Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy [1st ed.] 9783030504281, 9783030504298

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xv
Introduction: The Romantic Cultures of Infancy (Martina Domines Veliki, Cian Duffy)....Pages 1-19
‘A detached peninsula’: Infancy in the Work of Thomas De Quincey (Martina Domines Veliki, Cian Duffy)....Pages 21-42
William Blake’s Infant Joy (Robert Rix)....Pages 43-63
The Infant, the Mother, and the Breast in the Paintings of Marguerite Gérard (Loren Lerner)....Pages 65-89
Mother at the Source: Romanticism and Infant Education (Robert A. Davis)....Pages 91-113
Coleridge, the Ridiculous Child, and the Limits of Romanticism (Andrew McInnes)....Pages 115-133
Educational Experiments: Childhood Sympathy, Regulation, and Object-Relations in Maria Edgeworth’s Writings About Education (Charles I. Armstrong)....Pages 135-157
‘Advice […] by one as insignificant as a MOUSE’: Human and Non-human Infancy in Eighteenth-Century Moral Animal Tales (Anja Höing)....Pages 159-182
William Godwin, Romantic-Era Historiography and the Political Cultures of Infancy (John-Erik Hansson)....Pages 183-201
Experimenting with Children: Infants in the Scientific Imagination (Lisa Ann Robertson)....Pages 203-227
‘A wretch so sad, so lorn’: The Feral Child and the Romantic Culture of Infancy (Rolf Lessenich)....Pages 229-245
Back Matter ....Pages 247-279

Citation preview

Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy Edited by Martina Domines Veliki · Cian Duffy

Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy

Martina Domines Veliki  •  Cian Duffy Editors

Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy

Editors Martina Domines Veliki English Studies Zagreb University Zagreb, Croatia

Cian Duffy English Studies Lund University Lund, Sweden

ISBN 978-3-030-50428-1    ISBN 978-3-030-50429-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In memory of Professor Dr Rolf Lessenich (1940–2019) A scholar and a gentleman

Acknowledgements

Our friend and colleague Professor Dr Rolf Lessenich (1940–2019), the University of Bonn, died whilst the final manuscript of this book was in preparation. The editors would like to thank the Trustees of the University of Bonn Foundation for permission to include his final essay here. We would also like to thank Professor Dr Norbert Lennartz, the University of Vechta, for his invaluable assistance in acting as liaison in this matter between the editors and the University of Bonn. Professor Dr Lessenich, who authored many excellent studies of European Romanticism, was a kind and brilliant man whose loss is felt by all who knew him.

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Contents

1 Introduction: The Romantic Cultures of Infancy  1 Martina Domines Veliki and Cian Duffy 2 ‘A detached peninsula’: Infancy in the Work of Thomas De Quincey 21 Martina Domines Veliki and Cian Duffy 3 William Blake’s Infant Joy 43 Robert Rix 4 The Infant, the Mother, and the Breast in the Paintings of Marguerite Gérard 65 Loren Lerner 5 Mother at the Source: Romanticism and Infant Education 91 Robert A. Davis 6 Coleridge, the Ridiculous Child, and the Limits of Romanticism115 Andrew McInnes

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7 Educational Experiments: Childhood Sympathy, Regulation, and Object-Relations in Maria Edgeworth’s Writings About Education135 Charles I. Armstrong 8 ‘Advice […] by one as insignificant as a MOUSE’: Human and Non-human Infancy in Eighteenth-Century Moral Animal Tales159 Anja Höing 9 William Godwin, Romantic-Era Historiography and the Political Cultures of Infancy183 John-Erik Hansson 10 Experimenting with Children: Infants in the Scientific Imagination203 Lisa Ann Robertson 11 ‘A wretch so sad, so lorn’: The Feral Child and the Romantic Culture of Infancy229 Rolf Lessenich Works Cited247 Index267

Notes on Contributors

Charles I. Armstrong  is Professor of English Literature at the University of Agder, Norway. He is the president of the Nordic Association of English Studies and the vice-president of the International Yeats Society. In addition to being the co-editor of three essay collections, he is the author of the following monographs: Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History (2013), Figures of Memory: Poetry, Space and the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and Romantic Organicism: From Idealist Origins to Ambivalent Afterlife (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Robert A. Davis  is Professor of Religious and Cultural Education at the University of Glasgow. He has published an award-winning biography Robert Owen (2010; with Frank O’Hagan) as well as a range of articles and book chapters dealing with various aspects of the history and conception of childhood and education. He is working on a monograph about the English lullaby. He is the editor of the Journal of the History of Education. Martina Domines Veliki  is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Zagreb University, Croatia. Select publications include English Studies from Archives to Prospects: Volume 1—Literature and Cultural Studies, ed. with Stipe Grgas and Tihana Klepač (2016), and a range of articles on Wordsworth and other British Romantics in Croatian and European journals. From 2013 to 2019 she was the president of the Croatian Association for the Study of English (CASE). She is currently finishing a monograph on Wordsworth, memory and class. xi

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Cian  Duffy is Professor and Chair of English Literature at Lund University, Sweden. His research concerns various aspects of the intellectual life and cultural history of the late eighteenth century and Romantic period. Recent publications include (ed.) Romantic Norths: Anglo-­Nordic Exchanges 1770-1840 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and (ed.) Samuel Glover, A Description of the Valley of Chamouni (2018). John-Erik  Hansson  is an early career researcher and a teaching and research fellow in English Studies at the Université de Cergy Pontoise, France. His doctoral thesis, from the European University Institute, Florence (2018), examined the writing for children of the English Radical philosopher, novelist, historian, and political theorist William Godwin. His research interests also include modern British and European intellectual history—particularly the history of (Radical) political thought and the intersection of literature and politics—as well as the history and theory of anarchism. Anja Höing  is a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. Her research focuses on representations of childhood, nature, and animals in British literature. She is working on a project tracing the interconnections between childhood, nature, and animals in Early Modern England. Recent publications include ‘Uncanny Pets: Posthuman Dimensions of the Depiction of Companion Animals in 21st-Century British Literature’, Anglistik 30/2 (2019); ‘Animalic Agency: Intersecting the Child and the Animal in Popular British Children’s Fiction’, in Ingrid E. Castro and Jessica Clark (eds.) Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen, and In-Between (2018); ‘“A Retreat on the River Bank”: Perpetuating Patriarchal Myths in Animal Stories’, in Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey (eds.), Women and Nature: Beyond Dualism in Gender, Body, and Environment (2017); ‘Negotiating Anthropomorphism in Talking Animal Stories—An Ecocritical Approach to Fantastic Animals’, in Fastitocalon—Studies in Fantasticism Ancient to Modern. (VI): Fantastic Animals, Animals in the Fantastic (2016); and her monograph Reading Divine Nature—Religion and Nature in English Animal Stories (2017). Loren  Lerner is Professor of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal. Women’s contributions to the cultural and material history of art are one of her areas of research with an emphasis on pictures of chil-

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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dren. In 2005 she was the curator of ‘Picturing Her: Images of Girlhood’ at the McCord Museum, which led to her editorship of Depicting Canada’s Children (2009). Her writings on children and youth appear in the journals Girlhood Studies, Journal of Canadian Art History, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, and in the volumes Healing the World’s Children (2008); Rethinking Professionalism: Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970 (2012); Girlhood and the Politics of Place (2016); Nineteenth Century Childhoods in Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives (2018); and Our Rural Selves: Memory and the Visual in Canadian Childhoods (2019). Rolf  Lessenich (1940–2019) was Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at University of Bonn, Germany. Over a long and productive career, his research interests lay chiefly in literary history from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. He authored more than seventy periodical and festschrift essays, contributions to books, dictionary articles on English and comparative literature, and six monographs: Romantic Disillusionism and the Sceptical Tradition (2017); Neoclassical Satire and the Romantic School 1780-1830 (2012); Aspects of English Preromanticism (1989); Lord Byron and the Nature of Man (1978); Elements of Pulpit Oratory in Eighteenth-Century England 1660-1800 (1972); and Dichtungsgeschmack und althebräische Bibelpoesie im 18. Jahrhundert (1967). Andrew McInnes  is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Edge Hill University, UK.  He has published widely on Romantic-period women’s writing, Gothic fiction, and children’s literature. His first monograph Wollstonecraft’s Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period was published in 2016. In 2018, he co-edited a special issue of the journal Romanticism on the topic ‘Edgy Romanticism’. His research project, on the Romantic Ridiculous, aims to take Romantic Studies from the sublime to the ridiculous, asking what it means to feel ridiculous. Robert  Rix is Associate Professor of English Literature at University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has published widely in several areas relating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: politics, religion, language, nationalism, and book history. He is the author of a number of articles on William Blake, the focus of which has been the milieux of radicals, revolutionaries, and enthusiasts who populated London in the 1790s. A theme he has pursued in this connection is Blake’s relationship with Swedenborgianism, which was first given extensive attention in his monograph William Blake

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and the Cultures of Radical Christianity (2007). Rix has also published extensively on British and Nordic antiquarianism, including the monograph The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination: Ethnicity, Legend, and Literature (2014). His current work is on European and American representations of Greenland. Lisa Ann Robertson  is Assistant Professor of Nineteenth-Century British Literature at the University of South Dakota. She researches theories and representations of minds and bodies in the literary and scientific writing of the Romantic period, with a particular focus on poetry, theories of imagination, materialist theories of education, and cognitive science, both historical and contemporary. She has published on these subjects in Essays in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Prose Studies, La Questione Romantica, and Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons, and has chapters ‘Enacting the Absolute: Subject-Object Relations in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Theory of Knowledge’ in volume 3 (Distributed Cognition in Enlightenment and Romantic Culture) of The History of Distributed Cognition. She is revising a monograph titled Embodied Organicism: Cognition, Aesthetics, and Ethics in British Romantic Literature and Science.

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4

Fig. 4.5

Fig. 4.6

Fig. 4.7

Antoine-Jean Duclos after Charles Monnet, La Fontaine de la Regeneration sur les debris de la Bastille, le 10 avril 1793, (c.1794). Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington (Wikimedia Commons) 67 Marguerite Gérard, L’Élève intéressante (1786). Private collection (Wikimedia Commons) 70 Marguerite Gérard, Les premiers pas, ou La Mère nourrice (1803–4). (Reproduced by kind permission of: Carlo Barbiero, Coll. Villa-Musée Fragonard, Grasse, France) 73 Robert de Launay after Charles Nicolas Cochin, l’Éducation de l’Homme commence à sa naïssance (1780–81), frontispiece to vol. 4 of Collection complète des oeuvres de Jean Jacques Rousseau (1782). (Reproduced by kind permission of The British Museum, London) 77 Marguerite Gérard, La Maternité [Motherhood] (c. 1795–1800). (Reproduced by kind permission of Baltimore Museum of Art, bequest of Elise Agnus Daingerfield, BMA 1944.102)80 Honoré Daumier, Le Wagon de troisième classe (c. 1862–64), New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929, accession number: 29.100.129. (Wikimedia Commons) 87 Berthe Morisot, Le Berceau [The Cradle] (1872). Musée d’Orsay, Paris (Wikimedia Commons) 88

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Romantic Cultures of Infancy Martina Domines Veliki and Cian Duffy

In his essay of December 1784, Beantwortung der frage: Was ist Aufklärung? [Answering the question: What is Enlightenment?], the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) defines Enlightenment as ‘der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit’, ‘the emergence of man from his self-imposed nonage’.1 Eighteen years later, in March 1802, the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) wrote in his poem ‘My heart leaps up’ that ‘the child is father of the man’, one of the most-often quoted lines of English Romantic verse.2 In the two decades between these statements, the 1  Immanuel Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, transl. Mary Smith; available at http://www. columbia.edu/acis/ets/ccread/etscc/kant.html (last accessed April 2019). 2  William Wordsworth, ‘My heart leaps up’, l. 7; quoted from Stephen Gill (ed.), William Wordsworth: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008). Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Wordsworth are from this edition.

M. Domines Veliki (*) English Studies, Zagreb University, Zagreb, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] C. Duffy English Studies, Lund University, Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Domines Veliki, C. Duffy (eds.), Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8_1

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concept of ‘infancy’ became across Europe a central topos in a range of different areas of enquiry, genres of cultural productivity, and national contexts. ‘Childhood’, as Andrew O’Malley puts it in the introduction to his Literary Cultures and Eighteenth Century Childhoods, became ubiquitous, ‘both in terms of the print materials marketed to people at this stage of life and in terms of the discourses in which it becomes an important consideration and significant trope’.3 It is with the manifestation of these various ‘cultures of infancy’ in the late eighteenth century and Romantic period that the essays in our volume are concerned. Before going any further, a note on terminology may prove useful. OED gives the earliest occurrences of the noun infant and the abstract noun infancy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries respectively, in theological and pedagogical contexts. For most of the period covered by our volume, the term infant, in the context of human biology, was generally taken to cover the first seven years of life and was often, in that sense, broadly synonymous with child.4 However, it was also during the period covered by this volume that it became increasingly common to use the term infancy in non-biological contexts, for instance, to refer to the infancy of civil society or to the infancy of a particular area of knowledge. Indeed, this diversification in the semantic and epistemological range of the term is one of the key phenomena which we study here. For these reasons, in our editorial commentary, we use infancy to refer to the concept or topos in general and childhood to refer specifically to young humans. This said, there will inevitably be some necessary variance in this policy because of differing usage in the primary and secondary sources which we consider. Where such variance is substantive, we will flag it up. As a contribution to an already-thriving scholarly field, the essays in this volume shed additional light on the remarkable breadth and cultural significance of the engagement with ‘infancy’ during the Romantic period, tracing it across national boundaries, in the visual arts, in works of educational theory and natural philosophy, and in both fiction and non-fiction written for children. Taken as a whole, our essays also find in the engagement with infancy during the Romantic period certain key features of what

3  Andrew O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods (London: Palgrave, 2018), introduction, p. 1. 4  See, for example, the entries on ‘infant’ and ‘infancy’ in Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and William Nicholson, The British Encyclopedia (1809).

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we might now call, following Michel Foucault, the Romantic episteme, that is to say, the manner in which knowledge was produced and structured at the time.5 We hope to show here how Romantic-period engagements with infancy, and Romantic-period representations of and for children, constitute sites of complex discursive interaction, where ostensibly unrelated areas of enquiry are brought together through common tropes and topoi.6 Such representations often illustrate, in other words, not only the pre- or proto-disciplinary nature of the Romantic episteme, where the boundaries between what we would now consider different kinds and areas of knowledge are fluid, but also the relative absence of any rigid boundary between literary and non-literary engagements with infancy. If it has often, rightly, been argued that the ‘modern’ child was born in the late eighteenth-century—most recently, for example, by Andrew O’Malley in Literary Cultures and Eighteenth Century Childhoods—then we suggest, here, that in the cultural investment in infancy during the Romantic period is also visible the emergence of a nineteenth-­century, disciplinary, and ‘two cultures’ episteme out of earlier forms of thought.7 * * * It has become somewhat routine, now, for both cultural historians of childhood and for scholars of the Romantic period to claim that the Romantics invented childhood. In her recent introduction to The Child in British Literature, for example, Adrienne Gavin suggests that: 5  In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault uses the term episteme to signify that which ‘defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice’ (see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1970), p. 183. 6  In ‘Crusoe’s Children’, Andrew O’Malley notes ‘the growing nexus of metaphorical associations attached to [childhood] by adults’ as the eighteenth century progresses. See Andrew O’Malley, ‘Crusoe’s Children: Robinson Crusoe and the Culture of the Childhood in the Eighteenth Century’, in Adrienne Gavin (ed.), The Child in British Literature (London: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 87–100 (91). 7  In his introduction to Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, O’Malley confirms that ‘the eighteenth century has long been regarded as a watershed period in the history of both childhood and children’s literature’ (p.  1). In The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (London: Cambridge University Press, 1959), Charles Percy Snow coined the expression ‘two cultures’ to refer to the division between the arts and the sciences, as distinct and sometimes opposed, means of knowing and describing the world.

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For the first time in a sustained way Romantic poetry constructed childhood as a desirable state, distinct from adulthood, for which adults longed: a lost, idealized, clear-visioned, divinely pure, intuitive, in-tune-with-nature, imaginative stage of life, of whose spirits adult felt the loss and sought to capture in literature.8

Gavin’s emphasis on ‘poetry’, here, and the particular model of the relationship between childhood experience and adult identity which she presents as ‘Romantic’, are instructive. Both point to an equally widespread corollary to the claim that the Romantics invented childhood: the idea that Wordsworth’s ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1807) constitutes the definitive, ‘Romantic’ configuration of childhood. Hence Gavin herself cites Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ as ‘one of the period’s most influential poems about childhood’, whilst Roderick McGillis’s chapter in the same volume goes even further, describing Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ as ‘arguably the most influential statement concerning the child that has appeared since the beginning of the nineteenth century’ before reminding us how ‘much of the poem focuses on what has become cliché: childhood purity, innocence, wisdom, joy, and freedom’.9 Hence, if Wordsworth does not loom especially large in our essays, it is not so much from any sense of a need to correct such accounts of his influence but rather out of a conviction that the cultural place and legacy of works like ‘Ode’ and ‘My heart leaps up’ has been, now, very well documented. Essays in our volume by Cian Duffy and Martina Domines Veliki, and by Rolf Lessenich, do, however, consider aspects of the work of some Romantic-period writers who wrote back against the paradigm of infancy developed in Wordsworth’s poetry, often on grounds of its perceived lack of realism. Whilst it is generally accepted by scholars that the Romantics invented childhood, however, the causes and consequences of that ‘invention’ remain the subject of debate. ‘How and why childhood and the figure of the child became so important to such a wide range of writers’, as Ann Wierda Rowland puts it in Romanticism and Childhood, ‘has long been

8   Adrienne Gavin (ed.), The Child in British Literature (London: Palgrave, 2012), ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–8. 9  Gavin, ‘Introduction’, in The Child in British Literature, p. 8; Roderick McGillis, ‘Irony and Performance: The Romantic Child’, in Gavin (ed.), The Child in British Literature, pp. 101–115 (101–2).

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one of the central questions of literary historical studies’.10 In her seminal account of ‘the fixation on childhood’ by Romantic writers, Judith Plotz traces the claim that the Romantics invented childhood back to the late nineteenth century, by which time, Plotz says, the notion of ‘childhood as a domain for exploration [and of] Wordsworth and his contemporaries as its explorers had become commonplace’.11 In its broadest sense, the claim reflects the idea that attitudes to childhood prevalent in the West today— the sense of ‘childhood as a distinct, individual element of human life’; a developmental understanding of the relationship between child and adult; and an extensive, sentimental investment in the abstract concept of ‘the Child’ as archetype of nature and innocence—all began to take recognisable shape in cultural texts dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.12 That is to say that our ‘social and cultural construct’ of the child, to use Stephen Mintz’s phrase, has been inherited from the Romantics.13 It is also at this moment in the cultural history of Europe and America that ‘the child emerges’, as Peter Coveney puts it in The Image of Childhood, ‘from comparative unimportance to become the focus of unprecedented literary interest, and, in time, the central figure of an increasingly significant portion of our literature’.14 In The Child in British Literature, Adrienne Gavin reminds us, importantly, of both ‘the constructedness of literary children’ in Romantic-period writing and of the fact that the substantial ‘symbolic value’ attached to the child in Romantic-period cultural texts was not always paralleled by a ‘realist function’, at least when compared to Victorian fiction: ‘few easily nameable Romantic literary children’, Gavin correctly observes, ‘stand out in memory’.15 Be this as it may, the extent of the cultural investment in infancy during the Romantic period means that the idea of infancy, as configured by Romantic-period cultural texts, has become central to our understanding of Romanticism 10  Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 5. 11  Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. xii, 1–2. 12  Horace Elisha Scudder, ‘Childhood in English Literature’, The Atlantic Monthly (1885), p. 474; quoted from Plotz, Vocation, p. 1. 13  Stephen Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. viii. 14  Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 29. 15  Gavin, The Child in British Literature, pp. 2, 9.

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itself. ‘In a certain sense’, as D. B. Ruderman has recently argued in The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry, ‘new formulations of infancy are inseparable from our imaginings of the inauguration of romanticism’.16 It is difficult to talk for long about the one without talking about the other. ‘That the artists and writers of what we call the Romantic period’, Rowland says, ‘created images of children that powerfully condensed and encapsulated new ideas of childhood that had been circulating and gaining pace over the course of the century is indeed a generally accepted feature of Romantic literature and culture’.17 In the cultural and critical legacy of the Romantic invention of infancy, then, we can see another variant of what Jerome McGann, writing in 1983, identified as ‘the Romantic ideology’: the tendency of scholarly responses to Romantic-­ period cultural texts to begin from starting positions defined by those very texts which are to be studied.18 But there is also a paradox involved in the claim that the Romantics invented infancy, first remarked upon by Judith Plotz: our abstract concept of ‘The Child, who is unmarked by time, place, class, or gender but is represented as in all places and all times the same’ arises out of a Romantic-­ period discourse of infancy which is so ‘diverse’ that it ‘makes nonsense’ of the notion ‘of a single Romantic type of child’.19 A historically and culturally specific ‘Romantic discourse’, so Plotz argues, ‘produces the Child, a timeless figure of essential childhood’.20 In Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood, Plotz charts this extensive ‘decontextualizing of the child’ across a range of Romantic-period literature and interrogates its potential social and political ramifications, anticipating, in some respects, Gavin’s later observations about the ratio of symbolism and realism in the ‘literary children’ of the Romantic period. Investment in a ‘timeless’ (in Gavin’s terms ‘symbolic’) concept of the child, Plotz argues, often functions in Romantic-period writing as a ‘buffer against the vicissitudes of the public sphere’, even, on occasion, ‘blotting out the contemporary ugliness of 16  D. B. Ruderman, The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry: Romanticism, Subjectivity, Form (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 10. 17  Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 9. 18  McGann defines ‘the romantic ideology’ as the discourse of ‘Romanticism’s own selfrepresentations’ which, McGann suggests, has enjoyed ‘uncritical absorption’ in much scholarly work done on the Romantic period (see Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 1.). 19  Plotz, Vocation of Childhood, pp. 4–5. 20  Plotz, Vocation of Childhood, p. 5.

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child exploitation’—though one should of course not forget that key Romantic poets of childhood, like William Wordsworth and William Blake (1757–1827), very often make that ‘ugliness’ a prime focus of their work.21 Building on Plotz’s attempt to re-historicise the abstract concept of ‘the Child’ within the variegated discursive context out of which it arose, and to which it responded, recent scholarship has further refined and complicated our understanding of the Romantic invention of infancy. In her search for ‘new answers’ to the questions of why and how infancy became important to the Romantics, Ann Wierda Rowland, in Romanticism and Childhood, traces what she describes as a ‘persistent rhetoric of infancy’— ‘the images, phrases, metaphors and figures of children and childhood’— across a ‘wide range’ of different genres of writing and areas of enquiry in the eighteenth century and Romantic period.22 It became increasingly common, in other words, during the eighteenth century, for writers to use an infant-adult paradigm to model such ostensibly unrelated topic as the history of societies, of nations, and even of the earth itself. ‘Notions of infancy and childhood’, Rowland argues, ‘served as rhetorical and conceptual tools in the long process of re-thinking human history, language, development and literature that we call Enlightenment’.23 For Rowland, this ‘re-thinking’ involves the emergence of a more genetic understanding of the relationship between infancy and adulthood from the stadial paradigms prominent in Enlightenment thought—a general trend visible in the quotations from Kant and Wordsworth with which we opened this introduction: for Kant, infancy (‘nonage’) is a limited, developmental stage which must altogether be left behind in order for maturity to be achieved, whilst for Wordsworth, childhood experience has a shaping influence on, and remains an integral part of, adult identity. In Rowland’s analysis this paradigm-shift led, in the Romantic period, to what she describes—in entirely non-pejorative terms—as ‘the infantilization of literary culture’: a process through which ‘new ideas of the child’s mind and memory enabled new ways of accommodating popular literature within a national literary tradition’, including the positing of 21  Plotz, Vocation of Childhood, p. 39. In his contribution to our volume, Robert Rix reevaluates Blake’s headline investment in infancy in relation to debates about children and children’s education in the late eighteenth-century and Romantic-period traditions of dissent and evangelicalism. 22  Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 5. 23  Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 6.

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vernacular (‘infant’) forms as a newly valued point of origin.24 But for others, such as D. B. Ruderman, scholarly attention to the wide-ranging valorisation of infancy in Romantic-period cultural texts has come at the expense of attention to a concurrent, ‘more disturbing and philosophically fraught notion of infancy’ during the period, which ‘notion’ Ruderman sees exemplified in the concept of ‘experience’ in the work of William Blake.25 Attending to this other, ‘more fraught and less continuous and synthetic narrative’ of the Romantic invention of infancy, Ruderman argues, provides ‘not only a fuller and deeper picture of what constitutes the romantic, but also a fuller and more complex picture of the prehistory of psychoanalysis’—which, he says, is ‘arguably the most powerfully tenacious iteration of late romanticism’.26 Hence, Ruderman seeks to ‘shift the focus from the thematic and narrative representations of childhood and infancy’ in Romantic-period cultural texts and to resituate ‘romantic constructions of infancy within protopsychoanalytic and phenomenological accounts of feeling and thought’ as well as of ‘aesthetic form’.27 Recent scholarship has also attended to other aspects of the ideological freight borne by the widespread cultural engagement with infancy in the late eighteenth-century and Romantic period. In her introduction to The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, Paula Fass reminds us that ‘the privileges of childhood are often related to other privileges, such as race, class, wealth, and sometimes gender’, but also that: the story of childhood as a privilege is also about how western societies in the period since the nineteenth century laid out a pattern, even a paradigm, that has increasingly defined, constrained, and regulated the lives of all children as it penetrated our belief systems as not only ideal but as a requirement of proper development.28

And with a more specific focus on the period covered by this volume, Andrew O’Malley, in The Making of the Modern Child, similarly remarks

 Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 6.  Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, p. 2. 26  Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, p. 4. 27  Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, p. 3. 28  Paula Fass, The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 3. 24 25

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on how ‘the history of childhood is, like that of any other subject, necessarily fragmented along such lines as class, gender, and race’.29 The use of infancy as a trope in the stadial theories of societal and racial development formulated by Enlightenment historians and philosophers such as Adam Fergusson (1723–1816) in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) meant that parallels between infants, so-called primitive peoples, and (on occasion) animals became increasingly common in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century cultural texts, across a range of genres and areas of enquiry. Exemplary in this respect would be the analogy drawn by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) in his ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1820) that ‘the savage is to ages what the child is to years’, but many other instances could be adduced.30 Chapters by Anja Höing and Rolf Lessenich in our volume touch on these often problematic equivalences—though much scholarly work remains to be done to investigate the role of race in the engagement with infancy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.31 The headline importance of ideas about gender in eighteenth-century debates surrounding the education of children is arguably most familiar, now, from the responses made by the English Radical feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) to the programme for male education set out by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–88) in his Émile, or On Education (1762), in her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), Original Stories from Real Life (1788), and Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The mixture of genres in which Wollstonecraft took up this debate—encompassing pedagogical writing, political tracts, and fiction for children—exemplifies again the extent to which the engagement with infancy during the late eighteenth century and Romantic period transcended the boundaries of what would today be considered different areas of enquiry and modes of writing. But that mixture also points to one of  O’Malley, Making of the Modern Child, p. 6.  Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, quoted from Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy (eds.), Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected Poems and Prose (London: Penguin, 2017), p. 653; unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent references to Shelley’s work are to this edition. For a detailed recent reading of Shelley’s analogy in the context of stadial models of societal and racial development, see Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, pp. 12–16. 31  For a recent essay on the early intermixture of ideas about race and infancy in an American context, see Jennifer Thorn, ‘Lemuel Haynes and “Little Adults”: Race and the Prehistory of Childhood in Early New England’, in O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, pp. 281–99. 29 30

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the most significant aspects of the material and ideological history of the Romantic cultures of infancy, recently discussed by Andrew O’Malley in a series of books and essays. The late eighteenth century not only witnessed, to use O’Malley’s terms, the ‘rapid growth of a specialized text industry addressing young readers’, but was also the historical moment when, in Britain at least, ‘children’s literature became one of the crucial mechanisms for disseminating and consolidating middle-class ideology’.32 ‘For children to participate successfully in the new ideological project of the period’, O’Malley writes, ‘they had to be rendered into subjects whose energies could be controlled and effectively harnessed’.33 Charles Armstrong and John-Erik Hansson, in their contributions to our volume, further examine the complex political inflections of instructive literature written for children, noting how such works often mirror the concerns and debates of writings aimed at ‘adult’ audiences. Nor, as Anja Müller has shown in a recent essay, was such subject-forming confined to books aimed at child readers: English periodicals aimed at adult readers were also ‘instrumental’ to ‘the circulation of ideas about childhood’ and the formation of a highly politicised ‘discourse of childhood’ during the eighteenth century.34 A number of scholars have identified the perceived otherness of children—and the need to account for and, to an extent, delimit that otherness—as key components of this evolving middle-class ‘discourse of childhood’. Mintz, O’Malley, and Michals, for example, all note the overlap between configurations of infancy and configurations of class during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with both children and ‘the people’ frequently defined, as Teresa Michals puts it, by ‘subordinate status’.35 In the late eighteenth century and Romantic period, however, tropes of infancy increasingly became a means of positing and valorising 32  See O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Childhoods, p.  1; and O’Malley, Making of the Modern Child, pp. 5, 11. 33  O’Malley, Making of the Modern Child, p. 11. 34  See Anja Müller, ‘Circulating Childhood in Eighteenth-Century England: The Cultural Work of Periodicals’, in O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, pp. 35–50 (35–6). See also Anja Müller, Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689–1789 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 35  Teresa Michals, ‘Age, Status, and Reading in the Eighteenth Century’, in O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, pp. 15–33 (15). See, for example, Andrew O’Malley, Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe (London: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 11–12; and Mintz, History of American Childhood, pp. 75–93.

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lost origins (whether of individuals, societies, or nations), enabling the otherness of those origins to be recognised but also to be made safe by incorporation within a coherent, ‘adult’ subjectivity. Hence, as we have seen, for Rowland, the figuring of English vernacular traditions as ‘infant’ enabled Romantic-period writers and critics: to construct a national literary culture capable of embracing a wider range of literary forms. New theories about infancy, mental development, early language and childhood memory gave this period innovative ways to value and include the most trivial and popular literary forms within a native culture and national history.36

Ruderman, in a related reading, examines how infancy ‘functions’ in the Romantic-period as ‘an index of certain emerging, often conflicting ideas about the self’, ideas which, he suggests, ‘assume their most cogent and lasting expression through renovations and revitalizations of form’.37 ‘Attention to infancy’ in Romantic-period Britain, Ruderman argues, ‘catalyzed a revolution in literary form and genre’.38 Building on all this work, Robert Davis and Loren Lerner, in their contributions to our volume, further extended critical understanding of the ways in which the Romantic cultures of infancy enable and involve the revalorisation of individual and cultural origins. * * * We have already noted Ann Wierda Rowland’s description, in Romanticism and Childhood, of the pervasive presence in a range of eighteenth-century and Romantic-period writing of ‘a rhetoric of infancy and childhood – the images, phrases, metaphors and figures of children and childhood’.39 In Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, Andrew O’Malley similarly suggests that ‘childhood’, in the eighteenth century, can be understood: as a set of expectations, desires, concerns, limitations, and capacities adults sought to address in their writing for young people; as a trope or symbol  Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 5.  Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, p. 4. 38  Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, pp. 3, 4. 39  Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 5. 36 37

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that performed a range of cultural work in the writings adults produced for adult readers; [and] as a lived, embodied experience children recorded and actively shaped.40

Our purpose in returning with this collection of essays to the rich scholarly debate about the place of ‘infancy’ in the cultural history of late eighteenth-­ century and Romantic-period Britain is twofold. The old juxtaposition, in English literary studies, of the Enlightenment and the Romantic period has mostly been discarded, now, by scholars of both periods, and replaced with an understanding of the thing we call ‘Romanticism’ as essentially a continuation and extension of the Enlightenment project.41 But this familiar juxtaposition has had something of an afterlife in cultural histories of childhood during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hence, we want to look again, here, at the configurations of infancy in eighteenth-­ century and Romantic-period cultural texts and to suggest that these are less distinct than has sometimes been implied. To put this more precisely, whilst Rowland and others are certainly correct to argue that a stadial understanding of infancy as a developmental stage to be outgrown gave place, gradually, to a more genetic understanding of an ongoing relationship between childhood experience and adult identity, important strands of the stadial model certainly persist in Romantic-period cultural texts. As noted, Percy Shelley’s analogy that ‘the savage is to ages what the child is to years’ is often (rightly) cited as exemplary of the persistence in Romantic-period writing of the use of infancy as a trope in stadial models of social development, which can be traced back (at least) to Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society.42 But Ruderman, for example, shows how ‘infancy’ often also functions in Romantic-period cultural texts as ‘an essential figure’ in ‘narratives of becoming’ and is ‘disruptive to linear theories of progress and development precisely to the degree that it remains an accessible space open to memory, mutability, revision, and modification’.43 In a similar vein, Andrew O’Malley has pointed  O’Malley, Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, p. 3.  Many of the problems of this dichotomy were embodied in the entangled critical debate, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, around the slippery and now largely outdated concept of ‘pre-Romanticism’. For a flavour of this debate see, for example: Marshall Brown, Preromanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Rolf Lessenich, Aspects of English Preromanticism (Cologne: Böhlau, 1989). 42  See Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, pp. 12–16. 43  Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, p. 7. 40 41

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in various places to the importance of ‘nostalgia’ in Romantic-period engagements with infancy, as a kind of ‘suture’ by which past and present, infant and adult, other and same, can be figuratively ‘bound together’.44 Drawing on these perceptions, a key issue which concerns us in this volume is, consequently, not the extent to which late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century cultural texts conform to either a stadial (Enlightenment) or a genetic (Romantic) configuration of infancy, but rather the extent to which such texts tend to blur or even altogether to reject that kind of dichotomy. We also hope in this volume to continue and to extend scholarly understanding of the extent to which the cultural investment in infancy during the late eighteenth century and Romantic period crossed the boundaries not only of genres but also of what would today be considered distinct disciplines and areas of enquiry. We have already noted Adrienne Gavin’s emphasis on the ‘constructed’ nature of ‘children and childhood’ in ‘literary texts’ from the period.45 Equally, scholars like Rowland and O’Malley have demonstrated beyond doubt (as we have seen) that the topos of infancy was not limited to literary texts. Our essays reflect the breadth of this engagement, considering, for example, representations of infancy in the visual arts, in educational theory, in political and historical writing, and in works of natural philosophy. But we also maintain a focus on what would now be considered literary texts here precisely in order to illustrate a claim which we have already made in this introduction: namely, that Romantic-period representations of and for children often exemplify how the difference between what would now be considered separately as literary and as other forms and genres of engagement with infancy was not then clearly established. We feel it less helpful, in other words, to talk about what would now be categorised as ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ engagements with infancy than to focus on the extent to which those engagements, through shared tropes and figures, illustrate the relative absence of such boundaries from the cultural texts of the time. Hence, again, our claim that the Romantic-period ‘cultures of infancy’ which we chart in this volume exemplify not only the pre- or proto-disciplinary nature of the Romantic episteme, in which writings from what would now be considered different areas of enquiry are united by common figures and 44  O’Malley, Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, pp. 11–12; see also O’Malley, Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, p. 3. 45  Gavin, The Child in British Literature, p. 3.

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tropes, but also how educational, historiographical, and scientific writing, for example, were only just beginning to emerge in their modern forms as distinctly non-literary modes, distinguished increasingly by a suspicion and avoidance of figurative language. Fascinating in their own right, then, as part of the history of (the representation of) childhood in Europe, examination of the Romantic ‘cultures of infancy’ is also important, we suggest, to an adequate understanding of ‘Romanticism’ itself. * * * The writing about and the representation of infancy by William Wordsworth have, as we have said, been very well documented by literary scholars and cultural historians. But rather less work has been done on the engagement with infancy by Wordsworth’s contemporary, biographer, and one-time friend, Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859), the ‘English Opium Eater’. The first essay in our volume, by Cian Duffy and Martina Domines Veliki, tracks the engagement with infancy across a selection of De Quincey’s expansive oeuvre. Infancy plays an obvious and central role in the autobiographical writings for which De Quincey is, today, primarily known: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), Suspiria de Profundis (1845), and The English Mail-Coach (1849). The configuration of infancy which De Quincey develops in these works is explicitly indebted to Wordsworth’s poetry, but also positioned as a corrective, writing back against the Wordsworthian paradigm which, De Quincey suggests, is both inaccurate and incomplete. In De Quincey’s autobiographies, the Wordsworthian idea of infant experience as something which is sublimated within adult identity gives way to a model of infancy as a developmental stage which is never wholly outgrown but which persists in and which can destabilise adult subjectivity under particular circumstances. And a similar understanding is visible in De Quincey’s use of infancy as an epistemological trope in a range of essays on subjects other than autobiography and biography: infancy in these works emerges as a relative and persistent condition rather than as an absolute stage capable of being left definitively in the past. Across the different genres of De Quincey’s writing, this chapter shows, the engagement with infancy bears out Ruderman’s arguments about how infancy can be ‘disruptive to linear theories of progress and development’.46  Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, p. 7.

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Robert Rix, in his essay, returns to the poetry and painting of one of the English Romantic-period poets who is most routinely associated with new configurations of infancy: William Blake. Rix focuses on the place of infancy in work done by Blake during the 1790s. As Rix notes, this work shares with many of Blake’s contemporaries a new, ‘Romantic’ understanding of infancy as a privileged state which is both free from but also vulnerable to corruption, or, to use Blake’s own terms, as an ‘innocence’ always liable to transition to ‘experience’. But within the specific historical and discursive context of the evangelical revival in late eighteenth-century Britain, a revival with which Blake was very much involved, his engagement with infancy takes on, as Rix shows, an especial significance. Specifically, Blake, in his poetry from the 1790s, articulates a theory of human spirituality with the concept of infancy at its core. Children, in these poems, are presented as having an intuitive understanding of the divine which, far from needing to be inculcated by education, needs rather to be defended from dogma and moralising. Ultimately, then, in Rix’s analysis, Blake’s configuration of infancy in his poetry of the 1790s is also a theory of education, one which rejects stadial Enlightenment models of infancy as a development phase which must be outgrown and one which, in its blending of theology, pedagogy, and poetry, exemplifies how the cultures of infancy crossed the boundaries of genre and discipline during the Romantic period. Loren Lerner’s essay examines the representation of the infant, the mother, and the female breast, in a selection of paintings by the French artist Marguerite Gérard (1761–1837). Lerner contextualises these representations in relation to the iconography of the French Revolution in the 1790s and the gradual movement towards French Impressionism following the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) at the Battle of Waterloo (1815). Gérard, Lerner shows, drew on classical sources comparable to those mobilised by neoclassical artists like Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) in service of ideas central to the ideology of the Revolution. However, she also drew on a range of other elements, including some borrowed from seventeenth-century Dutch painting. In considering the interplay of these various traditions in Gérard’s representations of infants and mothers, Lerner argues that her genre scenes articulate a distinctive, female domestic culture, which complements the revolutionary political agenda informing many of the historical- and mythological-themed works of the period. An important corollary of this assessment, Lerner concludes, is that the modern depiction of family life in French painting did not—as

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has often been suggested—originate with Impressionism but rather in earlier, Romantic interest in mother-infant scenes during the 1790s. Robert Davis reassesses the origins of the modern conception and practice of infant education in the ‘cultures of infancy’ developed during the Romantic period. Specifically, Davis shows how the early development of infant education, as theory and practice, by figures like Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) and Robert Owen (1771–1858), used new, Romantic configurations of early childhood as the basis of campaigns for educational reform, campaigns which challenged and repurposed earlier, but still current, Christian and Enlightenment models of childhood. Faced with the social and demographic crises of industrialisation, and the accompanying collapse (especially in urban contexts) of established networks of popular schooling, Davis argues, a refurbished, ‘Romantic’ representation of infancy—related to, but distinct from childhood per se—served to drive new philanthropic and civic models of ‘infant schooling’ in key locations. Through these models, Davis concludes, an emotionally and morally potent image of the infant and its capacities was consolidated. Andrew McInnes looks at the interaction between discourses of infancy and discourses of the ridiculous in a selection of British and German cultural texts from the Romantic period and considers also the more recent afterlives of these discourses in some contemporary writing for children. Starting from the examination of the ridiculous by the German Romantic aesthetician Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), in his Vorschule der Aesthetik [School of Aesthetics] (1804), McInnes considers how the ridiculous can function in Romantic writing as a corrective counterpart to configurations of infancy rooted in the aesthetics of the sublime, as well as to other related, headline Romantic ideas such as the figure of the isolated genius in solitary communion with nature. McInnes takes as a case in point the English Romantic writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), whom he reads as a philosopher responding directly to Richter’s ideas; as a writer of the ridiculous in relation to nature, society, and infancy; and as himself a figure of the ridiculous in both satirical writing from the Romantic period and in more recent fiction for children. Noting that ‘the Romantic Child’ has been both a persistent and a problematic category in academic discussions, then, the definition of which has often been intricately linked to wider, scholarly (mis)understandings of Romanticism, McInnes’s focus is on those Romantic period cultural texts which reject the tropes of individualism and the sublime so often associated with ‘the Romantic child’.

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Charles Armstrong returns our volume to the place of infancy and childhood in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideas about education. His focus is the educational fiction of Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), primarily the novel Belinda (1801) and a selection of stories from The Parent’s Assistant (1796)—all of which exemplify what O’Malley, as we have seen, describes as the new ‘specialized text industry addressing young readers’.47 Armstrong contextualises Edgeworth’s pioneering works of children’s literature in relation to her own pedagogic treatise Practical Education (1798), which she co-authored with her father, as well to a range of other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-­ century debates about infant education and the role of literature in that education. Armstrong reads Edgeworth’s writing for and about children as engaged in a complex dialogue between the established, Enlightenment configuration of infancy and in the nascent, Romantic valorisation of the special sensibility of the child and the need to understand and to sympathise with that sensibility. Attention to the presence of this dialogue in Edgeworth’s educational writing, Armstrong concludes, not only sheds new light on her work, but also points towards the inadequacy of received, binary categorisations of literary periods and genres. Eighteenth-century writing for and about children often investigates and sometimes blurs the boundary line between human infants and animals, and infant-animal tropes are also common in eighteenth-century studies of the origins of languages and societies. Both Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), in his Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772), and James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714–99), in his Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773–92), for example, investigate the relationship between animal noises and language acquisition in infants and early societies.48 In her essay in this volume, Anja Höing looks at the role of animal characters in moral tales for children, specifically those tales narrated from the point of view of an animal, taking as primary examples The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1784), by Dorothy Kilner (1755–1836), and Fabulous Histories Designed for the Instruction of Children Respecting their Treatment of Animals (1798), by Sarah Trimmer (1741–1810). Such  O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Childhoods, p. 1.  For a recent study of the role of literacy in these debates about language acquisition and the human-animal divide, see Ann Wierda Rowland, ‘Learned Pigs and Literate Children: Becoming Human in Eighteenth-Century Literary Cultures’, in O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, pp. 99–115. 47 48

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moral tales, Höing argues, whilst primarily literary texts, also serve a pedagogic and ideological function as, essentially, conduct books for children. Höing traces in these texts a double trope of infancy based on a sense of ontological closeness between child and animal. Specifically, animal and infant are configured as being in an equivalent state of infancy, defined by the absence of adult, human rationality. The animal characters, Höing suggests, are thus deployed in these narratives as both a metaphor for, and a metonym of, the child reader, whose moral development requires them to identify with, but ultimately also to transcend, the pre-rational animal protagonist in order to become a functional member of adult society. Hence such moral tales, in Höing’s analysis, combine a stadial, Enlightenment view of infancy as a limited, developmental stage to be outgrown with a more Romantic configuration of infancy premised upon a valorisation of sensibility and an ability to sympathise with otherness. John-Erik Hansson takes as his subject the ‘histories for the use of schools and young children’ written by the English radical philosopher and political theorist William Godwin (1756–1836) and published, under the pseudonym Edward Baldwin, as History of England (1806), History of Rome (1809), and History of Greece (1822). As Hansson shows, these ‘histories’ illustrate Godwin’s commitment to the imagination and the autonomy of the child. They also participate in the ongoing redefinition, during the early part of the nineteenth century, of the uses of classical and modern history in the education of children and young adults. Hansson also investigates the relationship between Godwin’s ‘histories’ in the political positions outlined in his influential Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness (1793). The ‘histories’ have in common with Godwin’s Enquiry, Hansson argues, a progressive politics drawing on both radical Whiggism and moderate republicanism in an attempt to rehabilitate and defend a Radical agenda in the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Taken as a whole, then, Godwin’s ‘histories’ illustrate not only the extent to which writing for children mirrored the political concerns of works aimed at adult readers, but also articulate a connection between the education of children and the promotion of progressive political change. Turning from education to natural philosophy, Lisa Ann Robertson looks at rhetorical or ‘thought’ experiments involving infants and children in the work of three highly influential eighteenth-century and Romantic-­ period thinkers: Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), Thomas Wedgwood (1771–1805), and Humphry Davy (1788–1829). Starting with a reading

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of the ‘creature’ in Mary Shelley’s (1795–1851) novel Frankenstein (1818) as a reflection on, amongst many other things, the development of cognition in infants, Robertson works back through Davy, Wedgwood, and Darwin, to the materialist theories of mind developed by the English associationist David Hartley (1707–57) in his Observations on Man (1749). Hartley’s theories gained renewed currency in the 1770s, following the publication by the English chemist, theologian, and natural philosopher Joseph Priestley (1773–1804) of Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind (1775). In this renewed debate about the origins, nature, and implications, of human cognition, Robertson argues, the infant became a key rhetorical battleground for different hypotheses, with Darwin, Wedgwood, and Davy, each using imaginary infants as rhetorical test subjects for their ideas. Rolf Lessenich brings our volume to a close with his essay on the empirical, experimental evidence concerning the development of infants which was provided during the late eighteenth-century and Romantic period by the rare but high-profile cases of feral children. Lessenich concentrates on one such case: the discovery, discussed across Europe, of Victor of Aveyron (1788–1828), a child who had been living wild in the woods in Lacaune, in the south of France, and who was made the subject of the poem ‘The Savage of Aveyron’ (1800) by Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson (1757–1800). Lessenich situates Robinson’s poem in relation to the ongoing tension in British and European writing between the stadial, Enlightenment view of infancy, which equated infancy with primitivism and savagery, both in terms of individual and of racial and societal development, and emergent, Romantic ideas about the privileged sensibility of infants. Cases such as that of Victor of Aveyron were difficult to reconcile, Lessenich argues, with Romantic reconfigurations of infancy, problematising, as they did, any idealisation of a pre-education state of nature. Conversely, cases such as that of Victor, and literary responses to them such as Robinson’s poem, illustrate, as Lessenich shows, that the ideological tussle between Enlightenment and Romantic configurations of infancy continued unresolved during the heyday of the so-called invention of infancy in Romantic-­ period cultural texts. Lessenich’s essay is thus a fitting place for us to conclude our volume, exemplifying, as it does, the richness, the range, and the discursive complexity of the Romantic cultures of infancy.

