Introduction: Children, Childhood and Childrens Culture in the Eighteenth Century

M. 0. CRENBY

It is often said that our modern idea ofchildhood first emerged in the eighteenth century. We ought to be on our guard against this kind of teleological and ethnocentric approach. There is no single concept of childhood today that is universally recognised or unanimously adhered to. Nor was there at any point in the eighteenth century. And our modern understanding of childhood is not the final word on the matter, but doubtlessly the latest stage in the continuing evolution of a social-cultural construct. Nevertheless, the eighteenth century was certainly a transformative period in the history of childhood in the West. J. H. Plumb was not wrong to write of The new world of children in eighteenth-century England, nor Colin Heywood to acknowledge that eighteenth-century thinkers came closer than any of their predecessors to our contemporary notions of childhood. John 1,ocke at one end of the century, William Wordsworth at the other, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau between them, all clearly deserve their prominent places in the standard histories of childhood. This is partly because their writing changed their contemporaries understanding of the child, but perhaps more because they reflected changes which were already underway. Locke was the most influential writer to put on paper that the moral and intellectual development of children should be carefully nurtured, that children were not inherently sinful but were reasonable beings who needed to be understood on their own terms, and that children of different ages required different treatment. Rousseaus idea of the inherent innocence of children and their subsequent corruption within society was an even more important epistemological shift. Then the Romantics insistence that children had as much to teach adults as to learn from them was more radical still - even if it probably had much less effect on how children were actually treated. None of these changes happened in a vacuum. They were affected by, and themselves affected, the broader socio-economic shifts which form the background to all study of eighteenth-century Europe: religious change, scientific enlightenment, the consumer revolution, demographic adjustment, the transformation of the family and so o n L Changed understandings of childhood brought many other developments. New types of school were established. Education became an industry. Cultural production was decisively affected, perhaps especially print culture. New forms of literature emerged

,314

M. 0 . GKHNRY

both about and for children. The latter especially arc often very captivating documents, but shaping the adults of the future, they must also have had a profound ctrect on society as a whole. This is why Andrea Immel, writing in t he new Carnbritlge History of the Book in Britain, has been able to claim that of all the new markets for print that emerged between 1695 and 1833, the one for rising generations of young readers was arguably among the most important to Great Britains polite and commercial society.1 Both the sociology and thc material manifestations of these cultures of childhood are now being thoroughly investigated by eighteenth-century scholars from a variety of disciplines. This volume of essays contains a diverse and multi-disciplinary selection of such work, including contributions from historians, art historians, book historians and literary critics. Focusing mostly (but not exclusively) on the British experience, each of the essays offers a fascinating insight into an area of childrens lives or childrens culture in the second half of the century. But they are also important because, taken in aggregate, they present responses to some of the fundamental questions about how childhood had come to be understood, and how children were treated, by the end of thc eighteenth century. Perhaps the most basic question of all is whether children were at the centre or on the margins of eighteenth-century culture. To judge by Kristiina Iaivalkoski-Shilovs examination of the representation of children in later eighteenth-century French and British novels, the answer is that their role was largely peripheral and ancillary. If they appear in novels at all, they tire almost always very minor characters and often represented in formulaic ways (perhaps especially in the French texts). Contrariwise, the other essays collected hcre concentrate on the visibility and importancc of children, rather than their absence and subordination. Rut they do not necessarily insist on childrens centrality to all aspects of eighteenth-century life. If, from the majority of essays hcre, children seem to be cherished, encouraged to be active, economically powcrful and the rccipients of all sorts of cultural and educational commodities, there is still no suggestion that they were being encouraged to enter fully into adult society. Rather, the culture of childhood that was developing should probably bc regardcd as always effectivelyseparate and distinct from the adults socio-cultural mainstream. For instance, the foundation of London charity schools, as investigated here by Dianne Yayne. demonstrates that children were increasingly seen as an appropriate object of eflort and expenditure, but, in eflcct, the schools served to help sequester children from adult society. not to intcgrate them. In cultural terms, too, children were provided with a literature of their own. Andrew OMalleyshows that in somc ways their shared reading of Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe joined adults and children together, but latcr eighteenth-century children wcre incrcasingly providcd with their own vcry different versions. Likewise, adults and children might have met at the actual performances ofpantomimes in London, but when spin-off publicationswcre produced - the harlequinades

