a vehicle for moral lessons. 7 Christina Rossetti's short story "Speaking Likenesses," for instance, shares with "The New Mother" its employment of grotesque imagery and didactic structure: both authors create frightening supernatural scenarios in which monsters teach disobedient little girls manners and morals.

Child Auctions in Nineteenth Century Sweden: An Analysis of Price Differences

During the nineteenth century, destitute and/or orphan Swedish children were boarded out as a part of that time's public assistance. The families to which they were allocated were determined by means of English auctions. This paper studies the price differences among such children using empirical data from 601 auctions. Price is regressed on variables related both to the buyer and to the child. The results suggest that variables related to the children's characteristics were important and that the willingness to take a poor or orphan child was dependent on the foster parents' uses for a child in the household. Children, who were old enough to be used as shepherd boys or girls, were easily placed. It was worse with those who were feeble, incapacitated, blind, sick, mentally deranged, or confined to their beds. They were useless to farmers and others. As a rule, the most miserable were boarded out to the poorest of the non-property owners. Julius Ejdestam (1969), The Poor's Sweden (my translation)

Enquiring Mind, Rebellious Spirit: Alice and Pinocchio as Nonmodel Children.

Ann Lawson Lucas lectures in the Italian Department of the University of Hull, U.K. Her research field is nineteenth-century children's literature, especially the work of Carlo Collodi and Emilio Salgari, the leading writer of travel and adventure novels for children. She translated and edited The Adventures of Pinocchio for Oxford University Press's World Classics series. She recently served as a Board member of the International Research Society for Children's Literature.

"Dream not of other worlds": Paradise Lost and the Child Reader

"Dream not of other worlds":Paradise Lost and the Child Reader Julie Pfeiffer (bio) With very many [children] the easy neatness or pompous sounds of verse [in] Paradise Lost, have an ineffable charm. . . . We need hardly remind those concerned in [children's] welfare, that Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and Addison, are enjoyable and appreciable from a very early age, and that the child's store of such reading is one of the richest legacies the adult can inherit. —Elizabeth Rigby Milton's importance to adult readers of the nineteenth century is unquestioned,1 even as his role in the education of their children has been ignored by twentieth-century critics.2 Milton's work was seen as significant enough in the nineteenth century to justify not only the inclusion of his poetry in schoolbooks but also the publication of two versions of Paradise Lost intended especially for children. In particular, Eliza Weaver Bradburn's 1828 retelling, The Story of Paradise Lost, For Children, allows us to examine Milton's role as an educator of nineteenth-century children.3 This text reinforces the belief that Paradise Lost was an essential component of a child's education, but it also suggests the ways in which adults of that time were unsettled by the poem. Written in the context of the Romantic fascination with Milton, Bradburn's text demonstrates Milton's complex roles for these readers as cultural icon, educator, and heretic. The Story of Paradise Lost, For Children reflects two nineteenth-century perspectives: the epic as good medicine that needs only to be made palatable for [End Page 1] young minds, and the epic as a dangerously tempting drug that requires the mediation of adult explication. The first perspective relies on the nineteenth-century commonplace that Paradise Lost is a literary text of central importance and a source of pleasure and a treasure trove for children. As Thomas De Quincey wrote in 1839, John Milton "is not an author amongst authors, not a poet amongst poets, but a power amongst powers; and the 'Paradise Lost' is not a book amongst books, not a poem amongst poems, but a central force amongst forces" (777). Thomas Keightley focused on the child's interaction with this cultural icon with his comment that "the reading of Paradise Lost for the first time forms or should form, an era in the life of every one possessed of taste and poetic feeling. . . . [Since childhood] the poetry of Milton has formed my constant study,—a source of delight in prosperity, of strength and consolation in adversity" (Nelson 3-4). Writers including Thomas Cooper and Sara Coleridge emphasized the importance of their childhood readings of Paradise Lost (Nelson 5; Cruse 11). Emily Shore listed hearing the first installment of Paradise Lost as a reason to feel "very much pleased" with her governess (Cockshut 384). The renowned actress Sarah Siddons claimed that at the age of ten "she used to pore over 'Paradise Lost' for hours together" (Campbell 20). After her retirement from the theater she continued giving readings from Milton both in public and in her home, and her lifelong interest in Milton's poetry culminated with the publication, in 1822, of An Abridgement of Paradise Lost. The preface to Siddons's abridgment reveals that she was motivated to produce this volume not simply by her own pleasure in Milton's text but also by the educational potential Paradise Lost offered the interested young reader. She wrote, "A taste for the sublime and beautiful is an approach to virtue; and I was naturally desirous that [children's] minds should be inspired with an early admiration of Milton. The perfection of his immortal Poem is seldom appreciated by the young; and its perusal is, perhaps, very generally regarded rather as a duty than a pleasure. This has been attributed by Dr. Johnson to the want of human interest" (iii, emphasis in original). Her solution was to select the passages "which relate to the fate of our first parents" and to remove "every thing, however exquisite in its kind, which did not immediately bear upon their affecting and important story" (iii-iv). In keeping with the ideals of Romanticism, Siddons linked "sublimity" with...