CHAPTER 2

‘A detached peninsula’: Infancy in the Work of Thomas De Quincey Martina Domines Veliki and Cian Duffy

Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859), the ‘English Opium-Eater’, is still best known to scholars of British Romanticism for three celebrated, autobiographical works: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822, 1856), Suspiria de Profundis (1845), and The English Mail-Coach (1849). Recollections of infancy play a central role in these works, which are prime examples of what D.  B. Ruderman describes in The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry as ‘narratives of becoming’.1 De Quincey’s less-familiar ‘Autobiographical Sketches’ (1853–54), in which he brought together in revised form essays previously serialised in the 1830s and 1840s in periodicals like Hogg’s Instructor, are also very much

1  D. B. Ruderman, The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry (New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 7.

M. Domines Veliki (*) English Studies, Zagreb University, Zagreb, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] C. Duffy English Studies, Lund University, Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Domines Veliki, C. Duffy (eds.), Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8_2

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concerned to examine the relationship between infant experience and adult identity.2 That De Quincey’s extensive autobiographical corpus should focus so closely and so consistently on infancy is not surprising in view of the new, ‘Romantic’ valorisation of childhood by writers such as De Quincey’s literary idol and one-time friend William Wordsworth (1770–1850). What is perhaps more surprising, however, is that in essays spanning a quite remarkable range of subjects beyond his own life—from the history of language to the history of the universe—De Quincey also repeatedly returns to the subject and to the topos of infancy. This engagement with infancy across the different genres of De Quincey’s writing is our subject here. Much has, of course, been written about De Quincey’s autobiographical work and about his structural and conceptual borrowings from the Biographia Literaria (1817) of his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and from The Prelude (1805), portions of which De Quincey read in Wordsworth’s manuscript draft.3 But De Quincey’s examination of childhood in these works has yet to receive the level of scholarly attention which it deserves. In the first section of our essay, ‘Infant sensibility in De Quincey’, we read De Quincey’s treatment of infancy in his autobiographical works as a deliberate writing back against and revision of the configuration of childhood in the poetry of Wordsworth in particular.4 In so doing, we complement and update the work of critics like John E. Jordan and Charles Rzepka, who perceived De Quincey’s relationship with Wordsworth as an Oedipal struggle on the part of the aspiring (infant)

2  Discussions of infancy, of the relationship between infancy and adulthood, and of the relationships between specific infants and adults, also play a noticeable part in the notorious biographical exposés of his friends William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which De Quincey published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in the mid-late 1830s—but these fall outside the scope of our discussion here. 3  Important critical studies of De Quincey’s autobiographical corpus to which we are indebted here include: Frederick Burwick, ‘De Quincey as Autobiographer’, in Eugene Stelzig (ed.), Romantic Autobiography in England (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp.  117–30; and John Whale, Thomas De Quincey’s Reluctant Autobiography (London: Croom Helm, 1984). 4  The phrase ‘infant sensibility’ is taken, of course, from Wordsworth’s well-known discussion of ‘the infant babe’ in The Prelude (1805) II l. 286. Quoted from William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008). Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Wordsworth’s work are to this edition.

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Romantic author to individuate from his idolised literary father, the author of Lyrical Ballads (1798).5 In the second part of our essay, ‘De Quincey’s other infancies’, we turn to consider the function of infancy as an epistemological trope in a selection of De Quincey’s writings on topics other than biography and autobiography.6 In these essays, we argue, the configuration of infancy mirrors that visible in De Quincey’s autobiographies. Hence there arises a question of discursive priority: should we look to De Quincey’s autobiographical writings, as many have done, for the source of the patterns visible in his writing on other subjects, or should we rather see De Quincey’s reconstruction of his past life as conditioned by and mediated through his response to contemporary events.7 De Quincey was himself evidently aware of this especially vexed element of the relationship between childhood experience and adult identity. In ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, for example, the first part of Suspiria De Profundis, De Quincey breaks off his account of the death of his beloved sister Elizabeth when he was seven years old to note that: the reader must not forget, in reading this and other passages, that, though a child’s feelings are spoken of, it is not the child who speaks. I decipher what the child only felt in cipher […] I the child had the feelings, I the man decipher them. In the child lay the handwriting mysterious to him; in me the interpretation and the comment.8

5  For detailed factual histories of, and commentaries on, De Quincey’s relationship with Wordsworth, see, for example: Frances Wilson, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); John E. Jordan, De Quincey to Wordsworth: A Biography of a Relationship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); and GrevelLindop, The OpiumEater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983). For more on the Oedipal dynamics of that relationship, see also Charles Rzepka, Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (Amhurst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 66, 166–222 passim. 6  Given the sheer scope of De Quincey’s oeuvre, and such selection must, of course, be representative. 7  John Barrell’s The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) remains the seminal statement of the former view, but subsequent studies, building on the new historicist turn in studies of romanticism, have questioned or at least revised the psycho-biographical approach. See, for example: Frederick Burwick, Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge and Power (London: Palgrave, 2001); and Josephine McDonagh’s De Quincey’s Disciplines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 8  Thomas De Quincey, ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, quoted from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 113n.; original emphasis.

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The temporally fractured subjectivity which De Quincey registers here, in which childhood experience is both isolated from and developmentally implicated in adult identity, is a consistent feature of the engagement with infancy across his oeuvre. The ‘child’ De Quincey in ‘The Affliction of Childhood’ is both separate from and yet still the ‘germ’ of the adult autobiographer; both a subject in and of itself and yet also an object in relation to the adult subject who describes it.9 And it is exactly this same, liminal configuration of infancy which, we argue, makes the concept of infancy such a potent epistemological trope in De Quincey’s non autobiographical writing. To put this in the terminology which we have already outlined in our introduction to this volume, then, our aim in this essay is to show how the engagement with infancy across the genres of De Quincey’s writing consistently problematises the shift from a stadial to a genetic configuration of infancy which has often been identified as defining the Romantic (re)invention of childhood.

Infant Sensibility in De Quincey As we have noted in our introduction to this volume, Wordsworth’s dictum that ‘The Child is Father of the Man’ has often been cited as exemplary of the new, ‘Romantic’ understanding of the genetic relationship between childhood experience and adult identity which developed out of the earlier, stadial paradigm of Enlightenment and Early Modern thought.10 Sometimes, De Quincey endorses this genetic view. Consider, for instance, his review of William Roscoe’s (1753–1831) edition of The Works of Alexander Pope (1824; reissued 1847), in which De Quincey reminds the reader:

9  De Quincey, ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, p. 113n. Cf. the argument made by Andrew O’Malley in Children’s Literature, Popular Culture and Robinson Crusoe (London: Palgrave, 2012) concerning how ‘nostalgia’ sometimes functions in Romantic-period engagements with infancy as a ‘suture’ by which past and present subjectivities can be ‘bound together’ (pp. 11–12). 10  William Wordsworth, ‘My heart leaps up when I behold’, l. 7. For a thorough overview of the paradigm shift in conceptions of infancy from a stadial to a genetic perspective, see Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 25–66.

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that he owes to the impassioned books which he has read, many a thousand more of emotions than he can consciously trace back to them. Dim by their organisation, these emotions yet arise in him, and mould him through life, like the forgotten incidents of childhood.11

More often than not, however, De Quincey, in the context of discussions of human infancy and in his use of infancy as an epistemological trope, tends to question the adequacy of this view of childhood, and especially so when he identifies it as a specifically Wordsworthian formulation. Wordsworth, throughout his poetry, develops an understanding of a ‘unified, agential, coherent self’, to use Anne Mellor’s phrase, in which childhood is configured as ‘the time of sensory indulgence’ which has to be imaginatively revisited, as Cathy Caruth explains, in order for the adult to recognise and evaluate what Wordsworth calls, in his ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1807), ‘strength in what remains behind’ (l. 183).12 For Wordsworth, in other words, the infant is appropriated as a figure within the attempt to construct a linear autogenesis. But for De Quincey, by contrast, the past is never utterly past, because—as in his celebrated image of the mind as a palimpsest—childhood experiences keep resurging into the present and are capable of forming a rift in adult identity: ‘the deep deep tragedies of infancy’, De Quincey assures the reader of Suspiria de Profundis, ‘remain lurking below all, and these lurk to the last’.13 De Quincey’s configuration of infancy is thus closer to that ‘more disturbing, philosophically fraught notion’ which Ruderman opposes to the Wordsworthian paradigm in The Idea of Infancy.14 The place of infancy in De Quincey’s autobiographical writing bears out, in other words, Ruderman’s argument that infancy can be ‘disruptive to linear theories of progress and development precisely to the degree that it remains an accessible space open to memory, mutability, revision, and modification’.15 11  Thomas De Quincey, ‘The Works of Alexander Pope’, quoted from The Works of Thomas De Quincey, gen. ed. Grevel Lindop, 21 vols. (London: Pickering &Chatto, 2002), v. 16, pp. 339–40; emphasis added. 12  Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (London: Routledge, 1993), p.  154; Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkin University Press, 1991), p. 17. 13  De Quincey, ‘The Palimpsest’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, p. 146. 14  Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, p. 2. 15  Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, p. 7; original emphasis.

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Exemplary of De Quincey’s revision of the Wordsworthian conception of childhood is the semi-autobiographical essay ‘Infant Literature’ (1851–2), in which he offers an explicit, extended reading of Wordsworth’s poem ‘My heart leaps up when I behold’, which was first published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). ‘Infant Literature’ is one of De Quincey’s ‘Autobiographical Sketches’: an extended, if disconnected, series of essays which complement his more-familiar explorations of the relationship between his young and adult selves in the Confessions and Suspiria. In it, De Quincey seeks to determine the influence of his childhood reading upon his adult sensibility. His opening analysis of ‘My heart leaps up when I behold’ is intended to establish the conceptual framework which he will use to describe that influence. ‘The Child’, De Quincey begins: says Wordsworth, “is father of the man”; thus calling into conscious notice the fact, else faintly or not at all perceived, that whatsoever is seen in the maturest adult, blossoming and bearing fruit, must have preëxisted by way of germ in the infant.16

On the face of it, then, De Quincey here valorises the Wordsworthian paradigm of the relationship between childhood experience and adult identity as comparable to the scientific discovery of a ‘fact’ about human nature, the supposed basis of which in natural rather cultural processes is underscored by De Quincey’s botanical analogy. And yet, for all this prima facie confidence in the genetic model of human infancy outlined by Wordsworth in ‘My heart leaps up when I behold’, De Quincey proceeds immediately to question the entire sufficiency of the paradigm. Specifically, De Quincey is concerned to examine which latent potentials of the infant do not ‘blossom’ in the adult was well as to understand why this might be the case. Hence De Quincey, having outlined the Wordsworthian model, demurs. ‘But not, therefore, is it true inversely’, he argues, continuing the analogies from botany and other branches of natural history: that all which preëxists in the child finds its development in the man. Rudiments and tendencies, which might have found, sometimes by accident, do not find, sometimes under the killing frost of counter forces, cannot find, their natural evolution. Infancy, therefore, is to be viewed, not only as part of a larger world that waits for its final complement in old age, but also as a separate world itself; part of a continent, but also a detached peninsula.  De Quincey, ‘Infant Literature’, quoted from Works, vol. 19, p. 68; original emphasis.

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Most of what he has, the grown-up man inherits from his infant self; but it does not follow that he always enters upon the whole of his natural inheritance.17

The impressive range of disciplines which De Quincey invokes as analogies here—botany, zoology, geography, law—certainly testifies to his awareness of the multivalence of infancy as a trope across Romantic-period cultural texts. The complexity of the paradigm of infancy which De Quincey himself is trying to develop, however, is evident from his nonsensical geographical analogy. What, after all, is a ‘detached peninsula’? Surely a ‘detached peninsula’ is actually an island and therefore not a peninsula at all? De Quincey is trying, in other words, to negotiate a sense of infancy as something which is at once a part of, but also separate from, adult identity; a state which has a value as the ‘germ’ of adult identity but which also has a value in itself, a value, moreover, which is (at least potentially) lost in the transition from infancy to adulthood. To put this in the terms of the critical debate about the cultural history of infancy in the eighteenth century and Romantic period which we have charted in our introduction to this volume, De Quincey seeks here to combine elements of a stadial (or ‘Enlightenment’) and a genetic (or ‘Romantic’) configuration of infancy into a single, complex paradigm. As De Quincey’s subtle ‘inheritance’ analogy (which draws both on legal and zoological discourses) makes clear, not only does he understand that adult identity is premised upon infant experience, but so too does he understand that there are valuable aspects of infant experience which the adult outgrows at some cost; that is to say, aspects of infant experience from which the adult is (again, at least potentially) disinherited. Hence, if both the stadial and the genetic paradigms of infancy tend, ultimately, to emphasise the completeness of adult subjectivity, De Quincey, by contrast, considerably complicates that positive assessment of maturation as unequivocal (all things considered) progress. ‘Childhood’, De Quincey insists: in the midst of its intellectual weakness, and sometimes even by means of this weakness, enjoys a limited privilege of strength. The heart in this season of life is apprehensive, and, where its sensibilities are profound, is endowed with a special power of listening for the tones of truth […] the sensibilities  De Quincey, ‘Infant Literature’, quoted from Works, vol. 19, p. 68; original emphasis.

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are not scattered, are not multiplied, are not crushed and confounded (as afterwards they are) under the burden of that distraction which lurks in the infinite littleness of details.18

For De Quincey, then, infant experience has an influence on adult identity which can be quantified both in terms of progression and in terms of loss. Infancy has a genetic, shaping influence on adult identity, but not a wholly determining influence; it is a stage to be outgrown, but such growth is also potentially limiting. De Quincey’s arguments about infancy in his essay ‘Infant Literature’ are, as we have seen, explicitly intended to revise the Wordsworthian paradigm—and we can safely assume that someone so familiar with Wordsworth’s poetry as Thomas De Quincey did not only have ‘My heart leaps up when I behold’ whilst he wrote. Wordsworth, of course, finds in the ‘years that bring the philosophic mind’ a ‘strength’ to compensate for the infant sensibilities which ‘fade into the light of common day’, as he puts it in his ‘Ode’, and works like The Prelude (1805) and The Excursion (1814) exude a similar confidence.19 But De Quincey, in his revision of the Wordsworthian configuration of childhood in ‘Infant Literature’, registers the limitations and losses of ageing rather more forcibly than does Wordsworth—something which warns us against any attempt to describe a unified ‘Romantic’ conception of childhood largely coincident with Wordworth’s paradigm. And in De Quincey’s account of his own childhood in his autobiographical writings, a similarly complex understanding of the relationship between infant experience and adult identity is visible. Not only does De Quincey emphasise the losses involved in the transition from infancy to adulthood, but he also emphasises the potential for those losses to disrupt and to fracture adult subjectivity. A sense of guilt or of culpable transgression is very often at the heart of De Quincey’s autobiographical narratives. In that respect, those narratives continue the genre of confessional autobiography coming from Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and given a secular twist by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his notorious Confessions (1782), a significant hypotext for De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.20 Whilst considerably the more  De Quincey, ‘Infant Literature’, quoted from Works, vol. 19, p. 68.  William Wordsworth, ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, ll. 189, 183, 76. 20  See Martina DominesVeliki, ‘Romantic Confession: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas De Quincey’, StudiaRomanica et AnglicaZagrabiensia, 60 (2015), pp. 131–44. 18 19

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religious of the two, De Quincey, like Rousseau, does not express any sense of responsibility or remorse to god for the transgressions which he recounts but rather, following Rousseau’s example, appeals to the reader as judge. De Quincey’s youthful misdemeanours, as recounted in his autobiographical narratives, tend to centre on perceptions of having betrayed himself or others through moral and/or physical cowardice, and on financial indebtedness. He documents at some length, in the Confessions and Suspiria, how the emotional effects of these early experiences continue to haunt his adult self, through dreams and through laudanum-induced visions. In this respect, De Quincey’s subjectivity, as he describes it, is not the coherent, teleological sequence of events which Wordsworth constructs out of his life in his poetry, but rather a continuous present, a constant recollection and reliving of what Wordsworth calls in Book 11 of The Prelude ‘spots of time’.21 But whilst for Wordsworth, the recollection of such foundational experiences has ‘a renovating Virtue’, for De Quincey, the effect is the opposite: the recollection of past experience does not so much reinforce as disrupt adult subjectivity.22 De Quincey, in other words, emphasises how the troubling experiences of infancy continue to exist in and influence the adult persona. As Susan Levin puts it in her reading of De Quincey’s Confessions, ‘as the narrator explores his inner being to confess, the more he demonstrates that linear sequence does not sufficiently reveal the cumulative complexities of his background’.23 For Wordsworth, in his ‘Ode’, the forgetting occasioned by the transition from infancy to adulthood is a problem for which the adult needs to find ‘recompense’. But for De Quincey, conversely, it is the inability to forget infant trauma which can disrupt adult subjectivity. De Quincey’s autobiographical narratives frequently register, in other words, not a developmental, teleological transition from infant to adult, but rather the damaging persistence in adult subjectivity of infant trauma. Hence in ‘The Pains of Opium’ section of Confessions, for example, De Quincey assures the reader that ‘there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind’:

 William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Book 11, l. 258.  William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Book 11, l. 260. 23  Susan Levin, The Romantic Art of Confession (Columbia: Camden House, 1998), p. 31. 21 22

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A thousand accidents may, and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever; just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas, in fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil.24

The echo of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’—with its lament for how the adult sees ‘the vision splendid’ which they experienced as a child ‘fade into the light of common day’—confirms again the paradigm of the relationship between infancy and adulthood that De Quincey is seeking to revise here.25 And of course De Quincey’s idea of the indelible experiential ‘inscriptions on the mind’ would find its fullest expression, as we have already seen, in ‘The Palimpsest’ section of Suspiria de Profundis, where he points out how the ‘deep deep tragedies of infancy […] lurk to the last’ in the mind. As Markus Iseli explains, in De Quincey’s autobiographical works, such early, traumatic experiences ‘remain active as unconscious mental contents, which are further processed in absence of awareness and bear influence on the way one thinks and acts’.26 Long before Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Marcel Proust (1871–1922) and Henri Bergson (1859–1941) began to develop the ideas about the duration of infant subjectivity which would prove so influential for Modernist writing, then, De Quincey formulated comparable ideas within the context of the Romantic cultures of infancy.27 In De Quincey’s autobiographical narratives, the self grows through a continuous re-­ confrontation with and re-inscription of the whole of its past experiences. Subjectivity is, in any given moment, thus both altogether new but also compiled of all previous subjectivities, which coexist within it. Hence, De Quincey’s engagement with childhood scenes in the Confessions and Suspiria understand and represent the continued presence of childhood 24  De Quincey, ‘The Pains of Opium’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, p. 69; original emphasis. 25  William Wordsworth, ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, ll. 73, 75–6. 26  Markus Iseli, Thomas De Quincey and the Cognitive Unconscious (London: Palgrave, 2015), p. 49. 27  For other elements of De Quincey’s work which could be said to anticipate the Modernist turn, see Cian Duffy, ‘Ambiguity and the value of “Literature”: Thomas De Quincey’s Modernist commodities’, in Sebastian Domsch, Christoph Reinfandt, and Katarina Rennak (eds.), Romantic Ambiguities, Abodes of the Modern (WVT: Trier, 2017), pp. 111–24.

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experience in adult identity not as part of a teleological process, as in Wordsworth’s poetry, but rather as a simultaneity, as in De Quincey’s figure of the palimpsest. In doing so, such scenes reinforce the often-noted labyrinthine structure of Confessions and Suspiria conceptually, through the notions of repetition and return. But for the same reason, such scenes often also function as tropes of loss, as sites for exploring other, earlier subjectivities.28 Very often, in De Quincey’s autobiographical narratives, this exploration of loss is negotiated through young female figures who had played a protective role in relation to De Quincey’s childhood self: the 15-year-old prostitute Ann, whom De Quincey credits with saving his life in the ‘Preliminary’ section of his Confessions, and his sister Elizabeth, whose death forms the fulcrum of ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, the first part of Suspiria de Profundis.29 For reasons of scope, we will focus here only on De Quincey’s account of the death of Elizabeth. De Quincey’s description of ‘the earliest incidents of my childhood which affected me so deeply as to be rememberable at this day’ opens with a picture of life at the family home in Green Hay, outside Lancaster.30 ‘Though born in a large town [Manchester]’, De Quincey writes: I had passed the whole of my childhood, except for the few earliest weeks, in a rural seclusion. With three innocent little sisters for playmates, sleeping always amongst them, and shut up forever in a silent garden from all knowledge of poverty or oppression, or outrage, I had not suspected until this moment the true complexion of the world in which myself and my sisters were living.31

This rural Eden (‘garden’) which De Quincey describes is reminiscent of the pastoral scenes invoked by William Blake (1757–1827) in conjunction with infancy in many of his Songs of Innocence (1789) and certainly  Cf. Burwick, ‘De Quincey as Autobiographer’, p. 119.  A number of critics have identified the death of Elizabeth as the primal trauma in De Quincey’s life and as a key interpretative context for his other writings. See, for example, Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey, pp. 25–36; and J. Hillis-Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 17–25. 30  De Quincey, ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, p. 96. 31  De Quincey, ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, p. 98. 28 29

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confirms a fairly consistent collocation of infancy and nature in Romantic-­ period cultural texts. In this respect, De Quincey’s professed innocence of ‘the true complexion of the world’ so close to a manufacturing city brings to mind Judith Plotz’s critique of the tendency of Romantic-period conceptions of infancy to act as a ‘buffer against the vicissitudes of the public sphere’ by ‘blotting out the contemporary ugliness of child exploitation’—though one could certainly not accuse the author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater of shying away from the realities of urban child poverty and exploitation.32 One of the earliest books explicitly to engage with that ‘ugliness’ during the Romantic period, The Rights of Infants, was published by the English Radical Thomas Spence (1750–1814) in 1797, but this was, as R. S. White points out, more concerned with the necessity of proper nourishment for children than with legal rights per se.33 But De Quincey would later become one of the earliest literary voices to protest, for example, against parents who killed or let their children die in order to be able to claim funeral allowance—as he does in his review of Final Memorials of Charles Lamb (1848) by Thomas Noon Talford (1795–1854) for the North British Review in November 1848.34 Having described the Edenic idyll at Green Hay, De Quincey then narrates how the transition from innocence to experience was enacted by the death of not one but two of his sisters. ‘The first who died was Jane’, De Quincey writes, thereby both echoing and curiously inscribing his own trauma within the diegesis of William Wordsworth’s poem about infant mortality and infant understanding of mortality, ‘We Are Seven’ (1798), in which a young girl, recounting for the speaker the death of two of her siblings, says that ‘The first who died was little Jane’.35 Like the child in Wordsworth’s poem, who will not accept that her deceased children are truly gone—‘A simple child […] What should it know of death?’—De Quincey, in ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, recalls that he did not really understand the finality of Jane’s death, recalling that he felt ‘sad perplexity’ rather than ‘sorrow’.36 ‘I was sad for Jane’s absence’, he writes: ‘but 32  Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (London: Palgrave, 2001), p. 39. 33  R.  S. White, Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s (London: Palgrave, 2005), p. 210. 34  See De Quincey, Works, vol. 16, pp. 389–90. 35  William Wordsworth, ‘We Are Seven’, l. 49. 36  William Wordsworth, ‘We Are Seven’, ll. 1, 4; De Quincey, ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings,p. 97.

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still in my heart I trusted that she would come again. Summer and winter came again – crocuses and roses; why not little Jane?’37 The extensive intertexts of De Quincey’s account with Wordsworth’s poem mirror the complex fracturing of subjectivity attendant upon his understanding of the relationship between (past) infant experience and (present) adult identity: the actual experience was entirely De Quincey’s own, but, in ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, it is, equally, entirely, mediated through Wordsworth’s poetry, making De Quincey’s infancy doubly a construct. The larger autobiographical point which De Quincey wishes to make, however, concerns the sharp contrast between his reaction to the death of Jane and his reaction to the death of Elizabeth. It was her death which taught him the true nature of death: ‘Oh! moment of darkness and delirium, when a nurse awakened me from that delusion and launched God’s thunderbolt at my heart’.38 The conceptualisation of this ‘awakening’ which De Quincey offers in ‘The Affliction of Childhood’—simultaneously the loss of his beloved sister and the loss of the ‘delusion’ of his youthful innocence—is the exact opposite of the amplification of space and time which De Quincey, in both Confessions and Suspiria, notes as the effect of opium-eating. His acceptance of the death of Elizabeth, when he sneaks into her room to view her body alone, is contracted into a single moment and a confined space—and yet, as moment which persists throughout his subsequent life and through his autobiographical writings. In other words, the death of Elizabeth is presented by De Quincey as in a very real sense the end of his infancy, but also as a trauma which has continued and which will continue to define his adult subjectivity: he states his ‘belief’ ‘that final experience in my sister’s bedroom […] will rise again for me to illuminate the hour of death’.39 In view of this, it is perhaps not surprising that De Quincey, in his account of Elizabeth’s death, openly attacks what he calls ‘the unsoundness of a passage in The Excursion’ where: Mr. Wordsworth argues, that if it were not for the unsteady faith which people fix upon the beatific condition after the death of those whom they 37  De Quincey, ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, p. 97. 38  De Quincey, ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, p. 102. 39  De Quincey, ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, p. 107.

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deplore, nobody could be found so selfish, as even secretly to wish for the restoration to earth of a beloved object.40

The ‘passage’ to which De Quincey refers is presumably the opening of Book 4 of The Excursion, ‘Despondency Corrected’, which urges ‘faith/ Faith absolute in God’ as the only remedy for earthly sufferings and loss.41 Such a view, De Quincey says, ‘I utterly deny’.42 ‘In what world was I living’, he recalls of Elizabeth’s funeral: when a man (calling himself a man of God) could stand up publicly and give God “hearty thanks” that he had taken away my sister? But, young child, understand – taken her away from the miseries of this sinful world. Oh yes! I hear what you say; I understand that; but that makes no difference at all. She being gone, this world doubtless (as you say) is a world of unhappiness. But for me, ubi Caesar, ibi Roma [where Caesar is, there is Rome] – where my sister was, there was paradise; no matter whether in heaven above, or on the earth beneath.43

De Quincey then proceeds to consider in some detail how the death of a loved one affects a child and to outline his conviction that the religious ideas which may offer consolation to adults in grief and emotional solitude are not suited to infant sensibility, the ‘beauty’ of which, he says, consists of ‘joy, and guileless innocence’ and ‘simplicity’.44 He is particularly critical of the ‘dreadful […] picture’ of ‘a child trained to talk of religion’ and thereby to do violence to the truth of its own feelings.45 It is tempting to detect, in De Quincey’s account of this ‘picture’, an echo of Wordsworth’s critique, in Book 5 of The Prelude, of the ‘monstrous birth’, the ‘Child, no 40  De Quincey, ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, p. 109. 41  William Wordsworth, The Excursion (London, 1814), Book 4 ‘Despondency Corrected’, ll. 21–2. Wordsworth’s poetry is of course replete with children dying from poverty, with their parents persisting in impossible conditions whilst wanderers look on, offering consolation through faith, but never much in the way of practical help. 42  De Quincey, ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, p. 109. 43  De Quincey, ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, p. 118; original emphasis. 44  De Quincey, ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, p. 121. 45  De Quincey, ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, p. 113; original emphasis.

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Child’, who has been transformed into ‘the noontide shadow of a man complete’ by misguided education.46 It is thus, De Quincey argues, that ‘the religion becomes a nonsense and the child becomes a hypocrite. The religion is transformed into cant, and the innocent child into a dissembling liar’.47 If De Quincey echoes here Wordsworth’s ‘Anecdote for Fathers, Shewing How the Art of Lying May be Taught’ (1798), then he certainly also takes implicit aim at the speaker of ‘We Are Seven’, who sees error in the little girl’s refusal to accept the death of her siblings: for De Quincey, hers would be a privileged sensibility to which the adult speaker should not attempt to do violence, however well-intentioned as education. Throughout De Quincey’s autobiographical writings, then, a prelapsarian (or ‘innocent’, to use Blake’s terminology) infant sensibility is understood less as the genesis of adult subjectivity than as an alternate subjectivity, valorised in its own right, which persists within, and can disrupt, adult subjectivity. In other words, De Quincey does not subscribe to—and in fact writes back against—what Harold Bloom has called Wordsworth’s ‘myth’ of ‘memory’: the conceptualisation of memory as existential salvation; of the recollection of childhood experiences as a potent source of consolation for the adult who transcends and incorporates those experiences within their own subjectivity.48 Conversely, De Quincey advocates a model of subjectivity as a palimpsest in which infant experience persists, for better or for worse, as a discrete component; a model of subjectivity which is neither linear nor teleological but in which past subjectivities coexist simultaneously and can, through artificial or traumatic stimulation, erupt into present consciousness. In ‘Savannah-La-Mar’, the ‘finale’ to the first part of Suspiria de Profundis, De Quincey imagines the Jamaican port—which had actually been devastated by a hurricane in 1780, but which was quickly rebuilt— preserved in the depths of the ocean, ‘with all her towers standing and population sleeping’.49 De Quincey’s reworking of the disaster is a prime instance of what Albert Goldman, in The Mine and the Mint, defines as De Quincey’s practice of rifacimento: the imaginative recasting of source  Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Book 5, ll. 292, 294, 297.  De Quincey, ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, p. 113. 48  See Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 131–40. 49   De Quincey, ‘Savannah-La-Mar’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, p. 157. 46 47

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material.50 In De Quincey’s re-vision, Savannah-La-Mar, now sunken rather than merely flooded, serves implicitly, like the palimpsest, as an analogy for the othered but still intact and accessible subjectivities of the past, and enables an explicit comment on the temporally fractured nature of adult subjectivity. ‘How incalculably narrow’, De Quincey affirms, is ‘the true and actual present’: ‘of that time which we call the present, hardly a hundredth part but belongs either to a past which has fled, or to a future which is still on the wing. It has perished or it is not born’.51 Once again, then, De Quincey challenges the notion of a coherent, teleological subjectivity existing within linear historical time, with a model of a subjectivity which is, like time, infinitely divisible, almost to the point of evanescence, at any given moment. Furthermore, In ‘Savannah-La-Mar’, De Quincey also draws revealing parallels between natural traumas, such as the disaster that struck the town in 1780, and the private traumas that can shatter the innocence of infancy. In both cases, De Quincey argues, trauma is an agent of growth, part of ‘the agriculture of God’, either through geomorphic or through emotional processes.52 ‘Upon a night of earthquake’, De Quincey affirms: he [read god] builds a thousand years of pleasant habitations for man. Upon the sorrows of an infant, he raises oftentimes from human intellects glorious vintages that could not else have been. Less than these fierce ploughshares would not have stirred the stubborn soil. The one is needed for earth, our planet […] But the other is needed […] for the mysterious children of the earth!53

In the ‘deep deep tragedies of infancy’, then, as De Quincey calls them in ‘The Palimpsest’, is to be found the genesis of adult subjectivity. But unlike the Wordsworthian paradigm, in which childhood experience is to be sublimated within adult subjectivity, for De Quincey past subjectivities, and all their attendant traumas, remain accessible to adult subjectivity, as 50  See Albert Goldman, The Mine and the Mint: Sources for the Writings of Thomas De Quincey (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), pp. 91–2. 51  De Quincey, ‘Savannah-La-Mar’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, pp. 158–9. 52  De Quincey, ‘Savannah-La-Mar’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, pp. 159. 53  De Quincey, ‘Savannah-La-Mar’, quoted from Confessions […] and Other Writings, pp. 159.

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both othered past and, under certain circumstances, actualised present. However, the analogy between natural and personal trauma which De Quincey constructs in ‘Savannah-La-Mar’ reminds us, in addition, of the range of infancy as a trope, not only in De Quincey’s own writing, but across Romantic-period cultural texts more generally. And it is to that use of infancy as an epistemological trope in De Quincey’s writings on subjects other than autobiography and biography that we will now turn.

De Quincey’s Other Infancies As we have seen, in his essay ‘Infant Literature’, De Quincey seeks to revise the Wordsworthian paradigm of the relationship between infant experience and adult identity by developing a notion of infancy which is at once the ‘germ’ of adult subjectivity but also a state to be valorised in its own right and which is not left behind without irrecoverable loss. In addition to its use as a structuring principle in De Quincey’s autobiographical writings, however, this configuration of infancy—which understands that infant sensibilities are increasingly scattered, as we age, by an ‘infinite littleness of details’—also has an epistemological application in De Quincey’s work.54 More precisely, whilst De Quincey’s autobiographical writings understand the transition from infancy to adulthood to involve the loss of sensitivity to ‘the tones of truth’, so, too, do De Quincey’s writings on other subjects often suggest that the increasing proliferation of knowledge being generated in and by different areas of enquiry as they mature paradoxically diminishes the knowledge which any single individual can hope to command.55 De Quincey’s best-known formulation of this paradox can be found in the third of his ‘Letters to a Young Man whose Education has Been Neglected’ (1823), where he registers his anxiety that the sheer volume of books coming onto the market makes it impossible for an individual reader to read everything or even to know what might be worth reading in the first place. Detailed studies of these ideas and their relationship to De Quincey’s much-discussed distinction between the ‘Literature of Power’ and the ‘Literature of Knowledge’ have been offered by many critics of his

 De Quincey, ‘Infant Literature’, quoted from Works, vol. 19, p. 68.  De Quincey, ‘Infant Literature’, quoted from Works, vol. 19, p. 68.

54 55

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work.56 Of primary interest to us here, however, is, again, the extent to which that anxiety registers in epistemological terms exactly the same concern which De Quincey expresses in experiential terms, in his essay ‘Infant Literature’, about the movement from infancy to adulthood. Just as De Quincey there questions the notion of meliorative progress from infant to adult so, in ‘Letters to a Young Man’ and elsewhere, does he interrogate that fundamental premise of the Enlightenment: that the expansion of knowledge is altogether without drawbacks. In both cases, experiential and epistemological, De Quincey understands, conversely, that development from ‘infancy’ comes at the cost of clarity and integration, both of individual ‘sensibilities’ and of epistemological categories. In De Quincey’s works, in other words, the generation of what we would now call disciplinarity by the Enlightenment emerges as the direct, epistemological equivalent of the ‘infinite littleness of details’ in which the individual adult loses touch with the ‘tones of truth’ accessible to the infant. What De Quincey offers us, in other words, is an epistemological paradigm of ‘Romantic’ infancy which is not so much opposed to the stadial model formulated by Enlightenment cultural texts as it is concerned to test the scope and limitations of the stadial paradigm. Something of the process and consequences of this interrogation can be seen in another of De Quincey’s essays which deploys the topos of infancy in an epistemological context: ‘System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes’ (1846). The majority of ‘System of the Heavens’ is taken up with De Quincey’s speculations about the impact of recent astronomical observations made by William Parsons, third Earl of Rosse (1800–67), for the so-called nebular hypothesis first formulated by Immanuel Kant in his AllgemeineNaturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels [‘Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens’]) (1755): the idea that stars formed from the condensation of nebular gasses. De Quincey opens his essay, however, with reference to an earlier translation, by himself, of another essay by Kant ‘on a very interesting question, viz. the age of our own little Earth’.57 56  See, for example: Cian Duffy ‘“His canaille of an audience”: Thomas De Quincey and the revolution in reading’, Studies in Romanticism 44/1 (Spring 2005), pp.  7–22; McDonagh, De Quincey’s Disciplines, pp. 68–9; and Brian McGrath, ‘Thomas De Quincey and the Language of Literature’, Studies in English Literature, 47/4 (Autumn 2007), pp. 847–62. 57  Thomas De Quincey, ‘System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes’ (1846), quoted from Works, vol. 15, p. 395.

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In that essay, De Quincey reminds the reader, Kant was concerned ‘not to ascertain how many years the Earth had lived’ but rather with ‘the period of life, the stage, which she may be supposed to have reached. Is she a child, in fact, or is she an adult?’.58 The question is interesting to the extent that it provides further evidence, were any needed, of the extent to which infancy continued to function during the Romantic period as an epistemological topos in a range of different areas of enquiry, just as it had done in Enlightenment cultural texts such as Kant’s essay in earth history. Both astronomy and geology number amongst the Romantic cultures of infancy—as we saw signalled in De Quincey’s analogy between natural and personal catastrophe in ‘Savannah-La-Mar’.59 Of even greater interest, however, is the fact that having introduced the topos, De Quincey points immediately to its potential insufficiency in a departure from Kant’s essay. ‘But suddenly at this point’, he interjects, ‘a demur arises upon the total question’.60 And this ‘demur’ arises precisely from De Quincey’s awareness of the instability of ‘infancy’ as an epistemological category. ‘For is there after all’, he asks, ‘any stationary meaning in the question?’: Perhaps in reality the Earth is both young and old. Young? If she is not young at present, perhaps she will be so in future. Old? If she is not old at this moment, perhaps she has been old, and has a fair chance of becoming so again. In fact, she is a Phoenix that is known to have secret processes for rebuilding herself out of her own ashes. Little doubt there is but she has seen many a birthday, many a funeral night, and many a morning of resurrection. Where now the mightiest of oceans rolls in pacific beauty, once were anchored continents and boundless forests. Where the south pole now shuts her frozen gates inhospitably against the intrusions of flesh, once were probably accumulated the ribs of empires.61

De Quincey’s idea of the earth as ‘a Phoenix’ draws on the cyclical, catastrophist models of earth history outlined by figures like Georges Cuvier  De Quincey, ‘System of the Heavens’, quoted from Works, vol. 15, p. 396.  For detailed histories of the emergence of these disciplines out of eighteenth-century ‘natural philosophy’, see Martin Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) and DometaWiegand Brothers, The Romantic Imagination and Astronomy (London: Palgrave, 2015). 60  De Quincey, ‘System of the Heavens’, quoted from Works, vol. 15, p. 397. 61  De Quincey, ‘System of the Heavens’, quoted from Works, vol. 15, p. 397. 58 59

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(1769–1832) in his Théorie de la Terre (1813), although these had been largely discredited by the time that De Quincey came to write ‘System of the Heavens’. If not necessarily up-to-date in its geological theory, then, what the passage does nevertheless illustrate is De Quincey’s sense of the potential limitations of using infancy as an epistemological rather than just as an experiential topos. We recall Ruderman’s aforementioned argument about how infancy, as a topos, can be ‘disruptive to linear theories of progress and development precisely to the degree that it remains an accessible space open to memory, mutability, revision, and modification’.62 This is exactly the point which De Quincey makes about infancy as an epistemological topos in ‘System of the Heavens’. As we have seen in our introduction to this volume, Wierda Rowland and others have illustrated the extent to which it was common practice in the Enlightenment to use infancy as a topos in writings about subjects like the history of the earth and the history of civil society. De Quincey, however, suggests that such usage is problematic precisely because infancy is a relative rather than an absolute term. In other words, the problem with the stadial model of infancy on which many Enlightenment cultural texts reply is, in De Quincey’s analysis in ‘System of the Heavens’, that the boundaries of the stages can neither be securely nor objectively established. Some version of this problem is visible in the varying definition of ‘infancy’ across different areas of enquiry in the late eighteenth century and Romantic period: the entry on ‘infancy’ in William Nicholson’s (1753–1815) British Encyclopedia (1809), for example, glosses it as ‘the first stage of life. In a medical and political view, extending from birth to about the seventh year’, but also notes that ‘in our [i.e. British] law, the full age of man or woman is twenty-one years’.63 For De Quincey, however, it is a systemic problem in the use of infancy as a topos in the epistemology of the Enlightenment, implicit in claims such as that made by the dissenting natural philosopher and political theorist Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), in his Socrates and Jesus Compared (1803), that ‘the present state’ may ‘be considered as nothing more than the

 Ruderman, Idea of Infancy, p. 7; original emphasis.  William Nicholson, The British Encyclopedia, or Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences, 6 vols. (London, 1809), vol 3, np. Cp. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755) on ‘Infancy: The first part of life. Usually extended by naturalists to seven years’ and ‘Civil Infancy, extended by the English law to one and twenty years’. 62 63

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infancy of our being’.64 De Quincey understands, in short, that the ­episteme of the early nineteenth century (or, for that matter, of any period) is just as fragmented and subject to temporal disruption as any individual, human subjectivity.

Conclusion The consideration of infancy in De Quincey’s autobiographical writings, and the use of infancy as an epistemological trope in De Quincey’s writings on other subjects, is both intricately bound up with constructions of temporality and historical process. De Quincey understands that infancy, whether the actual infancy of an individual or the figurative infancy of an area of enquiry, has a genetic influence on subsequent development. In this respect, De Quincey’s engagement with infancy departs from the stadial configuration prevalent in Enlightenment cultural texts, where infancy is a limited, developmental stage which needs altogether to be transcended. But unlike the Wordsworthian paradigm of the relationship between infant experience and adult identity, in which infancy is wholly sublimated within adult subjectivity, De Quincey’s work formulates a model of infancy as a state which is at once part of and yet wholly distinct from later stages of development—as in his paradoxical figure of infancy as ‘a detached peninsula’. Infancy, for De Quincey, is both a relative and an absolute state; both a part of the past and a continuing element of the present, like the inscriptions on a palimpsest which are hidden but never actually erased by each succeeding layer of writing. In his autobiographical writings, De Quincey develops this paradigm of infancy specifically in response to the poetry of William Wordsworth, for whom the invocation or the recollection of the past serves as a source of strength for the adult. For De Quincey, however, infant experience is riven, perhaps even defined, by traumas which are constantly re-lived, rather than merely recollected, by the adult—and hence his insistence rather on the ‘disruptive’ potential, to use Ruderman’s phrase, of infant experience. In his writings on subjects other than human life, too, De Quincey’s use of infancy serves to complicate rather than to cement any (Enlightenment) notion of steady, teleological process. As an epistemological trope, De Quincey insists that infancy is a 64  Joseph Priestley, Socrates and Jesus Compared (Philadelphia, 1803), p.  32; original emphasis.

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relative rather than an absolute denominator; a term whose entire significance is dependent, as he argues in his essay on Kant and the history of the earth, on an adequate understanding of the timescale within which it is placed. To put it succinctly, whereas for many Enlightenment and Romantic-period cultural texts, infancy is safely of the past, for De Quincey infancy is constantly of the present, ‘something evermore about to be’, to adapt Wordsworth’s well-known phrases, rather than ‘something that is gone’.65

65  William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Book 6, l. 542; ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, l. 53.

CHAPTER 3

William Blake’s Infant Joy Robert Rix

As Duffy and Domines Veliki point out in their introduction to this volume, it has long been recognised that the cult of childhood played a significant role in the development of British Romanticism.1 William Blake (1757–1827) was an artist who took up childhood, and in particular infancy, as a pervasive theme in his work. Critics still routinely read his engagement with infancy as a seminal expression of ‘the Romantic sense of adulthood, or experience, as a falling away from childhood’s innocence’, to use Adrienne Gavin’s phrase.2 Blake shares the conception of infancy as a privileged state with other writers at the time. However, ‘infancy’ also

1  For recent critical works that have considerably refined our understanding of the origins, permutations and afterlives of the Romantic cult of childhood, see: Adrienne Gavin (ed.), The Child in British Literature (London: Palgrave, 2012); Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child (London: Routledge, 2003) and (ed.) Literary Cultures and EighteenthCentury Childhoods (London: Palgrave, 2018); Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and D. B. Ruderman, The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry (London: Routledge, 2016). 2  Gavin, ‘Introduction’, in The Child in British Literature, p. 8.