Introduction: Children, Childhood and Childrens Cirlture

31s

discussed by Jacqueline Reid-Walsh - these were apparently aimed only at the young. To say that childhood was becoming increasingly important but that the gap between adult and childrens culture remained fixed, if it did not widen further, is really to say that the principles of Locke and Rousseau were being faithfully adhered to. The development of a separate childrens literature (discussed by Gillian Dow, Lissa Paul and Jacqueline Labbe as well as OMalley and Reid-Walsh) and of new educational provision (explored by Payne for the London poor, and by Michele Cohen for much more affluent girls) is an expression of the point that both Locke and Rousseau insisted upon, that different age-groups had their own specific needs and required their own specific curricula. OMalley does query this, suggesting that children were often conflated with adults from the lower orders of society, both being regarded as subjects who were not fully mature in their intellectual abilities or tastes. Overall, though, the impression given by these essays is that at least middle-class and elite children were no longer being understood in terms of their inferiority to something else - adulthood. It is also tempting to argue that as the eighteenth century went on, the child at the centre of this new culture of childhood became increasingly real,deposing the two-dimensional, idealised child who had been the subject of earlier philosophies, curricula and childrens books. Certainly, when we read the Puritan childrens books of the late seventeenth century. their child characters can often seem so ludicrously pious that they appear to modern eyes to be vessels for adult attitudes and aspirations, little more than conduits for religious strictures. The same (but in a more secular context) might also be said of the characters who populate the pioneering childrens books of the mid-century: John Newberys Goody Two-Shoes and Giles Gingerbread, for instance, or Miss Jenny Peace from Sarah Fieldings The Governess ( T 749). The child characters of those childrens books published from the ~ 7 7 0 s for . instance by Madame de Genlis and Eliza Fenwicls (discussed by Dow and Paul respectively), seem so much more rounded and authentic, with opinions and ideas of their own, that it is difficult not to believe that childrens books were beginning to cater for children as they were, not as they should be. The children who appear in Stories for Miss Cec.ilia-Charlotte-~stlier Burney, examined by Patricia Crown, naturally seem even more real. They were, after all, drawn from life by fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls for their sisters. Yet we need to be just as cautious about this supposed transition from the ideal to the real as about the frequently-stated but now contentious notion that childrens literature moved from instruction to delight across the course of the eighteenth century. As Crown points out, S t o r k for Miss Crcilia-Charlotte-Esther Burney omits, minimizes, elides, and avoids topics and events that would have been part of the authors lives. This includes the familys anxieties, quarrels, illnesses, deaths, scandals and financial travails, as well as the childrens own jealousies, fights and the injuries they inflicted upon one another. Labbes essay is also instructive on this point. Catherine

j16

M. 0 . G K E N K Y

Sinclair, with whose HoZidq House (1839) Labbe closes her essay, is often congratulated for the sprightliness of its young characters, whose mischief and wilfulness marks them out as prototypes for authenticchildren like Lewis Carrolls Alice or E. Nesbits Bastables.4 Compared with them, the children and Mary who feature in WollstonecraftsOriginal Storiesfrom Real Lge (1788) Martha Sherwoods Tlw History of the Pairchild Family (1818) with which Labbe begins, or the work of Genlis, Fenwick or any other eighteenth-century childrens author, seem little more than ciphers. By comparison, they all appear as essentially passive recipients for the rational or religious instruction directed at them by the adults. Their role is not, ultimately, very different from the children of the Puritan books, nor those of the adult novels analysed by laivalkoski-Shilov.Yet even HolidayHouse is a strange mixture of the realistic and the idealised.writes Labbe. Frank, the elder brother whose death ends the novel in conventional Evangelical style, remains a very idealised character. The characters of the two younger children, Harry and Laura, as well as the books structure, are also highly schematised, being designed to expose as ineffective and barbarous the disciplinary tactics of the severe governess Mrs Crabtree. Moreover, in Labbes analysis, any change in the representation of child characters from the Puritans to the rationalists to the Evangelicals to the early Victorians was due not to a determination to represent real children. but to a theological shift from a doctrine of Atonement towards a more mainstream Anglican emphasis on Incarnation. That the children of late eighteenth-century childrens literature were artilicial constructions designed to support particular didactic agendas, even though authors struggled to give the impression that they were representing real children, is significant when we turn to consider educational theory. The girls curricula that Cohen discusses in her essay are certainly open to similar interpretations. They were putatively designed for real girls, notionally taking into consideration their natural talents and capacities, and litting them for the roles that they would grow up to play. These were principles articulated by Rousseau. As Cohen notes, he had claimed that there were some things that girls were naturally inclined to (needlework, playing with dolls, conversation), and some at which they would never succeed (deep analysis, abstract enquiry). Educationalists took up these pseudopsychological arguments. The very structure of womans mind, Cohen quotes one as saying in J 789, rendersher incapable of the profound thought and careful reasoning that carry knowledge to its zenith of perfection. Such contentions were quickly cemented into curricula, and educationalists were proud that their new pedagogic programmes were based for the first time on girls r . c d capabilities and needs. Hut in fact, Cohen shows, these curricula were enforcing the very notion that they rested on, that girls were inevitably intellectually much shallower than boys. The educationalistsrealgirls were as much artificial constructions, carefully created to fit certain ideological agendas. as the child protagonists of childrens literature.