Little waifs: estimating child body size from historic skeletal material

Child body weight formulae are developed from two radiographic studies that have measured the mid-diaphyses anteroposterior diameters of the humerus, femur and tibia. The results show that formulae that include a stature component are more reliable than those derived only from bone diameters and that formulae that use diameters of the femur or tibia to estimate body weight appear more to be reliable than those that use the diameter of the humerus. These formulae are applied to a historic nineteenth century child skeletal population excavated from a Sydney orphans cemetery. The results show that the orphans were shorter and lighter than comparable nineteenth century children. This difference is attributed to disrupted growth rates due to poor nutrition and health of children prior to their admission to the orphanage. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The fantastic sublime: romanticism and transcendence in nineteenth-century children's fantasy literature

Romanticism, Childhood, Fairy Tales and the World of the Spirit Puer Aeternus, the Divine Child Old Fairy Tales and the New Romantic Child The Moral Tale and the Fairy Tale The Consubstantial World of Faery The Wind from Beyond the World The Correspondent Breeze From the Romantic to the Fantastic Sublime The Fantastic Sublime in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows The Fantastic Sublime in George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market and the Feminine Rereading of the Fantastic Sublime The Price of Fairy Fruit in Goblin Market The Domesticated Sublime in Frankenstein The Imagination Unbound in Goblin Market Difference and Common Ground Bibliography Index

Bear facts and fiction in 19th and 20th century children's books

Bears have been symbols of worship and reverence from earliest times. Myths, legends, fables and folk tales spoke of powerful creatures to be feared and respected. The oral tradition symbolised the image of the bear that was to be created within nineteenth and twentieth century children's literature. Stereotypical portrayals gave specific characterisation to the motif within children's stories, from ‘the three bears’ onwards. Bears real and toy became acknowledged in two distinct representations: wild beast or cuddly plaything. Both depictions had human qualities, with the bear becoming a popular perpetuated character used as an educational tool in children's books as well as in fiction for pleasure. Examples are provided from both nineteenth and twentieth century children's books.

Cultural contexts in dialogic format

Cultural Contexts in Dialogic Format Lissa Paul Denis Butts, ed. Stories and Society: Children’s Literature in Its Social Context. London: Macmillan, 1992. Stories and Society, edited by Denis Butts, is a good book. Here are some of the reasons. It offers a narrative coherence more commonly associated with collections of linked short stories; a depth of critical analysis rarely found in historical surveys; and elegantly written essays by people who know and love their fields. I learned a lot—which is what I always hope for when I read a critical text. Butts has organized the collection so that each general, historical essay—on the familiar children’s literature genres of the school story, the home story, the adventure story and fantasy—is set against an essay examining a specific text or author in the light of that genre. Each essay, made-to-order for this collection, reveals how different genres developed in response to “specific social, historical and cultural situations” (xiii). A clear focus of attention is what makes Stories and Society better than related collections, James McGavran’s Romanticism and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Literature, for instance, which lacks narrative coherence, even though it has some fine essays in it. A meticulous scholar, Denis Butts has a broad knowledge of nineteenth-century children’s literature and the historical conditions that produced it. He has edited and written scholarly introductions for books in the World’s Classics Series for Oxford University Press, including The Secret Garden, King Solomon’s Mines, and The Railway Children. And he has written Mistress of Our Tears, a new literary and bibliographical study of the once popular nineteenth-century children’s author, Barbara Hofland. So it is not too surprising to find Butts’s interest in cultural contexts reflected in the collection. He has chosen his colleagues well, from both sides of the Atlantic. All are good writers as well as good scholars. I will [End Page 288] name them: Jeffrey Richards, Perry Nodelman (the one Canadian), Gillian Avery, Elizabeth Keyser, Fred Inglis, C. W. Sullivan III, Peter Hunt, and Mark West. Denis Butts himself contributes the adventure story essay. In the introduction to Stories and Society, Butts points out that children’s literature evolved along with changes in society, including Romanticism, the growth of schools, and advances in printing. The adventure story, he explains, developed partly “as a reflection of British imperialism”; the school story became an “expression of changing attitudes towards childhood and adolescence”; and the domestic story reflected “the changing size and character of the family household in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century” (xi). All the essays in the collection draw on recently available historical records, as well as on the theoretical insights of feminist theory, ideology, and post-colonial discourse. That marks them as distinct from the totalizing discourses that dominated earlier historical surveys, Harvey Darton’s classic Children’s Books in England (even with Alderson’s revision) for example, or John Rowe Townsend’s Written for Children. Butts’s project also differs from earlier ones in that he uses a dialogic format. Each general overview is engaged in a dialogue with a case study, in order to see how “individual writers or works reflect, argue with, or even subvert ideologies in which that work was produced” (xiv). I will examine the interactions between three sets of essays in the collection—the school story, the domestic story, and the adventure story—in order to demonstrate the range of conversations that take place. Jeffrey Richards, in his discussion of “The School Story,” traces the shift from stories of elite (all-white, all-male, all-Christian) teams of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, to stories of (British) television’s multi-ethnic, working-class Grange Hill. Truth, justice, and good behavior are seen to be malleable, as Richards demonstrates how they evolve through successive generations of the school story: the imperialist ideal gives way to the “problem” novel. Even though the value systems change, Richards attends to the way the school life reflects (and is reflected by) fictions about school. In an essay following the one by Richards, Perry Nodelman challenges the reflective nature of the school story. Nodelman...