R. Rix (*) University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Domines Veliki, C. Duffy (eds.), Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8_3

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takes on a distinctive meaning in Blake’s work which cannot altogether be contained within a generic idea of ‘Romantic infancy’. In ‘Irony and Performance: The Romantic Child’, for example, Roderick McGillis has recently suggested that Blake, through the dual categories of innocence and experience, ‘expresses […] more forcefully’ than any of his contemporaries the ‘ironic nature of the child’ as both ‘natural, and pure as well as stubborn and irrational’.3 In this chapter, I want to re-examine Blake’s representation of engagement with childhood by focusing on the ways in which Blake’s distinctive conceptualisation of infancy led him to break with the traditions and the conventions of the late eighteenth-century industry of books written for children. In particular, I want to focus on Blake’s adaptation of the metaphors of early childhood and spiritual rebirth that came to prominence as part of the evangelical revival in eighteenth-­century Britain. In his introduction to The Making of the Modern Child, Andrew O’Malley suggests that ‘perhaps the most important point of agreement […] between disparate religious groups within the middle classes came at the level of child-rearing and education’.4 Whilst I have no wish to disagree with that claim here, it is nevertheless the case that Blake’s engagement with metaphors and tropes of infancy differs from his dissenting contemporaries. In recent years, critics have increasingly laboured to find correspondences between Blake’s works and Methodism, the most prominent and conspicuous movement of the evangelical revival.5 However, the particular influence of Methodist ideas on Blake’s conception of the infant child has been underserved in critical studies. Furthermore, comparisons of Blake’s religious ideas with mainstream evangelicalism risk normalising his poetry by shoehorning it into models of understanding that often obscure his radicalism. In this chapter, I will therefore endeavour to emphasise not only where Blake’s poetry chimes with evangelical discourses but also to point out where he departs to pursue more intensely mystical and libertarian ideas on infancy. To limit a potentially unwieldy discussion of Blake’s extensive references to infancy, I will focus my discussion on his works from the early 3  Roderick McGillis, ‘Irony and Performance: The Romantic Child’, in Gavin (ed.), The Child in British Literature, pp. 101–115, citation on pp. 105 and 106. 4  O’Malley, ‘Introduction’, in The Making of the Modern Child, p. 11. 5  See Michael Farrell, Blake and the Methodists (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Jennifer G. Jesse, William Blake’s Religious Vision: There’s a Methodism in His Madness (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013).

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1790s, especially the collection Songs of Innocence (1789), which Blake illustrated with his own etchings; it is thus a composite visual and a literary work. The poems of this collection are written in simple rhythms and rhyming patterns, with the addition of images showing children among animals and flowers. Yet the songs do not shy away from dealing with difficult subjects such as poverty, child labour and the repression of children by society and the Church. It is against this repressive ideology that Blake most clearly articulates a theory of ‘infancy’ as pivotal for an understanding of man’s rights to be treated respectfully as an individual. The infant is the epitome of man’s human divinity in its uncorrupted state, and the poems are both a celebration of innocence and a criticism of how religious repression may thwart and defile man’s true spirit. Songs of Innocence was intended as commercial publication to be sold in the market for children’s books, for which reason it also engages with other contemporary and educational publications, which were primarily influenced by the Enlightenment ideas of childhood discussed in the introduction to the present volume. I will argue that Blake puts forward a different model for educating the child than was otherwise promulgated in children’s books at the time. Instead of inculcating children with religious learning, as if the mind of the child were the kind of tabula rasa described by the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), Blake holds that infants/small children have an intuitive understanding of the divine. Infancy should therefore be protected against didactics moralising, which threaten to blot out children’s natural receptivity to their own divine humanity.

Infant Joy To understand Blake’s view of infancy, it is useful to delineate how it can be seen to pose a challenge to mainstream ideas in the eighteenth century. If an aggrandisement of childhood began to emerge in Britain during the second half of the century, it was still common to view the earliest stages of life as belonging to a state of imperfection. A characteristic dismissal of infancy can be found in the modernised edition of the emblem book Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man, showing the seven ages of man, published by the poet Francis Quarles (1592–1644) in 1634. This work (published in several editions during Blake’s own childhood in the 1760s and 1770s) presented a censorious view of the child. Under the heading ‘Infancy and Childhood’, we find the following lines: ‘The speechless Infant utters

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nought but Cries; /Quite helpless in its Mother’s Lap it lies’ and ‘our first Ten Years in waste we spend/In childish Trifles, and to no solid End’.6 In contrast to this deprecatory description stands Blake’s poem ‘Infant Joy’ from Songs of Innocence. This simple two-stanza poem presents the reader with a jubilant vision of infancy: I have no name I am but two days old. – What shall I call thee? I happy am, Joy is my name, – Sweet joy befall thee! Pretty joy! Sweet joy but two days old, Sweet joy I call thee; Thou dost smile. I sing the while Sweet joy befall thee.7

This poem appears, as do all the Songs, to be deceptively simple, but harbours significant religious propositions. Most notably, it features what must be the youngest child ever to speak in a poem—only two days out of the mother’s womb. In other Romantic poems, which also promote the blissfulness of early childhood, infants tend to be represented as objects rather than speaking subjects. For example, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798), the ‘cradled infant’ is addressed only as a speechless ‘babe’, who slumbers silently by the poet’s side.8 The English term ‘infant’ derives from the Latin infans, ‘unable to speak’. That Blake makes the two-day-old child both smile and speak is therefore a fanciful touch that contradicts what Blake’s own contemporaries knew about the natural development of human children. When Coleridge read Blake’s poem, he enjoyed it, but took exception to the line ‘Thou dost smile’, because ‘a Babe two days old does not, cannot smile’. He objected to 6  Francis Quarles, Emblems and Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man, Modernized (London: J. Cooke, 1773), p. 179. 7  William Blake, ‘Infant Joy’, ll. 1–12. Quoted from William Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), p. 16. 8  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’, ll. 6, 49; quoted from Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997).

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Blake taking liberties with the child’s developmental milestones because ‘innocence and the very truth of Nature must go together’: ‘Infancy is too holy a thing to be ornamented’, he maintained.9 That Blake gives a small child agency in this way places it in the category of fictional speakers that Brian Richardson dubs ‘unnatural narrators’.10 The ‘unnaturalness’ of the speaker has caused interpretive problems. Galia Benziman, for example, takes Blake to task for ventriloquising children’s speech ‘in order to transmit adult ideas’ and thereby failing ‘to acknowledge the difference’ between the child’s voice and ‘that of the adult’.11 Other critics argue that the impossibility of Blake’s verbal infant necessitates an ironic reading of the poem.12 However, such readings fall short of acknowledging the fact that Blake’s first stanza is stylised in the form of a riddle—the kind in which an object (often inanimate) is allowed to speak of its various qualities, providing clues for what it is. Such riddles were common in books for children.13 One example is the following: ‘At two days old good Latin I speak /Tho’ for it I ne’er went to school / Arms I have four, which come out of my back/ And in yellow am dress’d like a fool/All men do me seek, tho’ few can me get /When caught I’m confin’d like a fish in a net’.14 The answer to this sestet (the form which Blake also uses in his two stanzas) was: a newly minted ‘guinea’, which, during the reign of George III of England (1738–1820), was a gold coin with a Latin inscription and a shield bearing the arms of England, Scotland, France, Ireland and Hanover. The logic of the riddle is that although it is

9  Gerald E. Bentley (ed.), Blake Records, 2nd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 337. 10  Brian Richardson, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2006), p. x. 11  Galia Benziman, ‘Two Patterns of Child Neglect: Blake and Wordsworth’, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 5/2 (2007), p. 170. 12  For an example of reading of the poem as ironic, see John H. Jones, Blake on Language, Power, and Self-Annihilation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 39. 13  For a general discussion of Blake’s writing on the backdrop of riddles published in the period, see Gregg A.  Hecimovich, Puzzling the Reader: Riddles in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 30–59. 14  This was a common riddle appearing among other places in the many editions of Ben Johnson’s Jests; or, The Wit’s Pocket Companion and other books of entertainment. I quote it here from Yorick’s Jests: or, Wit’s Common-Place Book, new edition (London, 1783), p. 122; italics in the original.

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new and of insignificant size, the coin is a sought-after object.15 What Blake establishes in ‘Infant Joy’ is the infant’s worth in non-materialistic terms or, rather, the value of ‘Innocence’, which had become a prized quality in evangelical discourse, as we shall see later. The natural ‘joy’ that can be observed in the new-born child is the point to which all men of more advanced years must seek to return.16 Blake would have known ‘joy’ as a word from religious discourse, which designated holy exultation. This is how the term is repeatedly used in the King James translation of the Bible, and, subsequently, a number of eighteenth-­century religious works.17 Furthermore, the individual’s experience of divine ‘joy’ as an ideal for the higher Christian life became a key concept in eighteenth-century evangelicalism, which was a revitalisation of spiritual faith and an emphasis on a personal experience of the divine. In Britain, the Methodists John Wesley (1703–81) and George Whitefield (1714–70) spearheaded the movement from the 1740s. Charles Wesley (1707–81) was the movement’s songwriter, and Methodist preachers took advantage of his popular and memorable hymns to reinforce the message of spiritual renewal. In Methodist hymnology, ‘joy’ was often used. In one of Charles Wesley’s Hymns for Children (1814), for example, the young are urged their ‘souls to God resign/Fill’d up with peace and joy divine’.18 As we shall see below, Blake borrows a number of metaphorical terms related to infancy and childhood from Wesley. What is important to note at this point is that Blake’s infant enjoys a special closeness to the divine. Such notions will be familiar to readers of Romantic poetry, and perhaps most clearly in relation to the philosophical (or semi-Neoplatonic) argument William Wordsworth (1770–1850) puts forward in ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1807):

15  The mention of ‘two days’ refers to the convention that children in England were often baptised on the third day after birth—thus, having no name yet. 16  For ‘Infant Joy’ and its links to the tradition of riddle, see my ‘William Blake’s “Infant Joy” and the Rhetoric of Riddle’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 30, no. 4 (2017): 216–18. 17  See Adam Potkay, The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 18  Hymn XXV, in Charles Wesley, Hymns for Children, and Others of Riper Years 4th ed. (London: J. Paramore, 1784), p. 24.

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But trailing clouds of glory do we come       From God, who is our home. Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close       Upon the growing Boy, But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,       He sees it in his joy.19

The idea promulgated in these lines is that infancy is a blessed state, where the light of the divine is seen in a state of ‘joy’—presumably Wordsworth is here invoking the same religious connotation of divine bliss as Blake. According to Wordsworth, however, such privileged insight regrettably tapers off with age. In view of this, it is not surprising that much of Wordsworth’s poetry is characterised by a retrograde motion to childhood through which he hopes to recover the strength needed to become a poet. Likewise, in an annotation to the philosopher George Berkeley’s tract Siris (1744), Blake scribbles: ‘the Spiritual Body or Angel as little Children always behold the Face of the Heavenly Father’.20 This must be understood as a mystical rewording of Matthew 18:3: ‘Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven’. Blake’s claim is that in order to live in the spirit in this world, one must become like a receptive child again. Thus, ‘infancy’ signifies a state in Blake’s vocabulary that is not only a time of early childhood but also a metaphor for the reawakening of the spiritual self. It is interesting that Blake, in his later poetry, invented his own mythology of man’s spiritual fall and rebirth, he holds onto the possibility of a spiritual return to the innocence of the infant child that will restore the link to an immanent divine state. The childlike mindset, standing in opposition to the devastation of the human soul, is given attention in the poem Jerusalem (1804), at the point in the narrative when Albion (a figure representing humanity in general and England in particular) suffers the loss of all ‘infant Loves & Graces’ and ‘his infant thoughts & desires’ are thwarted to become ‘cold, dark, cliffs of death’.21 Having established the lineaments of Blake’s  William Wordsworth, ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, ll. 64–70. Quoted from Stephen Gill (ed.), William Wordsworth: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008). 20  William Blake, ‘Annotations to Berkeley’s Siris’, quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 663. 21  William Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 8: l.45; Plate 9: l.2; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, pp. 151–2. 19

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conceptualisation of ‘infancy’ as a state of divine innocence, the next step in my enquiry is to examine his ideas against the backdrop of eighteenthcentury religious culture.

Religious Perspectives The image of spiritual rebirth was a key metaphor of the evangelical revival in the eighteenth century. Heightened and emotionally charged religiousness was hailed as the antidote to erudite and aloof theology. It is a similar evangelical fervour that motivates Blake’s antagonism towards Robert John Thornton’s (1768–1837) scholarly translation of the Lord’s Prayer. Blake comments that this is the ‘Most Malignant & Artful attack upon the Kingdom of Jesus By the Classical Learned’, and, further, that ‘The Beauty of the Bible is that the most Ignorant & Simple Minds Understand it Best’.22 Similarly, in his annotations to Berkeley’s last work, Siris (1744), Blake asserts that ‘Jesus supposes every Thing to be Evident to the Child & to the Poor & Unlearned Such is the Gospel’.23 As this latter annotation was made late in Blake’s life, it shows the persistence of such sentiments in his religious thinking. In evangelical discourses, the idea of ‘infancy’ being a blessed state had significant resonance. We may see this, for example, in Joseph Wilde’s (dates unknown) sentimental poem Infancy, which begins in the following manner: ‘Hail white-rob’d Innocence, sweet cherub hail! / Who smiling sittest in yon radiant cloud, / In more than mortal brightness’.24 As mentioned above, Methodism established itself as the most successful flag-­ bearer for evangelical revival in the eighteenth century. The preaching of John Wesley and George Whitefield fundamentally changed the religious landscape in Britain, and they had an enormous influence on all aspects of culture, including the instruction of children. It is generally acknowledged that Charles Wesley’s Methodist hymn ‘O mercy divine, O couldst Thou incline’ influenced Blake’s ‘Infant Joy’. Wesley’s hymn expresses wonder at the paradox that Christ was incarnated in the frail body of a human infant such as any man may father: ‘My God, to become such an infant as 22  William Blake, ‘Annotations to Thornton’s The Lord’s Prayer Translated’, quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 667. 23  William Blake, ‘Annotations to Berkeley’s Siris’, quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 664. 24  Joseph Wilde. Infancy: A Poem (Norwich, 1814), ll. 1–3.

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mine?’. The hymn concludes with a call to seek spiritual rebirth: metaphorically, the believer must become like Christ in the manger. In other words, the Christian must revert to the state of Innocence to truly approach God in his/her heart: So heavenly-mild, His innocence smiled, No wonder the mother would worship the Child, The angels she knew had worshipped Him, too, And still they confess adoration His due.             [……..] Like Him would I be, my Master I see In a stable; a manger shall satisfy me; And here will I lie, till raised up on high, With Him on the cross I recover the sky.25

The notion that the child of innocence ‘smiles’ is a metaphor which we saw Blake echoed in ‘Infant Joy’. Nothing is more helpful towards an understanding of Blake’s handling of religious themes here (or more revealing with respect to his independence from his sources generally) than comparing his poem to other examples in the textual landscape of religious literature. We may take Blake’s ‘The Lamb’ as an example. This is a poem in which Blake reaches for the traditional Agnus Dei metaphor of Christ as the ‘lamb of God’. But Blake not only seizes on the allusion to Christ sacrificing himself on the cross, he also clearly wants to play on the idea that the lamb is the equivalent of a child. Evidently, Blake found inspiration for his poem in Charles Wesley’s ‘Lamb of God, I look to Thee’, a Methodist hymn first included in Hymns for Children. Wesley thematises the movement of a believer towards spiritual rebirth as a repetition of Christ’s incarnation in the body of a human infant: LAMB of God, I look to Thee, Thou shalt my example be; Thou art gentle, meek, and mild; thou wast once a little child.           [……..] Make me, Savior, what Thou art, Live Thyself within my heart. 25  Charles Wesley, ‘O mercy divine’, ll. 2, 9–12, 25–8. The hymn was first published in Wesley’s Hymns for the Nativity of Our Lord (1745). I quote it here from a reprinted London edition of 1788, which appeared the year before Blake finalised his Songs of Innocence.

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I shall then show forth Thy praise, Serve Thee all my happy days; Then the world shall always see Christ the holy Child in me.26

In what may best be described as an adaptation, Blake’s poem uses Wesley’s metaphor but reifies it by making his speaker focus on a real lamb. The second of Blake’s two stanzas comprises the following lines:      Little Lamb I’ll tell thee! He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb: He is meek & he is mild, He became a little child: I a child & thou a lamb, We are called by his name.27

If Blake’s poem is couched in familiar lamb-of-God rhetoric, the speaker’s statements reach an intensity dissolving all boundaries of human and divine. This is to the extent that a mystical sense of oneness with the divine seems to replace figurative speech. As Christ became incarnated in the frail and humble body of a child, Blake allows for every believer, even the lowly rural child, who speaks in the poem, to realise the divine spirit within. That Blake makes the speaker a child (perhaps, we may identify the young child in the illustration on the plate with the voice in the poem) further stresses this idea. The message is that the realisation of man possessing a divine spirit is one that can be reached by everyone, and perhaps best by uneducated minds. A comparison between Christ and every human infant is pursued in an even more radical manner in Blake’s ‘A Cradle Song’, from Songs of Innocence. This poem allows us scope for examining another aspect of Blake’s references to ‘infancy’. Blake’s song borrows its theme from ‘A Cradle Hymn’ by Isaac Watts (1674–1748). This was one of the most popular poems printed in Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (first published in 1715, but subsequently issued in numerous editions well into the nineteenth century). In 14 quatrains, Watts’ 26  Charles Wesley, ‘Lamb of God, I look to thee’, ll. 1–4, 15–20; quoted from Hymns for Children, and Persons of Riper Years, fourth edition (London, 1784). 27  William Blake, ‘The Lamb’, ll. 12–18; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 9.

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poem compares the eighteenth-century infant’s warm, safe and comfortable sleep with that of the infant Christ, who was born in a manger under poor and dangerous conditions. Watts’ poem addresses parents who must provide comfort for their new-born babe. Should they fail to do so, they will be judged as essentially no better than the ungodly people who forced the infant Christ to be born in a stable. Blake’s ‘A Cradle Song’ is similarly lines imagined to be spoken over the infant’s bed, but it does not put forward any injunctions. Rather, Blake’s version shifts the focus to make the poem about the adult carer’s realisation of divine innocence, as this registers in the child: Sweet babe in thy face, Holy image I can trace         [……] Thou His [Christ’s] image ever see, Heavenly face that smiles on thee Smiles on thee on me on all; Who became an infant small, Infant smiles are his own smiles, Heaven & earth to peace beguiles.28

Blake’s poem makes a radical extension of the comparison between Christ and any human infant made by Watts. Blake does not only compare, but goes as far as to assert that human infants are born with an immanent divine spirit. The claim is that ‘infant smiles’ can ‘beguile’ (here, in the sense of ‘charm’) to the effect of reconciling heaven and earth. The message in Blake’s ‘A Cradle Song’ is also ultimately aimed at the adult; the call is to awaken the reader to a mystical consciousness that will restore the reader to divine innocence. To put this into the perspective of eighteenth-century pedagogics: Blake’s belief that the child is born with an intuitive understanding of the divine universe marks a departure from the conceptions usually promoted in children’s books. One of the most significant educational thinkers whose work influenced eighteenth-century literature was John Locke. Although he is known today primarily for An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke’s most immediate influence came through 28  William Blake, ‘A Cradle Song’, ll. 21–2, 27–32; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 12.

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his educational tract Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693).29 Locke’s educational theories belong with the Enlightenment and hinge on the philosophical claim that sense perception (and not innate ideas) is what guides man. And it is in Locke’s focus on bringing up children that his theory of sense perception is most strongly asserted. As Duffy and Domines Veliki note in their introduction to this volume, Enlightenment theories still characterised thinking about children’s education in the age of Romanticism. In the last paragraph of Some Thoughts, Locke states that the book is appropriate as a guide for the son of a gentleman ‘who being then very little, I considered only as a white Paper, or Wax, to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases’.30 That the child should acquire religion and moral codes is at odds with Blake’s idea that it is through the child’s ‘Innocence’ that one may gain access to ‘infant joy’. Blake’s most clear-cut objection to Lockean modes of thinking is his annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1798). ‘Reynolds Thinks’, Blake writes scornfully, ‘that Man Learns all that he Knows I say on the Contrary That Man Brings All that he has or Can have Into the World with him. Man is Born Like a Garden ready Planted & Sown This World is too poor to produce one Seed’.31 Blake also takes Lockean ideas to task in There is NO Natural Religion, written in 1788 around the same time as the Songs of Innocence. This work consists of 12 plates that contain a series of philosophical aphorisms, representing fundamental principles and views on religion and man’s ability of perception that Blake would adhere to throughout his career. The immediate target of the work may be Deism, but Blake also refutes the whole of Locke’s philosophy of man as a tabula rasa. In the A-Series of plates, Blake presents what he sees as the absurdity of sensation-based philosophy: ‘The Argument. Man has no notion of moral fitness but from

29  In his study John Locke and Children’s Books in Eighteenth-Century England (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), Samuel Pickering describes and documents how eighteenth-century writers for children widely adopted Lockean principles of education in order to transform the child into a moral, religious and economic man capable of succeeding in society. 30  John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, in The Works of John Locke Esq, vol. 3 (London: John Churchill, 1714), 98. 31  William Blake, ‘Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynold’; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 656.

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Education. Naturally he is only a natural organ subject to Sense’.32 The focus on education here is also evident in the plate illustrations. On Plate A III, for example, a nurse is reading a book, flanked by a young boy and a girl reading. Blake’s claims in the A-series are complemented by those in the B-series, so that the assertion ‘I. Man cannot naturally Percieve [sic] but through his natural or bodily organs’ is expanded by the statement ‘Reason or the ratio of all we have already known. is not the same that it shall be when we know more’ (Plate B II).33 The B-series is concluded with the resolution: ‘Therefore / God becomes as we are, / that we may be as he/ is’ (plate b12). This early statement marks out the trajectory for Blake’s writing that can be traced in his Songs, which I have examined above.

Educational Perspectives In Songs of Innocence, Blake frames his ideas within the genre of children’s poetry, in which animals were often used to convey an allegorical message.34 This trend in eighteenth-century children’s books had its origin in Aesop’s Fables, which was published in a number of English translations throughout the century.35 In order to understand how Blake’s poems both relate to and diverge from other religious poetry for children, it is useful to briefly examine the most direct precursor for Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Hymns in Prose for Children (1781) by Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825), who was a teacher at the dissenting Palgrave Academy in Suffolk and whose ideas of child pedagogy proved influential in the period. Her Hymns mixed Enlightenment ideals of observation, curiosity and rationality with an emphasis on teaching the child religious sensibility. The work was published by the London bookseller Joseph Johnson 32  William Blake, ‘There is NO Natural Religion’, Plate A; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 2. 33  William Blake, ‘There is NO Natural Religion’, Plate AIV, Plate BII; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 2. 34  For a discussion of animals in literature for children, see Pickering, John Locke and Children’s Books, pp.  3–39; Ann Wierda Rowland, ‘Learned Pigs and Literate Children: Becoming Human in Eighteenth-Century Literary Cultures’, in O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, pp.  99–115; and Anja Höing’s essay in the present volume (pp.159–182). 35  The version produced by the bookseller Francis Newbery (1743–1818), for example, reached its 13th edition by 1787.

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(1738–1809), who was Blake’s most regular source of commissioned engraving work during the 1780s and 1790s. Barbauld’s work was innovative and liberal compared to earlier eighteenth-century didactic poetry for children.36 David Erdman, Northrop Frye and, most extensively, Thomas C. Kennedy have pointed out that Blake takes several of his themes in the Songs from Barbauld’s prose pieces, responding to them in a critical or even satirical mode.37 In religious children’s literature, animals often served the function of communicating a lesson about God’s omniscience and care for all his creatures. Blake was not the first to talk about lambs. One may look at the second piece in Barbauld’s Hymns, for example, where we hear of ‘The lambs just dropt are in the field […] their young limbs can hardly support their weight’; nonetheless, we are assured that they are quite safe: ‘If you fall, little lambs, you will not be hurt; there is spread under you a carpet of soft grass, it is spread on purpose to receive you’.38 Barbauld presents the young readers with a parable of how God’s benevolent universe offers infants protection and care. It is similarly a recurrent motif in Blake’s early writing that the lowest and humblest creatures are often those that hold the closest relationship with the divine through their innocence, and who may even represent messianic qualities. In the Innocence song ‘A Dream’, for example, a glow-worm is ‘set to light the ground’, so that a lost Emmet (ant) can find its way home by following a beetle.39 This scenario is meant to show the all-encompassing nature of divine benevolence. In particular, the reference to the glow-worm here recalls the allegory of Christ in John 1:9, where Christ is ‘the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world’. Children’s books held out a promise to teach and to socialise children from a very early age. We find titles such as The Infant Tutor; or, An Easy Spelling-Book, for Little Masters and Misses (1776), The Infant’s Miscellany: or Easy Lessons, Extracted from Different Authors (1778) and The Infant’s Friend … A Spelling Book (1797). Such books often combined early 36  For more on the moral, philosophical and commercial elements of eighteenth-century poetry written specifically for children, see Louise Joy, ‘Eighteenth-Century Children’s Poetry and the Complexity of the Child’s Mind’, in O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, pp. 117–37. 37  For an overview of the field, see references in Thomas C.  Kennedy, ‘From Anna Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose to William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience’, Philological Quarterly 77, no. 4 (1998): 359–77. 38  Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hymns in Prose for Children (London, 1781), pp. 8–9. 39  William Blake, ‘A Dream’, l. 17; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 16.

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practical instruction, such as spelling, with a rather stern Christian didacticism. In a ‘Morning Prayer for a Young Person’ from The Infant Tutor, for example, the child speaker pleads: ‘Teach me to believe in Thee, to fear Thee, and to love Thee with all my Heart […] Make me love my Neighbours as myself, and to do unto all Men as I would they should do unto me; make me obedient to my Parents, and to all my Governors in Church and State’.40 We might also consider Isaac Watts’ popular Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children, in which child speakers generally express their deference to a restrictive religious morality, and are cowed by the impending threat of divine retribution, as, for example, in ‘The Advantages of Early Religion’: Let the sweet Work of Pray’r and Praise Employ my youngest Breath; Thus I’m prepar’d for longer Days, Or fit for early Death.41

As already indicated, the unusualness of the children in Blake’s poems often only becomes fully apparent when they are compared with models otherwise available in the eighteenth century. Many of Blake’s poems are remarkably free of restrictive didacticism, and indeed openly critical of it. The speaker of ‘Infant Joy’, for example, celebrates their unadulterated ‘joy’ without any sense of impending reproof. In ‘The Lamb’, the child asks probing questions (‘Little Lamb who made thee/ Dost thou know who made thee’) and comes up with their own answers, granted that these are safely consonant with Christian imagery.42 This rather libertarian self-­ exploration was a significant departure from established modes of instruction. The question-answer format was often employed in catechistic instruction with the purpose of teaching young children important Christian doctrines.43 In the Anglican Church, one could find the following format: 40  Anon., The Infant Tutor; or, An Easy Spelling-Book, for Little Masters and Misses […] Published by the King’s Authority (London, 1776), p. 182. 41  Watts, Divine Songs, p. 18. 42  William Blake, ‘The Lamb’, ll. 1–2; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 8. 43  According to Alan Richardson, the child-speaker in ‘The Lamb’ speaker subverts the authority of catechistic instruction by parodying the form (Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 74).

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Ques. What is your Name? Answ. N. or M. Quest. Who gave you this Name? Answ. My Godfathers and Godmothers in my Baptism; wherein I was made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven. Quest. What did your Godfathers and Godmothers then for you? Answ. They did promise and vow three things in my name: First, that I should renounce the devil, and all his works, the pomps and vanity of this wicked world, and all the sinful lusts of the flesh. Secondly, that I should believe all the Articles of the Christian Faith. And thirdly, that I should keep God’s holy Will and Commandments, and walk in the same all the days of my life.44

The focus in this part of the catechism is on naming and the obligations that receiving a Christian name entails. In contrast, Blake lets the child-­ speaker of ‘The Lamb’ define themselves in a self-reflexive move: ‘We are called by his name’.45 In this way, Blake’s speaker circumvents the need for an external questioner. In ‘Infant Joy’, we do find an adult interlocutor, but the young child is allowed to assign their own name without the adult intervening: ‘I happy am / Joy is my name’.46 Barbauld was generally seen as a liberal educator in her own time. Nonetheless, she often upholds the corrective tone of her precursors. ‘Hymn VI’ of her Hyms in Prose, for example, takes the form of catechism, in which the child is prodded to acknowledge God’s manifestation in the natural world. To begin with, the child provides only descriptive answers about the beauty of the landscape, but fails to draw any religious conclusions. Hence, the adult interlocutor must prompt the child: Didst thou hear nothing, but the murmur of the brook? no whispers, but the whispers of the wind? Return again, child of reason, for there are greater things than these. – God was amongst the trees; his voice founded in the murmur of the water; his music warbled in the shade; and didst thou not attend?47

44  William Gilpin, Lectures on the Catechism of the Church of England, third edition (London, 1792), p. xi. 45  William Blake, ‘The Lamb’, l. 18; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 9. 46  William Blake, ‘Infant Joy’, ll. 4–5; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 16. 47  Barbauld, Hymns in Prose, p. 39.

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In Songs of Innocence, Blake also shows an appreciation of nature. The poem ‘Spring’, for example, is a celebration of the season, where the ‘Little Boy/ Full of joy’ and the ‘Little Girl/ Sweet and small’ spread their ‘Infant noise / Merrily Merrily to welcome in the Year’.48 However, the poem never turns into a lesson in natural theology, as often occurs in similar contexts in Barbauld’s Hymns. Nor does Blake see the need to introduce the corrective voice of an adult interlocutor. Hence, in ‘Nurse’s Song’ from Songs of Innocence, a stern voice would be expected, but is notably absent. When the nurse hears the voices of the children on the green, she finds that her ‘heart is at rest within my breast / And everything else is still’.49 When she finally exhorts them to come home, they gently protest that they are having fun, and that to do so would violate the natural order, to which the nurse replies: ‘Well well go & play till the light fades away’.50 It would undoubtedly have struck contemporary readers with surprise that the guardian of the children relinquishes her authority and leaves the young to their uninhibited play. This makes us think of the rejection by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), in his Émile, or On Education (1762), of heavy-handed instruction as a useful way to produce well-adjusted adults. Rousseau’s initially controversial ideas were echoed in Britain, including by his disciple Thomas Day (1748–89) in a popular multi-­ volume children’s story The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–89). However, if Blake’s poems espouse similar educational principles to Rousseau, it is important to realise that his poems are concerned with preserving the essentially divine spirit of the child, rather than with the best means of moulding the child into a good citizen.

Infant Sorrow and New Life A recurrent theme in Blake’s poetry is how the moral restrictions imposed by churches and a puritanical society inhibit man’s natural sexuality. Hence, it would be wrong to see Blake’s ‘Innocence’ as equivalent to chastity, restraint and abstinence. The themes of religious repression are writ large in Blake’s poem Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), which  William Blake, ‘Spring’, ll. 11–14, 17–18; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 15.  William Blake, ‘Nurse’s Song’, ll. 3–4; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 15. 50  William Blake, ‘Nurse’s Song’, l. 13; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 15. 48 49

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is about the female character Oothoon, whose natural urges are curbed and restrained by religious hypocrisy. In a key speech, Oothoon links unrestrained sexual joy with the state of ‘infancy’:           […..] Take thy bliss O Man! And sweet shall be thy taste & sweet thy infant joys renew! Infancy, fearless, lustful, happy! nestling for delight In laps of pleasure; Innocence! honest, open, seeking The vigorous joys of morning light; open to virgin bliss.51

Othoon’s celebration of her ‘infant joy’ is, however, soon stymied, as she faces religious morality, and her ‘joy’ is branded ‘with the name of whore’ (pl. 6, 13; Blake 49).52 In this connection, it is worth taking a second glance at ‘Infant Joy’ from Songs of Innocence. The illustration for ‘Infant Joy’ depicts a blooming plant with large, lavish petals. Jennifer Waller and Anne Mellor both interpret this illustration as suggestive of passion and sexuality.53 Alan Bewell supports this reading by noting that the illustration may be another example of how Blake uses botany as a vehicle of social critique, providing him ‘a language with which to criticize the repressive sexuality of his time’.54 So, man’s natural and inherent sexuality may be part of the ‘joy’ which infancy embraces. The interruption of natural sexual development is a theme taken up in ‘Infant Sorrow’, the counterpart to ‘Infant Joy’, from Songs of Experience. Blake struggled with the composition of this poem, as can be seen from the longer ‘Myrtle Tree’ sequence in the Notebook, from which it was quarried, and which Blake revised several times. In the extended draft, the

51  William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Plate 6: ll. 2–6; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 49. 52  William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Plate 6: l. 13; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 49. 53  Jennifer Waller, ‘Maurice Sendak and the Blakean Vision of Childhood’, Children’s Literature 6 (1977), p. 131; Anne Mellor, Blake’s Human Form Divine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 6. 54  Alan Bewell, ‘“On the Banks of the South Sea”: Botany and Sexual Controversy in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 185.

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infant boy grows up associating himself with a myrtle tree (associated since Classical times with love and sensuality), but ‘a Priest with holy look / In his hands a holy book / Pronouncd curses on his head/ Who the fruit or blossoms shed’, thereby making it impossible for the boy to enjoy them.55 In the printed version of ‘Infant Sorrow’, Blake would only use the first two stanzas, which deal with repression by parental authority during infancy: My mother groand! my father wept. Into the dangerous world I leapt: Helpless, naked, piping loud; Like a fiend hid in a cloud. Struggling in my fathers hands: Striving against my swaddling bands: Bound and weary I thought best To sulk upon my mother’s breast.56

The immediate physical restriction of the lively new-born child symbolises repression of various sorts and its effect is equally immediate: life turns to weariness, joy to sulking. The notion of the ‘dangerous world’ of temptation, into which the child is born, is echoed in The Religious Instruction of Children Recommended (1770) by James Stonehouse (1716–95), in which parents are told that it is imperative to ensure that children are moved ‘safely through this dangerous World’: to ensure their safety, parents should raise children to be ‘diligent in attending Public Worship, watchful to observe the Sabbath, shunning Temptations to sin, avoiding evil Company, and fearing the Lord, from their Youth’.57 Blake, in ‘Infant Sorrow’, is reacting against just such stifling of the child’s innate energy and divinity.

55  William Blake, draft of ‘Infant Sorrow’, ll. 19–22; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 797. Cp. further draft material on p. 799, and ‘The Garden of Love’, from Songs of Experience. 56  William Blake, ‘Infant Sorrow’ (Songs of Experience), ll. 1–8; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 28. 57  James Stonehouse, The Religious Instruction of Children Recommended (London, 1774), p. 28. Religious Instruction was popular and influential, running into at least ten editions before 1824. Several of Stonehouse’s writings were also included in the ‘Religious Tracts’ series, published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge.

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Of course, Blake’s image of swaddling the baby to restrain also reflected actual practice in Europe throughout the eighteenth century. However, the cruelty of this practice came under increased scrutiny as the century wore on. In Rousseau’s treatise Émile; or On Education (1762; three English translations appeared the following year), for example, the swaddling of infants is rejected several times as emblematic of a false model of parenthood which must be discarded for the benefit of creating better citizens in a better society.58 By the late eighteenth century, indeed, the practice of swaddling had almost universally been laid aside.59 Hence, again, the primary function of Blake’s reference to swaddling is to symbolise the social constraints imposed on children from an early age. A similar, figurative usage can be found in Blake’s early prophecy Europe (1794), in which the self-invented mythology comes to the fore. Here, the ‘nameless shadowy female’ looks with dread at the rebellious energy released by Orc, the spirit of revolution: ‘And who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band? / To compass it with swaddling bands?’.60

Conclusion This chapter made an early reference to an emblem book, for which reason it makes sense to conclude with a short discussion of Blake’s For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793), a collection of 17 intaglio-etched emblems with short inscriptions. This is not least because the image on the frontispiece encapsulates some of the themes I have discussed above. The illustration shows two large leaves growing from a branch, and on the lower leaf, an infant is cradled. The shape of the body suggests that it is a human chrysalis. This depiction of an infant suggests the imprisonment of the spirit in the physical body: the eyes are closed, the body swaddled and the veins on the lower leaf are pronounced to emphasise the corporeality of the bodily prison. The motto ‘What is a Man!’ seems to demand the answer that man is born with the potential to develop into a living spirit, 58  See, for examples, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia: or, a New System of Education, 3 vols. (London, 1762), vol. 1, pp. 17, 59, 61, and 80. 59  For more on eighteenth-century debates about swaddling, see Kirstin Olsen, Daily Life in Eighteenth-Century England (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), p.  107; and Anja Müller, Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689–1789 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 24–6. 60  William Blake, Europe: a Prophecy, Plate 1: l.1; Plate 2, ll. 13–14; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, pp. 60, 61.

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whose wings may carry him away. However, the picture also contains the threat that man’s transformation could be prevented. The leaf above the infant bears a menacing caterpillar. This insect represents the threat of oppressive religion that prevents true spirituality from developing, at least if one interprets it, following Matthew Green, through one of the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ from Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790): ‘As the catterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys’.61 Blake sees ‘infancy’ as the pristine, spiritual condition of the human. This is what may be destroyed by forcing children into oppressive paths of religious education. Hence, there is a remarkable absence of moral edicts for good behaviour in Blake’s Songs of Innocence. In Blake’s work, to reach back to the divine ‘joy’ that all infants naturally share, but which is gradually destroyed by moral codes and oppressive society, one must strip the spirit of the dross of all the false learning which it has amassed. Regression does not make one an ‘infant’, rather a hard struggle is required to change one’s perception of the world and to reconnect with the divine spirit within. It is exactly this change Blake wants to usher in with his poetry.

61  William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 9, l. 55; quoted from Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 37. For Matthew Green’s argument, see Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake: The Intersection of Enthusiasm and Empiricism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 134–5.

CHAPTER 4

The Infant, the Mother, and the Breast in the Paintings of Marguerite Gérard Loren Lerner

Introduction Following George Sussman’s ground-breaking study, Selling Mother’s Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France, 1715–1914 (1984), a substantial body of scholarship has investigated the cultural history of breastfeeding and its depiction in various media, in eighteenth-century France, and beyond.1 Extending that scholarship here, this chapter analyses a selection of paintings of the infant, the mother, and the breast, by the French artist Marguerite Gérard (1761–1837), painted at a time when pictures of the breastfeeding mother were in vogue. These works are considered in relation to early romantic concepts such as le goût moderne and sensibilité, and to writings and images featuring breastfeeding and the infant that first

1  See George D.  Sussman, Selling Mother’s Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France, 1715–1914 (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984). See also: Valerie Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986); and Joan Sherwood, Infection of the Innocents: Wet Nurses, Infants, and Syphilis in France, 1780–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).

L. Lerner (*) Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 M. Domines Veliki, C. Duffy (eds.), Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8_4

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appeared in France in the eighteenth century in highly influential publications focused on philosophical, biological, and social issues. Gérard also draws on Classical sources as well as on Dutch paintings from the seventeenth century to express ideals central to the new Revolutionary spirit of France. My purpose in surveying the elements employed by Gérard is to demonstrate how her genre scenes explore a distinctive, domestic female culture, which complements the politically motivated, historical and mythological works of the period. Gérard’s articulation of this domestic culture strongly suggests that modern depictions of family life did not originate, as has sometimes been suggested, in French Impressionist art, but rather in the romantic spirit of her maternal, infant-centric paintings.

Prelude In the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789 and during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815), allegorical images of the mother, the maternal breast, and the infant were widely circulated in France. Their purpose was to express ideas of nationalism and citizenship. These multiple and varied representations took on different meanings, but consistently the central theme was the relation of state ideals to the female form and newborn child. In 1793, for example, the artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) designed a fountain for the Festival of Unity and Indivisibility that celebrated the first anniversary of the Republic. The Fountain of Regeneration consisted of a large statue of Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility, with water flowing plentifully from her breasts (Fig. 4.1). The festival was attended by thousands of Parisians, including eighty-­ six delegates to the National Convention. One by one these men, in their capacity as newborn citizens of the state, drank the ‘maternal milk’ of Isis’s breasts. This iconic demonstration, in which breastfeeding represented the offspring and future of the new nation, led to actual demonstrations of mothers nursing their infants, as at the Festival of the Supreme Being (8 June 1794). This was just one of numerous celebrations that linked family relations and the values of the new republic through allegorical images and symbolic ceremonies.2 2  There is considerable literature on the iconography of French Revolutionary festivals. Two seminal texts are Ronald Paulson’s Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), and Festivals and the French Revolution by Mona Ozouf, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press 1988).

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Fig. 4.1  Antoine-Jean Duclos after Charles Monnet, La Fontaine de la Regeneration sur les debris de la Bastille, le 10 avril 1793, (c.1794). Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington (Wikimedia Commons)

One of the thinkers who defined the French Revolution was Maximilien Robespierre (1758–94), a lawyer and politician who was strongly influenced by the political ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), as outlined in The Social Contract (1762). Robespierre promoted deist ideas based on maternal bonds and a natural love for the state. Even after Robespierre’s execution on 28 July 1794 for his ruthlessness during the Reign of Terror (1793–94) and crowning of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) as emperor on 2 December 1804, maternity remained a powerful symbol for the French people. David emphasized female fecundity in his portrait painting The Coronation of Napoleon (1807). Viewers are drawn to the décolletage of the many women in the scene, a fashion that sharply accentuated their breasts. The kneeling figure of Napoleon’s wife Josephine (1763–1814), his mother seated high above the ceremony, and the large grouping of women witnessing the event, all wear the same Classically inspired costume with a high waist and squarely cut, very low neckline. Also significant in this painting is the only child present, the three-year-old Charles Bonaparte (1802–7), the son of Napoleon’s stepdaughter Hortense de

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Beauharnais (1783–1837). If Charles had lived, he would have succeeded to Napoleon’s throne should Josephine have failed to bear a child.

Introducing Marguerite Gérard Much has been written about these maternal women and infants in the large-scale historical works of David and other like-minded French artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. More recently, scholars have turned their attention to intimate pictures of family life made during the same period. Among these are the genre paintings by Marguerite Gérard, the younger sister of the miniature portrait painter Marie-Anne Fragonard (1745–1823).3 Marie-Anne was married to the Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), well known for his pastoral scenes. Gérard joined the Fragonard household after her mother died, when she was fourteen, and she received her artistic training in the artist’s atelier. Although she produced numerous portraits, she was notable for her genre depictions of infant-centred female domesticity. In this essay, I offer three readings of Gérard’s works: as images influenced by diverse kinds of paintings, as reflections on the historical era, and as responses to Rousseau’s writings on the domestic sphere. Rousseau was instrumental in defining familial love and devotion for the eighteenth century, and probably had more impact on public opinion than any other writer of his day. He wrote extensively on conjugal bliss and the proper education of the child, which began with the child’s emotional development through maternal nurturing. Crucially, Rousseau was productive at a time when new concepts of infancy and childhood associated the infant with early stages in personal development and new learning that could promote nationalistic ideals.4 In particular, Rousseau’s Emile, or On 3  Writings on Marguerite Gérard have dealt mainly with female friendship, intimacy, and portraiture. See, for example: Heather Belnap Jensen, ‘Modern Motherhood and Female Sociability in the Art of Marguerite Gérard’, in Reconciling Art and Mothering, ed. Rachel Epp Buller (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), pp.  15–30; Molly A.  Medakovich, ‘Between Friends: Representations of Female Sociability in French Genre Painting and Portraiture, 1770–1830’ (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012); and ‘Spotlight on Marguerite Gérard’, in Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from the Louvre, Versailles and other French National Collections (Washington, DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts; London: Scala Publishers, 2012, https://nmwa.org/blog/2012/04/03/royalists-toromantics-spotlight-on-marguerite-gerard/ (accessed 22 October 2017). 4  Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), examines ideas about infancy and childhood in relation to the literature of the

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Education, a multivalent text published in 1762, was a key source behind the emergence of this cultural paradigm. The book functions as an educational manual for raising a male child, a philosophical prescription for an ideal civil society, and a novel that chronicles the upbringing of the protagonist. Rousseau recognized childhood as a distinct phase of development, expounded on the sentimentalism of family happiness, and specified the domestic social behaviour of women in contrast to men, whose role was to rule public life. L’Elève intéressante [The Interesting Student], a self-portrait painted by Gérard in 1786, when she was twenty-five years old, says much about the artist’s approach to painting mothers and infants (Fig. 4.2). It also heralds her signature style. She is holding an engraving by Nicholas-François Regnault (1746–1810) of La Fontaine d’amour by Fragonard, part of a series he painted in the 1780s of allegorical depictions of love. Seated comfortably in a domestic space typically furnished with an Oriental carpet, velvet tablecloth, three-legged guéridon, and peg-legged bench, she intently studies the glass-mounted picture. Next to her foot is a spherical mirror that shows Gérard at her easel painting a portrait, which documents both her artistic practice and her use of the mirror as an optical device to achieve realistic effects.5 Keeping her company are an Angora cat and Continental spaniel, household pets that were popular at the time. Gérard is elegantly dressed in a white robe à l’anglaise that clings to her bosom and draws attention to her curvaceous form, an object of sensuality echoed in the female embodiment of amour in Fragonard’s print. Sensuality is elsewhere on display in the small statue of two putti caressing one another that dominates the background of the painting. As a self-portrait, The Interesting Student is an allegory that proclaims Gérard’s love of painting, much as Carle Van Loo (1705–65) and François Boucher (1703–70), who like Fragonard worked in the Rococo style, expressed their reverence for the art form in works that personified painting as beautiful, bare-breasted young women at their easel inspired by Enlightenment and Romanticism to show how these writers were using childhood and development to articulate new notions of history (p. 65). 5  For a discussion on the uses of the mirror for painting, see: Samuel Y.  Edgerton, The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York: Viking Studio, 2001); and Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).