Introduction: Children, Childhood and Cliildrtws Culture

31 7

This said, at least some later eighteenth-century educationalists and writers for children were evidently regarding their target market as active agents in their education and reading rather than as passive subjects of it. Cohen points out, for instance, that affluent girls might often receive a better educr c~t ion at home rather than school because, at home, they were able to help devise their own learning programmes. Journals and memoirs speak of the heavy use made of domestic libraries, and of syllabi that were self-imposed and self-monitored. More striking is the interactivity central to so much of the new childrens literature. Not only did the harlequinades examined by Keid-Walsh depend on children physically manipulating their books to make a story, but educational texts such as Eliza Fenwicks Rays from the Rainhow, discussed in Pauls essay, were designed to allow children to teach themselves, in this case by colouring in their book to designate different parts of speech (thus its subtitle: Being an Easy Method for Perfecting Children in the First Principles of Grammar, without the Smallest Trouble to the Instructor). Even more interactive were the dramas written by Genlis and designed to be acted by children. The children using (not simply reading) these books were active participants, not inert subjects. Dow points out that Genliss tales were treated much more earnestly in Britain than they had been in France, receiving much careful criticism in established periodicals. That childrens literature was receiving such genuine consideration is an indication of the commercial viability of childrens literature by the end of the century in Britain and also of how seriously childrens culture was being taken. What is interesting is that, as Dow notes, some very diverse critics condemned Genliss tales for what Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Wornrin, called her absurd manner of making the parental authority supplant reason. Even Wollstonecrafts ideological adversary, the anti-Jacobin Sarah Trimmer, agreed, noting that Genliss child characters often had to sacrifice their own preferences to those of their parents, for no apparent purpose, but to gratify the pride of the father and only on the basis of his right to demand implicit obedience.5 British children, they urged, ought to be free of such tyranny. During the Revolution Crisis of the 1790s this was a political point. But it is also evidence that neither their young age nor their debt to their parents required that children should necessarily be subordinate to their elders or understood as their inferiors. R. S. White has even argued recently that the rights of children had become, by the end of the century, as important a concern to some as the rights of man or the rights of woman. [Hlail the great Natures plan, wrote Thomas Spence in The Rights ofIilfantsof 1797. That fully gives to Babes those Rights it gives to Man.6 Whatever claims they make about changes to childrens lives in the later eighteenth century, however, the essays collected here also counsel us to be wary of asserting that either the status or conditions of childhood wcre dramatically and universally altercd. Cohen points out that her examination of shifts in the education of girls has to be seen in the context of the static nature