The Erotics of Pedagogy: Historical Intervention, Literary Representation, the "Gift of Education," and the Agency of Children

The Erotics of Pedagogy:Historical Intervention, Literary Representation, the "Gift of Education," and the Agency of Children Mitzi Myers (bio) I know that pedagogy is a depressing subject to all persons of sensibility, and yet I shall not apologize for touching upon it. Lionel Trilling In these times of wonderful revolution, and incalculable, & sudden changes in the fate of empires and the fortunes of individuals, the only good things of which we can feel absolutely secure are the possession of our minds, & of the esteem & affection of our friends. Maria Edgeworth to Etienne Dumont, 12 August 1815 Works of art exist simultaneously in two 'economies,' a market econ omy and a gift economy. . . . with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level . . . that we can give it away again. . . . the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or with its donor. Lewis Hyde Literary childhood, the representation of children for both juvenile and adult audiences, begins to play a significant part within the Anglo-American cultural tradition in a Revolutionary era. The global backdrop of the child's domestic debut is transnational change: the American, French, and industrial revolutions and the Napoleonic wars.1 But how do children and their literary history relate to what historians think of as "big" history—the macropolitics [End Page 1] and institutional events that identify and dominate the "masculine" public sphere?2 Literary critics are mostly content to say that this period's tales teach, without specifying precisely what they teach, whom they reach, or, most important, how they carry out their pedagogical agenda. For example, Claudia Nelson's study of late nineteenth-century children's literature packages its prehistory as an unproblematic narrative of obedience: "The stress in such stories is on the world as it is. Secure in the knowledge that adult civilization was daily going from good to better, eighteenth-century rationalist writers felt no urge to portray their young protagonists as in any way more powerful morally than their adult preceptors. . . . [T]he goal of overweening obedience forbids the implication that children may in any way positively affect their environment; their world neither asks nor needs any help from them."3 Neither the rationalist educator's own experience nor the stories she tells about her world seem quite so secure on closer inspection. Nor, for that matter, can Enlightenment education be equated with Wordsworth's reasoning little monster of the Prelude's Book 5, though few literary historians can resist the temptation (ll. 296–363). Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), the Anglo-Irish writer who is my subject, lived through all the cataclysmic events which mark the beginning of "modern" history and witnessed many of them at first hand. She saw Revolutionary Paris, fled for her life when the French invaded Ireland in 1798, and lived amid Irish upheaval. She coped with events ranging from murderous local marauders like the Defenders of the 1790s to the nationwide calamity of the Great Famine in the 1840s. Her public writing and its interplay with her world, her readers, and her life as a feeling daughter and a rational female writer solicit critical attention as exemplary of literary terrain we have not yet explored, not ground we know so well that we can dismiss it with a label. How, then, can historical contextualization and contemporary theory help us to specify what we mean when we say that a story from the literary past is "didactic"? Despite the theoretical bombardment to which the academy has long been subjected, despite the recognition that all texts (and interpretations) are historically and ideologically conditioned, despite the preoccupation with Difference, the Other, the Colonized, the Repressed, and the Marginal, it still does not seem to have occurred to the critical world at large that works for, about, and/or by children are ideal investigatory sites for trying out just about any contemporary [End Page 2] theory that elicits one's curiosity, be it gender, games, or gifts, subjectivity or psychoanalysis. Those who work with children's literature know better.4 Yet, as I've indicated, thus far critical...