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Fig. 4.2  Marguerite Gérard, L’Élève intéressante (1786). Private collection (Wikimedia Commons)

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winged putti. The putti also evoke purity, the imagination, and the sensual nature of the soul. Gérard used this symbolic idiom to announce herself as an artist, albeit in a self-portrait that confirmed her external adherence to a circumscribed female identity.6 Nonetheless, at a time when few women artists succeeded professionally, she boldly embraced the feminine attributes proscribed in that period and the maternal and infancy metaphors that were popular expressions of artistic creativity. In choosing not to marry, Gérard rejected society’s expectations that she become a wife and mother. Yet, she remained faithful to the subject matter deemed appropriate for women painters: portraiture and genre painting. This did not stop her, however, from showing in The Interesting Student her preference for composition that conveyed her personal thoughts and feelings as an artist and her knowledge of artistic styles from different periods.7 The statue of the putti borrows from the art of Classical Greece and Rome, and the print by Fragonard and other engravings scattered throughout the room are evidence of her traditional training, which involved copying prints by respected European artists. Her close study of Dutch seventeenth-century painting can be seen in the domestic setting, her rendering of realistic details, and the delicately blended brushstrokes. Gérard had easy access to Dutch genre paintings. The Fragonard household lived in the Louvre, as did many state-recognized artists and their families. Formerly a royal building, the Louvre had been converted into apartments, studios, and a large public museum that housed the royal collections and works of art looted during Napoleon’s campaigns. Despite the limitations Gérard was forced to accept as a woman artist and her reworking of content from disparate sources, the esprit of her paintings is original. Her pictures of mother and infant between 1795 and 1820 capture le goût moderne, a vague eighteenth-century term that refers to artwork that is not committed to any particular past tradition and 6  Perhaps Gérard saw Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Self-portrait (1781) and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Self-portrait with Two Pupils (1785) where the artist is wearing a plumed hat. Gérard, instead of showing herself with such a hat, perches it on the heads of the putti. 7  Marguerite Gérard’s studio in The Interesting Student can be seen as an example of a romantic interior by a woman artist. Rosemary Hill considers some examples of ‘The Antiquary at Home’, in Romantic Antiquarianism: A Romantic Circles Praxis Volume, eds. Noah Heringman and Crystal B. Lake, June 2014, https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/antiquarianism/praxis.antiquarianism.2014.hill.html (accessed 22 October 2017).

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foregrounds personal experimentation and sensibility.8 Art of this type, with its interest in the emotional bonds of contemporary life, was a nascent form of romanticism. This approach suited Gérard well given her awareness of the intimate relationship between mother and infant and the emotional states of her subjects.9 Attentive to the private moments of everyday life, she was interested in evoking her connection with the women she painted, probably friends and family, and in depicting familiar domestic spaces that resembled her home.10 At the same time Gérard’s genre paintings were a Romantic reaction to the rationality of the French Enlightenment. At times called sentimentalism or emotionalism but more often referred to as sensibilité (sensibility), this reaction denoted a refined, elevated, and morally virtuous disposition. By the 1780s, as a result of its widespread dissemination in literature, theatre, and art, sensibilité was well recognized as a genuine expression of feeling and an appropriate middle-­ class social behaviour.11

Marguerite Gérard’s Genre Paintings of the Infant, the Mother, and the Breast We begin with La Mère nourrice [The Nursing Mother] (1804), an intimate quartet of mother, maid, infant, and cat, in a domestic grouping characteristic of Gérard’s mother-and-infant scenes (Fig. 4.3). 8  The goût moderne, first defined in the early eighteenth century in reference to Rococo artists such as Fragonard and Watteau, was understood to mean a new kind of art ‘outside of tradition, and not beholden to the past […] of contemporary life’ (Jennifer D.  Milam, Historical Dictionary of Rococo Art (Scarecrow Press, 2011), p. 4). 9  Sally Wells-Robertson, in Marguerite Gérard (PhD diss., New York University, 1978), states that Gérard did not until 1800 depict a mother nursing a baby. Examples of breastfeeding portraits by French artists are The Young Mother by Jean-Laurent Mosnier (ca. 1770–80) and Marie-Geneviève Bouliard’s Portrait of M.  Olive and His Family (ca. 1791–92). The nursing mother was a widespread European motif that appeared in various settings and contexts. 10  Wells-Robertson, op. cit., in her well-documented catalogue of Gérard’s works, confirms that the artist often painted the same women in her genre paintings and the same assortment of furnishings. 11  Other artists of Gérard’s time such as Fragonard, Greuze, and Watteau were also considered advocates of the goût moderne. By the 1770s most French dictionaries, like the influential Dictionnaire de Trevoux (1771), defined sensibilité as a virtuous, uplifting, refined, and morally instructive emotion.

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Fig. 4.3  Marguerite Gérard, Les premiers pas, ou La Mère nourrice (1803–4). (Reproduced by kind permission of: Carlo Barbiero, Coll. Villa-Musée Fragonard, Grasse, France)

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Within this restricted setting, the variations in pose, attitude, and appearance offer different meanings despite the repetition of compositional devices and motifs. The curtained bed was taken from a Dutch interior, whereas the Grecian-like mother and infant originate in Gérard’s Le Premier Pas de l’enfance [First Steps] (ca. 1788). In this earlier work, with its joyful Arcadian spirit borrowed from Fragonard’s Rococo paintings, Gérard depicts mothers teaching their infants to walk. In The Nursing Mother she draws only one infant, his arm reaching out to his mother who is seated on a low bench by her bed. In the intimate space of their home, she offers the child her protruding breast, readily available for nursing. In this way, Gérard transforms the playful infant and eroticized female form into tender sentiments of Romanticized maternity. The mother in The Nursing Mother wears a Classically styled nightgown, following the trend of the late 1790s when fashionable women’s clothing was based on an idealized version of Greco-Roman dress, which sometimes exposed the breast. As a woman of distinction who invites her child to breastfeed, the mother represents the femininity, domesticity, and natural devotion of the new Revolutionary culture. Gérard fuses the mythological female of Classical aesthetics with the temporal reality of the new French woman to reveal how the romantic memory of ancient Italy fed into interpretations of contemporary society.12 Significantly, the whiteness of the mother’s nightgown and the cloth that drapes the infant, in concert with the white tones of the mother’s face and breast and the infant’s naked body, project a sense of emotional purity. Additionally, the white bed sheets, cat’s fur, and maid’s apron contribute to the harmonious symphony of pale hues that define the symbolic substance of the painting. Gérard, in common with fellow French artists of the late eighteenth century, took a time-honoured myth, in this instance the myth of Venus and Cupid, and transformed Venus into the ideal mother and Cupid into the infant child. Her objective was to create a visual rhetoric based on Classical sources that articulated contemporary ideas about self-awareness, sensorial experience, and social relations. From Greco-Roman times through the Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo periods, putti were deployed to encapsulate a catalogue of feelings, but not until the eighteenth century, in the paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), 12  The frieze-like arrangement of The Nursing Mother, the profile views of the two women, the Etruscan hairdo of the maid, and the Classically-inspired dress of the mother, all suggest the influence of Roman fresco painting and relief sculpture.

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Boucher, and Fragonard, were they used so extensively in secular works to express sentimental affection. Following this trajectory, the infant in The Nursing Mother is a metaphor for the vital forces of maternal tenderness and domestic bliss. In Emile, Rousseau follows the ethics of the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) and rejects the doctrine of Original Sin, arguing that children are innately innocent. He refutes the strict discipline advocated in childrearing manuals and contends that if allowed to develop naturally, the special characteristics of childhood will be preserved into adulthood. For example, the male child who is shielded from corruption and prepared for the perils of the public realm through a natural education will become a well-adjusted citizen. As Gérard reaffirms in The Nursing Mother, Rousseau advocated the nurturing act of breastfeeding as the first stage in the child’s development since it would bond the mother and infant from the moment of birth: ‘The earliest education is most important and it undoubtedly is woman’s work’, Rousseau argues, and ‘If the Author of nature had meant to assign it to men he would have given them milk to feed the child’.13 In the late eighteenth century, this new romantic ideal of emotional attachment as a form of education, initiated through mother-infant breastfeeding, was promoted as the foundation of the family. Just when the employment of wet nurses was spreading to the middle and lower classes (formerly it was the privilege of wealthy families who sent their infants away to be suckled by peasant women), Rousseau’s Emile denounced wet-­ nursing. He was not alone in wishing to return women to what he saw as their proper role as loving and attentive mothers. Paintings, as well as images in newspapers, magazines, novels, and books about conduct, likewise moralistically encouraged mothers to breastfeed.14 Also influential in this campaign was a medical treatise on the evils of wet-nursing written by the Swedish physician, botanist, and zoologist Carl Linnaeus (1707–78). 13  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or Education, trans. Barbara Foxley (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1921), p. 5. For an institutional analysis and in-depth study of the social context of the wet-nursing system in France, see Sussman, Selling Mothers’ Milk. 14  In Etienne Aubry’s Farewell to the Nurse (1776–77), the infant’s expression of fear and despair as the wealthy city mother retrieves her child from the country-dwelling wet nurse shows the inappropriate maternal bonding with the wet nurse criticized by Rousseau. LouisLéopold Boilly’s Game of Billiards (1807), however, presents a new relationship with the wet nurse who now lives in the family home. In this painting two mothers pause from a game of billiards with friends and family to look tenderly at their infants being breastfed by the wet nurses seated at the side of this social gathering.

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A practicing physician whose seven children, born between 1741 and 1757, were breastfed, Linnaeus coined the term mammalia to emphasize how natural it was for humans and animals to suckle their own infants. His treatise, entitled Step Nurse, was published in France in 1770 as La Nourrice marâtre, ou Dissertation sur les suites funestes du nourrissage mercenaire. It proclaimed that wet-nursing violated the laws of nature and deprived newborns of the colostrum in their mother’s first milk, which was essential for cleansing the child of the faeces ingested in utero. More likely, the era’s high infant mortality rate and its perceived connection to infants being nursed by women who weren’t their mother was behind the public’s support for condemnations of wet-nursing. The frontispiece for Emile, entitled l’Éducation de l’Homme commence à sa naïssance [The education of Man begins at his Birth], of the fourth volume in the series Collection complète des oeuvres de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782), shows a portrait bust of Rousseau surrounded by a flurry of boys who represent different stages of male education (Fig. 4.4). At its base, a mother conspicuously nurses one child and removes the swaddling clothes from another. In Emile, Rousseau strongly denounces wrapping bands of cloth around a newborn child to restrain and quiet it. In leaving its limbs free, he writes, the infant can begin to develop and stretch those tiny limbs.15 An open book, presumably Emile, rests on the ground in front of the mother and is the source of her instruction. Gérard’s The Nursing Mother, while obviously different from the frontispiece in style and technique, closely approximates its motifs. By evoking everyday life, the painting’s intent was to produce a strong emotive response in the viewer. The naked infant appears to be on the verge of flying to the mother’s breast. Gently held by a length of cloth, he is free to stretch his arms and legs towards his mother, who is fully absorbed in her maternal duty. The man in the portrait on the bedroom wall is the husband, father, and family patriarch, responsible for his son’s upbringing. According to Rousseau, the father’s role began when the child’s infancy ended, at the age of five. Despite the apparent adherence of The Nursing Mother to Rousseau’s Emile, the painting contains a contradiction. Rousseau writes: ‘When women become good mothers, men will be good husbands and fathers’.16 Breastfeeding, he continues, ‘makes the father and mother more necessary, dearer to one another; it tightens the conjugal bond between them’.17  Rousseau, Emile, p. 27.  Rousseau, Emile, p. 14. 17  Rousseau, Emile, p. 14. 15 16

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Fig. 4.4  Robert de Launay after Charles Nicolas Cochin, l’Éducation de l’Homme commence à sa naïssance (1780–81), frontispiece to vol. 4 of Collection complète des oeuvres de Jean Jacques Rousseau (1782). (Reproduced by kind permission of The British Museum, London)

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At the time when Emile was published, most couples abstained from sexual intercourse during nursing. Sexual activity was frowned upon because pregnancy might dry up the mother’s breasts and thus increase the chance of the infant dying. However, the scene in The Nursing Mother includes an unmade bed, suggesting conjugal relations between husband and wife. Unquestionably, the sensuality of Gérard’s painting has mostly to do with the pleasure of nursing an infant, a sensation that was acknowledged in the medical literature of the period. Yet with the curtained bed so close, Gérard links sexual contentment and the mother’s tender look at the sight of her child. Her erect breast appears to be erotically stimulated, but it is also the wellspring of her heartfelt emotion for her infant child. Neither The Nursing Mother nor Emile is free of social bias. Included in Rousseau’s criticism of wet-nursing was the idea that blood ties were debased when mothers did not breastfeed. With the infant’s ‘blood’ not empowered by his caring mother, writes Rousseau, ‘fathers, mothers, children, brothers, and sisters cease to exist’.18 In contrast, ‘when mothers deign to nurse their own children, then will be a reform in morals; natural feeling will revive in every heart; there will be no lack of citizens for the state; this first step by itself will restore mutual affection’.19 Rousseau’s viewpoint reflects a radically new and different conception of social class. During this period, it was no longer the bloodlines of nobility that determined class, but the blood ties of the newly developing middle class, which could be tainted by the milk of a lowly wet nurse. This elitist attitude is possibly The Nursing Mother’s principal frame of reference. The consciousness of the rising middle class and the nobility’s professed adoption of similar values involved seeing themselves as heirs to the Classical ideals that inspired the French Revolution and transformed French society.20 Accordingly, the mother in The Nursing Mother is both Roman goddess and ideal Revolutionary woman. With her beauty and  Rousseau, Emile, p. 13.  Rousseau, Emile, p. 13. 20  Sarah Maza argues in The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003) that bourgeois identity was not articulated as a national identity or social class until the 1820s. Regarding the middle-class mother, Heather Belnap Jensen explains that ‘a consideration of post-Revolutionary culture suggests that the domestic ideal coexisted and comingled with another ideal—that of the fashionable mother’ (‘Marketing the Maternal Body in the Public Spaces of PostRevolutionary Paris’, in Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789–1914, eds. Temma Balducci and Belnap (New York: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 28–9). 18 19

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moral purity, she embodies private and public goodness. This contrasts with the maid, possibly a governess, whose rather common face, large-­ boned physique, and aproned dress are not only evidence of her lower social standing, but also characterize her as a less attractive human being. As for the infant, he appears to be like Emile, a healthy boy born in France whom Rousseau imagined to be of ordinary intelligence, very wealthy, and of noble birth. The Nursing Mother affords the opportunity to look closely at a private interior and identify with the values expressed by the artist. One of the only known genre scenes where Gérard explicitly shows the mother about to nurse or nursing, the painting acknowledges that maternal feeding, despite considerable encouragement, was not largely accepted in Paris. In comparison, Gérard’s Motherhood (La Maternité) (1795–1800) takes a different approach to the story of mother, maid, and infant, as if she decided to disclose another of the diverse aspects of maternity and female domestic life (Fig. 4.5). Motherhood is an archetype of long-established religious images of Mary and the infant Jesus. The mother’s tender embrace of her infant and their intimate play are indebted to the Renaissance artist Raphael’s (1483–1520) paintings of the Madonna and Child.21 But there is an essential difference. One of the results of the secularization of French society post-Revolution was the transformation of Mary into an exemplary female citizen, namely, a wife and mother. In Motherhood, the mother affectionately offers her cheek to receive the infant’s kiss. Her adoration, expressed through her gentle caresses and the obvious physical bond between the mother and child, suffuses the scene with quiet emotional intensity. Clearly, there is a devotional quality in Gérard’s depiction of the mother, but the interiority associated with Christian devotion has become a modern form of absorption in which the mother is immersed in contemplating her child. Her inwardness no longer suggests religious reflection but instead brings to mind thoughts and feelings related to female virtue. Although Motherhood is suffused with Christian ideas and values, they are interwoven with Revolutionary ideals that have as their underlying objective the building of a social order whose spiritual nucleus is the family.

21  Raphael represented the Classical ideal from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century and was considered one of the principal exemplars of Neoclassicism. Gérard was aware of Raphael’s paintings from engravings and paintings brought to Paris during the French wars and Napoleonic occupation of Italy.

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Fig. 4.5  Marguerite Gérard, La Maternité [Motherhood] (c. 1795–1800). (Reproduced by kind permission of Baltimore Museum of Art, bequest of Elise Agnus Daingerfield, BMA 1944.102)

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At the same time, Motherhood is strongly indebted to Dutch genre artists of the seventeenth century, especially Pieter de Hooch (1629–84), Gabriël Metsu (1629–67), Jacob Ochtervelt (1634–82), and Gerard ter Borch (1617–81), who painted peaceful scenes of upper-class domestic life.22 Their works focus on Classical depictions of the human figure, the sheen of luxurious fabrics, and detailed renderings of home furnishings. In Motherhood, the idealized figure of the mother recalls the Classical ­sculpture used by Raphael as the prototype for his paintings of women. But her rounded torso, broad hips, and full skirt transform her statuesque form into an evocation of fertility. Complementing the sensuous folds of her dress are cascades of silk and satin that drape across the table and chair. A brass chandelier and a Neoclassical table, the legs of which extend from the chest of a sphinx-like woman, distinguish the elegant interior of the home. The emphasis in Motherhood on class difference, as communicated through costume and body language, is also reminiscent of seventeenth-­ century Dutch interiors. The maid in the painting, with her simple aproned dress and dark hair secured by a band, is clearly the product of a lower class. She looks appreciatively at the mother and child as she leans comfortably on the table, her arms folded. The accent on her low-cut dress and ample breasts suggests she may be a wet nurse working in the home of this upper middle class family. If indeed she is a live-in wet nurse, her presence indicates a substantial change: instead of sending the infant to the countryside to be nursed, wealthy families invited the wet nurse to live in the home, where she was considered part of the family. Her inclusion is evident in the strong sense of female companionship conveyed in the painting, even as it articulates the contrasts between the women’s different social classes. The subtle smiles lighting up their faces express the emotional satisfaction of caring for an infant. By the second half of the eighteenth century, a gentle smile was a typical signifier of the happiness women felt when nursing a child. In this scene, however, it may not be the mother who is doing the breastfeeding. Nevertheless, her smile and the 22  Gérard was attracted to Dutch domestic scenes for the approach to subject as well as the formal elements. Beate Söntgen explains that Dutch genre painting ‘is an early form of bourgeois culture, but it remains steeped in Christian ideas and values intertwined, since the fifteenth century, with humanist ideals whose overarching objective is the establishment of a harmonious social order’ (‘Mariology, Calvinism, Painting: Interiority in Pieter de Hooch’s Mother at a Cradle’, in Interiors and Interiority, eds. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Söntgen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), p. 187).

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way she lovingly embraces her child show her to be the emotional epicentre of the family. In turn, the infant kisses his mother in what Rousseau calls the ‘mutual affection’ that defines social virtue and the nurturing of relationships that is fundamental to nature. So many influences coalesce in Gérard’s genre paintings that it is difficult if not impossible to know the full extent of the attitudes, beliefs, and customs that characterize her works. Everyday objects and practices obviously had an impact on her depictions, but what they are exactly and what meanings they contain are open to interpretation. For example, we can only guess at the meaning of the large white panel behind the mother, with its three columns of indecipherable text. Perhaps it is a reading aid, included by the artist to show the mother’s willingness to teach her child at home. The significance of the plentiful display of fabric is easier to guess. Beautiful flowing fabric recalls the sculptures of Classical antiquity, Raphael’s paintings of female garments, and the ability of Dutch painters to render textures and fine fabrics with the utmost fidelity, a skill Gérard learned in her art training. Or maybe it refers to the newer wealth of members of the middle class, who were now in a position to purchase luxury textiles, previously the privilege of only the court and nobility. Conceivably, the overwhelming presence of high-quality fabric is Gérard’s way of acknowledging that technical innovations in weaving had recently made it less expensive to acquire silk textiles. As for her Dutch-like scenes, it is possible they are recreations of the tableaux vivants Gérard saw when she went to the theatre. As someone who appreciated stage performances, she may have been influenced by the way vaudeville, in its depictions of the family, was inspired by paintings from the Low Countries. Similarly, the portrayal of only one child in Motherhood may have different meanings. The most obvious explanation is that the painting updates depictions of the Madonna and Child to a modern, secular context. Alternatively, Gérard frequently depicted one infant in her genre works because she wanted to focus on the mother’s newfound joy in caring for her firstborn. Another possibility is that the artist’s decision to seldom show more than one child signifies the smaller size of the middle-class family during this period. This change can be explained by an array of social and ideological circumstances. Although populations grew substantially through the latter part of the eighteenth century due to the absence of famines and plagues, the fertility rate among wealthier French citizens decreased. Presumably breastfeeding mothers either refrained from

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intercourse or prevailed upon their husbands to practise coitus interruptus. These women, who read and appreciated Rousseau, may have been motivated by his social philosophy, which encouraged parents to promote the happiness and welfare of their children. At the same time, French society, liberated by the Revolution, was increasingly preoccupied with social mobility and material wealth. These new ideas and aspirations demanded smaller families. The cat in Motherhood, which looks towards the viewer, is also intriguing. It could be simply a sympathetic presence whose purpose is to draw the viewer into the painting. However, various contemporary discourses raise the possibility of another interpretation, one that relates to the animal’s intrinsic connection to the infant. As Laura Brown observes in Fables of Modernity, ‘animals intruded upon European consciousness in distinctive and novel ways in the course of the eighteenth century’: In the life sciences, new paradigms in biology, zoology, and natural history raised controversial questions about the nature of the physiological and developmental links among animals, or between animals and men.23

In the second half of the eighteenth century, in particular, in an attempt to comprehend the human mind and body, some Enlightenment thinkers put forward the notion that animals had souls. This was a rejection of an idea promoted by the sixteenth-century philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650). When contrasting animals to humans, Descartes came to the conclusion that the human soul was spiritually unique and that it alone was the seat of reason. In a well-received philosophical treatise, David Renaud Boullier (1699–1759) argued that the purposeful motions of animals proved they also had intelligence and a soul, though on a lesser scale than humans. Later, the naturalist Charles Bonnet (1720–93) advanced the idea of an even closer relationship between animal and human souls, based on his observation that the two species experienced common physical sensations. Then the physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–51)

23  Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 224. Brown focuses in particular on the ‘intimate connection’ between animals and ‘the human denizens of eighteenth-century England’ which resulted from ‘the full flowering’ at the time ‘of a modern phenomenon’: ‘the keeping of pets’ (p. 232).

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proposed the radical concept of the soul being an emotive power shared by both humans and animals.24 This new correlation was the underlying thesis of La Mettrie’s Treatise on the Soul (1745) and Machine Man (1747). While Rousseau did not necessarily believe in the materialism of these thinkers, he postulated in his Discourse that for the infant, perceiving and feeling would be his first state, which he would have in common with all animals.25 In Emile, Rousseau argues that infants, like animals, are capable of significant learning: ‘They have senses and must learn to use them; they have needs, they must learn to satisfy them’.26 Furthermore, Rousseau used animal stories to d ­ emonstrate that the human attribute of compassion, a key social virtue, had its origins in the natural passion of animals. Compassion, Rousseau argues is: a disposition suitable to creatures so weak and subject to so many evils as we certainly are: by so much the more universal and useful to mankind, as it comes before any kind of reflection; and at the same time so natural, that the very brutes themselves sometimes give evident proofs of it. Not to mention the tenderness of mothers for their offspring and the perils they encounter to save them from danger.27

Rousseau’s admiration for animals was not only philosophical. His steadfast companion, to whom he was devoted, was his pet dog Sultan. These ideas about animal-human commonalities were broadly disseminated through popular writings and works of art involving domestic animals such as cats and dogs, which were often associated with infants, girls, and women. With such notions entrenched in eighteenth-century thinking, we can assume that the cat in Motherhood connects to the infant on several levels. They are both small and soft to the touch. Just as the infant needs nourishment and protection in the home environment, so does the cat. Above all, the infant and cat are similarly steeped in feeling, which is also what drives the affectionate, nurturing care of the breastfeeding 24  For more on comparisons between human infants and animals in the period, see Ann Wierda Rowland, ‘Learned Pigs and Literate Children: Becoming Human in EighteenthCentury Literary Cultures’, in Andrew O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and EighteenthCentury Childhoods (London: Palgrave, 2018), pp. 99–115; and Anja Höing’s essay in his volume, (pp. 159–182). 25  Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Origin of Inequality’, in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole, ed. Ernest Rhys (New York: E.P. Dutton, Everyman’s Library), p. 207. 26  Rousseau, Emile, p. 29. 27  Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Origin of Inequality’, p. 197.

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woman. In these interrelated ways the painting reflects the Romantic belief that animals and people are both governed by emotion and instinct.28 Moreover, the shared response of the infant and the cat to the natural world through sense perception is understood to be the basic requirement for a loving family and caring society. For thirty years, from the 1790s to the 1820s, that is, during the heyday of Romanticism, Gérard specialized in various iterations of the mother and infant child. In The Nurse (La Nourrice) (1802), the breastfeeding mother of The Nursing Mother, completed that same year, becomes the mother tenderly observing the wet nurse feeding her child, her arm wrapped around the nurse in a close embrace. Occasionally, the husband enters the composition to watch the mother and child from a distance or as an active participant in the scene, as in Maternal Pride (La Fierté maternelle) (1815–20), where he lovingly embraces his wife as she cradles their child in her lap. Gérard’s tributes to motherhood were well appreciated, and not only by contemporary artists and critics: they were highly marketable and sought by the public into the final years of her career.29 But by the time of her death in 1837, romanticized maternity as a symbol of private and public virtue, and as a metaphor for republican values, had been overtaken by a new pessimistic realism.

Afterlives In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Paris experienced rapid industrialization and overpopulation. The resulting, rampant poverty in large measure explains the leading role played by the city’s residents in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, which precipitated a new and radical interpretation of the breastfeeding mother and infant child. Artists were no longer interested in idealizing the domestic life of the middle-class family. Rather, the neglect and misery of the proletariat inspired them to create paintings and prints of impoverished mothers attempting to nourish their unfortunate children.  McCoy, ‘Romanticism in France’, op. cit.  Gérard, who began to exhibit publicly in 1799, benefited from the opening of the Louvre’s Salon. In contrast with the Ancien Régime tradition of permitting only members of the Académie to exhibit, the new Salon exhibitions welcomed all artists. Numerous engraved renditions of Gérard’s paintings, making them available to less well-off art lovers, also helped to increase her fame. 28 29

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In Gustave Courbet’s (1819–77) The Painter’s Studio (L’Atelier du peintre) (1855), a ‘real allegory’ intended to encapsulate the first seven years of his artistic and moral life, the artist depicts a breastfeeding beggar shrouded in darkness.30 She is seated on the ground and barely covered in rags, and behind her lurks a skull, a premonition of her death and the death of her child. Their misery stands in contrast to the adjacent scene of Courbet painting a landscape of a mountain valley and river near his childhood home in Franche-Comté, while a healthy young boy and nude model attentively watch. This scene personifies the ideals of Rousseau’s Emile: Courbet, the boy, and the model symbolize inspiration and natural beauty and are the hoped-for redemption of a society gone terribly wrong. Honoré Daumier’s (1808–79) Le Wagon de troisième classe [The Third-­ Class Carriage] (1862–4) strikes a similar chord. Here we find an exhausted mother gazing down at the infant cradled in her arms. She has found repose in a dark, crowded public space, and is accompanied by a sleeping child and very tired grandmother who looks at the viewer with an expression of grave concern (Fig. 4.6). Maternity as representative of the ideals of the family and the virtues associated with a regenerated French republic only returned with the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot (1841–95), born four years after Gérard’s death. Morisot would have been well aware of Gérard, who was the most recognized French woman artist of her era. In fact, her fame eclipsed Fragonard’s during the 1790s and 1800s. Furthermore, there was a family connection, as Morisot’s mother was Fragonard’s great-niece. The connection can also be seen in her artwork. While Morisot’s depictions of modern domestic life were considered innovative—she was particularly recognized for her sketch-like brushwork, unblended soft hues, and subtle atmospheres infused with natural light—in truth, despite her dramatically different style of painting, she was following in the footsteps of Gérard. The artist’s first picture of motherhood, titled The Cradle (Le Berceau) (1872), shows her sister, Edma, gazing fondly at her sleeping newborn daughter, Blanche. Morisot’s decision to show The Cradle at the Impressionist exhibition of 1874, the first woman to exhibit with the group, attests to the importance she attached to this subject (Fig. 4.7).

30   Linda Nochlin, ‘Courbet’s Real Allegory: Rereading The Painter’s Studio’, in Representing Women (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), p. 125.

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Fig. 4.6  Honoré Daumier, Le Wagon de troisième classe (c. 1862–64), New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, H.  O. Havemeyer Collection, bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929, accession number: 29.100.129. (Wikimedia Commons)

The resemblance to Gérard’s paintings can be found in the echoes between the mother’s body and the child’s and in the sense of tranquillity that pervades the scene. In addition, the mother’s mesmerized look of maternal love is a similar emotional expression of maternal bonding. The lace cradle-covering and window curtains that structure the composition also recall Gérard’s use of fabric to complement the arrangement of the figures in her paintings. Moreover, like Gérard, Morisot is attentive to fashion in the rendering of Edma’s dress and hair style, clearly aware that her paintings are catering to middle-class female viewers. Over the years Morisot continued to visualize tender leisure moments in the everyday life of Edma and her child, until, eight years later, after her own daughter was born, she painted The Wet Nurse Angele Feeding Julie Manet (La Nourrice Angèle allaitant Julie Manet) (1880). Here again she borrowed from Gérard’s preoccupation with the wet-nursing subject to depict her infant child suckling the breast of the wet nurse Angele. In this

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Fig. 4.7  Berthe Morisot, Le Berceau [The Cradle] (1872). Musée d’Orsay, Paris (Wikimedia Commons)

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portrayal, Morisot provides evidence of middle-class life that was also typical of Gérard’s era, when female maids were contributors to the middle-­ class household, especially wet-nurses who were considered to play an integral part in an infant’s survival. Importantly, the bonnet and parasol lying beside Angele on the grass signify Morisot’s presence in the loving care of her daughter. Still, as the artist who depicts this scene, Morisot has the time to devote to painting, an activity that was believed to be an appropriate cultural pursuit for a bourgeois woman.

Conclusion In the late 1700s, among the prominent texts concerned with the infant child was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education, in which he insists that the mother, rather than the wet nurse, should breastfeed the child. Visual representations of the nurturing mother, intended both for public display and private viewing, gained popularity during the years of the French Revolution and continued to be celebrated into the 1820s. In this context, Marguerite Gérard’s paintings can be interpreted variously as symbolic of beauty and wealth, a tribute to the French Revolutionary spirit, and confirmation that being a mother was a woman’s natural and most productive role. Most importantly, these images made visible a Romantic engagement centred on the infant child. Through their intimate depictions, Gérard’s paintings projected the private emotions experienced in the everyday practices of maternity and female domesticity. While the ideal of the breastfeeding mother did not survive in the harsh political climate of the mid-nineteenth century, it resurfaced a short time later in the paintings of the Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot. In fact, Morisot’s romantically inclined images of family life are very likely the reappearance of an approach that began with the eighteenth-century goût moderne, captured by Gérard in genre paintings that focused on the infant, the mother, and the breast.

CHAPTER 5

Mother at the Source: Romanticism and Infant Education Robert A. Davis

In her introduction to The Child in British Literature, Adrienne Gavin emphasises the extent to which ideas about ‘children and childhood’ have been ‘constructed in literary texts’.1 In the period covered by this volume, the distinction between literary and non-literary texts was, of course, not nearly so clear-cut as it would become in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But it could certainly be argued that the major conceptual concerns of the eighteenth-century cultures of infancy which this volume examines were first set out in two treatises on education: John Locke’s (1632–1704) Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and Jean-­ Jacques Rousseau’s (1712–78) Émile, ou de l’éducation [Emile, or On Education] (1762). As Andrew O’Malley points out in his introduction to Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, ‘the nature of the child’s mind, how it acquired information and knowledge, was a subject of

 Adrienne Gavin (ed.), The Child in British Literature (London: Palgrave, 2012), p. 3.

1

R. A. Davis (*) University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Domines Veliki, C. Duffy (eds.), Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8_5

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considerable interest’ during the long eighteenth century.2 These books by Locke and Rousseau were seminal in establishing the terms of that debate, at least from a pedagogical perspective, although, as has often been observed, both books range well beyond their ostensible, education-­ focused remit—illustrating, again, the relative absence from the culture of the long eighteenth century of the disciplinary boundaries with which we are now, for better or for worse, familiar. This chapter begins by considering very briefly the pre-history in British and European literature of the debate about infant education engaged by Locke and Rousseau. That pre-history is important and not only because it adds chronological strength and depth to Adrienne Gavin’s aforementioned claim about the pivotal role of literary texts in shaping and perpetuating ideas about infancy. Rather, re-historicising the debate between Rousseau and Locke sheds light on the emergence of the stadial and genetic conceptions of infancy which have often been associated by critics with Enlightenment and Romantic thought respectively—and with Locke and Rousseau specifically—and which have often been framed by critics sequentially, although they are now increasingly and (correctly) recognised as entangled in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century cultures of infancy. In the light of this re-historicising, this chapter will go on to consider the complex relationship between the stadial and genetic conceptions of infancy in the work of two champions of infant education in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Johannes Pestalozzi (1746–1827) and Robert Owen (1771–1858). Within the terms of an older scholarly lexicon, it would be easy to characterise the interventions of Pestalozzi and Owen as ‘Romantic’ critiques of both hypertrophied Christianity and institutionalised rationality. Yet both men, even at their most counter-cultural, saw themselves as heirs of the Enlightenment, and Pestalozzi, at least, also considered himself at all times a devout Christian. Hence it may be more fruitful to interpret their monumental undertakings on behalf of infant schooling as part of a much deeper pattern of historical and cultural change in which the discourses of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism each participate in an extended and conflicted genealogy of infancy.

2  Andrew O’Malley, Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods (London: Palgrave, 2018), p. 6.

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Historicising Locke and Rousseau on Infant Education Forty years ago, in an unjustly neglected study, Laura Marcus ingeniously—if somewhat mischievously—suggested that the survival in early modern England of the affirmative, non-institutionalised perception of ‘unregulated’ infancy, in the face of the dominant, fatalistic Calvinist view of early childhood ascendant in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, was attributable to the Oratorian spirituality imported to the country in 1625 with the entourage of the French Catholic wife of Charles I (1600–49), Henrietta Maria (1609–69).3 While this view was of course unduly simplified, and ignored the complex variegation of Protestant belief in Reformation England and beyond, Marcus’s analysis did point fruitfully to vital Continental influences spanning Counter-Reformation Catholicism and Arminian moderation in which a potent imagery of the visionary or celestial child survived the exactitudes of the rising, punitive doctrines of infant depravity and control. These movements and spiritual fraternities drew on a deep well of mystical Christian meditation and observance centred originally on the icon of the infant Jesus, the tableau of the Nativity and the eventual abstraction of the figure of the infant baby as the locus of contemplative interiority. The resultant body of mid-seventeenth century ‘infancy literature’, poetry and prose, is in consequence strongly associated with an older ‘Anglican’ culture facing seeming destruction at the hands of the Puritan victors of the English Civil War.4 A similar ‘defensive’ posture can also be seen in the writings of European figures from the more supposedly ‘moderate’ factions of the multiple wars of religion tearing Europe apart from 1618 to 1648. This has led some commentators to see the recurrent aesthetic and emotional embrace of infancy among conservative educated humanist elites as a kind of crisis-poetics: a ‘retreat’, or withdrawal from violent conflict into either the comforting embrace of the mother or the

3  See Laura M.  Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978). 4  For more on this association, see Edmund Newey, ‘“God made Man Greater when He made Him Less”: Traherne’s Iconic Child’, Literature and Theology, 24/3 (2010), pp. 227–41.

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oblivion and innocence of that unremembered and blameless state of pre-­ consciousness reserved for the youngest babies.5 Historicising this emergent poetics of infancy of course calls into question some of its convenient binaries. It does, after all, tell us very little of how Early Modern infants were actually treated in the domestic circles of these educated, infancy-devoted elites. Nevertheless, we cannot underestimate the importance of these Early Modern platonic-spiritual movements in igniting a potent imagery, which ricochets down European letters, of what David Kennedy terms a ‘child […] so profoundly and unconsciously grounded in her own existence and free of the tyranny of speech and reason, that truth proceeds from her every word and action as from an oracle’.6 We will see that this highly charged ‘tradition’ of infancy, however laden it may be with paradox, is, when mobilised on behalf of social and educational action, a force of immense symbolic and material concentration. If the ‘inner light’ reproduction of infancy posits a ‘return’, even under strict contemplative-metaphoric conditions, to its signature apophatic state, this aspiration of course sits firmly at odds with the dynamics of education as envisaged even across the many rival styles of Early Modern pedagogic practice. From the benign, object-centred Janua Linguarum Reserata [The Gate of Tongues Unlocked] (1631) and Didactica Magna (1638) of the Moravian theologian and pedagogue John Amos Comenius (1597–1670), to the infamous Jansenist schools originating at the abbey of Port-Royal-Des-Champes, with their ruthless Cartesian didacticism fashioned to ‘undo the prejudices of childhood’, the shared ambitions of late Renaissance and early Enlightenment schooling follow the classic trajectory of rapid forward movement from the unformed ignorance of infancy to the full attentiveness of early rationality.7 Building on the pioneering work of Anne McClintock, literary historians of the role of infancy in Romanticism, such as Judith Plotz and Ann 5  See, for example, Elizabeth S. Dodd, ‘Affirmation and Negation: The semantic paradox at the heart of innocence’, in Innocence Uncovered: Literary and Theological Perspectives, ed. Elizabeth S. Dodd and Carl E. Findley III (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 21–41. 6  David Kennedy, The Well of Being: Childhood, Subjectivity and Education (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 29. 7  On educational practices deriving from Port-Royal, see N.  Hammond, Fragmentary Voices: Memory and Education at Port Royal (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2004); and A.  Arnauld and P.  Nicole, Logic or the Art of Thinking, Ed J.  V. Buroker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). The quotation is from Arnauld and Nicole, p. 53.

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Wierda Rowland, have seen in these expressions of European historicism the emergence of a new construction of cultural and biographical time, which renders the older religious-recursive longing for a ‘retreat’ or a ‘return’ to infancy of the kind we see in the Anglican Metaphysicals not only an outmoded impossibility but a reactionary superstition.8 For these scholars, the education of the individual within both rationalist and empiricist versions of Enlightenment psychology forever constitutes infancy as a fundamental deficit to be overcome exclusively by forms of intervention parallel to those utilised and perfected in that other great encounter with the ‘infantile’—the domination of colonial and imperial subjects otherwise immobilised, as it were, in the mute ‘infancy’ of human civilisation. This teleological thinking, in which ontogeny of the human infant recapitulates the phylogeny of humanity, may then seem at face value fertile terrain for the transvaluation by Jean-Jacques Rousseau of both childhood and primitivism in his revolutionary educational and political writings, which—as we shall see—were destined to prove of such decisive influence in the popularisation of a new style of European infant schooling during the Romantic period. Rousseau, however, is notoriously reticent and ambivalent about infancy as such, as opposed to childhood tout court. In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1750), for example, Rousseau describes infancy as a state of such extreme physical and mental dependence as to entail an infirmity that excludes the infant from civil society without the compensatory attachments to nature that dignify the ‘noble’ savages of the imperial imaginary. And even twelve years later, in Rousseau’s educational manifesto, Emile (1762), where childhood is valorised as the open secret to humanity’s transformation, its initial infant stages (which for Rousseau extend to age 5) are typified by a condition of weakness that excites chiefly impatience and anxiety. ‘We are born weak, we need strength’, Rousseau argues: ‘we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment’.9 The infant’s weakness, for Rousseau, affords the invitation for adult care, but it is care construed as containment as much as 8  See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (London, Palgrave, 2001); Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization Of British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 9  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (1762), ed. and transl. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 38.

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solicitude. The troubling combination of mental and physical incapacity in babies and infants demands and shapes the permanent nurturing presence of adults in their lives, but it is a presence already alert to both the prodigal potential of the smallest children and the need for the ‘cultivation’ of ‘strength’ and ‘judgment’ in them to be simultaneous. Frankenstein-like, Rousseau permits himself early in Emile the morbid thought experiment of ‘a man born big and strong, his size and strength […] detrimental to him in that they would keep others from thinking of aiding him. And abandoned to himself, he would die of want before knowing his needs’.10 This potential mixed-age hybridised monstrosity of infancy—the ‘age of nature’ in Emile—extends also to that other great disquiet which Rousseau registers around very small children: the fearful recognition of their egoism: The first tears of children are prayers. If one is not careful, they soon become orders. Children begin by getting themselves assisted; they end by getting themselves served. Thus, from their own weakness, which is in the first place the source of the feeling of their dependence, is subsequently born the idea of empire and domination.11

Of course it is important to recognise that in true empiricist fashion, these dangerous tendencies visible even in infants are, for Rousseau learned (‘if one is not careful’ to prevent it) and not innate, and, as such, they serve to sanction the primary, Lockean educational act, which is the authorisation of the tutor to ensure that they do not in fact germinate in the first place. The culminating vices of the ego are not selected idly here: empire and domination are the evils denounced in Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762), from which it will also be the task of education to protect society. But it is interesting nonetheless to see that in Rousseau’s underlying imagery of ‘unregulated’ infancy, its ‘tears’ and ‘prayers’, previously so central to that older European incunabula of redemptive infancy, risk becoming the deceptively clamant entreaties and ultimatums of a corrupt society channelling its terrors and appetites through its smallest and most vulnerable members. Despite its evasiveness on infancy per se, Emile nevertheless furnishes early childhood education with something approaching a programme for the formation of the infant person that functions as both a provocation  Rousseau, Emile, p. 47.  Rousseau, Emile, p. 75.

10 11

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and an invitation to educators. Evidence for this was visible across Europe as Emile was disseminated and translated at enormous speed from the radical presses.12 National and regional responses to Rousseau’s claims were, however, extremely mixed, combining imitation, reaction and refraction commensurate with local, often volatile, circumstance. They reflected, also, the character of indigenous movements for educational reform; the evolving attitude of urban elites to the increasingly vexatious plight of a large and growing industrial demography of the very young, barely containable within the pre-existing literary and folk tropes of the foundling, the orphan and the abandoned baby; and the deliberately revolutionary temper of Emile as a political document. Recent commentators such as Julie Davidson and Beatrice Turner stand in a long line of critics highlighting the ambivalence with which Emile was greeted by progressive opinion, and literary practice, in late eighteenth-­ century Britain.13 In relation to infancy, writers and committed ‘improvers’ such as William Godwin (1756–1836) and Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825) appear in one sense to welcome Rousseau’s critique of an ossified European educational culture wholly inadequate to both the optimistic promise of Enlightenment psychology and the social menace of proletarian exclusion. Yet both in distinct ways express a deep suspicion of what Godwin termed ‘a series of tricks, a puppet-show exhibition, of which the master holds the wires’, and what Barbauld called ‘mimic experiments in education’ in which ‘there is always something which distinguishes them from reality’.14 This fear of the supposed hidden artifice and manipulation in Rousseau’s scheme appears in one sense to reassert a purity of the natural to which Rousseau was himself ostensibly committed, but in the generative logic of the improving regimes to which figures such as Godwin, Barbauld, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744–1817) and Thomas Day (1748–1789) were committed—the latter two infamous for their failed Rousseauvian experiments with real living older children (including Edgeworth’s own son, Dick)—the newborn infant epitomised 12  For the circulation of Rousseau’s ideas, see Bernadette Baker, In Perpetual Motion: Theories of Power, Educational History and the Child (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). 13  Julie Davidson, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Beatrice Turner, Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs: Reproduction and Retrospection, 1820-1850 (London: Palgrave, 2017). 14  William Godwin, ‘Of Deception and Frankness’, The Enquirer, 126 (1797), p. 61; Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘What is Education?’, quoted from Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Williams McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002), p. 324.

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the feral origin-point of the ‘natural’ human about which there could be only deeply conflicted feeling.15 From their bitter family experience almost wholly abandoning Rousseau in favour of the calmer, more gradualist version of associationism formulated by David Hartley (1705–57), Richard Edgeworth and his daughter Maria (1768–1849) produced their renowned Practical Education (1798), determined upon the vigilant control and manipulation of ‘the first impressions which infants receive’ rather than its surrender to the emancipatory conditions of profligate nature.16 Severely constraining Rousseau in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1798), William Godwin similarly distances and objectifies ‘the infant’, almost like a laboratory animal, in the book’s account of both child-rearing and education—conceding that ‘we are, by various causes, excluded from a minute observation of the infant mind’, and insisting defensively (and dismissively) that this helpless, inscrutable creature’s initiation into culture of even the most rudimentary kind ‘will probably devolve upon the mother’.17 We can see that these varied responses to Rousseau by champions and practitioners of educational reform channel and amplify, even in their ultimate rejection, their sponsor’s uncertainty about the unstable place of infancy in Enlightenment accounts of socialised learning. Generative and improving thought echoes Rousseau’s key conviction that, whatever its proximity to nature, infancy is a state to be gotten over, to be ‘overcome’ by domestic instruction and then formal schooling. Yet the symbolic economy of Emile, which cannot rid itself of the irreducible imagery of a different kind of infant—one closer, perhaps, to its inner-light forebears—also imprints these often enormously inflated projects for national educational renewal. This is the figural baby and very young child in its iconically visceral preverbal and paraverbal condition: set at the liminal threshold of the social through the stark episodes of its exacting gestation, its bloody (often high-mortality) parturition, its inability to speak, its flagrant physical declarations of its needs, its protracted remoteness from reason, its extended 15  See Rachel Hewitt, A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind (London: Granta, 2017). For more on rhetorical and actual experiments on children, see the essay by Lisa-Ann Robertson in the present volume (pp. 203–227). For more on the educational theories and practices of Richard and Maria Edgeworth, see the essay by Charles Armstrong in the present volume (pp. 135–157). 16  Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education, 3 vols. (London, 1798), vol. 1, pp. 8–9. 17  William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1798), ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2015), pp. 222, 228 [Bk 4, Ch. 7].