of boys education, still anchored to the Middle Ages by the unchanging Latin and Greek syllabus. Paynes analysis of the education that some children of the settled and industrious poor in London were able to benefit from has to be understood alongside the dearth of educational opportunities for the vast majority of young people. We should also remember that support for poor children was not without its ulterior motives. As Donna Andrew showed in her study of early modern philanthropy, by the mid-eighteenth century, charitable giving to maternity hospitals, child welfare agencies and schools was designed largely to boost the domestic worltforce, provide recruits for the army and navy. and lo support colonial settlement. Relieving suffering and enforcing a moral code were secondary concerns.7 Paynes study of charity schools here does not challenge this, but it does also hint at how education had come to be regarded as an investment in the individual as well as the nation. Families were content t o suffer privations in order to gain places for their children a t the charity schools. They petitioned hard, paid money and even moved residence to secure entry, as well as depriving themselves temporarily ol their childrens labour. All this was undergone, it seems, because of the long-term financial gains that a sound education offered. The same impulse surely lay behind the growth of childrens literature in the mid- and late century. Childrens boohs, like education, were marketed as an investment. Iay for these books now, their publishers urged, and your child will benefit from the education you have provided, enjoying future financial success and socia I elevation. Even more striking than this construction of children as a national and personal resource was the identification of childhood as a market to be exploited. A multitude of products catering for this new market quickly developed. including toys and childrens clothes; nursery furniture and special crockery; potties, breast pumps and nipple shields; special medicines and li)odstuITs:educational tools and games. Childrens immersion in commodity culture is obliquely and intriguingly suggested by the versions of Robinson (r~oe that OMalley surveys: they are fixated on the material possessions of the castaway. It is also indicated by the existence of Staffordshire pearlware dishes depicting scenes from Rohiiisoii Crusoe made especially for children in the early riincteenth century. The competing curricula which Cohen investigates in her essay itre evidence of the commodilication of education. They need to bc read ;IS prospectuses for rival products as well as attempts to edify and improve the nations youth. Most remarkable of all was the expansion in the market for childrens booLs. The proliferation of varieties is partially charted in this volume. 0Ma1leys childrens chapbooks and Reid-Walshs harleyuinades are just two of the more specialist niches of the ramifying market. Books by Eliza Fenwick, considered by Paul, are also revealing of the extent of childrens literatures commodilication. IIer Visits to II luvmile Library (1805) exalts in, and advertises, all the varieties of book available to children at the beginning of the nineteenth century and, as Paul shows, seeks to construct Tabarts

Introduction: Children, Childhood and Cliildrc.ns Culture.

319

booltshop not as the source of instruction but as the fashionable emporium of very desirable products. Fenwicks Rays from the Rainliow demonstrates even more clearly how the consumer revolution had affected childrens books. In the mid-century, childrens books had been inherited from generation to generation, or at least used by siblings or fellow-pupils. Raysfrotti t l t ~ Ruinhow was designed to be coloured in by a single child - to be used once then thrown away. Even though it is a home-made manuscript, Storips f b r Miss Cecilia-Charlottr-Esther Rurney also shows how absorbed children had become in commodity culture. Not only are material objects, especially toys, extremely prominent throughout the text, and represented as objects of great importance to the children, but Crown shows how the text was produced to resemble a printed book. This is nicely symbolic of the repackaging of childrens stories. Once upon a time they had been communicated verbally but by ~ 7 9 3even , within the home, children apparently desired their stories to be in material form and to come packaged as if they had been expensively purchased at a booltshop. The essays assembled here, then, do not insist that culture was relentlessly becoming more child-centred in the eighteenth century. nor that by J 800 the modern child had come into existence. What they do show is the vibrancy of childrens culture, in Britain at least, and that this vibrancy was largely powered by educational and cultural entrepreneurs seeking to make profits in a new and largely unexploited market. Childrens culture, at least for the middle and upper classes, had become largely commoditiscd by the end of the century. But this should in no way devalue the importance, nor the great interest, of the educational and cultural products which came to the market. Nor should it in any way dissuade us from further exploring the complicated ways in which children used, understood and related to the products which had become available to them.

NOTES
I . J. H. Plumb. The Ncw World of Childrcn in Eightccnth-Ccntury England. Post m i d Prcwrit 67 ( I 975). p.64-95: Colin Heywood, A Histor;! of Childliood. Cliildr-cvi rrrid Cliiltllrood in the, West s zoo I ), p.23. from Mafirwil to Modern T i n i ~ (Cambridge 2 . Lawrence Stone, The hitiily, Sux and Mrirrimgr~i n J:rigltrnd I .5 oo-1 hoo. abridged version (London I 979). p.428. 3. Andrea Tmmel, Specialist Markets: Childrens Roolis and School I3ooks,Crrrnhrirlge History of tjte Book in Brituin. vol.5 ( I 695- I 8.3 3), forthcoming. 4. Mary V. Jackson, Engines oflnstructinn,Miscliic.f.arid Magic. (liildrms I,ifcwtur-c,in Rnglrriid from its Beginnings to 1 x 3 0 (Lincoln, N U 1 9 8 y ) ,p.232. 5. Sarah Trimmer, The Guardian of Education L ( I 803). p.509. jI o. 6. K.S. White. Natural Rights nrtd the Birth cfRoniaiitiiisrn i n tlw I 790s (I3asingstoke 2 0 0 j). p. 196.2 I 2 (p.2 12). 7. Donna Andrew. PhilanthroJy and Police: London Cliaritg in tlic Biglitcwitli Cmtur;/ (Ncw York 1989).