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altricious dependence on its carers, its infinite power to surprise, delight and terrify—and its proximity also to death. In other words, the vacillating response to infancy across the educational visions of many of these English successors to Rousseau may reflect an unassimilable intransigence in the idea and the experience of infancy itself, which will frustrate or otherwise redirect all essentially ‘Enlightened’ endeavours to incorporate it into the critical-developmental bildung of education in either its progressive-­ egalitarian or its conservative-hierarchical forms.18 In The Idea of Infancy, David Ruderman discerns these same tensions freighted at the heart of the emergent Romantic poetics of infancy in English verse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.19 These poetics of course overlapped and interpenetrated in vital ways with the widespread philosophical and charitable campaigns for a new morality of childhood in industrial society and for a fresh, vigorous commitment to the provision of state-sponsored and compulsory juvenile education. As Barbara Garlitz and Alan Richardson have in different ways shown, the remarkable nineteenth-century popular cultural afterlife of, for example, the ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1815) of William Wordsworth (1770–1850), is dominated by two themes: the almost scriptural reverence accorded the poem in non-­ conformist reading circles, where it was often favourably compared with the Gospels, and its appeal as a visionary defence of childhood in the nationwide agitation for the extension and funding of mass education in the early decades of the new century.20 Of course, as many critics have argued, Wordsworth’s celebrated ‘Ode’ can support multiple divergent readings and indeed did so over decades among its celebrity readers, from Matthew Arnold (1822–88) to John Stuart Mill (1806–73). However, its resonance for infant school campaigners is particularly striking, because the poem in its hesitancy and irresolution seems in key respects intrinsically hostile both to conventional 18  For more on this discursive and conceptual intransigence, see Robert A. Davis, ‘Brilliance of a fire: innocence, experience and the theory of childhood’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 45/2 (2011), pp. 379–97. 19  David Ruderman, The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry: Romanticism, Subjectivity, Form (London: Routledge, 2016). 20  See Barbara Garlitz, ‘The Immortality Ode: Its Cultural Progeny’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 6/3 (1966), pp. 639–49; and Alan Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 64–77.

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narratives of bildung and to socialised constructions of infancy. Even if we accept that Wordsworth’s ‘six years’ Darling of a pigmy size’ can stretch Rousseau’s pastoral definition of infancy by an extra year, the heart of the poem’s sustained and watchful meditation on infancy itself is again the language-less sleeping-dreaming baby, the ‘Priest’ and ‘Seer’ bright with the afterglow of elemental being and ‘intimating’, signalling, in terms akin to the older inner light movements, the validating presence of an intensity of humanity anterior to the losses, the falling away into life, that accompany the onset of language and learning.21 Wordsworth’s argument that the growth of the self through time rests upon an unnameable and perhaps ontologically unknowable origin erased by the ratiocinative processes of enculturation might be seen to spell the death of education as conceived and debated in the wide and voluble responses for and against Rousseau. If there is an ‘educable subject’ as Godwin feared and wondered, it is surely not this child, with his endless, impossible degringolade from fullness of being into the prison-houses and graveyards of ‘custom’, ‘Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!’.22 Burdened with a plenitude that no social institution can possibly reproduce or contain, least of all schools, yet which is at the same time permanently haemorrhaging being with each exchange and encounter between nature and society, the infant amplifies the poet’s own aporetic questioning, situated like a kind of lacuna at the heart of the poem: ‘Where is it, now, the glory and the dream?’23 It may be that those early readers of Wordsworth galvanised by this immensely popular poem, referenced in a plethora of politically and religious progressive literature, saw a particular and enabling turn in the textual hiatus that Wordsworth left unresolved for the long two years in which the poem was set aside. Unconvincing though most modern critics have found its proposed answer to its defining question to be, the subsequent register of the ‘Ode’ first invites a frank appraisal of the cost of the social, but then enlists a range of powerful faculties heightened by the energies of poetry itself in order to bring to consciousness ‘those shadowy recollections’ that can still serve as ‘the fountain light of all our day/ […] 21  William Wordsworth, ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1815), ll. 86, 71, 114; quoted from The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 297–303. Interestingly, in the original, 1805 text of the ‘Ode’, the ‘pigmy’ is four rather than six years old. 22  Wordsworth, ‘Ode’, l. 131; quoted from The Major Works, p. 300. 23  Wordsworth, ‘Ode’, l. 57; quoted from The Major Works, p. 298.

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a master light of all our seeing’.24 Framing its healing vision of children sporting on the shore, the poem culminates in harnessing the imagery of childhood to the forward-looking tasks of the ‘primal sympathy’: the work of the imagination not in the end retreating into the preconscious, politically impotent oblivion of unfathomable infant subjectivity, but bestowing rather its ‘celestial light’ on the spectacle of human suffering and joy in morally meaningful ways.25 So we can see then that despite the tidal pull of the platonic infant that perhaps, indeed, Henry Vaughan would have recognised in Wordsworth’s poem, the ‘Ode’ staked out for important sections of its readership a terrain of social and educational activism bent upon the protection of the inviolability of infancy and the provision of a schooling culture worthy of its compelling moral and imaginative appeal.

Pestalozzi and Atavistic Infancy In the standard historiographies of early nineteenth-century infant education, which identify it for the most part with orthodox Enlightenment hermeneutics and paternalistic reform, narratives of infancy and narratives of infant education tend to split at this juncture, with only limited or superficial attention paid to the continuing salience of what Agamben terms the ‘historico-transcendental dimension’ of infancy for the emergence and the fortunes of early infant schools.26 Yet the career of one of the international founders of infant schooling, the Swiss educationalist Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), which we are only now beginning to reappraise in its literary and cultural detail, cannot be separated from a vision of infancy that replays many of the Romantic and pre-­ Romantic tropes we have encountered in this discussion so far.27 Pestalozzi’s educational thought emerged from the tumult of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the concurrent dislocations  Wordsworth, ‘Ode’, ll. 152, 154–5; quoted from The Major Works, p. 301.  Wordsworth, ‘Ode’, ll. 184, 4; quoted from The Major Works. For this reading of the ‘Ode’, see Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 26  Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History (London: Verso, 1993). For examples of such historiographies across two eras see: Harold Silver, The Concept of Popular Education (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1965); and Natasha Gill, Educational Philosophy in the French Enlightenment: From Nature to Second Nature (London: Ashgate, 2010). 27  For one such reappraisal, see Daniel Tröhler, Pestalozzi and the Educationalization of the World (London: Palgrave, 2013). 24 25

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and political crises of the Swiss Confederation—during which he endured great personal hardship—and his avid reading of Rousseau. Pursuing a series of abortive popular educational experiments on a broadly Commenian basis that were vitiated by the political upheavals of the time, Pestalozzi responded restively to Rousseau in two ways: first in the writing of his own sprawling novelistic treatment of the ‘educative moment’, Leonard and Gertrude (1781–87), a kind of reply to Emile, then later in a series of letters elaborating and enlarging the philosophy of education contained in the novel, with the title How Gertrude Teaches her Children (1801).28 In the lengthy interval between these two major publications, Pestalozzi composed a series of ‘spin-off’ texts explaining and advocating his new pedagogy and recording his increasingly important and increasingly viable expressions of it in a series of initiatives in municipal schooling. Shortly after the publication of the Gertrude Letters, Pestalozzi established in 1805 his most successful and enduring educational venture at Yverdon in Vaud, Switzerland, which swiftly gained international renown as one of the first, and certainly the most admired, formal infant school, and which at the same time became a hub for the dissemination of both the concept and its founder’s wider philosophy of education.29 Central to Pestalozzi’s thought is his revisionist reading of Rousseau’s Emile, set against the backdrop of his defence of the institution of the school, properly conceived and developed, and his core conviction that all of the advantages accruing to Rousseau’s favoured ruralist settings for the education of the young can be vouchsafed by observing closely how the rural peasantry actually live and how they educate their children within the boundaries of their available material, cultural and spiritual circumstances. This is the defining message of Leonard and Gertrude, where manifold hardships and injustices are surmounted by a withdrawal into, and then an assertion of, the virtues and resilience of the rural Christian family. Pestalozzi argues throughout the novel that this pastoral-spiritual understanding of the household is the cradle of an authentic education, originating in the kinship bond, but written into a full acknowledgement of the wider human dependence on nature, precisely as Rousseau originally 28  Johannes Pestalozzi, How Gertrude Teaches her Children, trans. Lucy E.  Holland and Francis C. Turner (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1894). There are various early translations of Leonard and Gertrude; the earliest and most cited is Leonard and Gertrude: A Popular Story, trans. Anon (Bath: S. Hazard, 1801). 29  See Hugh M. Pollard, Pioneers of Popular Education 1760-1850 (London: John Murray, 1956), pp. 29–50.

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envisaged just such a relation. The religious tenor of the writing is important here, not only because favouring religion represents another departure from Rousseau’s perceived anti-clericalism, but also because its significance grows in Pestalozzi’s writings as a context for understanding his critically and ontologically distinct spirituality of infancy and early childhood, and its locus of protection and enrichment within a practical child-centred educational climate of reformed, reorganised schooling. Although the mature Pestalozzi’s legendary ‘method’, destined to prove for a time a cornerstone of the international nursery education movement, was pedagogically layered and cognitively complex, its predication on his idea of the child is unceasing.30 From this idea a number of almost ‘doctrinal’ principles emerge and evolve in Pestalozzi’s thought, deeply influenced by Romantic and Rhineland inner-light representations of childhood, and mediated in texts that fluctuate between novelistic fiction, campaigning pamphlet, psychobiography and epistolary prophecy. These principles can be characterised as: first, an unwavering belief in the sacred origins and personality of the infant child; second, a belief in the inherent moral goodness of the child, attendant upon the first principle and dispositionally at odds with Rousseau’s fear of infant egoism; third, a radical privileging of the mother-child dyad as the primary nexus of nurture and education that all institutional practices of teaching and learning must seek to replicate; and, fourth a belief in an innate vatic energy and inchoate psychical potentiality in the infant child which, once discovered and released, holds forth the prospect of an unimaginable transformation.31 Hence Pestalozzi in How Gertrude Teaches Her Children: [The children] felt their own power, and the tediousness of the ordinary school-tone vanished like a ghost from my rooms. They wished, tried, persevered, succeeded, and they laughed. Their tone was not that of learners, it was the tone of unknown powers awakened from sleep; of a heart and mind exalted with the feeling of what these powers could and would lead them to do.32

 See Tröhler, Pestalozzi, pp. 62–73.  I draw my summary of these principles from Maria McKenna, ‘Pestalozzi Revisited: Hope and Caution for Modern Education’, Journal of Philosophy and History of Education, 60 (2010), pp. 121–5. 32  Pestalozzi, How Gertrude, p. 17. 30 31

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The resonance of these registers with perceptions we have encountered before in consideration of this literature is not coincidental, but reflects, rather, broad movements of European feeling ingrained by the early 1800s in the genres of theology, psychology, biography, nationalist polemic and lyric poetry. Again, we see a ‘hauntology’ of infancy at work here, where ghosts and spectres are never far away, both as metaphor and mystical fact, but where their invocation and their exorcism are performed by the embodied utterances and actions of fully realised little children themselves. Awake from the infant sleep, these children suffer not a loss of power, not a fall, rupture or forfeiture into language and learning from the bliss of antecedent wholeness, but an untold enlargement of capacity and an almost oracular anticipation of their destinies: No; it is no dream. I will put skill into the hand of the mother, into the hand of the child, and into the hand of the innocent; and the scorner shall be silenced and shall say no more ‘It is a dream’.33

The self-efficacy promised children by Pestalozzi’s system is highly dependent on, first, the instinctive pedagogical handiwork of mothers in their homes and, second, the comprehensive imitation by infant schools of the absent domestic ambience wherever mothers are not available in person. We should never forget that one of Pestalozzi’s more fanciful ambitions was to make his own elementary schools redundant by eventually training a generation of Swiss mothers to give up all other forms of labour and to educate at home. Pestalozzi’s aggrandisement of motherhood cannot therefore be overstated. Whilst it reprises a general trend in German Romanticism, from Herder to Nietzsche, in few instances is the figural mother, the mother at the source, more pointedly and successfully attached to one of the great advances of early industrial social reform than in Pestalozzi’s eloquent promotion of infant schooling.34 Throughout this championing of ‘natural motherhood’ the iconic imagery of the primordial dyad of mother and infant is rarely far away, constituting in key regards the paradigm which guarantees the integrity and mutuality of the whole infant schools undertaking as a moral, heuristic and aesthetic experience. Mothers and families are here not serving civic and voluntary society;  Pestalozzi, How Gertrude, p. 18.  On this trend, see David E. Wellberry, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 187–222. 33 34

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rather civic and voluntary society is hallowing the sacred mysteries of a domestic piety which, in Pestalozzi’s view, underpin community, nation and civilisation: With song the mother lulls her babe to sleep; but here, as in everything else, we do not follow the law of Nature. Before the child is a year old, his mother’s song ceases; by that time she is, as a rule, no longer a mother to the weaned child. For him, as for all others, she is only a distracted, over-­ burdened woman. Alas! that it is so. Why has not the Art of ages taught us to join the nursery lullabies to a series of national songs, that should rise in the cottages of the people, from the gentle cradle song to the sublime hymn of praise?35

European letters and European infant schooling proved, in Pestalozzi’s time and after, quite unable to resolve this paradox in anything like the terms that would have answered satisfactorily his question. Moreover, women educators from Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) onwards vigorously contested this inflexible alignment of womanhood, babyhood and nationhood; work song, art song, national song and divine song. From the outset of the ‘Romantic’ infant school project in Yverdon, its emancipatory potential for women was recognised, alongside its simultaneous collusion in the maintenance of gender-essentialised subject positions and hierarchies. Pestalozzi’s disciple, the German Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), was destined to complicate these imbalances still further in his extraordinary invention in the next few decades of the kindergarten— that inverses indoor Romantic pastoral of childhood, staffed and led by the great ambivalent archetype of professionalised femininity, the Nursery Nurse and perhaps Romanticism’s most abiding living legacy to popular, democratic education.36 Yet, as his career advanced into its concluding stages, and the reputation of his elementary school and its many imitators expanded across Europe and America, it was to young children that Pestalozzi returned— assuming once again the mantle of the psychopomp channelling to the next generation truths from a realm somehow beyond society and beyond  Pestalozzi, How Gertrude, p. 204.  For further discussion see Mary Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation’s Young: Education and Public Doctrine in Britain 1750–1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); and Robert A. Davis, ‘Government intervention in child-rearing: governing infancy’, Educational Theory, 60/3 (2011), pp. 285–98. 35 36

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rationality, yet transformative of both. This almost final public utterance of Pestalozzi has retained its obscurity—justly so, in some eyes—and was even in its own time at first little observed and haphazardly translated. It consists of an 1810 ‘Christmas Oration’: a lengthy Christmas Discourse or Sermon to Children in which the full atavism of Pestalozzi’s thought is disclosed to that other audience towards which we might suppose his grand programme of infant schooling was always implicitly directed— infant children themselves. The seasonal setting is also critically important here, for this is also one of the first extended references to Swiss-German Christmas gift-giving traditions, and almost certainly the first known reference to the practice of placing presents specifically for children at the foot of the Christmas Tree (like the nursery, another symbol of the new Romantic ‘indoor pastoral’ of which education will take singular advantage).37 From the beginning of the oration, Pestalozzi makes it clear that he intends to depart from the conventional Protestant Watchnight Sermon by incorporating the children by whom he is surrounded not as audience or congregation but as celebrants: Beloved children! It is for your sakes that we are united in one family; our house is your house, and for your sakes only is it our house. Live in our family in the simplicity of love, and trust in our faithfulness and our paternal affection towards you. Be ye children, be ye innocent children in the full sense of the word.38

This altered relationality anticipates a further radical step in Pestalozzi’s philosophy. For the children before him do not only belong to the household; rather they transform it by their presence, altering the dynamics of the adult-child encounter and manifesting themselves as a model for the moral and imaginative regeneration of adult lives: ‘We know, that except we be converted and become as little children, except we be elevated to the simplicity of a childlike mind, we shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven’.39 The blueprint for this renovation is of course, as Pestalozzi well 37  See Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (New York: First Vintage Books, 1996), pp. 200–19. 38  The most reliable translation of the ‘Sermon’, and earliest full English language account of it, is given by E. Biber in Henry Pestalozzi and his Plan of Education (London, 1831), pp. 93–104 [101]. 39  Biber, Pestalozzi, p. 101.

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knew, ‘the Christchild under the form of an innocent babe’: revealing to us almost as it were in flashback those platonising Renaissance Metaphysicals who similarly merged the infant Jesus with the form of infancy, ‘that we might all be like unto our children’, in spiritual protest before the crisis of history breaking in on their worldview and ripping the ancient fabric of their traditional Catholic piety.40 As the Christmas Oration grows more unconstrainedly rhapsodic in its praise of the purity and simplicity of the infant heart, we cannot help but observe nonetheless that an altogether unprecedented and different kind of history is breaking in on the charmed circle of its magical theophany of childhood—in many respects no less violent than that faced by its seventeenth-­century forerunners, yet in other ways infinitely more insidious and destructive. All around the children venerated by Pestalozzi as consecrated bearers of a fresh intergenerational hope, in the hieratic cadences drawn deep from the repositories of Romantic infancy, lie the signifiers—the promised Christmas gifts—of what will soon become for European and North American society a novel and quite revolutionary consumerist dispensation. Characterised by an almost miraculous productive abundance, it will eventually regulate the lives and appetites of even the youngest children through a radicalised contractual commerce of exchange and obligation, covenant and threat, ambivalently foreshadowed by the gifts under Pestalozzi’s tree. Nowhere will this new regime of reward and punishment be more sharply felt than in the chilled corridors and dismal classrooms of the schools of the nineteenth century. Against no phase of the modern lifecycle will its uneasy symbolic accommodations and its outright moral contradictions be more keenly calibrated than in the protracted and wholesale capitalist refashioning of the figure of the child.41

 Biber, Pestalozzi, p. 102.  For further discussion of the intersection of an emergent ‘consumerist’ infancy with a ‘Romantic’ one, see Robert A. Davis, ‘Mysteries and Histories: Children and the Paradox of Religious Empowerment’, in Child Autonomy and Child Governance in Children’s Literature: Where Children Rule, ed. Christopher Kelen and Björn Sundmark (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 43–66. 40 41

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From Ritual to Romance: Owen, New Lanark and the Performance of Infancy In 1803, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) visited the picturesque Falls of Clyde in central Scotland, and lingered at the outskirts of New Lanark village long enough for Dorothy to be impressed by reassuring reports of the basic literacy of the passing workforce and the unusually ordered conduct of the young female apprentices making their way home in the evening. It was later considered a pity that the party did not enter New Lanark itself or meet its famous proprietor.42 By this stage of his career, the Welshman Robert Owen—a charismatic self-made entrepreneur, inventor, Godwinite atheist and philanthropist— had secured by circuitous machination full ownership of the New Lanark cotton village from his ailing father-in-law, David Dale (1739–1806). Sharp and connected, Owen was well advanced in his remaking of the enterprise as a national and international showcase of innovative social welfarism and leading-edge educational reform—one that had so far remained resilient (and highly profitable) before the grim realities of the Continental System war economy and the accompanying reactionary politics of Church and State. In the fifteen years that followed, Owen succeeded in transforming the productive capacity of the village on a truly staggering scale, bringing him both a vast personal fortune and the financial supply to realise his utopian (and increasingly socialist) ambition to have his school in the New Lanark village recognised worldwide as a practical inspiration for an entirely new kind of global popular education. In the course of this immense undertaking, which absorbed a large portion of his seemingly boundless energy and spectacular wealth, Owen formulated a conception of early childhood and of early education leading to both the English coinage ‘infant school’ and to a massive public campaign for the adoption of the New Lanark method as the template for popular progressive pedagogy across the British Isles. Assailed by conservative opponents bitterly hostile to his irreligious sympathies and subversive political leanings, denounced by former allies suspicious of his growing 42  See Ian Donnachie and George Hewitt, Historic New Lanark: The Dale and Owen Industrial Community since 1785 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), p.  74; and, Dorothy Wordsworth, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, ed. C. K. Walker (New Haven: CN, Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 32–3.

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anti-democratic personality cult, Owen, at the pinnacle of his renown and standing with his army of ‘Owenite’ followers, proclaimed the infant school to be the most important achievement of his tenure at New Lanark and also the vital key to emancipating future generations from the evils of superstition and the wants of material disadvantage. Loosed from these shackles, the educated young would, Owen repeatedly averred, refashion the world—overcoming the supposed Malthusian limits of existing human potential and harnessing the powers of science and technology to the eventual mastery of nature and society.43 These rhetorical registers inescapably resonate with the widespread ‘Promethean’ energies and optimism of the Romantic era. Owen had begun as a steadfast disciple of William Godwin and as a frequent visitor to Skinner Street had impressed and shocked the youthful Godwin daughters with his lengthy predictions of revolutionary upheaval and coming technological advance. If this suggests the imagery and inflections of Victor Frankenstein, it might be said to be further vindicated in the passion with which Owen used New Lanark and its infant school as a ‘laboratory’ for social experimentation which, in its more extravagant and dangerous moments, extended to the imagined factory production of improved human workers and a speculative flirtation with eugenics.44 While all of this may not in the end amount to the criminal delusions of the self-deceived yet captivating protagonist of Mary Shelley’s (1797–1851) Frankenstein (1818), it was eventually sufficiently alarming to make one of Owen’s most searching and persistent critics, William Hazlitt (1778–1830), characterise him contemptuously as ‘an engineer, who will […] move the world, and New Lanark is the place he has fixed his lever upon for this purpose’.45 Interpreted as a site of idealistic social renewal or as a likely incubator of totalitarian technocracy, the infant school at New Lanark arose and evolved 43  See Robert A.  Davis and Francis J.  O’Hagan, Robert Owen (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), pp. 129–59. 44  The possibility of Owen as inspiration for and/or reflection of Victor Frankenstein has been considered by scholars. See, for example: Robert Anderson, ‘“Misery Made Me a Fiend”: Social Reproduction in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Robert Owen’s Early Writings’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 24/4 (2002), pp.  417–38; and James Brown, ‘Through the looking glass: Victor Frankenstein and Robert Owen’, Extrapolation, 43/3 (2002), pp. 263–78. 45  William Hazlitt, ‘A New View of Society’ (1816), in The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols. (London: Pickering, 2007), vol. 4, pp. 92–7.

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in response to the layered and recondite content of Owen’s autodidact learning, his habit of imitation, and his patient observation and temper for reform. Behind the ‘infant school’, as Owen well knew, lay the ‘infant child’, and Owen’s working theory of infancy moved through several complex and uncertain stages even as the destiny of his school unfolded and then finally unravelled. In consequence of his early formation in Manchester salon and philanthropic circles, and from his haphazard reading in the library of the city’s famous Literary and Philosophical Society, Owen initially absorbed from John Locke and Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–71) the prevailing Enlightenment understanding of character formation—a powerful ideological cipher which of course accorded the profession of education enormous symbolic and functional influence over the lives of the very young: Any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means.46

This formulation of the social and psychological mission of education, drawn straight from one of Owen’s key distillations of his theoretical and practical ideas, epitomises Enlightenment empiricism at its most single-­ minded and uncompromising. Human beings do not make their own characters nor bring to consciousness innate ideas and proclivities inherent in their nature or needs. They are, rather, the exclusive result of the intellectual, emotional and ethical forces that have acted upon them since birth, for good or ill, with the implication that benign influences, duly and scientifically applied, will produce benign outcomes and vice versa. These convictions at first drove Owen’s every key innovation at New Lanark, from his decision to minimise, or even exclude, Rousseau-style, the use of books for the teaching of basic literacy to infants, to his creation of the celebrated Institute for the Formation of Character: New Lanark’s signature-­built expression of Owen’s investment in non-confessional lifelong learning, wrap-around improving art and culture, and programmatic moral reproduction and reform. That human beings of all capacities and 46  Robert Owen, ‘On the Formation of Character’, quoted from Gregory Claeys, (ed.), A New View of Society and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 37. There are here clear anticipations of the ‘environmental determinism’ that would later dominate progressive education. The word ‘environment’ still awaited at this juncture its 1828 coinage (by Thomas Carlyle). Owen’s preferred Enlightenment term is ‘circumstance’.

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all stations can be through effective education renovated in mind and spirit, drives and democratises this philosophy in the day to day operations of the infant school and its bucolic-industrial surroundings, resulting in an environment of learning and teaching which, if not unique, certainly flouted spectacularly the violent, coercive norms of most industrial and parish schooling in Britain at the time. Owen visited Pestalozzi at Yverdon when his own plans had begun to be implemented and when the older man’s methods in his model school had become very well established and admired. Owen found the atmosphere and the pupil learning at Yverdon impressive, but he was at first sceptical of the distinctive Pestalozzian ambience and the occasionally overpowering, even irrational, symbolic penumbra accompanying the perception and treatment of very young children in Pestalozzi’s academy. Nevertheless, despite dissenting openly from Pestalozzi’s belief in the prior sensibilities and inherent moral goodness of infants, Owen, in his own infant school, established norms and values that were similarly pioneering in the actual benevolent engagement with young children, including the many who fell below Rousseau’s favoured boundary age of five. Physical chastisement was prohibited at the New Lanark infant school, as were all devices for rewards and punishment in the administration of learning and teaching and the recognition of attainment. Children were required to be treated with kindness and compassion in every aspect of their teaching in the school. School rooms were enlarged, ceilings raised, windows introduced and daylight admitted to the airy spaces of the classroom. The rooms were filled with objects, pictures, charts and plants. Learning beyond the school was celebrated, with the outdoors becoming a popular signifier of all that made Owenite early-­ years education different from the circumscribed norms of the surrounding Church schools and their often feverishly fatalistic and monitorial control of childhood and children. In both Yverdon and New Lanark the prioritisation and affirmation of play were central to curriculum and pedagogy. Here again was that principle held as permanent accompaniment to all visionary versions of infancy: seen as integral to the embodied expression of infant sociality, curiosity, pleasure and discovery and raising up in the institutional practices of the infant school one of the central pillars of future progressive, child-centred education. This was true, most especially, for those strands of opinion and practice that would lead Owen’s followers finally, in the 1830s, to differentiate the ‘Nursery School’ completely as a separate zone for the experientially led development and flourishing of the very young:

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Children are, without exception, passive and wonderfully contrived compounds; which, by an accurate previous and subsequent attention, founded on a correct knowledge of the subject, may be formed collectively to have any human character. And although these compounds, like all the other works of nature, possess endless varieties, yet they partake of that plastic quality, which, by perseverance under judicious management, may be ultimately moulded into the very image of rational wishes and desires.47

It has been argued recently that even these more fundamentally ‘Romantic’ impulses in Owen’s mature and later educational psychology—edging inexorably towards an implicit recognition of the special ontology and agency of early childhood as poetically dramatised by its episodes of pure feeling, captivation and even rapture in the phenomenological encounter with the world—serve mainly to camouflage in radical-progressive colours a continuing stress on ideological reproduction and cultural surveillance, particularly when set in the context of New Lanark’s express preference for spectacle and showmanship as its primary form of ‘scientific’ demonstration.48 In other words they are transparently Owen’s handiwork, Owen’s contrivance and Owen’s control in action: an exotic choreography of sympathy and desire, distance and proximity, calculatingly positioning early childhood at the nexus of familiarity and strangeness in order better to regulate those same pre-socialised insurgent energies that Pestalozzi believed he could channel and direct by repeatedly affirming and sponsoring their supposed moral excellence. However, against this perhaps inevitable reductionism and scepticism, we still might safely recognise in Owen’s repeated appeal to sentiment, sympathy, plasticity, sociality and even the embodied pleasures of an infant state absorbed in the wonder of an improvident world, a more hopeful summation of his educational theory, and the shifting, evolving conception of infancy underpinning a large part of it. Here the Enlightenment doctrine that Owen inherited and avowed is being subtly reworked by its practical, resourceful encounter with the ‘otherness’ of early childhood. Owen at these moments integrates the practices of early education, in 47  Owen, New View, p. 17. For move on the development of Owen’s ideas by his followers, see Philip McCann and Francis A. Young, Samuel Wilderspin and the Infant School Movement (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1982). 48  See Cornelia Lambert, ‘“Living Machines”: Performance and Pedagogy at Robert Owen’s Institute for the Formation of Character, New Lanark, 1816-1828’, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 4/3 (2011), pp. 419–33.

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other words, into something approaching the ‘Romantic’ project of the self and self’s enlargement of its powers (be these powers bestowed from the infant beyond or wrested assertively from recalcitrant reality by the educated will). At the same time, Owen also strives through the continuing and necessary ‘Enlightenment’ tasks of character formation to embed such repurposed subjectivism in an organic understanding of the ties and obligations of community, work and society, serving to enfold infant and adult in an embrace of mutual recognition, trust and care, and before the quiet rewards of which the glimmering intimations and ministrations of eternity may be—at least for the time being—suspended.

CHAPTER 6

Coleridge, the Ridiculous Child, and the Limits of Romanticism Andrew McInnes

Is Romanticism ridiculous? In asking this question, I do not seek to dismiss either the period or its literature as meaningless or unimportant, but to ask instead whether an alternative approach to its aesthetic categories can open up new perspectives on some of its key concepts: our relationship with the sublime, the nature of creativity and imagination, and headline Romantic constructions of the child and of infancy. Taking my point of departure in the work of the German Romantic-period philosopher Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), I define the ridiculous as a comic juxtaposition of perspectives, based on an initial failure of understanding. Richter argues that our sense of the ridiculous originates in childhood interactions with nature, triggering a kind of counter-sublime which reorients the relationship between individuals, imagination, and landscape to focus on joyous communion between social groups and the natural world. For Richter, the ridiculous is most clearly seen in social interactions, provoking laughter, community, and collaboration. I argue that the ridiculous functions as a lens through which to read

A. McInnes (*) Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Domines Veliki, C. Duffy (eds.), Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8_6

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Romantic-period engagements with the natural and social worlds, shifting the emphasis away from encounters between an individual genius and sublime scene to an aesthetic perspective which privileges joyful group dynamics promising moral and spiritual rejuvenation, especially in relation to children and childhood. In this chapter, I focus in particular on Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) as a philosopher responding to Richter’s ideas in his own lecture on wit and humour; as a writer of the ridiculous in relation to nature, society, and childhood; and as a figure of the ridiculous in both Romantic-period and later satires. Often read as part of Coleridge’s engagement with the sublime, his representations of children and childhood tap into Richter’s conception of the ridiculous as a form of spiritual finitude in order to probe the limits of his own Romantic ideology. Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (usually known at the time as ‘Jean Paul’) was a German aesthetician and novelist who theorized the ridiculous in the sixth ‘Course’ of his School for Aesthetics (1805). Discussing the importance of laughter in nineteenth-century debates about humour and feeling, Matthew Ward argues: Repudiating the proud, tendentious quality of laughter, [Richter] prioritizes kindly feeling […] For [Coleridge, De Quincey, and Carlyle], Richter’s ideas offered a form of Romantic irony, scrutinizing the relationship of the individual – in a finite state – to the infinite. Thinking about why we laugh, Coleridge remarks that ‘when we contemplate a finite in reference to the infinite, consciously or unconsciously, [there is] humor. So says Jean Paul Richter’.1

In this chapter, I position the ridiculous as a counter to the sublime in terms of Richter’s emphasis on finitude and Coleridge’s use of Richter to develop his own definitions of wit and humour. Both Richter and Coleridge associate ridiculous finitude with children and childhood. This chapter begins with Richter’s definition of the ridiculous; continues with Coleridge’s mapping of the ridiculous onto his construction of childhood in his notebooks; climaxes with a close reading of childhood in ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798) in relation to finitude and the limits of Romanticism; and concludes with a coda considering the ridiculous figure of Coleridge himself in contemporary children’s literature. Contemporary children’s 1  Matthew Ward, ‘Laughter, Ridicule, and Sympathetic Humor in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 57/4 (2017), pp. 725–49 (741–2).

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literature explores the opportunities afforded by the ridiculous to build communities and to collaborate as a counter to the individualized focus of both sublime aesthetics and the construction of the Romantic Child. In his study of Coleridge and the sublime, Christopher Stokes posits that ‘we may understand the sublime as a conversation about finitude’, defining the sublime in terms of Longinus’ emphasis on language, Burkean terror, and Kantian representation.2 For Stokes, the missing element in our critical conversation about the Coleridgean sublime is a probing of the sublime as a limit rather than a method of transcendence. I, too, am interested in Coleridge’s thinking about limits, but argue that his engagement with finitude is best understood through Richter’s definition of the ridiculous. For me, the ridiculous transforms terms associated with the sublime, with classical rhetoric falling into linguistic play, terror giving way to laughter, and representation changing into performance. Jean Paul begins to theorize the ridiculous by dismissing earlier definitions of it from Aristotle (384–322 BCE) to Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant’s resolution of expectation into nothingness is represented as essentially tautological: for Richter, ‘Kant’s definition is just as indefinite and hence just as true as if I said that the ridiculous consists in the sudden resolution of the expectation of something into a ridiculous nothing’.3 Aristotle’s harmless incongruity ‘is at least on the right road to the goal’, but does not distinguish between comic and non-comic incongruity.4 Hence, the ridiculous, for Richter, functions as a counter-sublime emphasizing smallness where the sublime seeks infinity, further connecting the ridiculous to a lack of understanding between subject, object, and situation. Arguing that ‘No man’s actions can appear ridiculous to himself, except an hour later, when he has already become a second self and can attribute the insights of the second to the first’, Jean Paul focuses his definition of the ridiculous on the contrast between the experience by the observer and the observed of a situation or action, as follows: the contradiction between the effort or existence of the ridiculous being and the sensuously perceived circumstance I call the objective contrast; the circumstance itself I call the sensuous element; and the second contradiction 2  Christopher Stokes, Coleridge, Language, and the Sublime: From Transcendence to Finitude (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 10. 3  Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aeshetics, trans. Margaret R. Hale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), p. 71. 4  Ibid.

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between the two, which we impose upon them by projecting our mind and point of view, I call the subjective contrast.5

For Richter, then, the ridiculous stems from contradictory intellectual perspectives on a sensuously experienced scene or scenario, insisting on a division between laughing subject and ridiculous object. Building on this, I am now going to use Coleridge’s famous account, in his letters, of his descent of Broad Stand, to argue that the poet broaches this division faster than the ‘hour later’ that Richter suggests, experiencing himself as ridiculous moments after his precipitous descent. The way that Coleridge toggles from the ridiculous to the sublime in this descent, I will then go on to show, echoes the representations of childhood elsewhere in his writing. Jean Paul himself is ambiguous on the divisiveness of the ridiculous, arguing later that laughter brings people together: ‘Laughers are good-­ humoured and often set themselves among the rank and file of those laughed at. Children and women laugh the most […] No one is ashamed of having laughed […] Finally, no laugher takes it ill, but rather in good part, when another hundred thousand laugh with him’.6 Far from dividing laughing subject from ridiculous object, then, the sensuous experience of the ridiculous brings subject and object together in shared enjoyment, particularly for women and children. Jean Paul concludes his definition of the ridiculous by adding a further three categories to its relationship with pleasure: (1) ‘no strong feeling intrudes to disturb its free course’; (2) ridiculousness is more akin to the comic than wit, enjoying ‘the complex relationships of persons’ above mere things, and experienced with ‘sensuous vividness’; and (3) ‘the charm of indecision, the tickling effect of the alternation between apparent displeasure (caused by the minimum of another’s understanding) and the pleasure in one’s own projected insight, which […] touches and teases us the more piquantly’.7 Jean Paul concludes his chapter on the ridiculous with a typically gnomic condensation of his thinking into a seemingly pithy (if frustratingly ineffable) statement: ‘The ridiculous therefore is the eternal consequence of spiritual finitude’.8 What does this mean? Jean Paul’s School for Aesthetics is written in a deliberately teasing—even tickling—style, making demands on the reader  Richter, Horn of Oberon, pp. 79–80; original emphasis.  Richter, Horn of Oberon, p. 85; original emphasis. 7  Richter, Horn of Oberon, pp. 86–87. 8  Richter, Horn of Oberon, 87. 5 6

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to meet its playfulness half way. For me, Jean Paul’s definition of the ridiculous is helpful for its emphasis on the ridiculous as an aesthetic counter to the sublime, based on an initial failure of the understanding between two or more parties (even, or especially, if these parties are the same individual separated by some amount of time), and tending to bring people together in shared enjoyment. His focus on ‘spiritual finitude’ is useful for my focus on Romantic limits refracted through a comic perspective. As already noted, my test case for the ridiculous as an alternative aesthetic within Romanticism is Coleridge’s descent of Broad Stand, using his experience on the mountain to explore his representations of the relationship between the sublime and the ridiculous specifically in relation to childhood. Coleridge describes his precipitous descent of Broad Stand across several letters to Sara Hutchinson (1775–1835) in August 1802. Coleridge’s narration has been much discussed in relation to Romantic-period mountaineering and aesthetics.9 Coleridge plots his location geographically whilst emphasizing the bodily effects of his descent: ‘I put my hands on the Ledge, & dropped down/in a few yards came just such another/I dropped that too/and yet another, seemed not higher-I would not stand for a trifle/so I dropped that too’.10 The next lines emphasize the physical costs of Coleridge’s exertions: ‘the stretching of the muscle[s] of my hands & arms, & the jolt of the Fall on my Feet, put my whole Limbs in a Tremble’. Realizing that he is caught between an impracticable ascent or a potentially fatal descent, Coleridge continues: My Limbs were all in a tremble-I lay upon my Back to rest myself, & was beginning according to my Custom to laugh at myself for a Madman, when the sight of the Crags above me on each side, & the impestuous Clouds just over them, posting so luridly & so rapidly northward, overawed me / I lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance & Delight-& blessed God aloud, for the powers of Reason & of the Will, which remaining no Danger can overpower us!11

9  See, for example, Alan Vardy, ‘Coleridge on Broad Stand’ Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 61 (2012) and Simon Bainbridge, ‘Writing from “the perilous ridge”: Romanticism and the Invention of Rock Climbing’, Romanticism, 19/3 (2013), pp. 246–60. 10  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), vol. 2, pp. 841–2; original emphasis. 11  Coleridge, Collected Letters, 842.

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As we have seen, Jean Paul argues that ‘No man’s actions can appear ridiculous to himself, except an hour later’ when one can view a situation from the perspective of a second self. Coleridge, palsied, trembling, and on the brink of death, accelerates through this perspectival shift to laugh at himself ‘for a Madman’ during his descent of Broad Stand. Coleridge’s experience of his situation as ridiculous—impossible to return from and seemingly impossible to proceed from without killing himself—focuses on his feelings of bodily failure, emphasizing the spiritual finitude described by Jean Paul. However, Coleridge attempts to transfigure his ridiculous experience into a sublime moment, ‘when the sight of the Crags above’ triggers in him ‘a state of almost prophetic Trance & Delight’. Sublimity and ridiculousness intermingle in Coleridge’s conflicting response to his situation: bodily failure mixes with religious rapture, laughter and delight with prophetic trance and near-death experience. The language of the sublime acts here as a defence against his earlier experience of his situation and himself as ridiculous. But, in spite of Coleridge’s attempt to transfigure his experience into the realm of the sublime, it is the ridiculous emphasis on bodily failure and spiritual finitude which reappears after his successful descent. Coleridge writes: so I began to descend / when I felt an odd sensation across my whole Breast-not pain nor itching-& putting my hand on it I found it all bumpy-­ and on looking saw the whole of my Breast from my Neck to my navel-& exactly all that my Kamell-hair Breast-shield covers, filled with great red heat-bumps, so thick that no hair could lie between them. They still remain / but are evidently less-& I have no doubt will wholly disappear in a few Days. It was however a startling proof to me of the violent exertions which I had made.12

Coleridge’s moment of religious rapture stuck on his crag and suspended between life and death celebrates the power of his God-given reason and will. His account also gives voice to an alternative aesthetics which privileges mad laughter in the face of danger, both following and followed by bodily discomfort. Coleridge’s palsied muscles and these concluding ‘great red heat-bumps’ resist the narrative of sublime transcendence he attempts to overlay on them, emphasizing instead the physicality and finitude of bodily limits.  Coleridge, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 843.

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I want to label Coleridge’s narrative of his descent of Broad Stand as ‘ridiculous’ by mapping it onto Jean Paul’s tripartite division of the aesthetic discussed earlier. Jean Paul points to ‘the contradiction between the effort or existence of the ridiculous being and the sensuously perceived circumstance’ as ‘the objective contrast; the circumstance itself I call the sensuous element; and the second contradiction between the two, which we impose upon them by projecting our mind and point of view, I call the subjective contrast’.13 The ‘sensuous element’ in this case is Coleridge’s descent of Broad Stand. He experiences himself as a ‘ridiculous being’, especially in his emphasis on the physical effort of his descent, and sets up a series of contradictions in his later narration of the descent between sublimity and ridiculousness, life and death, God-given sense and self-directed laughter. Coleridge’s sense of himself as ridiculous prompts a shift of register towards the sublime but this move towards transcendence is undercut by Coleridge’s continuing emphasis on bodily fragility. The ridiculous exists, then, as both a counter to and the flipside of the sublime in ways that can also be discerned in other well-known Romantic-period examples of transcendent experience, such as, for example, William Wordsworth’s (1770–1850) account of crossing of the Alps in The Prelude (1805), which begins with his embarrassing realization that his party has already crossed the Alps followed by his double take re-imagining the experience as sublime. What I want to consider now, however, is the extent to which Coleridge’s switch from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again in his experiences at Broad Stand also inflect his representations of childhood in his personal notebooks and in his published poetry. Children and childhood are a recurring theme in Coleridge’s notebooks, which also record various philosophical and poetic ideas, his experiences of nature and society, as well as his interest in jokes, puns, word play, and more scatological humour. Seamus Perry describes the notebooks as ‘the undeclared prose masterpiece of the period’, exploring their ‘avoidance of conclusion or closure’ as allowing ‘the tragicomedy of Coleridge’s formative irresolution [to] be most freely played out’.14 For me, the ‘tragicomedy of Coleridge’s formative irresolution’ can be most clearly seen in his constructions of childhood experience as caught between the sublime and the ridiculous. Coleridge sometimes celebrates children’s ability for sublime wonder. Alongside these more conventional c­ elebrations,  Richter, Horn of Oberon, pp. 79–80.  Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 31.

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though, is a more grounded appreciation of children as both objects and subjects of humour, tapping into Richter’s ideas that children are closely attuned not to the sublime but to the ridiculous. In a note headed ‘Infancy & Infants’, Coleridge includes a 15 point list of images related to children and childhood, often combining sentimentality with sublimity, but also closely observed moments of child behaviour. The first in the list is ‘The first smile  – what kind of reason it displays – the first smile after sickness’, highlighting two themes to which Coleridge returns throughout his engagement with children in the notebooks: pleasure and rationality (as well as his interests in health and disease).15 The list also contains imagery related to children’s engagement with nature, for example: ‘Asleep with the polyanthus held in its hand, its bells drooping over the rosy face’ and ‘Seen asleep by the light of glowworms’. It further contains potential titles and ideas for longer works related to childhood, such as ‘The Souls of Infants, a vision  – (vide Swedenborg)’ and ‘Some tales of an Infant’.16 The last entry in the list reads: Children in the wind  – hair floating, tossing, a miniature of the agitated Trees, below which they play’d – the elder whirling for joy, the one in petticoats, a fat Baby, eddying half willingly, half by the force of the Gust  – driven backward, struggling forward – both drunk with the pleasure, both shouting their hymn of Joy.17

Not only the last but also the longest entry in the list, this more worked-­ out scene seems to draw on a moment experienced by Coleridge himself in relation to his own children. His notebooks frequently refer to his third son Derwent (1800–83) as ‘a fat Baby’, as in the above quotation, further suggesting that the elder figure here is Coleridge’s eldest son, Hartley (1796–1849). The two boys playing in the wind form an image of children connected closely to the natural world, their hair resembling the trees above them, and infused with happiness. The final image of the two boys ‘both drunk with […] pleasure’ tips the scene gently into ridiculous territory. So, the children are not depicted as experiencing individual moments of transcendence in relation to nature, the kind of sublime moments which 15  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 5 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), vol. 1, p. 330. 16  Ibid. 17  Ibid.

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Coleridge sometimes imagines Hartley in particular experiencing in his notebooks and poetry. Instead, both Hartley and Derwent share a collective sense of communion with nature, which emphasizes their smallness, their ‘spiritual finitude’. Coleridge records both Hartley and Derwent’s childhood development in detail over the course of his notebooks. Coleridge’s entries on Hartley tend to emphasize his kinship with nature and the sublime, for example, in this moment, when Hartley’s sight of the moon assuages the pain of a fall: ‘The Moon caught his eye – he ceased crying immediately – & his eyes & the tears in them, how they glinted in the Moonlight!’.18 The moon here has an immediately calming effect on the child, reinforcing Hartley’s aesthetic propinquity to the sublime. Moreover, Hartley becomes himself a sublime object in the passage, with Coleridge’s appreciation of how Hartley’s eyes and tears glinted in the moonlight combining in an image visual perspective and aesthetic affect. Coleridge also emphasizes Hartley’s ratiocination throughout notebook entries focusing on his oldest son. For example, in sublime form, Hartley asks ‘Will yon Mountains always be?’, in response to which Coleridge presents his son with a telescope to view the mountain in closer perspective, noticing that Hartley ‘struggled to express himself concerning the Difference between the Thing and the Image almost with convulsive Effort. – I never before saw such an Abstract of Thinking as a pure act & energy, of Thinking as distinguished from Thought’.19 Coleridge is fascinated by his son’s thought processes, viewing reason as an active agency. Other commentators than Coleridge also noted Hartley’s dedication to thinking, although he appears, I think, as more ridiculous than sublime in this anecdote of Robert Southey’s (1774–1843): ‘“The pity is”, said he one day to his father, who was expressing some wonder that he was not so pleased as he expected with riding in a wheelbarrow,  – as the pity is that I’se always thinking my thoughts”’.20 The details of the wheelbarrow, Coleridge’s expectations, and the childish ‘I’se’ pitch Southey’s observation into comic territory. If Hartley is associated with the transcendental qualities of the sublime, sharing his father’s taste for intellectual metaphysics, Derwent, Coleridge’s  Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 219.  Coleridge, Notebooks vol. 1, p. 923; original emphasis. 20  Robert Southey, quoted in Judith Plotz, ‘Childhood Lost, Childhood Regained: Hartley Coleridge’s Fable of Defeat’, Children’s Literature 14 (1986), pp. 133–148 (134). Plotz’s article also gives an interesting account of Hartley Coleridge’s own imaginative response to Coleridge’s ideas about children and childhood in his writing. 18 19

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‘fat baby’, is associated much more closely with laughter, wit, and humour. Coleridge records: ‘Derwent laughed at six weeks old’.21 Coleridge is fascinated by Derwent’s linguistic play, sometimes expressed as frustration or incomprehension, finding humour in his son’s struggles to put his childish wishes into language. For example, he records: ‘Derwent extends the idea of Door so far that he not only [calls] the Lids of Boxes Doors, but even the Covers of Books/a year & 8 months’.22 The indication of Derwent’s age shows Coleridge’s interest in childhood development, but there is more emphasis in this note on the witty potential of extending ‘the idea of Door’ to cover lids and, more suggestively, books, turning literary objects into imaginative portals. In a note dated 6 November 1803 and entitled ‘Tea time’, Coleridge relates an anecdote about Derwent’s distress that ‘all the Cake was eat up’: ‘Don’t eat all the Cake! You have eat the cake[.] O but don’t eat up all the cake!’ – His Passion had compleately [sic] confounded his Sense of Time & its Consequences – He saw that it was done, & yet he passionately entreated you not to do it… This Mem. for the effect of the Passions on the reasoning power imprimis in producing Bulls.23

Coleridge is fascinated here by both the philosophical and comic (sublime and ridiculous) potential in childhood responses to thwarted wishes. Quoting Coleridge on bulls, Megan O’Connor explores ‘the (false) unity of the bull, which “consists in the bringing together two incompatible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense, of their connection”’.24 Bulls, for Coleridge, partake of the ridiculous split in perspective analysed by Richter, joined together by an emotional response rather than a rational one. Derwent’s bull leads Coleridge to make a more general point about childhood worth quoting in full: Derwent’s Bull from eager Desire & Disappointment – Nov[ember] 6 in g–w Mem: book. – at the same time I noticed the remarkable disposition of all Children of his Age, who are any way kindly treated, to contradict – the  Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 835.  Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 1192. 23  Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 1643; original emphasis. 24  Megan O’Connor, ‘To Read a Bull: Nominalism, Commodification, and Negative Dialectics in the Biographia Literaria’, European Romantic Review, 29/6 (2018), pp. 751–768 (751). 21 22

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pleasure they find in it / when there is any plausibility in their own counterassertion it often rises to passion & self-willedness; when none, it is fun – & wit – . It hangs in a String with their love of calling white black &c. – as Derwent when he had scarce a score of words in his whole Tonguedom comes holding up a pair of filthy Pawlets, & lisps  – Here’s clean white Hands! – & laughed immoderately.25

If his eldest son Hartley is closely associated with sublimity, then, Coleridge positions Derwent, along with ‘all Children of his Age’, as something more akin to the ridiculous, a comic play with perspectives based on contradiction, ‘fun  - & wit’. Coleridge clearly sides with Derwent’s outrageous lies here, enjoying his son’s riotously deceitful statement. Indeed, Derwent’s word play inspires Coleridge’s own, coining ‘Tonguedom’ for his son’s developing language, with ‘Pawlets’ linking Derwent to animal nature, as in much children’s literature. Coleridge’s notebooks combine a restless striving after sublimity with a more amused account of his own and especially his children’s ridiculousness. Kathleen Coburn emphasizes the delight to be found in the combination in the notebooks of ‘the quick, sensitive, minute or grand, quiet or boisterous, visual, aural, and tactile enjoyments of nature, exuberant or painful, headlong or meticulous’.26 Coleridge’s engagement with his children, and especially with Derwent, in the notebooks, emphasizes boisterousness and exuberance. Even in his amusement, though, Coleridge aims to represent his experience of ‘spiritual finitude’, as Richter would have it, seriously and philosophically. Coleridge’s published work tends to privilege the sublime, tempered sometimes with a self-satirising sense of the ridiculous. By mapping Coleridge’s sense of the ridiculous onto his engagement with infancy in his conversation poem ‘Frost at Midnight’, I argue that this text is structured in a strikingly similar way to his experience on Broad Stand, with an original encounter with spiritual finitude being transmuted into a sublime moment, in this case, mapped imaginatively onto a potential future for his infant son, Hartley. ‘Frost at Midnight’ presents its reader with a complex temporal movement from the speaker’s present moment, awake at midnight beside his sleeping child, back to his own past as a dreamy schoolboy, and forward  Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 1645; original emphasis.  Kathleen Coburn, The Self Conscious Imagination: A Study of the Coleridge Notebooks in Celebration of the Bi-Centenary of His Birth 21 October 1772 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 53. 25 26

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again to his current dreams of a sublime future for his son. Coleridge’s sense of the ridiculous at first appears submerged in this particular poem, with its solemn, contemplative tone seeming to forbid the love of wordplay and buffoonery visible elsewhere in his writing. Describing his midnight reverie, alone on a frosty midnight in front of a ‘low-burnt fire’, Coleridge muses over a film of flame fluttering on the grate, which becomes ‘a companionable form’ in his imagination, seeming to share his sympathies, making ‘a toy of Thought’.27 In the first version of the poem, published in 1798, Coleridge characterizes the imaginative process of personifying inanimate matter in this way as transfused ‘sometimes with deep faith /And sometimes with fantastic playfulness’.28 ‘Frost at Midnight’ associates the Coleridgean imagination with child’s play, here, foreshadowing both the speaker’s (re)turn to the past of his own childhood and his future wishes for his son. The ‘toy of Thought’, in its connection between ratiocination and children’s games, harks back to Coleridge’s fascination with the thought processes of the young Hartley. The division in the 1798 version of the poem between ‘deep faith’ and ‘fantastic playfulness’ in imaginative creation mirrors the divide between the sublime and the ridiculous in Coleridge’s writings. In a subsequent version of ‘Frost at Midnight’, published in the Poetical Register in 1809, ‘fantastic’ changes to ‘wilful playfulness/That stealing pardon from our common sense /Smiles, as self-scornful, to disarm the scorn/ For these wild reliques of our childish Thought’.29 These lines, in their combination of playfulness, self-scornful smiles, and childhood experience, almost spell out Coleridge’s understanding of the ridiculous, a perspective which appreciates the humour in one’s own failings. Coleridge’s turn to his own past in ‘Frost at Midnight’ is coloured by this sense of the ridiculous. In a smiling, self-scornful gesture, Coleridge pictures himself as a sleepy, dreamy schoolboy: ‘Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye/Fixed with mock study on my swimming book’.30 Coleridge uses this retrospect, ruefully caught between the ‘wild pleasure’ of ‘the hot Fair-­ day’ and the next day’s ennui at school, to stage a sublime foreshadowing 27  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1834 text), ll. 14, 23; unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Coleridge’s poetry are from The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997). 28  Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798), ll. 24–5. 29  Coleridge ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1809), ll. 25–7. 30  Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1834), ll. 37–8.

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of a glorious future for his son.31 Like Coleridge’s experience on Broad Stand, in which his perception of the ridiculousness of his situation is used to stage a sublime renaissance in his understanding of nature, ‘Frost at Midnight’ shifts from the ridiculousness of schoolboy-Coleridge’s reverie to a powerful statement of future mastery, this time for his son rather than for himself. Coleridge addresses his sleeping child in an extended apostrophe, expressing the boy’s essential difference from his own experience: But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And ancient mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in Himself. Great universal Teacher! he shall mould Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.32

Like Coleridge’s turn to the sublime in his account of his descent of Broad Stand, this apostrophe to his sleeping child is structured in response to his earlier experience of himself as ridiculous. Whereas Coleridge ‘was reared/ In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim’, his child will experience sublime freedom; whereas the schoolboy Coleridge is ‘Awed by the stern preceptor’s face’ and can only pretend to be following the lesson, his son will be led by God as ‘Great universal teacher’ to an experience of nature as an experiential whole. Concluding his analysis of the tension between lyric voice and an answering silence in the language of ‘Frost at Midnight’, Stokes asks ‘is this sublime?’ His answer is that the poem would seem to mark ‘the end of the sublime’ or at least its limit or disintegration.33 For me, Coleridge’s interest in limits and disintegration is better described as ridiculous, even if asking ‘is this ridiculous?’ seems initially disrespectful to such an earnest fantasy of future potential. Earlier in his analysis, focusing on the lack of response imagined in Coleridge’s ‘conversation poem’, Stokes argues that  Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1834), ll. 32, 30.  Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1834), ll. 44–64. 33  Stokes, Coleridge, p. 58. 31 32

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‘Coleridge has here reached a limit of Romanticism: specifically, the limit of the voice of true feeling, and the point at which the lyric subject reaches an internal aporia (an aporia only softened by his clinging to his child, a movement that perhaps deserves further commentary which I cannot attempt here)’.34 I argue that Coleridge’s sense of ‘spiritual finitude’, described by Stokes here as ‘a limit of Romanticism’ and an ‘internal aporia’, is intimately connected to (rather than softened by) his representation of childhood in the poem (and elsewhere). By turning himself into a ridiculous child and imagining a literary version of Hartley into his sublime counterpart, Coleridge accomplishes a similar movement as in his account of his descent of Broad Stand, both registering his sense of himself as ridiculous (emphasizing playfulness and ratiocination) and attempting to overcome his feelings of finitude and lack through a turn to the sublime, connected this time to an imagined future for his son. * * * Ridiculously, I want to conclude this essay on the Romantic ridiculous with an extended digression of contemporary children’s literature, arguing that some of this literature sets out (at least in part) to challenge the ideological dominance of the figure of the Romantic child by stressing the community over the individual, an aesthetic approach which I associate with the ridiculous. The Romantic child is an ideological construction which represents childhood, as Donelle Ruwe argues, through ‘an idealized, nostalgic figure that is characterized by innocence, imagination, and nature’.35 Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as philosophers from Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) to Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), contributed to the cultural construction of childhood as a utopian space associated with spirituality and creativity. William Stroup points out that the Romantic child forms part of Romanticism’s ‘wider project of investigating “nature” in all its meanings’ rather than ‘a self-indulgent desire to tell one’s own story’, even if the figure has come to be associated with something akin to the Wordsworthian

 Stokes, Coleridge, pp. 56–7.  Donelle Ruwe, British Children’s Poetry in the Romantic Period: Verse, Riddle, and Rhyme (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 10. 34 35

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or egotistical sublime.36 I have coined ‘the Ridiculous child’ as an alternative construction of childhood which exists in counterpoint to representations of the Romantic child in Coleridge’s notebooks and poetry: the Ridiculous child privileges laughter, linguistic play, and social interaction, in ways that reconfigure traditional interpretations of childhood in Romantic and later writings. Contemporary children’s literature engages with the ridiculous aesthetics—laughter, play, community—which I have outlined above, in the process of which it combats the legacy of the Romantic child as individualistic and aloof. For my concluding case study, I have chosen Chris Riddell’s Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse (2013), a treat for any Romanticist because of its wide-ranging allusions to eighteenth- and nineteenth-­ century literature, from Lord Goth and his penchant for shooting at garden ornaments (‘mad, bad, and dangerous to gnomes’) to Jane Ear, one of the protagonist’s governesses, who is more interested in seducing Lord Goth than in educating his daughter.37 More pertinently to this essay on Coleridge and the ridiculous, Coleridge himself appears, ridiculously transformed into an albatross accompanying Frankenstein’s creature on his Arctic explorations. Coleridge has of course appeared as a figure of fun in Romantic period satires from William Hazlitt’s (1778–1830) poison pen portraits of his sometimes friend and mentor to Thomas Love Peacock’s (1785–1866) comic gothic representations of Coleridge as the otherworldly philosopher, Mr Flosky, in Nightmare Abbey (1818). Riddell’s Goth Girl series features the adventures of the Byronically named Ada Goth in and around her unheimlich home Ghastly Gorm Manor, represented as a literally and figuratively haunted house, its east, west, and ‘broken’ wing haunted both by the ghost of a mouse in the first of the series and by the memory of Ada’s mother, who tragically (or perhaps tragi-comically) died in a trapeze accident. Lord Goth is represented as a deliberately distant father in this first book of the series, unable to cope with his daughter’s resemblance to his dead wife. Rather than a boisterous and exuberant, ‘ridiculous’ child in the style of Derwent Coleridge, Ada starts the series as a quiet, self-possessed, dignified child, rendered melancholy by her troubled relationship with Lord Goth and her lack of engagement with children of her own age. On the contrary, it is the adults 36  William Stroup, ‘The Romantic Child’ Literature Compass 1/1 (2003–2004), n. p. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2004.00078.x; last accessed January 2020. 37  Chris Riddell, Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse (London: Macmillan, 2013), p. 2.

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around Ada who seem ridiculous, including Coleridge, transformed into the species of bird killed by the poet’s own Ancient Mariner. Although she does not discuss Riddell’s Goth Girl, as it was published after her chapter, Anna Jackson theorizes the construction of a ‘canny child’ in contemporary children’s gothic fiction in a way which speaks to the representation of Ada Goth in the series. Jackson connects the distinction between the uncanny and canniness to Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) discussion of the unheimlich in his essay of 1919: Like the German unheimlich, the English uncanny means both unusual and unnatural  – spooky, eerie, unsettling. Canny […] means ‘knowing, sagacious, shrewd, astute; skilled or expert, frugal or thrifty’. The words are not quite opposites, since the quality of uncanniness seems to belong to a situation or event, as an effect the situation or event produces, whereas canniness is a quality that properly belongs to a person.38

Inspired by Freud, Jackson explores the etymological connections between canny and uncanny, with canniness initially connected to prudence before the uncanny took on supernatural associations. ‘Canny’, finally, ‘comes to mean more broadly cunning or wily, occasionally even with the suggestion of supernatural abilities’, especially as it is increasingly used in relation to women.39 For Jackson, canniness is related to ‘self-possession’ and ‘allows for effective action to be taken in the face of the uncanny, because of its location in a powerful sense of self’.40 The canny child’s self-possession and agency seem to link her back to constructions of the Romantic child and his connections to the egotistical sublime. However, Jackson argues that this powerful sense of self ‘is shown to depend very much on other people, and their recognition’.41 For the canny child to act successfully in the world, she needs the backing of a like-minded community. It is this sense of community which brings her back within my own focus on the ridiculous; although, I argue in the case of Riddell’s Goth Girl that this 38  Anna Jackson, ‘Uncanny Hauntings, Canny Children’ in The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders, eds. Anna Jackson et  al. (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 157–176 (158). 39  Jackson, ‘Uncanny Hauntings’, p. 159. 40  Jackson, ‘Uncanny Hauntings’, p. 160. 41  Ibid.

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sense of the ridiculous is very much directed away from children and towards an appreciation of the failings and frailties of adulthood. Ada forms a community by making friends with the children of Charles Cabbage, alluding lightly to the collaboration between the girl’s historical inspiration, Ada Lovelace (1815–52), and the inventor Charles Babbage (1791–1871) on early computer programming. The Cabbages introduce Ada to a group of children inspired by figures from children’s fiction of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Ada’s new friendships enable her to effectively combat the evil plans of the estate’s ‘indoor groundskeeper’ and reconcile her with her grieving father. Riddell’s novel encourages children to celebrate Ada’s canniness and to enjoy the ridiculousness of the surrounding cast of adult figures. Coleridge appears as ‘an enormous white bird with a curved yellow beak and a sticking-plaster cross on its belly’ in Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse, whose role is to lead Ada to an encounter with ‘the Arctic Explorer’, inspired by Frankenstein’s creature.42 Riddell has transformed Coleridge into an albatross, riffing off the bird’s fate in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) with the plaster over his heart, but resurrecting him as guide and witness. Coleridge becomes the creature’s parrot-like albatross, exclaiming variations on lines from the Ancient Mariner: ‘Water, water everywhere […] nor any drop to drink!’43 Coleridge’s metamorphosis into an animal guide entertainingly subordinates the adult poet to the status of something like a pet for Ada and the creature. He also serves as witness to scenes of reconciliation between parents and children, as not only is the creature reconciled with his author—in the form of Mary Shellfish, with whom he is angry about misrepresentations in her novelization of his life—but Lord Goth also learns to recognize his daughter as ‘really like your beautiful mother […] Brave, intrepid, and graceful!’ and love her for these qualities rather than strive to avoid her.44 Connected to the actual Coleridge’s interest in father-son relationships, the albatross Coleridge functions as comic witness to reconciliations between parents and children, guiding Ada to the aid of Frankenstein’s creature and, in so doing, leading her to reconnect with her own father.  Riddell, Goth Girl, 22.  Riddell, Goth Girl, 27 and passim. 44  Riddell, Goth Girl, p. 210. 42 43

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However, Riddell engages more widely with the Romantic idealization of childhood than merely through his transmutation of Coleridge into comic foil for Ada. Just before Ada’s encounter with albatross-Coleridge, Riddell shows how she resists Romantic, or more specifically Gothic, representations of childhood in her interactions with various governesses, each of whom spoofs literary antecedents. Ada’s first governess, Morag Macbee (a thinly veiled version of Nanny McPhee) is disappointed to discover that ‘Ada wasn’t a difficult child and rarely got into trouble’ and returns to Inverness with a ‘severe skin rash’.45 Hebe Poppins quickly grows bored with Ada as she ‘wasn’t shy or unhappy’.46 The aforementioned Jane Ear is more interested in Lord Goth than Ada, being sent away ‘when she tried to burn down the west wing’.47 Several other governesses, including Nanny Darling (a sheepdog as in Peter Pan), Becky Blunt, and Marianne Delacroix, are dispatched as disappointing or unsuitable before Ada receives more useful instruction in both deportment and sword-fighting by the vampiric Lucy Borgia, inspired by the Mona Lisa. Ada’s normative resistance to Gothic tropes of difficulty and unhappiness positions her against representations of childhood from the Romantic period to the present day. Her canny self-possession, developed in collaboration with a community of like-minded children, taps into the aesthetics of the ridiculous, even if these are directed outwards at the adult world rather than inwards towards her own sense of self, as was the case, as we have seen, with Coleridge. In Coleridge’s notebooks and poetry, the relationship between himself as an adult and his children is represented as shifting between the sublime and the ridiculous. As in Coleridge’s account of his experience on Broad Stand, indeed, his initial perception of both his own ridiculousness and the ridiculous of children and childhood is countered by an attempt at sublimation. Coleridge is, at least in part, responsible for the development of the ideology of the Romantic Child: a construction of childhood which privileges innocence, imagination, and nature, but which is often implicitly white, male, and middle class. Contemporary children’s literature combats the legacy of the Romantic child by ridiculing it, puncturing its pomposity in order to create new visions of childhood, privileging  Riddell, Goth Girl, p. 20.  Ibid. 47  Ibid. 45 46

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laughter, play, and community. Laughter, play, and community are also at the heart of Johann Richter’s alternative aesthetics of the ridiculous, an aesthetic experience which challenges the individualism and exceptionalism of both the Romantic sublime and the Romantic child. The Ridiculous child probes the limits of Romanticism, creating new spaces for community and collaboration, laughter and play.

CHAPTER 7

Educational Experiments: Childhood Sympathy, Regulation, and Object-Relations in Maria Edgeworth’s Writings About Education Charles I. Armstrong

In his introduction to Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, Andrew O’Malley describes the eighteenth century as ‘a watershed period in the history of both childhood and children’s literature’: ‘as children increasingly became subjects for whom adults wrote’, O’Malley observes, ‘they similarly became subjects about whom adults wrote’.1 Something of the complex relationship between these newly emergent infant subjectivities can be seen in the work of two of the leading voices of late eighteenth-century educational writing and writing for children: Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) and her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744–1817). We can take, as exemplary, the two-volume 1  Andrew O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods (London: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 1–2.

C. I. Armstrong (*) University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Domines Veliki, C. Duffy (eds.), Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8_7

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Practical Education published by the Edgeworths in 1798, the first chapter of which starts in a somewhat surprising fashion. Rather than providing the basic, underlying principles of a science of education, the opening chapter deals—as its title simply states—with ‘Toys’. Furthermore, the first paragraph deals not with the practical use of playthings, but rather their disuse, with children’s tendency to destroy their own toys: “Why don’t you play with your playthings, my dear? I’m sure that I have bought toys enough for you; why can’t you divert yourself with them, instead of breaking them to pieces?” says the mother to her child, who stands idle and miserable, surrounded by disjointed dolls, maimed horses, coaches and one-horse chairs without wheels, and a nameless wreck of gilded lumber.2

This could have been the beginning of a fictional tale rather than an educational treatise, something which indicates the close connection between literature and instruction in Maria Edgeworth’s oeuvre. The scene is arresting: mother and child are surrounded by a veritable battle-field of material carnage. Broken objects are everywhere. Perhaps even more striking is the authors’ subsequent defence of the destructive child: ‘is it not rather unjust to be angry with him for breaking them to pieces, when he can by no other device render them subservient to his amusement?’3 This stance is indicative of key traits of Edgeworth’s writings: an innate sense of sympathy with the viewpoint of the child, and a keen understanding of how a failure to take that viewpoint into consideration can have destructive consequences.4 As will become apparent in what follows, broken or dysfunctional objects recur in Maria Edgeworth’s writings, often exposing moments of crisis in the development of children. This chapter explores Maria Edgeworth’s early writings for children and on the topic of education, focusing on her writings around 1800, which established her as a pioneer of children’s literature. Indebted to analyses of Edgeworth’s life and writings by scholars such as Marilyn 2  Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education, ed. Susan Manly (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), p. 1. 3  Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, p. 1. 4  Roderick McGillis has recently pointed, similarly, to Edgeworth’s ‘dual presentation of the child as immature and yet sensitive to life’s beauty’ in stories like ‘The Purple Jar’ (1796). See Roderick McGillis, ‘Irony and Performance: The Romantic Child’, in Adrienne Gavin (ed.), The Child in British Literature (London: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 101–15 (111).

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Butler, the specific focus here will be on the extent to which Edgeworth’s use of literature for educational purposes involves a complex dialogue between Enlightenment and emergent Romantic configurations of infancy and infant education.5 This chapter will begin with an examination of Edgeworth’s engagement with the concept of sympathy, focusing in particular on her preface to The Parent’s Assistant and on the story ‘The Bracelets’. Following on from this, the second part of the chapter will illustrate the interdisciplinary—or, more precisely, the predisciplinary— nature of Edgeworth’s project, which ranges across what would now be the borders between literature, education, and the experimental methodology of the natural sciences. Here, Edgeworth’s novel Belinda and her story ‘Waste Not, Want Not’ will be given special attention. Edgeworth has been described as ‘seemingly anomalous as an Enlightenment writer in a Romantic age’.6 However, shifts in literary historiography and challenges to received period boundaries are starting to make it possible to approach her position in a more nuanced, and less straightforwardly paradoxical, manner. Far from excluding figures like Edgeworth because they seem to fall between the boundaries of periods and genres, the ongoing, scholarly rethinking of Romanticism rather takes the complicated negotiations of critical positions by such writers as an impetus to eschew traditional, binary periodizations. If the Romantic child has long been seen as ‘essentially an idealized, nostalgic, sentimental figure of childhood, one characterized by innocence, imagination, nature and primitivism’, then the child that is depicted in, and constitutes the assumed readership of, Maria Edgeworth’s tales is a very different kind of being.7 But as the Romantic canon has been expanded, and more encompassing reading practices have engaged with the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, our understanding of Romantic infancy has begun to suffer a sea-change. Edgeworth’s children are sensitive beings, who have an individual worth of their own but who are also fathers and mothers, as it were, to the adults they one day will become. Crucial to their growth is ethical development through exposure to fitting exemplars and self-improvement in the face of crises—crises most typically manifested in  Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).  Clíona Ò Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), p. 1. 7  Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 9. 5 6

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Edgeworth’s work through the temporary disaster of objects breaking. The children and youths of her fiction must regulate themselves, even as their progress is monitored and regulated, as part of what Edgeworth would ideally like to see as a scientific process. It is, in any case, a fragile and difficult process, and, as this chapter shows, her fiction is not free of doubt about the ethics of the experimenting adult or scientist, nor complacently sanguine about its results. Like the previously mentioned toys and other fragile objects encountered at key moments in her narratives, things may indeed fall part. Ultimately, though, Edgeworth’s accomplishment is intrinsically tied to her clear-sighted acknowledgement of just how difficult a matter childhood education is, accompanied by her unprecedented willingness to pursue a sympathetic relation with child readers. Edgeworth’s intense, questioning cultivation of the categories of sympathy and sensibility is very much of its age. Recent criticism has uncovered not only that the ‘Age of Sensibility’—often siphoned off to the second half of the eighteenth century, or to a couple of ‘pre-romantic’ decades preceding Romanticism—in many respects has no clear boundary separating it from Romanticism, but also that its most important concepts were subjected to a variegated debate of considerable scope and urgency continuing even into the nineteenth century. Adela Pinch identifies the 1780s and 1790s as the period constituting ‘the heyday of the most heated controversies between the pro-Sensibility and anti-Sensibility forces’.8 Yet even in the later Romantics, a concept such as the sympathetic imagination cannot really be fathomed fully without acknowledging its roots in the Age of Sensibility. Authoritative work in this field carried out by scholars such as Janet Todd and Jerome McGann has been followed by extensive elaboration.9 Sensibility concerns not just ethical sympathy with others or a heightened stress on personal emotion, but also is a precondition for the period’s investment in domesticity and gendered, domestic roles: ‘central to the purpose of the culture of sensibility was the aggrandizement of the affectionate family and, at its heart, mothering’.10 Edgeworth’s accomplishments as a writer for children would be impossible without this context, 8  Adela Pinch, ‘Sensibility’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 59. 9  Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986); Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 10  G. J. Barker-Benfield, ‘Sensibility’, in Ian McCalman (ed.), The Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 105.

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which facilitated her own role as a pioneer in the field. As James Chandler notes, Edgeworth ‘was deeply affected by her engagements with writers representing a range of aspects of the sentimental tradition’.11 However, in histories of children’s literature, she is nevertheless typically placed in a somewhat ambiguous position. She is hailed as representing a considerable improvement upon the wooden and didactic fare offered to children in the eighteenth century, even while she is excluded from the ‘Golden Age’ purportedly initiated during the middle of the nineteenth century and including such classics as The Water Babies (1863), Through the Looking Glass (1871), and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Thus while Peter Hunt grants that Edgeworth is perhaps ‘the most readable’ of children’s writers from the early nineteenth century, he also damns her with faint praise, arguing that she ‘showed at least some understanding of children as they are rather than as they should be’.12 While contemporary readers will (perhaps inescapably) approach texts from the past in a way different from that of their original audiences, a blunt application of a different hermeneutical horizon can sometimes obscure significant aspects of the texts in question. Doubtless a contemporary reader might find the ethics of Edgeworth’s story ‘The Little Dog Trusty; or, The Liar and the Boy of Truth’, included in the first edition of A Parent’s Assistant, overly transparent. There is no equivocation here over how the broken object frequently encountered in Edgeworth’s tales for children—in this case, a milk basin—is to be navigated by the main characters. The ‘Boy of Truth’ of the title, called Frank in the story, is obviously the exemplary figure while the lying of his brother, Robert, is presented as an unfortunate choice that no one would wish to imitate. Owning up to the accident that broke the basin, Frank is gifted with the dog mentioned in the title, while Robert’s mendacity is rewarded with a beating. Such didactic transparency has its own motivations and modulations. Approaching Edgeworth’s own stance on ‘instruction’ will in fact not only help us to see how her fiction necessarily differs in some of its aims from mainstream children’s literature today, but it will also help contextualize crucial aspects of her project.

11  James Chandler, An Archeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Moe in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 265. 12  Peter Hunt, An Introduction to Children’s Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 47.

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One such aspect of Edgeworth’s development of children’s literature is her care to address her young audience. The preface to The Parent’s Assistant provides a key statement of her goals, which will help document and explicate this concern. There, Edgeworth argues that the enormity of the challenge inherent in writing for children cannot be fully realized by all: Those only who have been interested in the education of a family, who have patiently followed children through the first processes of reasoning, who have daily watched over their thoughts and feelings – those only who know with what ease and rapidity the early association of ideas are formed, on which the future taste, character and happiness depend, can feel the dangers and difficulties of such an undertaking.13

As we shall see later, the concluding emphasis on ‘dangers and difficulties’ points towards an important dimension of Maria Edgeworth’s engagement with infancy. The everyday experience mentioned here implicitly alludes to Edgeworth’s own role in the raising of several of her father’s twenty-two children in the family home, an Anglo-Irish big house in Edgeworthstown in County Longford, Ireland. For Edgeworth, such closeness to the lives of children is also a prerequisite for the writing of stories they will want to read. In what one might term an early example of reader-reception criticism, she insists that the age and social class of the children will determine the kind of texts with which they are comfortable. Concerns about the audience also must affect the very language of children’s literature. In her book, Edgeworth claims to have included only such situations ‘as children can easily imagine, and which may consequently interest their feelings’.14 Further, identification with the child reader also entails that the adult must anticipate with whom the child can identify: ‘such examples of virtue are painted as are not above their conception of excellence, or their powers of sympathy and emulation’.15 Sympathy with the child, then, involves envisaging and eliciting the child’s own sympathetic identifications. Edgeworth’s preface goes on to elaborate possible negative and positive identifications. What has formerly been described as ‘instruction’ includes taking seriously what is understood to be children’s innate tendency 13  Maria Edgeworth, ‘Preface’, in Edgeworth, The Novels and Selected Works, vol. 10, ed. Elizabeth Eger and Clíona Ó Gallchoir (London: Pickering & Chatto), pp. 1–2. 14  Edgeworth, ‘Preface’, p. 3. 15  Edgeworth, ‘Preface’, p. 3.

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towards sympathetic identification. Edgeworth is not unique, of course, among her contemporaries, in seeing such identification as constituting an important part of the reading process. Cassandra Falke has argued that reading characterized by sympathy was dominant from early Romanticism to the 1830s and 1840s, when its potentially detrimental effects on a working-class readership caused an ‘increasing advocacy of affective distance’.16 Given the sympathetic model of reading, the virtues (or lack thereof) of the characters depicted in fiction become of paramount importance. Whereas Falke documents how the middle-classes were disconcerted by the effects that the glorification of villains in the Newgate novels of the 1830s and 1840s might have on the lower orders, Edgeworth worries about the effect of presenting attractive rascals to young readers: ‘it is hoped that the common fault of making the most mischievous characters appear the most active and the most ingenious, has been as much as possible avoided. Unsuccessful cunning will not be admired, and cannot induce imitation’.17 Edgeworth also notes that she has sought to provide an antidote against the ‘epidemic rage for dissipation’.18 This is one of the moments in her preface when she sounds the closest to William Wordsworth’s (1770–1850) preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, with its disparagement of the age’s ‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’.19 There is in both a reaction against what they take to be modish excesses of emotion. In many respects, Edgeworth and Wordsworth are very different writers, and their sole meeting—during Wordsworth’s tour of Ireland in 1829—did not reveal any profound affinity.20 Yet there are significant points of intersection, some of which stem from their shared basis in eighteenth-century associationist thought. Furthermore, both drew important pedagogical lessons from Rousseau, including a distaste for exaggerated emphasis on book learning and a complementary emphasis on the holistic development of the individual. One of Wordsworth’s key claims to being innovative is based upon his realigning of poetry’s relationship with its audience: His

16  Cassandra Falke, ‘On the Morality of Immoral Fiction: Reading Newgate Novels, 1830–1848’, in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 38/3 (2016), p. 188. 17  Edgeworth, ‘Preface’, p. 4; original emphasis. 18  Edgeworth, ‘Preface’, p. 4. 19  William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), p. 599. 20  See Butler, Maria Edgeworth, pp. 442–3.

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poet is intended to be but ‘a man speaking to men’.21 Although his poet is an especially talented individual, a levelling tendency is nonetheless evident in how a more direct form of communication, setting aside conventional ornament and neoclassical allusion, is being sought. This directness can and was construed as being childlike: as Ann Wierda Rowland points out, Wordsworth’s critics, for example, claimed that his ‘overly simplistic language and trifling subject-matter’ were ‘products of the nursery or of a childish or infantile sensibility’.22 Wordsworth’s use of themes and motifs that appeared, at first sight, eminently non-poetical was a source of bemusement for many critics. In the words of Wordsworth’s preface, his goal was to ‘choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men’.23 Wordsworth’s realism is certainly not without parallel in Edgeworth. Through her transatlantic influence, the latter has been interpreted as a key inspiration for a general skepticism towards fantasy and fairy tales in later American children’s literature.24 Whereas Lyrical Ballads creates an uncanny offspring to the classical, meditative lyric and the more demotic ballad, Edgeworth’s tales inject a new realism and emotional acuity into children’s literature. While Wordsworth describes his own volume as an ‘experiment’, we shall later see that this concept plays an even more substantial role in Edgeworth’s understanding of her project.25 William Hazlitt (1778–1830) suggested that the ideals of the French Revolution provided a decisive ‘model’ for the ‘poetical experiments’ of William Wordsworth, and they may also have played an important— although arguably more circumscribed—role in the development of Edgeworth’s new style.26 Although the Edgeworth family, as Irish landlords, were shaped by a patrician class politics that took certain hierarchical divisions for granted, they were not without sympathies for some of the democratic ideals that were in the vogue in the 1790s. As Marilyn Butler’s account of the politics of Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth suggests,  Wordsworth, Major Works, p. 603.  Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 2. 23  Wordsworth, Major Works, pp. 596–7. 24  See Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn, Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 49. 25  Wordsworth, Major Works, p. 591. 26  William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, ed. E.  D. Mackerness (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1991), p. 139. 21 22

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however, the reception of a book such as Practical Education could, in 1798, only be hindered by the events of the decade since the Revolution began: ‘in England, where the political tide was strongly reactionary, it was not a year for welcoming progressive books’.27 Any situating of Edgeworth in relation to Romanticism should take into account how she approaches the faculty of the imagination, traditionally taken to be a key focus of Romantic poetics. In Edgeworth’s preface to The Parent’s Assistant, the imagination only gets a look-in at the very end, and is then presented in a negative roll-call of what the author has ‘taken care to avoid’.28 Alongside a ‘restless spirit of adventure’, ‘false views of life’, and unrealizable hopes, Edgeworth here lists the ‘inflaming’ of ‘the imagination’.29 The effects of this inflammation are exemplified by the character of Cecilia in the story ‘The Bracelets’. When a situation makes too forcible impression on Cecilia, she loses her ability to think rationally: Such was the nature of Cecilia’s mind, that when any object was forcibly impressed on her imagination, it caused a temporary suspension of her reasoning faculties. Hope was too strong a stimulus for her spirits; and when fear did take possession of her mind, it was attended with total debility.30

There is a structural similarity to the first step in the mechanics of the sublime here. Edgeworth was familiar with Edmund Burke’s (1730–97) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1757), and its description of how the sublime fear ‘robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning’.31 Although Edgeworth’s understanding of the resulting ‘debility’ lacks any immediately elevating follow­up, it is broadly attuned to the kind of ‘blockage’ that has been described by Burke, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and later accounts of the

27  Butler, Maria Edgeworth, p. 172. For a rather different view of Edgeworth’s relationship to the French Revolution, see Rebecca Davies, Written Maternal Authority and EighteenthCentury Education in Britain: Educating by the Book (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 89–91. 28  Edgeworth, ‘Preface’, p. 4. 29  Edgeworth, ‘Preface’, p. 4. 30  Maria Edgeworth, Selected Tales for Children and Young People, ed. Susan Manly (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 32. 31  Edmund Burke, The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 1, ed. T. O. McLoughlin and James Boulton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 230.

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sublime.32 If, as we shall see, an ethical realization can be discovered in Edgeworth’s fiction, it is through a gradual process of hard-won experience rather than, say, the revelation of an inner law or identity. She also lacks any parallel to how the Wordsworthian sublime, as formulated most notably in Book VI of The Prelude (1805), offers a crucial role to the imagination in transcending the limits of empirical experience. The ethics of Edgeworth’s stories is evident in how they portray the failure to fulfil even minor obligations to be indicative of questionable ethics, rather than something that (as in certain of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads) provides access to a more profound level of being. Edgeworth was criticized by contemporary reviewers for not dwelling on the religious aspect of education, and one characteristic related to this is her utter eschewal of any reference to transcendence.33 If there is something philosophic about Edgeworth’s children, it is ascribed in more homely fashion to their ‘philosophic curiosity’ or to the ‘absent little philosopher’, whose ability to think abstractly is accompanied by a slowness of wit: it is rooted, in other words, rather more in what McGillis calls Edgeworth’s ‘dual perception’ of the child than in any Wordsworthian configuration of the infant as ‘seer blest’.34 That lack of infant transcendence or transcendent potential in the infant is persistently linked by Edgeworth to the exchange and the destruction of objects. This linkage is evident, for example, in the previously mentioned tale ‘The Bracelets’, which was published in the first edition of The Parent’s Assistant. ‘The Bracelets’ presents the vicissitudes of the friendship of two young girls: the outgoing and assertive Cecilia, and the more temperate and modest Leonora. Displaying the signature ability of sentimentalism to ‘assume multiple locations in narrative space’, Edgeworth’s narrator lets us experience the intense and varying emotions of not only these two girls, but also of their teacher and fellow pupils.35 The story shows how their friendship is deepened, but also challenged, by competition. Its first half is devoted to a contest, organized by their teacher Mrs Villars: ‘nothing so much contributed to preserve a spirit of emulation in this little society as 32  See chapter three in Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 33  On this topic, see for instance Jane Rendall, ‘“Elementary Principles of Education”: Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth and the Uses of Common Sense Philosophy’, in History of European Ideas, 39/5 (2013), pp. 613–30. 34  Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, pp. 89, 21. 35  Chandler, Archaeology of Sympathy, p. 176.

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a small honorary distinction, given annually, as the prize of successful application’.36 The whole class of twenty pupils participates, but Cecilia wins the prize of a bracelet bearing the image of Mrs Villars. Cecilia is however fated to discover that the material prize is of no absolute value: ‘the triumph of success is absolute but short’.37 In her excitement, she knocks over a fellow pupil, Louisa, destroying her mandarin (a Chinese porcelain doll). As a result, her friendship with Leonora sours. As already noted, broken objects often take on a central role in Edgeworth’s narratives for children, and this tale is no exception. Such objects are susceptible to Freudian interpretation as replacements or stand-­ ins for parental presence and authority, or Lacanian emblems of the imaginary self.38 Yet their most obvious role is as catalysts for plots of self-improvement. For the rest of the story, Cecilia is plagued by her guilty conscience. A lengthy, didactic conversation with Mrs Villars convinces her that she has no evil will and that her ‘active desire of improvement’ can help her make amends.39 Cecilia then organizes a follow-up competition— this time to be awarded to the girl voted the most amiable in the group— to be decided a month later, where the prize is a bracelet with the pupils’ braided hair. The unfolding of this second competition turns out to be more complex than the first one: Cecilia realizes that her friendship for both Leonora and Louisa is of more importance than the competition, and yet she still wants to win. This desire is ascribed by the narrator to a masculine tendency in the protagonist, which stems from a faulty upbringing. In this respect, she is negatively compared to Leonora: the latter ‘had a character and virtues more peculiar to a female: her judgment had been early cultivated, and her good sense employed in the regulation of her conduct’.40 Unlike Cecilia, Leonora is ‘habituated to that restraint which, as a woman, she was to expect in life, and early accustomed to yield’.41 Here Edgeworth’s narrative exposes the differing gender narratives of her times, and the remainder of the story shows her protagonist struggling

 Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 24.  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 27. 38  Lacanian psychology has a key role in Bill Brown’s programmatic formulation of central concerns in contemporary ‘thing theory’. See Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, in Critical Inquiry, 28/1 (2011), pp. 1–22. 39  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 34. 40  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 37. 41  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 37. 36 37

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to internalize the necessary ‘regulation of her conduct’.42 A side-plot unfolds, whereby she seeks to buy a new mandarin for Louisa, replacing the original broken one. However, Cecilia is defeated by her own desire to excel and to gain approbation, and as a result she again damages a friendship. When she spots that the visiting pedlar has a finer object—a ‘figure of Flora, crowned with roses, and carrying a basket of flowers in her hand’—she instead obtains it, misguidedly handing over a keepsake from Leonora as part of the bargain.43 Lack of self-control here shows itself in letting the desire triggered by a luxurious commodity over-ride the ethical obligation of gift relations with a close friend. Cecilia receives her chastisement at the end of the story but defeats her over-eagerness for success by sacrificing her own victory. She has grown despite the confusion and antagonism that has hampered her on her way. But it is a fraught and difficult growth, which tacitly is hampered by regret. Particularly jarring is Mrs Villars’ final admonition to Cecilia to learn ‘habitual gentleness’ as well as ‘prudence and good sense’: implicitly Cecilia still must set aside her own ‘male’ adventurousness and put on Leonora’s female compliance.44 Both Cecilia and Leonora, close competitors for the bracelet, end up renouncing it—and hand it over instead to Louisa. Friendship triumphs over competitiveness, and ultimately this is also a triumph for a combination of ethics and sensibility. The narrator depicts in detail the young girls’ changing emotions, spelling out the consequences of a guilty conscience: Let those who are tempted to wrong by the hopes of future gratification, or the prospect of certain concealment and impunity, remember, that unless they are totally depraved, they bear in their own hearts a monitor, who will prevent their enjoying what they have ill obtained.45

 Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 37.  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 39. 44  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 49. Fiona Robinson astutely articulates Cecilia’s final sacrifice in ‘Peculiar Dearness: Sentimental Commerce in Maria Edgeworth’s “The Bracelet”’, in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 37/3 (Fall 2012), pp.  323–43. For an earlier essay on how Cecilia’s predicament echoes aspects of Maria Edgeworth’s own upbringing, see Mitzi Myers, ‘De-Romanticizing the Subject: Maria Edgeworth’s “The Bracelets”, Mythologies of Origin, and the Daughter’s Coming to Writing’, in Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M.  Kelley (eds.), Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1995), pp. 88–110. 45  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 40. 42 43

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Ultimately, Cecilia is to simply feel better with friends rather than prizes, and the pleasure of being good is presented as a sufficing spur towards virtuous behaviour. This ethics is quite contrary to the spirit of Kantianism but more in line—through the sense of an internal reward coming from harmonizing one’s behaviour with one’s conscience—with, for instance, the thought of Adam Smith (1723–90). In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith claims that ‘the prudent man is always supported and rewarded by the entire approbation of the impartial spectator, and of the representative of the impartial spectator, the man within the breast’.46 The objects mentioned in the title of ‘The Bracelets’ are ultimately superseded, as indeed is Louisa’s broken mandarin, as being of less import to the narrator than the togetherness of Cecilia, Leonora, and Louisa. Although Edgeworth avoids any religious or idealist underpinnings in her story, there is still a transcendence of sorts in her insistence upon that the temptation to overinvest in objects needs to be resisted in favour of intersubjective relations. Yet the narrator never questions the wisdom of offering the bracelets as prizes. We are told at the outset of the story that Mrs Villars was ‘peculiarly fitted […] for the most difficult, as well as most important of all occupations – the education of youth’.47 No indication is given that her organizing the first competition, and countenancing the second a month later, in any way lowers the narrator’s estimation of her, although the children’s struggles to handle these events may play their part in showing just how ‘difficult’ the process of education is. Another narrative from the first edition of The Parent’s Assistant—‘The Purple Jar’—both corroborates and amplifies the ethics of ‘The Bracelets’. This story has been described as a ‘locus classicus of its kind’, has been much analysed by scholars of children’s literature, and was recently used as one of six paradigmatic examples of children’s literature in Perry Nodelman’s The Hidden Adult.48 In ‘The Purple Jar’, seven-year old Rosamond is accompanying her mother in the streets of London. The young child is overwhelmed by the riches on view in the shops of the capital: ‘“Oh! Mother, how happy I should be,” said she, as she passed a 46  Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Ryan Patrick Hanley (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 253. 47  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 24. 48   Mitzi Myers, ‘Socializing Rosamond: Educational Ideology and Fictional Form’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 14:2 (1989), p.  52; Perry Nodelman, The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 1–81.

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toy-­shop, “if I had all these pretty things!”’49 Soon she is nagging her mother about every object they come across, the one more brilliant and enticing than the other. In an understated articulation of Edgeworth’s proto-utilitarianism, which might also be compared with the later demystification by Karl Marx (1818–83) of how exchange value obfuscates use value, the mother’s constant response is that she doesn’t have any use for any of these objects. Pretty roses, baubles in a jeweller’s shop, a buckle, sundry colourful objects in a chemist’s shop: all of these are equally desired by little Rosamond, and all are treated with equal indifference by her mother. This is also a financial matter for the mother: ‘I have not money, enough to buy shoes and flower-pots, and buckles, and boxes, and every thing’.50 Finally she gives her daughter a choice: they can buy Rosamond new shoes—which she evidently needs, as the ones she is wearing are falling apart—or they can buy a pretty, purple vase. The mother stresses that this will be Rosamond’s own choice, and that she should deliberate wisely and inspect the objects in question closely. In the end, Rosamond is taught a lesson: in a variation on the ‘broken object’ motif, the pretty purple vase she chooses turns out to be ‘a plain white glass jar, which had appeared to have that beautiful colour, merely from the liquor with which it had been filled’.51 Hobbling around in worn shoes, Rosamond learns her lesson and declares that she will be wiser the next time. At first glance, ‘The Purple Jar’ is a rather transparent tale prompting children to improve and cultivate their own judgement. Merely pretty, transitory appearances are contrasted with the depth value of use over time. At the same time, the tale is also informed by the scepticism concerning imagination that we encountered in the preface to The Parent’s Assistant. Imprudently wallowing in the aesthetic spectacle of the objects at hand in the shopping streets of London, Rosamond luxuriates in a kind of aesthetic free play of the imagination. The mother figure in Edgeworth’s story denounces her daughter’s choice, pointing out that a thorough examination of the object would have revealed its short-sightedness. The narrator further rubs things in, adding that ‘many were the difficulties and distresses into which her imprudent choice brought her, before the end of the month’.52 This moral checking of the imagination stands in contrast to  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 6.  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 8. 51  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 10. 52  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 11. 49 50

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key Romantic celebrations of the same faculty. As critics in recent decades have traced connections between postmodernism and unfettered global capitalism, one can see in Edgeworth’s little tale an implicit suggestion that the limitless Romantic imagination might be more closely attuned to the hoarding instincts of bourgeois capitalism, revelling in objects loosened from any obvious use-value, than it appears to be at first sight. Additionally, she seems to suggest—as in “The Bracelets”—that this limitless desire has something jejune about it, which requires the regulation of reason. So far, we have only addressed Maria Edgeworth’s fiction for children. Mitzi Myers has however suggested that Edgeworth is most productively conceived of as a ‘cross-writer’ who ‘negotiates numerous borders— national, historical, and generic, as well as generational’.53 For Myers, keeping the adult work of Edgeworth separate from her production for children is misguided: ‘rather than bracketing Edgeworth’s children’s stories from her adult tales […], more adequate accounts of Edgeworth’s family romances and scenes of instruction need to mix tales for juveniles and adults’.54 Following this suggestion, we can see in Edgeworth’s novel Belinda (1801) a productive elaboration of her interpretation of character-­ formation at this stage of her career. Anticipating Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, and other of Jane Austen’s protagonists, the title character of the novel navigates a series of obstacles before achieving a fulfilling marriage. The novel defends rationality against an unhinged and one-sided cultivation of sensibility. This is evident in the treatment of the reformation of Belinda Portman’s dangerously decadent protector, Lady Delacour, and also in Belinda’s ultimate rejection of an unfitting suitor, Mr Vincent. The latter’s persistence ‘in his disdain of reason as a moral guide’ shows him thinking, acting, and suffering as a hapless parody of the ‘man of feeling’.55 Belinda’s successful suitor, Clarence Hervey, is not devoid of emotion, but although his feelings are ‘naturally impetuous’, he (unlike Mr Vincent) is able to bring them ‘under the subjection of his reason’.56 Belinda also deals more directly with education, through Hervey’s attempt to fashion the identity of an innocent young orphan girl, by 53  Mitzi Myers, ‘Canonical “Orphans” and Critical Ennui: Rereading Edgeworth’s CrossWriting’, in Children’s Literature, 25 (1997), p. 116. 54  Myers, ‘Canonical “Orphans” and Critical Ennui’, p. 118. 55  Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 424. 56  Edgeworth, Belinda, p. 417.

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having her raised in isolation, to become his wife. Here Maria Edgeworth reworks the real-life story of how her father’s close friend and (at the time) fellow-Rousseauvian, Thomas Day (1748–89), raised two young women as part of a misguided plan to cultivate the perfect wife for himself.57 In Belinda, Hervey renames his young girl of choice (who is originally called Rachel) Virginia, in deference to the sentimental novel Paul et Virginie (1788) by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de St Pierre (1737–1814). Hervey’s projection of the idealized relationship between Paul and Virginia onto his own relations with Rachel/Virginia proves to be hopelessly wide of the mark.58 By the end of the novel, Hervey understands that his deepest affections are reserved for Belinda, and he acknowledges how misguided his whole plan has been: ‘nothing could be more absurd than my scheme of educating a woman in solitude, to make her fit for society’.59 This realization echoes the consistent criticism by the Edgeworths of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1712–78) desire that Emile, the titular character from Rousseau’s seminal treatise on education, should know ‘no human being other than himself alone’ while he is being educated.60 This is yet another issue in which the Edgeworths concur with Adam Smith, who insisted that a hypothetical individual growing up in ‘some solitary place, without any communication with his own species’, would have no sense of morality.61 As long as it builds upon a base of harmonious domesticity, society rather than nature is the true cradle of character. The misguided scheme to educate Virginia has consequences. Virginia herself worries about her relationship to her benefactor: how will Hervey react, she ponders, if he discovers that her feelings for him are devoid of passion? She believes that Hervey wants to marry her, and has promised to comply with his wishes: ‘only let me always know your wishes, your sentiments, your feelings, and by them I will, as I ought, regulate mine’.62 57  For recent accounts of Day’s scheme, see Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future, 1730–1810 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), pp.  181–93; and Rachel Hewitt, A Revolution in Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind (London: Granta, 2017), pp. 113–27. 58  For a reading of Edgeworth’s allusion to Paul et Virginie, see Jeanne M.  Britton, ‘Theorizing Character in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda’, in Nineteenth-Century Literature, 67/4 (2013), pp. 433–56. 59  Edgeworth, Belinda, p. 472. 60  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or, On Education, transl. Allan Bloom (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 187. 61  Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 133. 62  Edgeworth, Belinda, p. 401.

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Interestingly Virginia’s protector, Mrs Ormond, immediately points out the flimsy basis for this commitment: ‘Wishes, and feelings, and sentiments, are not to be so easily regulated’.63 In a novel that generally insists upon the forms of rationality and prudence often neglected by a modish overemphasis on sensibility, this is an important correction, and one which reveals something of the complexity of Edgeworth’s blurring of the boundaries between established Enlightenment and emerging Romantic configurations of infancy and infant education. It turns out Virginia is not mature enough to give Mrs Ormond’s observation its due weight. In vaguely proto-Freudian fashion, the young woman’s desires surface in her dreams, one of which features her murdering Hervey in order to marry another suitor. Her worries are amplified when her father, Mr Hartley, enters the plot at a late stage. For the latter, there is no doubt that Virginia owes Hervey a debt that is so colossal, that it even obliges her to love him: Mr Hartley protests ‘that he should look upon her as a monster, if she did not love him’.64 Tellingly, Virginia responds in similar terms, when Mr Hartley puts her on the spot, asking her if she will refuse her suitor: ‘Refuse him! do you think that I could refuse him anything, who has given me every thing? I should be a monster indeed! There is no sacrifice I would not make, no exertion of which I am not capable, for Mr Hervey’s sake’.65 The repeated trope of monstrosity is obviously an instance of hyperbole, yet no less striking for occurring in a novel that takes care not to shock or offend its middle-class readers. While several scholars have tended to see a satirical depiction of the feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) in the novel’s scathing depiction of the character Harriet Freke,66 the surfacing of this latent Gothicism brings out a tacit connection between Belinda and the most famous work of Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley (1797–1851). Among the numerous interpretations of Frankenstein (1818), many highlight the centrality of the education of Frankenstein’s creature in the cottage of the De Lacey family. Frankenstein is not only an instance of proto-science fiction, but also a cautionary tale about the monstrosity of an educational experiment gone  Edgeworth, Belinda, p. 401.  Edgeworth, Belinda, p. 407. 65  Edgeworth, Belinda, p. 414. 66   See for instance Deborah Weiss, ‘The Extraordinary Ordinary Belinda: Maria Edgeworth’s Female Philosopher’, in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 19/4 (2007), pp. 441–61. 63 64

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wrong. Even if all its plotlines issue in suitably sanguine conclusions at the end, Belinda is shadowed by a similar fear. The theme of educational experiment is a recurring one in Edgeworth’s writings. Practical Education makes much of the burgeoning science of education, duly allotting the necessary use of experimentation a key role. Thorough observation, we are told, is crucial: ‘in early education nothing must be thought beneath our attention’.67 Keenly watching the child from a distance that does not preclude sympathy—this is no cold-hearted ideal of objectivity—as the adult caregiver must in many ways embody the idealized figure of Adam Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’.68 Parents must, however, do more than merely watch and observe: they must also control the environment of their children. This becomes particularly evident in the chapter of Practical Education which is devoted to books: Falsehood, caprice, dishonesty, obstinacy, revenge, and all the train of vices which are the consequences of mistaken or neglected education, which are learned by bad example, and which are not inspired by nature, need scarcely be known to children whose minds have from their infancy been happily regulated. Such children should sedulously be kept from contagion; their minds are untainted; they are safe in that species of ignorance, which alone can deserve the name of bliss. No books should be put into the hands of this happy class of children, but such as present the best models of virtue.69

The stress on purity, isolation, and strict regulation is very much in line with the scheme underlying Virginia’s upbringing in Belinda. Her mother has kept her ‘away from the world’, and Hervey is the first man whom she ever meets.70 When Belinda’s mother dies, Hervey believes that her naïve and untainted heart can be cultivated under his watchful eye, with a view to making her the ideal wife for him when she has grown up. Although it does not involve the same extremes of secrecy and isolation, the basic idea underlying the Edgeworths’ educational philosophy is closely related. For Maria Edgeworth and her father, restricting children’s access to bad exemplars stretched far beyond the avoidance of nefarious literary heroes, as the children must also be protected from the interference of strangers. Practical Education argues that the ideal environment for growing up is a  Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, p. 84.  Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 101. 69  Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, p. 186. 70  Edgeworth, Belinda, p. 366. 67 68

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limited sphere of domesticity, where even relations with servants must be carefully monitored and limited: not only do children risk becoming “capricious and tyrannical” from their relations with servants, but they are also in danger of imitating their turns of speech, mannerisms, and habits.71 All things considered, more ‘failures in private education have been occasioned by the interference of servants and acquaintance, than from any other cause’.72 Children’s education requires the construction of a stringently isolated milieu, watched over with minute attentiveness. What goes on in this artificially designed space is akin to scientific experiment. Practical Education makes evident not only the children’s exposure to experiments developed by the natural sciences, but also the relevance of such examples to the very process of education. In the preface, the Edgeworths state that, although there is a long way to go, the long-term goal must be to convert ‘the art of education’ into an ‘experimental science’.73 The final section of this chapter on books states the authors’ conviction that ‘the art of education is best improved by the registering of early experiments’, and proceeds to list their own experiences with controlled exposure of their children to chosen instances of literature. James Chandler has shown how the ideals propounded in Practical Education derive from Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s membership of the Lunar Society. This Birmingham-based society of intellectuals was active from the mid-1760s until the 1780s.74 In addition to Edgeworth, it counted among its members such luminaries as Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), James Watt (1736–1819), and Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95).75 According to Chandler, the underlying method of the Society was a form of scientific experiment practiced across what only later would develop into separate disciplines with rationales of their own. At this point in history, the natural sciences were not isolated from literature, and Chandler traces in Belinda a ‘Lunar-like interdisciplinary commitment

 Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, p. 78.  Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, p. 398. 73  Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, p. 5. 74  For a thorough history of this group, see Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men (London: Faber and Faber, 2013). 75  For an examination of the engagement with infancy and experimentation in a selection of the work of Lunar Circle members, see Lisa Ann Robertson’s chapter in this volume, pp. 203–227. 71 72

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to experiment and practical observation’.76 He also suggests that this commitment informed the application of an experimental form in Maria Edgeworth’s novels. Such a form can, however, also be found in her tales for children. As Susan Manly has observed, Maria Edgeworth’s educational writings have as their foundation an ‘experimental approach to children’s learning’.77 The preface to The Parent’s Assistant makes the implicit common ground clear, pointing out the ‘grand difficulty’ of ascertaining ‘facts’ that will help develop ‘the science of education’.78 Although parents’ partiality towards their own children is admitted to be a potential problem, nevertheless they are encouraged to keep records of their experiments. Irrespective of the difficulties involved, ‘the objects of every experiment are so interesting that we cannot hold our minds indifferent to the result’.79 The preface goes on to suggest that the Edgeworths’ own ‘experiments’ are closely related to Maria Edgeworth’s fiction: ‘these notes have been of great advantage to the writer of the following stories’.80 One of the later stories added to the third, expanded edition of The Parent’s Assistant, ‘Waste Not, Want Not; or Two Strings to Your Bow’, shows experimental ideas brought into the content of Edgeworth’s fiction. As the title indicates, this tale celebrates the virtue of thrift. It does so, however, by way of a narrative frame of a rather unusual kind. Retiring after a successful career as a merchant, the wealthy Mr Gresham decides to start a new family through adoption: ‘He was fond of children, and as he had no sons, he determined to adopt one of his relations. He had two nephews, and he invited both of them to his house, that he might have an opportunity of judging of their dispositions, and of the habits which they had acquired’.81 From this beginning, the story focuses on the contest between Gresham’s two nephews, the ten-year old boys Hal and Benjamin. A clear contrast is established from the very beginning: Hal has grown up with a spendthrift father and has developed a sense of superiority in the 76  James Chandler, ‘Edgeworth and the Lunar Enlightenment’, in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 45/1 (Fall 2011), p. 94. 77  Susan Manly, ‘Introduction’, in Maria Edgeworth, Selected Tales for Children and Young People, ed. Susan Manly (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. xii. 78  Edgeworth, ‘Preface’, p. 2. 79  Edgeworth, ‘Preface’, p. 2. 80  Edgeworth, ‘Preface’, p. 2. 81  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 74.

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company of servants, while Benjamin’s father—being of more modest means—has instilled in his son ‘habits of care and foresight’.82 Through a series of episodes, the superior wisdom of Benjamin’s approach is demonstrated for the reader. Narrative continuity between these episodes is provided by a series of objects rather than by the plot. At the beginning of the tale, the boys are given parcels tied up with a whip-­ cord: while Benjamin carefully preserves the cord, Hal cuts his. Soon they are given spinning tops, without string, and thus Hal must use his hat-­ band since he does not have a whip-cord handy. Later he will regret the looseness of his hat. As in ‘The Bracelets’, the motif of the broken object presents the fulcrum for an ethical challenge to the protagonist. Mr Gresham plays a markedly withdrawn role in the narrative. Although his motivation is never spelled out directly, he evidently does not want to affect the unfolding of his experiment. His interventions are restricted to making minor comments, such as telling Ben never to be ‘ashamed of being good-natured to those who are younger and weaker than yourself’ or making a frustrated exclamation at signs of frippery.83 But although these are tell-tale signs to the reader of where Gresham’s sympathies lie, the boys are encouraged throughout to think and judge for themselves. There are, he insists, some things ‘that young people must learn from experience’.84 In this respect, he echoes one of the lessons of Practical Education, where we are told that the: danger of doing too much in education is greater even than the danger of doing too little. As the merchants in France answered to Colbert, when he desired to know ‘how he could best assist them’, children might perhaps reply to those who are most officious to amuse then, ‘Leave us to ourselves’.85

Hal does indeed learn his lesson in ‘Waste Not, Want Not’. About two-­ thirds into the story, the narrator lets slip that he ‘was really a  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 74.  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 78. 84  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 82. 85  Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, p.  30. During his tenure as French minister of finance between 1665 and 1683, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) tried to encourage the development of commerce. 82 83

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good-­natured boy, though extravagant’, and in the end he is both helped by Benjamin and enjoys the latter’s success in winning the archery competition.86 Somewhat mysteriously, though, the crucial competition underlying the whole story—whereby Gresham is going to decide which of the boys to adopt—is not mentioned at all at the conclusion. One might ascribe this to the fact that it has been evident to the reader, from the very beginning, that Benjamin is the most fitting heir to his uncle. On the other hand, there is a sense that Hal has been put through sufficient disappointment through the story, without spelling out his failure in a final decision. In such a reading, Edgeworth is here softening the severity of her story, recoiling somewhat from the stark consequences of its central plot premise. While the implicit monstrosity of Hervey’s experiment was acknowledged in Belinda, a tacit uneasiness about artificial experimentation with young lives is more subtly present in ‘Waste Not, Want Not’.87

Conclusion This chapter has examined Edgeworth’s educational stances in her tales for children, in her novel Belinda, and in her treatise Practical Education. I have examined her engagement with nascent, Romantic ideas about infancy and infant education, as well as her ambivalent negotiation of the cultural heritage of the Age of Sensibility. Edgeworth’s educational project, I have argued, exemplifies the extent to which the cultures of infancy which are the object of study in this volume range across not only the boundaries of literary genre but also across what would today be seen as the disciplinary boundaries between educational theory and praxis, fiction, and the natural sciences. Writing during a transitional period, Edgeworth’s writings for and about children represent a significant contribution that is all the more interesting because of how those writings effectively negotiate between a diversity of intellectual and historical currents. Although very much informed by the examples of preceding eighteenth-century figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, and Adam Smith,  Edgeworth, Selected Tales, p. 91.  As noted above, in her chapter in the present volume, Lisa Ann Robertson examines rhetorical and hypothetical experimentation with infants in the writings of some of Birmingham’s Lunar Circle. 86 87

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Edgeworth’s contribution also partakes in the development of a Romantic pedagogy and configuration of infancy. Challenged by broken objects and struggling for sympathetic recognition and insight, the children of her criticism and fiction remain to tell the tale of a literary experiment that is of continued relevance.

CHAPTER 8

‘Advice […] by one as insignificant as a MOUSE’: Human and Non-human Infancy in Eighteenth-Century Moral Animal Tales Anja Höing

Introduction The late eighteenth-century belief that childhood experience was a main factor in constituting adult identity sparked an exceptionally productive genre of moral tales for children that were basically conduct books disguised as fiction. In some of these moral tales, one can observe a special narrative technique: they are narrated not by a potentially patronising adult human, but from the point of view of an animal, or focalised through the eyes of an animal. Stories such as Dorothy Kilner’s (1755–1836) Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1783) or Sarah Trimmer’s (1741–1810) Fabulous Histories Designed for the Instruction of Children, Respecting their Treatment of Animals (1798), also known as ‘The History of the Robins’, feature talking animal characters who observe human (especially children’s) behaviour and reflect upon it. Roderick McGillis has recently

A. Höing (*) University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Domines Veliki, C. Duffy (eds.), Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8_8

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argued that Kilner’s ‘importance […] in the discourse of the Romantic child’ comes, in part, from her ‘grasp of the duality of this child’ as both ‘beautiful, natural and pure as well as stubborn and irrational’.1 In a complementary reading, I will argue here that moral animal stories like Kilner’s and Trimmer’s often work on a double trope of infancy based on an ontological closeness between child and animal. Both the child and the animal are constructed as being in a state of infancy defined by an absence of human reason. The moral animal tale uses the animal protagonist’s ineradicable infancy as a mirror to the child’s transient state of infancy. The implied child reader is held, in turn, to both identify with and ultimately to overcome the animal protagonist and its pre-cultural essence in order to develop into a functional member of society. In her recent exploration of why ‘British children’s literature of the eighteenth-century featured nonhuman animals and animal stories so extensively’, Ann Wierda Rowland focuses on how scenes of reading and literacy in such stories engage with a wider, contemporary concern to delimit the boundaries of the human: ‘what is at stake’, she argues, ‘in scenes of children learning to read is not only what makes us human, but how we understand the child in relationship to this interiorized humanity’.2 In this chapter, I will look again at how moral animal stories seek to define the boundary between the animal and the human. In their representation of human infancy, such tales, I suggest, in fact often blur that boundary, suggesting that it was less clearly defined, at the time, than one might think. Equally, the liminal configuration of human infancy in these stories tends to question the argument often made by historians of childhood for a clear cut distinction between the stadial model of the relationship between infant experience and adult identity developed by Enlightenment thinkers and the more genetic configuration of that relationship traditionally favoured by Romanticism. While Kilner’s story is exclusively told by a mouse narrator (except for the frame narration, in which the mouse induces a human woman to write down its story), Trimmer’s narration jumps between two narrative strands, one set in a human, the other in a robin family, whose lives intertwine. 1  Roderick McGillis, ‘Irony and Performance: The Romantic Child’, in Adrienne Gavin (ed.), The Child in British Literature (London: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 101–15 (114, 105). 2  Ann Wierda Rowland, ‘Learned Pigs and Literate Children: Becoming Human in Eighteenth-Century Literary Cultures’, in Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, ed. Andrew O’Malley (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp.  99–115 (101, 103, 113).

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Narrative voice remains firmly in human hands throughout, but one of the two strands is focalised through the birds. The animal characters mainly have a metaphorical function, as their lives and experiences provide allegorical comments on the implied reader’s own human life. However, there also is a metonymical dimension to such representations of animals: as Cosslett points out, ‘however anthropomorphised, these eighteenth-­ century children’s talking animals are not just metaphorical or allegorical, but convey lessons about animals in the real world’.3 These two dimensions create a tension not unusual to literary representations of animals that often work on what Fudge calls a ‘paradox of […] same and different’ which simultaneously destabilises and reinforces the human-animal border.4 In the eighteenth century, this border was generally perceived as stable, divinely ordained and clearly hierarchical, as Trimmer frequently highlights in her Fabulous Histories.5 Still, the mere existence of a genre of talking animal stories for children shows that the border was ambiguous and semi-permeable even at Trimmer’s time, and, as I will show, the position of children forms the heart of this ambiguity. After having long been dismissed as trivial, and therefore neglected by scholars, moral animal tales have recently begun to draw scholarly interest, especially regarding the question of how they navigate the sameness/ difference-­paradox and the human-animal border. Sarah Trimmer in particular has come to be regarded as one of the most central woman writers of children’s literature in the Romantic period and has been described as ‘the most important individual influence on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British children’s literature’.6 The most conclusive study of Trimmer’s animal stories has been conducted by Tess Cosslett, who discusses the Fabulous Histories as a ‘rich and sometimes contradictory mixture of the animal and the human, the moral and the scientific, the fantastic and the instructional’.7 A 2010 article by Jane Spencer approaches the topic from another direction. Focussing on the 3  Tess Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786-1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 39. 4  Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2002), p. 7. 5  Cosslett, Talking Animals, 41. 6  David Rudd, The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature (London, New  York: Routledge, 2010), p. 237; M. O. Grenby, ‘“A Conservative Woman Doing Radical Things”: Sarah Trimmer and The Guardian of Education’, in Culturing the Child, 1690–1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers, ed. Donelle Ruwe (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2005), p. 137. 7  Cosslett, Talking Animals, 49.

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metonymical dimension of the animal protagonists and thus on ‘literal [rather than metaphorical] meanings’ underlying moral animal stories, Spencer claims that writings such as Trimmer’s and Kilner’s ‘played a role in the period’s re-thinking of animal-human relations’.8 This is because the moral animal tales, while still highlighting human superiority and a clear-cut human-animal border, also use narrative techniques that ease an emotional connection and accordingly identification with non-human animals. As noted, Rowland has recently drawn attention to the role of reading and literacy in demarcating the boundaries of the human in these stories. My focus, once again, will be on the liminality of human infancy as represented in animal moral tales and on how this liminality complicates our understanding of the relationship between Enlightenment and Romantic configurations of infancy. In linking the infant child with the animal, one can see at work a trope that not only defined the Romantic imagining of animals but which continues to influence ours today: the idea of the animal as tied to a ‘receding past’.9 In an essay that by now is (in)famous for its romanticised view of historical human-animal relations, John Berger states his belief that in pre-­ industrial times there was a genuine, more closer tie between humans and animals that was later disrupted by mid-nineteenth-century capitalism and industrialisation, that is after the publication of the texts with which I am concerned here.10 Berger argues that any form of reading animals in the typical post-nineteenth-century anthropocentric stance ‘is to project a 19th century attitude backwards across the millennia’.11 Although Berger’s view of a past conjunction of human and animal is certainly coloured by a form of eco-nostalgia, it is important to keep his ideas in mind. Even if the historical accuracy of these ideas is questionable, Berger’s reading of the past mirrors a common perception of the animal-human bond in the twentieth century, which certainly also spills over into the twenty-first: a nostalgic view of animals which conjures up a (imaginary) past time of connectedness in the face of a perceived disconnectedness of the present. 8  Jane Spencer, ‘Creating Animal Experience in Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33/4 (2010), pp. 469–86 (470, 472). 9  John Berger, About Looking (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1980), p. 10. 10  Berger, About Looking, p. 2. Berger himself concedes that ‘nostalgia towards animals was an 18th century invention’, thus placing the nostalgia for the thing lost before the moment he pinpoints as the one at which the loss allegedly occurred. See About Looking, p. 10. 11  Berger, About Looking, p. 2.

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In this essay, I argue that much the same conception is already at work in eighteenth-century moral animal tales. These animal tales, however, look into a different kind of past. Instead of equating the animal with historical cultures, they connect animals to an ontogenetic past: the period of childhood to which the adult author of a moral animal tale looks back from a position of both perceived adult superiority and perceived loss.12 The animal represents the human before reason, before civilisation and, crucially, before Christianity. As I will demonstrate, the appearance of the animal in literature echoes an underlying narrative of a pre-cultural human essence which was perceived as surfacing in childhood and which both fascinated and disturbed the eighteenth-century imagination. Moral animal tales both acknowledge and explore this genetic connection, while simultaneously extolling its dangers and advertising an alternative stadial model of infancy that includes the need for the human child to overcome its connection with the animal as the prerequisite for a full initiation into society.

Conceptualising ‘Animal’ Aspects of Human Infancy In order to explore this connection in depth, it is necessary first to reflect on the conceptual frameworks that governed the perceived connection between children and animals, or children and nature in general. As Dobrin and Kidd say of contemporary literature, literary representations generally reflect a ‘twofold’ understanding of this relationship.13 They refer to two concepts of the child. The first is a view of the child deriving from the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) as ‘in a state of nature’ and, therefore, ‘innocent and/or virtuous’.14 The second is a model of infancy deriving from John Locke (1632–1704), who saw the child as a ‘blank slate’ or ‘empty vessel’.15 Although Dobrin and Kidd discuss 12  Equating the animal with historic cultures is a frequent device in late twentieth-century talking animal stories, such as Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972). In Adams’s rabbit story, the narrator directly compares the animal protagonists to primitive humans. Richard Adams, Watership Down (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 169. 13  Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd, ‘Introduction: Into the Wild’, in Wild Things. Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism, ed. Sidney I.  Dobrin and Kenneth B.  Kidd (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), p. 5. 14  Dobrin and Kidd, ‘Into the Wild’, p. 5. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia: or, a New System of Education (Dublin, 1779), p. 103. 15  Dobrin and Kidd, ‘Into the Wild’, p. 6.

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c­ontemporary literature, the two models of infancy which they discern certainly also interplay in Romantic cultures of infancy. With regard to the Romantic period, these two models can roughly be aligned with genetic and stadial understandings of the relationship between infant experience and adult identity. The idea of childhood innocence, in particular, is central to the notion of human infancy in many writings of the Romantic period. Childhood innocence is not of course an invention of the Romantics and can be traced further back in English literature, at least to the Renaissance where it is strongly evident in the work of William Shakespeare (1564–1616).16 Yet the Romantic period was certainly when it came to prominence in literature, especially in poetry, inspiring authors such as William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and William Blake (1757–1827). The concept of childhood innocence is closely interwoven with a perceived ontological closeness between the child and nature, since, as Rousseau puts, the condition of the child is the ‘natural’ one, that is a genetic one true to human essence, while ‘prejudice and custom’—in short, the products of culture—have altered the dispositions of adults.17 Rousseau’s model is prevalent in Romantic poetry and, since this poetry dominates the traditional canon of Romantic literature, also governs our twenty-first century perceptions of Romantic concepts of childhood.18 Yet, the central importance of educational treatises and conduct books for children shows that a Lockean perspective accentuating the Enlightenment ideal of progress and the related necessity to gain knowledge was by no means absent from eighteenth-century and romantic-­ period conceptions of childhood and may even have dominated everyday perceptions of children. A simple reason for this is perhaps that while Rousseau’s ideas were still novel to the Romantic imagination, Émile having been published as recently as in 1762, John Locke’s had been around for about a century: Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education was published in 1693. While Rousseau’s writing strongly influenced the educated classes and poets in particular and thus shaped abstract, poetic concepts of childhood, his ideas were probably slower to take root among 16  Thomas Kullmann, ‘Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale and the Myth of Childhood Innocence’, Poetica 46, 3/4 (2014), pp. 317–330 (329). 17  Rousseau, Emilius, p. 103. 18  Dobrin and Kidd, ‘Into the Wild’, p. 6.; Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. xv.

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more conservative groups, such as the female writers producing conduct books for children. In both Trimmer’s and Kilner’s works, for example, the Lockean influence is clearly dominant, as this essay will show. Nonetheless, I would argue that it is virtually impossible to read any publication of the era as confirming entirely either to Locke’s or to Rousseau’s conception of the child, or as entirely genetic or stadial, but that different conceptions of infancy mingle, and sometimes, regardless of their conflicting nature, even fuse. Trimmer’s writing may serve as an example here. As Coats argues, the Lockean view of the child is closely tied to ‘the increased emphasis on rationality and empiricism during the European Enlightenment [which] denigrated imagination and emotion as ways of knowing’.19 Authors such as Trimmer, Coats argues, ‘followed the Lockean injection to keep children away from fantastic tales of supernatural creatures in order to ensure that their growth in rational judgement would be unperturbed by irrational fears of and wishes for things that didn’t exist under a rationalist or empiricist paradigm’.20 This claim is certainly true for Trimmer’s periodical, The Guardian of Education, which is the centre of Coats’s argument, yet Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories lends itself less well to being placed exclusively in the Lockean paradigm. Although in the Prologue Trimmer emphasises that her robin family is metaphorical, while real robins do not talk, there is a touch of the fantastic to the ‘fabulous’ animal world she creates.21 One can easily imagine her cute talking birds sparking a wish in the child reader for talking robins to appear in real life and Trimmer even openly acknowledges that such a wish, expressed by her own children, made her write the story in the first place.22 Discussing this matter in a slightly embarrassed undertone, she also distinctly refers to ‘the force of imagination’ which underlies her tale and thus forms the basis of all its morals.23 Cosslett also remarks on this contradictory element of fantasy in an age of rationalism, asking in her chapter on Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories: ‘How and why does anyone write stories about talking animals

19  Karen Coats, ‘Fantasy’, in The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, ed. David Rudd (London, New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 78. 20  Coats, ‘Fantasy’, pp. 78–9. 21  Sarah Trimmer, Fabulous Histories Designed for the Instruction of Children, Respecting their Treatment of Animals (London, 1798), pp. vii, ii. 22  Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. vii. 23  Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. vii.

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for children in an age of Enlightenment and Reason?’24 Even Trimmer, the ‘self-appointed guardian of children’s literature’, thus walked a borderline borrowing from both concepts and did not dogmatically adhere to the ‘opposition to fantasy’ Rudd describes as the ‘female [view] of English Romanticism’.25 Although Trimmer’s didactic aims might be primarily Lockean, and thus in accordance with Rudd’s claim, the narrative mode which she applies is most certainly not. Trimmer’s writings, one might argue, seek to advertise a Lockean conception of infancy and especially the rationality inherent to this perspective, but she also—perhaps unintentionally, perhaps deliberately—bases her overtly Lockean argument on a covert background of Rousseau’s ideas about the natural essence of the child. The conflict created by a combination of Rousseau’s and Locke’s models of childhood in literary representations of children becomes visible when it comes to connecting literary child and animal. Rousseau’s ‘child as nature […] embodied’ conceptually puts the child in an ontological closeness to the animal, which like the child, is, in its essence, natural.26 Cosslett too notes this conjunction, stating that ‘the nearer the child is to the animal, the less corrupt he is’.27 Accordingly, from this viewpoint, ‘the motif of the animal, which even as an adult can still be rendered as being in a “state of nature” lends itself particularly well to being paralleled with the Romantic child’.28 Hence it is not surprising that, as Baker states, it has become the standard critical modus operandi to read talking animal characters as metaphors for ‘childhood innocence’.29 Locke, in contrast to Rousseau, defines the child through absences— absence of reason, absence of experience and so on—and, in consequence, absence of any form of immediately obvious closeness to animals. Here, closeness to animals comes into being through a shared negative. Both groups are connected through a lack of faculties that define the (adult) human, although Locke repeatedly emphasises that the absence of these faculties in the child is only a transient state—if, that is, the child is

 Cosslett, Talking Animals, 37.  Coats, ‘Fantasy’, p. 79; Rudd, Companion to Children’s Literature, p. 237. 26  Dobrin and Kidd, ‘Into the Wild’, p. 6. 27  Cosslett, Talking Animals, p. 19. 28  Anja Höing, Reading Divine Nature: Religion and Nature in English Animal Stories (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2017), p. 96. 29  Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast (Urbana: Illinois Paperback, 2001), p. 136. 24 25

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educated correctly.30 Central to these faculties is the one that is not only most important to Locke’s understanding of the human, but also to traditional philosophical attempts to define the human-animal border. In the theory of the human mind developed by René Descartes (1596–1650), which still dominates discussions on the human-animal border today, the French Enlightenment philosopher (in)famously describes animals as ‘machine[s]’ which are defined by their ‘lack of reason, thoughts, consciousness, and souls’.31 Being exempted from (adult) reason like the animal, the child thus moves into a position of ontological closeness with the animal even when regarded not from the point of view of Rousseau but from that of Locke. Yet while Rousseau’s ‘state of nature’ has many positive aspects, Locke’s pre-rationality is a sign of deficiency only.32 In Locke’s framework the position of the animal in its connection with the child is thus notably different and far more compromised. In Locke’s concept of the child there is a void instead of reason, the famous ‘blank slate’ that Locke urges parents and governors to inscribe with a reason which the child ‘cannot but have a reverence for’.33 As O’Malley argues, this categorisation of the child ‘as subject in need of reason’ also marks the child as ‘other’, a position which it shares with the animal.34 In Rousseau’s natural child, something else takes the place of the void waiting to be filled with reason: a kind of instinctive closeness to the non-human world, or what Clark calls ‘an unalienated union of mind and nature’.35 I will refer to this using the term ‘instinct’, a concept inseparably tied to non-human animals and thus highlighting their shared ground with the Romantic child. In Rousseau’s model of childhood, the child’s instinct is a positive force which, for example, contains an intrinsic virtuousness.36 In other words the guidance of instinct is the root of childhood 30  John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. John W. and Jean S.  Yolton. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 105. 31  René Descartes, Discourse on the Method and the Mediations (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p.  73; Lori Gruen, Ethics and Animals  – An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 3. 32  Rousseau, Emilius, p. 103. 33  Dobrin and Kidd, ‘Into the Wild’, p. 6; Locke, Some Thoughts, 138. 34  Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child (London, New  York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 11–12. 35  Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 22. 36  Dobrin and Kidd, ‘Into the Wild’, p. 5.

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innocence.37 It places childhood in a temporal frame prior to the Fall of Man from Rousseau’s ‘state of nature’ into human civilisation with all its pitfalls, and, in Rousseau’s view, degenerations of essential humanity.38 In this latter, Romantic perception of the instinctive child, the child, prior to reason, is innocent in two ways: temporally placed before the Fall of Man, it is guiltless: original sin has not yet affected it. But it is also inexperienced, having not yet committed mistakes that allow the child to gain experience by learning from them. In the Biblical story, eating of the tree of knowledge is what first allows humans to see the difference between good and evil. Accordingly, a child conceptually placed before this act cannot yet know the difference, and, as a result, its very innocence renders it vulnerable to temptation. The child’s instinct, in short, does not necessarily have to be a good force: it might just as easily point into the wrong direction. Innocence thus goes hand in hand with naivety and gullibility. This in turn places Rousseau’s child in a position similar to Locke’s as an ‘empty vessel’ that can as easily be filled with sin as with virtue.39 From Locke’s perspective, the same paradigm is explained as an expression of unbridled animal ‘passions’ which need to be subdued by human reason.40 The instinct of Locke’s child does not have a pre-Babel-quality, reflecting a pre-cultural, Arcadian vision of human (or even inter-species) unity, but rather a feral one, that constantly threatens the cultural order of society. The same is true for the innocence based on this instinct: standing in sharp separation from both Humanist rationalism and Christian morality, this innocence might induce children to overlook moral pitfalls and thus prove more dangerous than useful. A host of conduct books published during the eighteenth century aimed at channelling the child’s process of gaining experience in directions ideologically sanctioned as ‘virtuous’. Only few of these conduct books use an animal narrator or talking animal characters acting as focalisers as medium, but these few deserve special attention. Due to the curious and 37  Later animal stories, from Victorian and Edwardian Britain, would see this child/instinct connection exaggerated into an almost exclusively Rousseauvian representation of children and animals. These stories, such as William Gordon Stables’s (1840–1910) Sable and White (1893) or Richard Jefferies’s (1848–87) Wood Magic (1881), represent the child’s ‘animal instinct’ as universally good and also introduce a universal language allowing human infants to communicate with animals or nature. 38  Rousseau, Emilius, p. 103. 39  Dobrin and Kidd, ‘Into the Wild’, p. 6. 40  Locke, Some Thoughts, p. 172.

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contradictory conceptual positioning of infancy discussed above, these stories can employ connections between children and animals in manifold dimensions. Most notably, they can either stress similarities between animal and infant, thus enhancing the child-adult border, or stress the need for the child to overcome any connection to the animal, thus enhancing the human-animal border. Whenever the stories seek to enhance one of these borders, the other one proves to be permeable.

Synanthropic Creatures The linking of children and animals in order to enhance the child-adult border becomes especially conspicuous when one takes into account the kinds of animal species which most often feature in moral animal tales of the eighteenth century. This set of protagonist species differs profoundly from the one that makes up the characters of talking animal stories of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In animal stories of our own times, the animal protagonists tend to be wild and resourceful, and sometimes even dangerous, notably including wolves and cats, two species infamous for their independence in the face of human attempts to tame them and both shrouded in an air of mystery. The authors of eighteenth century moral animal tales, instead, in Coats’s words, ‘emphasized the canny, that is, the homelike and familiar’ and hence, as Spencer puts it, ‘in the last two decades of the [eighteenth] century, familiar domestic and work animals, and small wild animals and birds, featured increasingly as fictional protagonists’.41 Both Kilner’s mice and Trimmer’s robins fit into these categories, and additionally share some further characteristics that render them particularly fitting to be compared to children. First, they are wild animals, but synanthropic species, living in close vicinity to and interacting with humans and their lives. Even though they are not alien to the child readers, their secret lives are unknown to them and thus far more open to fantasy than a story about a domestic dog would have been. The synanthropic state of the animal thus mirrors the state of children, who, like the non-human protagonists, are close to and even somewhat attached to adult (human) culture, but not a full, and certainly not an equal part of it: they are in a synanthropic position themselves. Second, both these animals are small and innocuous, and not at all dangerous to humans. Indeed, both species  Coats, ‘Fantasy’, p. 79; Spencer, ‘Creating Animal Experience’, p. 469.

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were frequently caught in traps in the eighteenth century, mice as they fed on human provisions, and robins to be placed in aviaries. These animals are inconspicuous, apparently insignificant and unable to defend themselves in a threatening situation—like the child readers themselves. In Kilner’s story, the mice cannot survive in the wild. They need houses, storerooms and barns: outside the safety provided by human environments, they face want or even starvation. Similarly, Trimmer’s robins raise their family in an orchard close to a human habitation. The birds can generally care for themselves, but in times of trouble, they need the humans— and the humans are aware of the birds’ dependency and their responsibility towards the robin family.42 This, too, creates a bond between the animals and the child readers who are as dependent on the adults surrounding them as the animals are on the human culture to which they attach themselves. As Cosslett says of Trimmer, moral animal tales thus work on a ‘definition of childhood as a period of helpless dependence’, a state which can be mirrored in the dependency of the continuously threatened and defenceless synanthropic animals.43 Adults in the story repeatedly remind naughty children of this analogy and their own inferior position and dependency on the goodwill of others.44 The animal protagonists even tend to escape death or suffering only because of such goodwill, thus serving as a constant reminder to children that their own lives, too, are in the hands of well-meaning adults, to whom children should thus show strong and unceasing gratitude.45 This, obviously, is not only a shared bond to help the child identify with the animal protagonist, but a lesson in humility and modesty, aimed at teaching the child readers to respect the superiority of their parents just as the animal protagonists respect their own inferior, synanthropic status. Cosslett, however, adds that Trimmer’s use of her specific animal protagonists widens the concept of childhood beyond this focus on dependency, as she also includes in her concept of childhood a definition of ‘childhood as protected space, as the robins are protected in the nest and in the orchard’.46 Again it is, notably, a human space which provides the safety, even for the robin family. When the father robin takes his curious  Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 20.  Cosslett, Talking Animals, p. 45. 44  Cosslett, Talking Animals, pp. 20–1. 45  See Dorothy Kilner, Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (Hamburg: tredition, 2011), p. 44; Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 104. 46  Cosslett, Talking Animals, p. 45. 42 43

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children on an excursion into a nearby forest, the young robins soon come to realise that the apparently ‘charming place’ is a very dangerous realm indeed: within a short period of their arrival, they observe boys stealing nests, a bird catcher, and a hunter shooting a redstart.47 The only place of safety, then, is the domestic space as represented by their orchard home and the kitchen table they visit for crumbs: the space presided over by Mrs. Benson as the ideal mother and unerringly righteous mouthpiece of Trimmer’s educational lessons. Underlying this sharp dualism of danger and protection, exploration and domesticity, wilderness and pastoral spaces, one can not only observe a stark child-adult border that sharply contrasts with the at-times almost imperceptible animal-child border, but also a gendering of both the space of protection for the small animals and the respective protected space of childhood. Safety is only provided in the female sphere of domesticity while, at least as regards human characters, the exclusively male domain of the forest is a place of dangers and trickery in which the young birds cannot survive before having been made acquainted with ‘the dangers of the world’.48 Human childhood, according to the underlying analogy, serves a similar purpose as the orchard for the robins: it shields children from exposure to all the dangers of the adult world until they are ready to face them.49

Growing Out of the Animal Yet, there is a huge conceptual gap between animal narrator and animal characters on the one hand and child reader on the other which all the analogies and similarities employed in the narratives cannot bridge. ‘Childhood’, as Summerfield states, ‘is inherently a state to be grown out of’.50 The implied reader as a pre-school child might still be close to the animal and the pre-rational condition of humanity for which it stands, but the ultimate aim of the moral animal story is to lead the child step by step to overcome the ‘animal’ condition for his or her full initiation into adult  Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, pp. 144, 145, 146.  Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 147. 49  Here, one can see how Trimmer’s and Kilner’s stories stand in direct opposition to the male Romantic writers analysed by Plotz, who ‘practice a kind of forcible repatriation of childhood, a patriarchal kidnapping that wrests children away from the female sphere’ (Plotz, Vocation of Childhood, p. xvi). 50  Geoffrey Summerfield, Fantasy and Reason: Children’s Literature in the Eighteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1984), p. xi. 47 48

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personhood. At one point, the child will have to bridge the child-adult border so laboriously constructed by a host of metaphoric creatures who preach on the differences between adult and child. When an animal represented as eternally set in the state of nature is mirrored to a human child urged to move beyond this state, the child-animal analogy reaches a critical phase. At this point, the eighteenth-century conceptual framework necessitates a break between animal and child. The need for this break can best be explained by harking back to John Berger’s argument. Even with regard to the eighteenth century, Berger sees the position of British culture with regard to animals in terms of ‘nostalgia’: animals are something to look back to, and looking back might be not only the effect of an historical, but also of an educational project.51 The child might be ontologically close to the animal, but for a human, infancy is a transitional state. The animal, in contrast, will remain in its state of ‘infancy’ for its entire life. In a way, the animal is thus represented as frozen at an early period of human development: it is the eternal child over which Adam was granted parental care by God’s command in the Garden of Eden. Approaching this connection between child and animal from the perspective of the animal, one can see how infancy also works as a key trope to distinguish the non-human from the human, that is to enhance the human-animal border, and ultimately to justify human dominance over other animals as a form of parental care. The animal is generally not defined as a slave that needs to be dominated by force to uphold the power structures of the hegemony, but as a creature that needs dominance as a form of protection granted by a being with a superior intellect.52 It is not by chance that in the English language, the word ‘creature’ long used to—and still, in parts does—refer not only to animals but to any other inferior being in need of protection and supervision, for example women and children, or, in colonial literatures, non-Europeans. Moral animal stories not just defining the ‘infant’ as ‘creature’ but also the ‘creature’ as ‘infant’ thus do not simply inferiorise the animal as a casual reading might suggest. Rather, this metaphorical connection is also a form of accepting responsibility for the non-human world, at least for those parts of it whose  Berger, About Looking, p. 10.  Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 115. Arguments based on hegemonic dominance and power struggles do also appear in the stories, however: Trimmer, for example, visibly struggles to justify human meat consumption and finally presents the argument that ‘we must eat animals, or they would at length eat us, at least all that would otherwise support us’ (p. 57). 51 52

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lives intersect with and have been visibly altered by human civilisation. The importance both authors attach to this can easily be gathered by the frequency and prominent positioning of their fervent outcries against cruelty to animals. Here, one can see at work what Ann Wierda Rowland, in Romanticism and Childhood, identifies as a ‘rhetoric of infancy’ that strongly shaped Romantic discourses not only of literature, but of many other fields of experience as well—in this case of human responsibility towards animals.53 In most aspects, however, moral animal stories do not enhance the human-animal border in order to highlight the animal’s need for human protection, but in order to highlight the child’s need to move beyond the animal condition once it leaves the protected ‘orchards’ of childhood. Both Trimmer and Kilner trace the two most central of these dangers to two of the main connections between child and animal: instinct and innocence. In terms of these two characteristics, the animal protagonist and the child are presented as differing in one crucial aspect: while both share a disposition of natural innocence and an instinctive approach to the world, these will lead to entirely different consequences. For the animals, instinct takes the place of reason and supplies them with the knowledge they need to survive. In consequence, in the narratives I am considering here, most instinctive reactions of the animal protagonists are rendered as rational choices, such as, in Fabulous Histories, the father robin’s sudden change of course in the wood excursion to avoid a hunter not a single one of them had seen.54 To a human child, however, such a ‘natural’ instinct is portrayed as profoundly dangerous, as it is not associated with knowledge, but with a lack of reason. Many of the instinctive acts of children in the same narratives are, accordingly, presented as wrong or even as dangerous to the point of self-destruction. Hence, the moral tales imply that if not checked in time, the pre-cultural essence of the child will lead to the child’s moral degradation and possibly even to physical harm. In earshot of Nimble, the mouse narrator, one of Kilner’s human characters delivers a lecture along these lines to her daughter, citing the example of a girl who intuitively jumps up at the sudden approach of an

53  Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 5. 54  Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 145.

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unknown dog and in doing so sets herself on fire.55 The narrating human character repeats the same lesson in two further incidents that befall the girl: she nearly drowns when trying to get out of the way of a group of cows heading straight for her and she almost bleeds to death after jerking her head back into a window pane in order to avoid a wasp.56 The adult woman does not condemn the girl in the story for overreacting to the animals (which might have caused the very animal attacks the girl is afraid of), but for being wary of them at all. She repeatedly emphasises that the intuitive fear of the girl is ‘ridiculous’ and ‘absurd’.57 An interesting aside to Kilner’s tale is that the three animal species used as examples (cows, dogs, wasps) are considered to be three of the top five animal species to cause human deaths in twenty-first century Britain: the only British animal more likely to kill a human than the three species named in Kilner’s story is the horse, presumably in connection with equestrian sport.58 It is not altogether unreasonable to assume that these statistics would have looked similar for the eighteenth century, perhaps even higher in terms of numbers, as more people were in direct contact with animals. Hence, there is a point to the girl’s instinctive urge to avoid unknown members of these three species. But an instinctive reaction, so Kilner’s argument, is bad per se: a human should suppress instincts and instead use reason to reflect on the comparative risks involved, realising that the dangers triggered by instinctive ‘flight’ are greater than the ones emanating from the creatures themselves (in the examples above, these secondary dangers are a hot iron, a broken bridge rail and a window pane). The mother’s narrative thus highlights a perceived superiority of human reason over instinctive behaviour and renders reason desirable to the listening child, while instinct is presented as something that needs to be suppressed at all costs. The child is thus exhorted to overcome its closeness to the animal and build a human-animal border, which, in turn, will help towards permeating the child-adult border. Innocence poses a similar problem. As stated above, the child’s human innocence is inevitably coupled with ignorance, unlike that of the animal,  Kilner, Life and Perambulations, p. 13.  Kilner, Life and Perambulations, p. 14. 57  Kilner, Life and Perambulations, pp. 13, 14. 58  See ‘Wildlife Expert Reveals for the First Time Britain’s Top Animal Killers’, Wildwood Trust, March 13, 2012, available at: https://wildwoodtrust.org/wildwood-kent/news/ wildlife-expert-reveals-first-time-britain%E2%80%99s-top-animal-killers (last accessed November 2017). 55 56

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which, in its innocent state of nature, can trust the guidance of instinct. The child, as shown above, cannot. Without experience from which to learn, the child cannot know the right from the wrong course of action, leaving the child in a complex dilemma. Gaining experience, the child will know right from wrong, but will have lost its innocence. In the state of innocence, conversely, the child cannot know wuuuhich uacuuuutions are morally wrong, and can unwittingly commit sin or error. This very conjunction of innocence and ignorance, and the dilemma posed by this conjunction, is at the heart of the Christian myth of the Fall of Man and the idea of felix culpa, or the fortunate fall. The image of the Fall as a historical myth runs parallel to the construction of an animal-­ human border as an ontogenetic myth: both are presented as inevitable steps for an initiation into full (adult) humanhood, even if this humanhood might be—as Rousseau would argue—a state based on ‘corrupt[ion]’.59 In Kilner’s Life and Perambulations of a Mouse, the story of the Fall is re-enacted in the transition of the child characters from a pre-­ school Garden of Eden in close vicinity to nature and its animal inhabitants to public school.60 Kilner presents public schools as breeding grounds for evil. Nimble is again listening in on a human conversation when a father tells his son: ‘before you have been at school [for a month], you will get to squabbling with and tricking the other boys […] and learn to cheat, and deceive, and pay no attention to what your mother and I have been telling you’.61 In Kilner’s image of public schools, peer pressure by older pupils will easily tempt younger ones to sin, and unless a child is deeply rooted in virtue, the temptations of the serpent/peers at public school are depicted as virtually irresistible. Even if the child does adhere to virtue, however, the Fall will happen. The state of innocence will inevitably dissolve once previously innocent children are faced with fallen peers. One way or another, they will gain experience from the encounter, and thus fall from their innocent natural state of infancy. Though not mentioned explicitly, the Christian concept of sin is at the heart of Kilner’s public school scene, as it is at the heart of the difference between animal and childhood innocence. After having overheard the family dialogue on public schools, Nimble reflects in an internal  Rousseau, Emilius, p. 114.  In Trimmer’s story this childhood Eden is even literally a garden: the Bensons’ walled-in orchard inhabited by fantastical talking birds. 61  Kilner, Life and Perambulations, p. 63. 59 60

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monologue: ‘How dreadful a crime, thought I, is lying and falsity!’, before directly addressing the human reader: ‘What pity is it, that human creatures, who are blest with understanding and faculties so superior to any species, should not make better use of them’.62 Nimble’s anthropocentric stance, which clearly acknowledges a human superiority above all other species, is typical for animal stories of the Romantic period and once again highlights the strictly hierarchical world order of the eighteenth century and the emphasis laid upon reason.63 But there is also a warning between the mouse narrator’s lines, highlighting the necessity for children to ultimately recognise an animal-human border. In the eighteenth century, ‘reason was viewed as a God-given gift separating humanity from the rest of creation’.64 Irrational misbehaviour by human children is thus not merely a ‘pity’ but also a ‘crime’, because unlike the animal narrator, the human child is subject to Christian doctrine and thus accountable for its sins.65 For Kilner’s mouse, in contrast, stealing is simply in its (instinctive) nature. When Nimble listens in on a poor family, he learns that a boy wants to leave a piece of plumcake for his sister. Nimble even reflects on this being ‘very [generous]’ but eats the cake anyway.66 At other points in the story, a human implied author chimes in, adding additional emphasis to Nimble’s animal voice and thus highlighting the central importance of one particular moral lesson.67 In the plumcake scene, however, the implied author remains silent: there is no lesson for the child reader to be learned from Nimble remorselessly stealing the plumcake. The didactic idea behind this is simple: the animal, the ‘poor dumb creature’, may only be accountable for its misdemeanour in this world, but the child, a Christian human, has to expect a much more severe punishment for its sins in afterlife and therefore has an even greater need to reform itself.68 Moreover, it was widely believed at the time that small sins committed in childhood would trigger bigger sins in adulthood. Both Kilner and Trimmer comment on this. In Kilner’s Life and Perambulations of a Mouse, Nimble overhears a father warning his children ‘that numbers of people who are every year hanged, began at first to be wicked by practising those  Kilner, Life and Perambulations, pp. 71, 72.  Cosslett, Talking Animals, p. 2. 64  O’Malley, Making of the Modern Child, p. 11. 65  Kilner, Life and Perambulations, pp. 72, 71. 66  Kilner, Life and Perambulations, p. 32. 67  Kilner, Life and Perambulations, p. 61. 68  Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 123. 62 63

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little dishonourable mean actions, which so many children are too apt to do at play’.69 Trimmer takes up the topic in the exemplary story of a nasty boy who, in adulthood, turns into a man who ‘had so hardened his heart, that no kind of distress affected him, nor did he care for any person but himself’, and who, in a twist of divine justice, is killed by an animal.70 One of the most common examples of such ‘little sins’ was cruelty to animals. Torturing animals was perceived as a sin in its own right, as can clearly be seen in Trimmer’s discussion of a boy torturing small creatures for his amusement.71 Nonetheless, cruelty to animals was first and foremost regarded as a warning signal, and was severely punished not for the sake of the animal, but to pre-empt the risk of later sins against humans of which cruelty to animals was an early sign. This belief, too, dates back to well before the Romantic period. ‘Your highness/ Shall from this practice but make hard your heart’, the physician Cornelius, in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1623), warns the Queen, when she amuses herself torturing animals— and indeed, her cruelty against animals pre-shadows her cruelty to her stepdaughter.72

Narrating Human Infancy Through Animal Eyes The animal narrator or focaliser is central to preparing the child for initiation into personhood. Unlike the child, the non-rational animal can be simultaneously innocent and experienced, as it gains its experience through instinct, not reason. Kilner’s mouse, for example, looks back upon its own youth from the perspective of an adult: the mouse dictates its autobiography to a woman, the first person narrator of the frame narrative. Like the narrators in other stories pretending to be autobiographies, such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), the narrating animal can look back upon the deeds and misdeeds of its younger self with the experience of an adult, and highlight faults which might have appeared insignificant to its younger self, and to the implied reader, but which were disastrous in the long term. The animality of the narrator plays a crucial role here, as, unlike an adult human narrator, it can look back to its past and at the child reader without looking down on them. Hence, it can  Kilner, Life and Perambulations, p. 68.  Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 168. 71  Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 49. 72  William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. J. M. Nosworthy (London: Methuen, 1972), I. vi. 23–41. 69 70

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provide child readers with experienced guidance still based upon the ‘virtuous’ ‘state of nature’ without the child being forced to remain in the precarious position of instinct-induced irrationality and innocence-induced ignorance.73 The animal thus provides a bridge to the prelapsarian, childhood Eden of a shared state of nature which can still hold firm even outside the protected haven of pre-school infancy. The human narrative voice of Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories cannot fulfil the same function as Kilner’s mouse narrator. This voice invariably looks down on the child reader from an experienced position of adult superiority. This superiority for example becomes obvious when the narrator introduces concepts such as ‘the divine principle of universal benevolence’ and urges the child reader to emulate these.74 Such a diction is notably absent from Kilner’s mouse narration, where the child is ultimately urged to learn the same principle, yet in a different fashion. In Kilner’s text, the child reader will observe human protagonists practice this principle, and will learn from the mouse’s naive observation that even the animal in its state of nature instinctively knows this act to be good. The story can hence transmit its moral without baffling its young readers by introducing abstract Christian values and what might be perceived as daunting adult terminology. In Trimmer’s story, a similar bridging function is assumed by the focalising robins, who act out the didactic lessons delivered by the narrator’s human voice. Yet, the robins only command one of the two narrative strands, and as focalisers rather than narrators, they are never as empowered as Kilner’s mouse is. They rather provide an additional animal perspective, which enhances the human/Christian argument voiced by the narrator. When the narrator introduces a moral statue in a human/ Christian context, the robins showcase that creatures in the state of nature will adhere to the same basic principles, albeit without being aware of their complex religious background to which the text as an educational project also introduces the child reader. The aim of the didactic lesson is hence identical in both stories, yet the means of transmitting the moral of the story vary according to the animal’s position as narrator or focaliser. A low standing in the hierarchy shared by animal and infant further strengthens the bond between human reader and animal narrator or focaliser. The freshman newly entering public school is in a position of inferiority with regard to older pupils that is comparable to the position of the  Dobrin and Kidd, ‘Into the Wild’, p. 5; Rousseau, Emilius, p. 103.  Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 172.

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animal relative to humans. Accordingly, this child can use the animal narrator or an animal character as a role model to withstand powerful peer pressure. Trimmer provides a prime example in the Robin character Pecksy, the only one of the little birds who follows to the letter all the instructions of her parents, and who refuses the tempting, naughty offers of her siblings, even when her fellow chicks start to mock and taunt her.75 Ignoring the instruction of their parents, all of Pecksy’s siblings end in compromised positions: Pecksy’s proud brother Robin is lamed and only able to survive as a pet, while her other siblings end up captured and imprisoned in an aviary. Pecksy, in contrast, prospers.76 She is clearly written as a role model for the implied reader to emulate. Unlike an adult human narrator, who might appear patronising to the child reader, the animal narrator or focaliser is thus almost at the child’s eye level—but not quite. As Maria Nikolajeva argues of contemporary stories for children which include animals: ‘Animals […] are usually inferior to children in strength and intelligence. This includes both the fictive children in the narrative and the young readers’.77 Accordingly, Nikolajeva continues, ‘animals are used to empower the human child, the character as well as the reader, who feel superior to beasts’.78 As Cosslett has noted, this pattern is very conspicuous in Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories, where ‘the robin parents, being lower down the hierarchy, are also dependent on the human children’, thus providing a stark human-animal border despite the strong metaphorical links between human and robin children.79 This dependence and hierarchy is, as Cosslett suggests, also explicit in Trimmer’s language, which juxtaposes the robins as ‘suppliants’ with the children as ‘benefactors’.80 The empowerment of children goes hand in hand with enhancing their humanity and thus starting to build a human-animal border. The dependency of the animals on the children also allows the children to find a creature poorer than themselves on which they can practice

 Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 26.  Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 171. 77  Maria Nikolajeva, Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 155. 78  Nikolajeva, Voice and Subjectivity, p. 156. 79  Cosslett, Talking Animals, p. 45. 80  Cosslett, Talking Animals, p. 45. 75 76

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charity, a concept which pre-supposes a stark border between the children acting out the charitable gestures and the animals at the receiving end.81 In the eighteenth century, the belief in human superiority over other animals was far more pronounced than it is today. In a society firmly based on Christian beliefs as yet unshaken by evolutionary theory and the resulting theological backlash, people could believe in the idea of a world created for their own sake, and in their own role as masters of creation. Trimmer in particular stresses this repeatedly, in having the adult role model character Mrs Benson tell the human children that ‘the human species, that is to say, all mankind together, have an undoubted superiority and dominion’ over other animals, as God has declared humans ‘the lords of creation’.82 The animal characters of moral animal stories in turn, as Granata suggests, ‘seldom question hierarchies in general; they […] implicitly agree with man’s belief in his own superiority’.83 Children, though conceptualised as prior to full human agency, were still human: their infancy was a transient period from which they would soon advance into full human adult agency, far beyond the animal who narrates a story or through whose eyes parts of a story are focalised. This fact opens the door for several didactic lessons based on the ever-widening animal-­ human rift. First, the animal can function as a reward for the child as well as a role model. In Trimmer’s story, for example, a formerly naughty girl is finally rewarded for reforming her character by the robins changing their habitation and moving into her garden.84 In short she gains the robins as a trophy. The same happens in Kilner’s story, when the cute little mouse repeatedly shows itself to—and even communicates with—the human narrator of the frame narrative, and finally assents to be her pet.85 In both stories, the reward for having overcome the animal is possession of the animal: a reward for a child’s obedience to the lessons voiced in the story that a human narrator would not be able to provide. 81  Anja Müller, Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689-1789 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 48. 82  Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 134. 83  Silvia Granata, ‘Talking Animals and the Instruction of Children: Dorothy Kilner’s Rational Brutes’, in Britain and Italy in the Long Eighteenth Century: Literary and Art Theories, ed. Rosamaria Loretelli, Frank O’Gorman (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 181–93 (189). 84  Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, p. 170. 85  Kilner, Life and Perambulations, p. 73.

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As to the didactic lesson itself, the inferiority of Kilner’s narrator softens the adult voice, making its didacticism more palatable for the reader. A similar claim can be made for Trimmer’s robin focalisers, whose sections of the story balance out the often rather heavy didacticism of the human-­ focussed narrative strand. Nikolajeva suggests that ‘animal shape distances the conflict, making it easier for the reader to deal with it’, and hence functions as an ‘estrangement [device]’.86 By virtue of such an estrangement device, the metaphorical animal children can provide a buffer zone for sensitive topics. Human children, so Cosslett suggests, ‘are […] allowed to keep more of their dignity’ when the most humiliating abasements which the naughty children in the stories need to perform in front of their parents in order to regain their good will are acted out by animal rather than human children.87 However, the inferiority of the narrator also enhances the importance of the didactic lesson. If ‘one as insignificant as a MOUSE’ exceeds the implied reader in virtue, then this increases the necessity for the child to emulate, and, at best, surpass, this role model.88 A child may easily accept that it does not yet reach the virtue of a wise, rational adult human: this virtue might be something to aspire to in adulthood, but as yet unattainable. If, however, it does not reach the moral integrity of a thieving little mouse, this defect needs immediate attention. Summerfield, though notably dated in other respects, is right to claim that despite all focus on reason ‘throughout the [eighteenth] century, the claims of fantasy, of a pre-rational, pre-decorous, pre-Christian world, continued to prove irresistible’ to the literary imagination of infancy.89 All these aspects come together in the conjunction of child and animal that, as this chapter has shown, was an integral element of notions of infancy in the eighteenth century. Based upon the perception of an ontological closeness between child and animal as two ‘creatures’ in an instinct-driven, pre- or non-Christian state of nature, authors set out to reinforce the animal-­human border that was destabilised through the animal-child connection, utilising the very concepts that destabilised it in the first place. Moral animal tales bear witness to these efforts and their often contradictory effects, showing that in the Romantic imagination, animality was not only a central element of infancy, but infancy also a central element of the  Nikolajeva, Power, Voice and Subjectivity, p. 156.  Cosslett, Talking Animals, p. 44. 88  Kilner, Life and Perambulations, p. 43; original emphasis. 89  Summerfield, Fantasy and Reason, p. xiv. 86 87

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literary animal. A reading of moral animal tales hence shows that the topos of infancy is an unstable category even within a very narrow frame of eighteenth century texts. None of the stories is based on a monolithic approach to infancy. Quite the opposite, although Kilner’s and Trimmer’s stories might ostensibly adhere to Enlightenment conceptions of childhood, there are rich Romantic undertones to their constructions of infancy, and various cultures of infancy interface and cross-pollinate even within these two highly moralising pieces of instructional children’s literature.

CHAPTER 9

William Godwin, Romantic-Era Historiography and the Political Cultures of Infancy John-Erik Hansson

In his essay ‘Of Manly Treatment and Behaviour’, published in The Enquirer (1797), the English polymath William Godwin (1756–1836) highlights both the connection between infancy and adulthood and that which differentiates these two stages of life: A young person should be educated, as if he were one day to become a man. He should not arrive at a certain age, and then all at once be launched upon the world. He should not be either wholly ignorant of, or unexercised in, the concerns of men.1

Less than a decade after writing these words, Godwin became wholly engaged in the education of an increasing number of children, both in and 1  William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), vol. 5, p. 129.

J.-E. Hansson (*) Université de Cergy-Pontoise, Cergy, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Domines Veliki, C. Duffy (eds.), Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8_9

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out of his own household. Writing for his own bookselling business, the Juvenile Library (founded in 1805), he thus contributed to the transformation of the cultures of infancy, as embodied in the increasing number of children’s books circulating in the period. Godwin wrote and commissioned a variety of works for the Juvenile Library, including Charles Lamb’s (1775–1834) celebrated Tales from Shakespeare (1806). His most significant output personally, however, was in the realm of history. He wrote and published three histories ‘for the use of schools and young children’, under the pseudonym Edward Baldwin: a History of England (1806), a History of Rome (1809) and finally, after struggling with the writing process, a History of Greece (1822).2 These three works—and many others in the Juvenile Library—are remarkable in different ways, as has recently been noted by some scholars. They have been shown to illustrate, for example, Godwin’s pedagogical commitments to the imagination and the autonomy of the child.3 It has also been argued that they are part of a more general project to redefine history in early nineteenth-century youth culture, and to communicate Godwin’s critical outlook on the English crown.4 In contrast, taking a narrower definition of politics, Matthew Grenby has argued that Godwin—and most other well-known popular children’s authors—avoided political positioning altogether.5 Building on these debates, and closely analysing Godwin’s historiographical output for children in comparison with contemporary historical 2  Edward Baldwin [William Godwin], The History of England. For the Use of Schools and Young Persons, First (London, 1806); Edward Baldwin [William Godwin], History of Rome: From the Building of the City to the Ruin of the Republic. Illustrated with Maps and Other Plates. For the Use of Schools and Young Persons, First (London, 1809); Edward Baldwin [William Godwin], History of Greece: From the Earliest Records of That Country to the Time in Which It Was Reduced Into a Roman Province. Illustrated with Maps and Portraits. For the Use of Schools and Young Persons (London, 1822). 3  See, for example: Janet Bottoms, ‘“Awakening the Mind”: The Educational Philosophy of William Godwin’, History of Education 33/3 (May 2004), pp. 267–82 (pp. 280–1); and Pamela Clemit, ‘Philosophical Anarchism in the Schoolroom: William Godwin’s Juvenile Library, 1805–25’, Biblion: The Bulletin of the New  York Public Library 9, 1/2 (2001), pp. 44–70. 4  See Julie Ann Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), pp. 236–40; and Clemit, ‘Philosophical Anarchism in the Schoolroom’, pp. 63–7. 5  Matthew Grenby, ‘Politicizing the Nursery: British Children’s Literature and the French Revolution’, The Lion and the Unicorn 27/1 (2003), pp. 1–26.

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writing for both children and adults, this chapter shows how Godwin contributed to a lively and contested late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-­ century political culture of infancy embedded in media specifically designed ‘for the use of children’, but which nevertheless reflected the broader nature of the political uses of Classical and modern history in the Romantic period. In so doing, this chapter also shows that Godwin’s three histories for children reflect his commitment to educate the child ‘as if he were one day to become a man’, and especially ‘a man’ ready to contribute to the cause of social and political reform. Godwin’s histories should be understood as an attempt to circulate progressive political viewpoints to child readers, which they were otherwise unlikely to encounter in the context of a victorious reaction against Radicalism in the years following the French Revolution.

The Civil War and the ‘Glorious Revolution’: From Historical Debates to Books for Children In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, historical writing was a platform for political arguments about the state of British politics and the legitimacy of the British government after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This process encompassed the entire political spectrum of the times: authors with more obvious Stuart sympathies, such as the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76), put forward histories which challenged those written in the Whig tradition, whereas Whigs and radicals, such as Catharine Macaulay (1731–91) and, later, Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59), wrote histories to counter the Humean narrative, and to defend republican positions (for the former) and the ‘Whig’ constitutional settlement of 1688 (for the latter). It was also at the beginning of the nineteenth century that Godwin clarified in writing his own historiographical and political positions in relation to the variety of available narratives. More broadly, he showed an increasing interest in the history of seventeenth-century England.6 In the unpublished essay ‘Of History and Romance’, Godwin describes that period as ‘the only portion of our history interesting to the heart of man’, although ‘its noblest virtues are obscured by the vile jargon of fanaticism 6  I am grateful to Pamela Clemit for bringing this point to my attention. See also her discussion in The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 83–4.

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and hypocrisy’.7 In preparing to write the novel Fleetwood (1805), Godwin read the Memoirs of the Civil War republican Edmund Ludlow (1617–92) and the History of the Rebellion (1702–4) by Edward Clyde (1609–74). Both his final title for the novel and its working title, ‘Lambert’, are allusions to Commonwealth generals.8 In 1805–6, Godwin was under contract to write a history of England of his own, to update, correct and eventually replace that of Hume, with whom, like Catharine Macaulay, he disagreed politically.9 However, the arena of political conflict expressed in the historiography of the Civil War extended to the realm of histories written for children and young adults; the political cultures of adulthood and of childhood were not so distinct in that respect. Reviews written both by and about Godwin show that the adults assessing the quality and suitability of works for children were concerned with politics. The anonymous reviewer of Godwin’s History of England for the October 1806 issue of the Monthly Review generally condemned the expression of political ‘opinions’, claiming that authors should instead ‘confine themselves very much to facts’, although the review ends by noting that, If the bias of a writer, however, should tinge productions of this sort, we should least quarrel with it when, like that of Mr. B. it is in favour of the rights of the subject.10

In the (unpublished) review of Sarah Trimmer’s (1741–1810) Concise History of England in 1808, written for young children, Godwin declares Trimmer to be the ‘most resolute advocate for despotism and arbitrary power’, because she, echoing Hume, sides with the Stuart cause against parliament.11  Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings, vol. 5, pp. 296–297.  See Pamela Clemit, ‘Introductory Note’ to Fleetwood in William Godwin, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), vol. 5. 9  See letter 408 (to Thomas Wedgwood, 25 March 1805) in William Godwin, The Letters of William Godwin, ed. Pamela Clemit, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 341. 10  Monthly Review, vol. 51 (London, 1806), p. 205. Regarding this point, see also Susan Manly’s comments in ‘William Godwin’s “School of Morality””, The Wordsworth Circle 48/3 (2012), pp. 141–2. 11  The manuscript review can be found in MS. Abinger c. 29 ff. 114–15. 7 8

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These were not simply rhetorical points aimed at encouraging or discouraging potential clients. For better or worse, depending on the point of view of contemporary readers, politics were indeed deeply embedded in the historical narratives that were presented to children, particularly regarding the Civil War. Trimmer thus describes members of the House of Commons as individuals who simply desired to encroach on the king’s prerogatives. Worse, in her analysis, they did so deviously, by using ‘the King’s necessities [to crush the rebellion in Scotland]’ in order to seize ‘the opportunity of accomplishing their original purpose of lessening his prerogative’.12 Charles I (1600–49), however, was ‘certainly a very virtuous character’, ‘though not free from faults’.13 This was not an uncommon view.14 By contrast, Godwin claims that parliament had ‘resolved to place the liberties of their country on a firm foundation’, avoiding the pitfall of absolutist monarchy, sought by Charles I.15 The king is therefore presented first and foremost as the man who ‘resolved to call no more parliaments’ and who would thus have turned England into ‘one of the most despotic governments in the world’.16 Descriptions of the regicide provide the occasion to go further into the details of the construction of the politics of children’s histories of England and demonstrate a specific instance in which the play of historical distance in its relation to sentimentality is used politically in children’s literature.17 Godwin passes over the execution of Charles I quite quickly, leaving it in the background and far from the mind of the reader. In contrast, Sarah Trimmer brings it to the forefront and encourages her readers to ‘shed a’ Humean ‘generous tear for the fate of Charles I’: almost quoting Hume verbatim, Trimmer comments on the impossibility ‘to describe the grief, 12  Sarah Trimmer, A Concise History of England, Comprised in a Set of Easy Lessons Illustrated by Engravings: Being a Continuation of the Series of Historical Books for Children, 2 vols. (London, 1808), vol. 2, p. 77. 13  Trimmer, Concise History, vol. 2, pp. 95–6. 14  See for example: Oliver Goldsmith, An History of England in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to His Son, vol. 2 (London, 1786), pp.  11, 19, 46; and Elizabeth Helme, The History of Scotland Related in Familiar Conversations, by a Father to His Children: Interspersed with Moral and Instructive Remarks, and Observations on the Most Leading and Interesting Subjects, 2 vols. (London, 1804), vol. 2, pp. 118–22. 15  Godwin, History of England, p. 132. 16  Godwin, History of England, p. 133. 17  I use distance in the sense described by Mark Salber Phillips in ‘Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance and the Transition from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography’, PMLA 118/3 (2003), pp. 436–49.

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indignation and astonishment, which took place throughout the whole nation’ following the regicide.18 Additionally, Trimmer accompanies her sentimental description with a chilling and detailed illustration of the execution of Charles I, entitled ‘King Charles’s Martyrdom’, thus creating not only narrative proximity, but also a controlled visual proximity.19 Despite Godwin’s growing interest in the period of the Commonwealth, it is superficially treated in his History of England for children. He does not mention republicanism, or the political order established before the assumption by Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) of the title of Lord Protector. At the same time, the Glorious Revolution receives a surprisingly warm retelling. Godwin associates the ‘Glorious Revolution’ with a victory in the ‘contention between power and liberty’, seeing in the accession of William of Orange and the passing of the Bill of Rights a settlement ‘in favour of freedom all the questions which, of late years, had been at issue between the king and the people’.20 This contrasts sharply with what Godwin had written just ten years earlier in his essay ‘Of History and Romance’, where he suggests that: ‘from the moment that the grand contest excited under the Stuarts was quieted by the Revolution, our history assumes its most insipid and insufferable form’, for it no longer is ‘the history of genuine, independent man’.21 While this gives Godwin’s work a distinctively Whig character, it also, more importantly, suggests different material limitations placed on the radical possibilities of the political culture of infancy in which Godwin was operating. To make sure that he would not undermine further the already fragile financial situation of both the Juvenile Library and his own household, Godwin needed to ensure that his books would sell, and therefore that they would not be too shocking to the general public or to schoolmasters.22 It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that Godwin avoided an open and openly sympathetic discussion of republicanism in England given the war with Revolutionary France, and the association of 18  Trimmer, History of England, vol. 2, p.  93.See David Hume, The History of Great Britain, Under the House of Stuart, The Second Edition Corrected, (London, 1759), vol. 1, pp. 453, 455. 19  Trimmer, History of England, vol. 2, p. 93. 20  Godwin, History of England, p. 151. 21  Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings, vol. 5, p. 297. 22  This is, according to Godwin’s own account in an undated letter written at the time of the Juvenile Library, the reason why he wrote under the name of Edward Baldwin. See the manuscript letter held in the Abinger Collection in Oxford, MS. Abinger c. 21 fols 32–33.

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r­epublicanism with the French regime, revolutionary demands and, ultimately, disorder at home and abroad. Equally, economic concerns may well explain Godwin’s representation of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, as he was soliciting money from, and advertising his children’s books to, aristocratic Whigs such as Henry Vassall Fox, Lord Holland (1773–1840) and James Maitland, Lord Lauderdale (1759–1839).23 In this context, it would have been difficult to defend the republican Commonwealth and to criticise the ‘Glorious Revolution’ without harming the Juvenile Library. Godwin’s ability to reform the historical and political culture of infancy was therefore limited.

Building the Child’s Radical Culture in Other Places: Godwin and the Revolt of 1381 Despite these limitations, however, Godwin found other perhaps more surprising places where he could foster a radical historical culture for children. In particular, his historical narratives suggest that it is valid to question the legitimacy of kings. In Godwin’s treatment of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, for instance, and in his retelling of the story of Perkin Warbeck (1474–99), we find two further examples of his taking a critical stance on the established history of the English monarchy. In these various instances, we find a Radical pattern to Godwin’s History of England, giving it a sharper political edge and undermining the formation of a youth culture based on cultural and ideological commonplaces. Since Pamela Clemithas already examined the case of Perkin Warbeck, I will concentrate here on Godwin’s discussion of Wat Tyler (1341–81) and the Peasants’ Revolt.24 For Godwin, the story of Wat Tyler serves as a way to criticise the monarchy by fundamentally reversing a common narrative concerning the noble actions of young Richard II (1367–1400), related for instance by Sarah Trimmer, George Davys, Elizabeth Helme and John Wilson Croker (1780–1857). The story is the following: a poll-tax is being levied by the Crown, and the peasants take up arms against this under the leadership of a man assuming the name of Wat Tyler. They are then met in the field by the king, Richard II, who confronts Wat Tyler, and eventually restores 23  See, for example, his letters to Henry Vassall Fox (Lord Holland), dated 1806 and 1807, MS.  Abinger c. 18 fols. 68–69 and 98–99, see also his letter to James Maitland (Lord Lauderdale) on 15 November 1806, MS. Abinger c. 18. 79–80. 24  Clemit, ‘Philosophical Anarchism in the Schoolroom’, p. 66.

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order to the country after Tyler’s death.25 However, the way in which order is restored differs greatly between these texts and Godwin’s. In Trimmer’s History, after the death of Wat Tyler at the hands of the king’s followers, Richard II comes ‘very weakly guarded’ to Smithfield and conducts his noblest action (indeed, the only one he is commended for): Observing the mob preparing to revenge [Tyler’s] death, the king boldly advanced, and with an affable and intrepid countenance cried out, ‘What is the matter, my good people? Are ye angry that you have lost your leader. I am your king; I will be your leader’. On which they implicitly followed him; and soon after all the rebels submitted.26

The king is described here in a very positive light. His words seem to have power to pacify the crowd and break the spell that Wat Tyler and the ‘seditious preacher’ John Ball (1338–81) had put on ‘the minds of the common people’.27 The power of the king is asserted and legitimated and his role as the head of the nation vindicated. Godwin, on the other hand, paints a wholly different picture. Instead of showing ‘prudence and presence of mind’, the king is portrayed as a trickster: king Richard rode forth from his own people to meet the rebels: he called out to follow him who was their king, and he would grant them whatever they should require: he led them into the open fields: while they were debating on terms with him, a considerable military force was collected: the multitude lost their opportunity, and the insurrection was soon after suppressed and vigorously punished.28

Here, the king’s authority does not rest on the truth and power of his words and leadership, but rather on the power of dishonesty and the sword. Hence, while in Trimmer’s History, Richard II is a kind, responsible king, in Godwin’s History he is simply a tyrant. 25  Godwin, History of England, pp. 86–8; Trimmer, History of England, vol. 1, pp. 146–9. See also: Helme, The History of Scotland, vol. 1, pp. 199–200; story 12 in J[ohn]. W[ilson] C[roker], Stories Selected from the History of England from the Conquest to the Revolution, Third Edition (London: John Murray, 1817); Davys, A Plain and Short History of England, pp. 81–3. 26  Trimmer, History of England, vol. 1, pp. 147–8. 27  Trimmer, History of England, vol. 1, p. 147. 28  Trimmer, History of England, vol. 1, p. 149; Godwin, History of England, pp. 87–8.

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There is more to this case, however, than a mere difference of political point of view, because Godwin reconstructs this historical incident as a part of a wider struggle between liberty and oppression. Godwin begins the chapter by establishing that ‘there was such a thing as liberty in England’ at the time of Richard II, ‘but it was confined to the lords and holders of estates’ whilst ‘the greater part of the country people were slaves’.29 This situation was beginning to change, according to Godwin, as ‘the commons, by means of the progress of trade and good sense, rose in process of time to a certain importance’, and this change was accelerating since ‘as much had been obtained’, the people ‘naturally wished for more’.30 The rebellion, then, comes after the Crown’s imposition of a new tax: an attack on the peacefully and progressively obtained liberty of the commons. As a consequence, the story is set, partly, as a struggle between the liberty of the commons, defended by Wat Tyler and his ‘multitude’, and the dominion of the king. This should not be over-interpreted: Godwin does not fully approve of the rebellion, and especially not of its violence, which he condemns with typically Godwinian elitism, as the ‘outrageous excesses’ of the ‘common people’ who ‘feel themselves masters’.31 Nevertheless, the ‘opportunity’ of the ‘multitude’ which Godwin mentions then takes on a different meaning: it was that of entrenching the liberty of the commons, in a struggle against the power of the king. To sum up, Godwin’s first history ‘for the use of schools and young persons’, the History of England, shows how he attempted to combine his progressive politics and his desire to question and to re-form the historical and political culture of children with a more pragmatic approach to broad commercial success. In doing so, Godwin upheld a Whig history of the 1688 settlement, while pushing a more radical agenda when and where he saw opportunities that—he thought—would cause only a minimal amount of backlash from more conservative reviewers and readers. And in this he succeeded well enough: while the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine remained circumspect, other reviewers were considerably more positive, with the Literary Journal commending ‘Mr. Baldwin’ for having ‘for the most part represented [events of British history] in a very proper light’, and the book eventually went through a significant number of editions, being updated and reprinted long after the collapse of the Juvenile Library,  Godwin, History of England, p. 85.  Godwin, History of England, p. 85. 31  Godwin, History of England, p. 86. 29 30

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and, indeed, after Godwin’s death.32 Though the actual political impact of these works is impossible to measure, then, we might still consider Godwin’s History of England as an earnest attempt to reform national historical consciousness as it was being forged in young readers in the early nineteenth century.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Republic In Romantic Antiquity, Jonathan Sachs notes that ‘the Roman past[…] was crucial in eighteenth-century Britain for articulating a coherent yet flexible set of models with which one could both attack or defend various models of political power’.33 Indeed, the description of ideals and the formulation of political claims based on classical history were also the result of political debates that operated throughout British historiography of the Classical world. These concerned both the legacy of the Republic and that of the Empire, providing examples of popular government, a mixed constitution and paradigmatic emperors.34 Although Rome undoubtedly loomed large in the late eighteenth century, references to ancient Greece also served the double purpose of reviewing domestic politics, and of providing a model for imperial organisation. In particular, historians and philosophers sought to compare Britain—and the world more generally—with both Athens and Sparta, condemning or praising each city’s political, social or imperial organisation as they saw fit depending on the subject at 32  See Kenneth W.  Graham, William Godwin Reviewed: A Reception History, 1783-1834 (New York: AMS Press, 2001), pp. 286–7. Later editions of Godwin’s History of England (still under the pseudonym of Edward Baldwin) appeared in 1827, 1836 (the year of Godwin’s death) and 1850. 33  Jonathan Sachs, Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789-1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 32; See also Jonathan Sachs ‘Republicanism: Ancient Rome and Literary Modernity in British Romanticism’, in Romans and Romantics, ed. Timothy Saunders et al., Classical Presences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 23–42. 34  On these issues, see: Philip Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in EighteenthCentury England (Cambridge, U.K.  ; New  York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1997); C AkçaAtaç, ‘Roman Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain Beyond Gibbon: Ancient Norms of Empire for Moderns’, in A Companion to Enlightenment Historiography, ed. Sophie Bourgault and Robert Alan Sparling (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2013), pp. 469–503; Gregory Claeys’ discussion of Thelwall’s use of Roman examples in ‘Introduction’, in The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), p. xxvii; and Gregory Claeys, The French Revolution Debate in Britain: The Origins of Modern Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 140–1.

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hand. More generally, the relationship between ancient Greece and the present was an important locus of debate, and different versions of political organisation at home and abroad were expressed in part by adopting or rejecting parts, or all of, ancient Greek political and imperial systems.35 In short, not only did the histories of Ancient Greece and Rome provide exemplary characters, but they also gave models and a language to discuss and represent domestic and imperial politics. Given, then, that Ancient Greece and Rome were continually present as points of reference for British politics over the course of the long eighteenth century, where does Godwin fit? His considerations in The Enquirer leave little doubt concerning his views on the excellence of the ancient republics and the ancient republicans in relation to his contemporaries.36 But in what way— if any—is this translated into the histories of Greece and Rome which he wrote ‘for the use of Schools and Young Persons’? To use Pocock’s turn of phrase, do these texts fulfil the ‘function of ancient history’ at the time and ‘problematise modernity’, but, in this case, primarily for the use of children rather than adults?37 One way in which Godwin problematised his own time in the History of Rome is simply through the narratological decision to focus only on the history of the rise, decline and eventual fall of the Roman republic. By starting with the founding of Rome and ending soon after the final ‘thread […] of Roman liberty was spun’, with the deaths of Marcus Junius Brutus (85–42 BC) and Gaius Cassius Longinus (85–42 BC) following the Battle of Philippi (42 BC), Godwin emphasised the connections between Roman republicanism and liberty, showing the different points at which—as he

35  For Sparta, see, for example, the recent brief philosophical survey in Varad Mehta, ‘Sparta, Modernity, Enlightenment’, in On Civic Republicanism: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics, ed. Neven Leddy and Geoffrey C.  Kellow (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2016), pp.  205–25. On Athens, see: Kyriacos Demetriou, ‘In Defence of the British Constitution: Theoretical Implications of the Debate over Athenian Democracy in Britain, 1770–1850’, History of Political Thought 17/2 (1996), pp. 280–97; and Karen E. Whedbee, ‘The Tyranny of Athens: Representations of Rhetorical Democracy in Eighteenth-century Britain’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly 33/4 (September 2003), pp. 65–85. On imperial governance, see C.  AkçaAtaç, ‘Imperial Lessons from Athens and Sparta: Eighteenth-Century British Histories of Ancient Greece’, History of Political Thought 27/4 (1 January 2006), pp. 642–60. 36  Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings, vol. 5, p. 295. 37  J.  G. A.  Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 349.

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viewed it—the Romans compromised their own virtue.38 Even as he dips briefly into the history of the Empire, in the last two chapters of his History of Rome—on the Battle of Actium (31  BC) and on Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65–27 BC) and Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 BC)—these discussions are made typographically and discursively distinct. In the first edition, they are printed in italics (a feature which disappears in the post-1825 editions), and Godwin carefully notes that ‘the quarrels of the tyrants make no proper part of the history of the Roman republic’.39 Furthermore, and to emphasise the connections between moral and civic excellence and the republic, Godwin stresses that ‘the most eminent literary geniuses of Rome’, Horace and Virgil, ‘were bred under the republic’ even though they ‘flourished in the court of the emperor Augustus’.40 This was a risky move. Although this kind of chronology was not completely unprecedented, it was nevertheless quite unusual.41 Authors of school books tended to carry the narrative at least as far as the fall of the Western Empire at the hands of Germanic tribes—as Oliver Goldsmith (1728–74), for instance, does in his Roman History (1769)—or even discuss, at more or less length, the fall of the Eastern Empire in 1453, as do writers like Helme, Trimmer, Elizabeth Sewell (1815–1906) or Julia Corner (1798–1875).42 Such books responded to and created an expectation; accordingly, some reviewers were critical of Godwin’s choice. Both the reviewers for the European Magazine and London Review and the Monthly Review disapproved of the volume’s chronology. In the Monthly Review, it was soberly noted that Imperial Rome also featured interesting examples—both positive and cautionary—that would be useful for  Godwin, History of Rome, p. 256.  Godwin, History of Rome, p. 256. For typographical differentiations, see, for example, the edition published by Baldwin & Cradock in 1835. 40  Godwin, History of Rome, p. 257. 41  See, for instance, Anonymous, A New Roman History, from the Foundation of Rome to the End of the Commonwealth (London: E. Newbery, 1800). 42  Oliver Goldsmith, Dr. Goldsmith’s Roman History, Abridged by Himself, for the Use of Schools (London, 1807); Elizabeth Helme, The History of Rome, From the Foundation of the City to the Fall of the Eastern Empire, Related in Familiar Conversations, by a Father to His Children: Interspersed with Moral and Instructive Remarks, and Observations on the Most Leading and Interesting Subjects, 4 vols. (Brentford, 1808); Sarah Trimmer, New and Comprehensive Lessons, Containing a General Outline of the Roman History (London, 1818); Elizabeth Sewell, The Child’s First History of Rome (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849); Julia Corner, The History of Rome: From the Earliest Period to the Close of the Empire. Adapted for Youth, Schools, and Families, A New Edition, with Chronological Table (London: Dean & Son, 1856). 38 39

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c­ hildren.43 More virulently, the reviewer for the European Magazine and London Review argued that the ‘Imperial enormities’ and ‘the tragical and disgraceful events of the lower Empire’ constitute a ‘moral’ to the history of the Republic, with the reviewer thus recommending the publication of ‘a second volume, […] which would form the moral of the first’.44 However, Godwin’s chronology allowed him to offer an alternative explanation for the corruption of the Republic, placed much earlier than other histories, to stress certain material conditions and institutional mechanisms that allowed the Republic to flourish (or to fade) and to bring out as exemplars those who—according to him—truly embodied the republican spirit of early Rome. This was largely possible precisely because, as we have seen, the Roman republic and its ‘aristocracy of virtue’ had been, since the earlier part of the eighteenth century, broadly understood as furnishing adequate examples of political and moral virtue. The politics of Godwin’s History of Rome are thus best identified as aligned with a variety of moderate republicanism. This suggests that Godwin was trying to stress what may be called the more progressive aspects of Roman history, and those which might lead the children of his own times to question the political institutions in which they are born. The book is, for example, distinctly anti-monarchical, but also, at least temporarily, distrustful of a purely popular form of government. Here, Godwin’s treatment of Servius Tullius (575–535 BC) is enlightening. The particular excellence of that Roman king is due to the fact that ‘he resolved to change the government of the state from a monarchy to a republic’, as he ‘judged the powers intrusted to the king of Rome to be greater than it was for the good of the state to confide to one man, and for life’, but also that he was wary of handing over power to the poor and uneducated.45 This position is echoed in Godwin’s chapter on ‘Dissentions Concerning the Abolition of Debts’, where Godwin sees the ‘contention’ between plebeians and patricians as an integral part of the excellence of the republic, as it: produced some mischief, and a great deal of good; if the people had possessed the whole authority of government, it would have wanted sobriety and consistency; and if the government had been entirely in the senate, the  See the review in Graham, Godwin Reviewed, p. 299.  See the review in Graham, Godwin Reviewed, pp. 298. 45  Godwin, History of Rome, pp. 13–14. 43 44

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members of that assembly, who were chosen into it for life, would have grown insolent, indolent, and degenerate.46

Following a variation on republican mixed-government, then, Godwin presents children with a model of good government, bringing together oligarchic and democratic constitutional elements, but with little in the form of monarchy. The oligarchic framework with which Godwin works, however, is tempered by two further points which relate to more radical elements of his philosophy and politics: (1) the demand for a roughly equal distribution of wealth, implied by Godwin’s conception of justice; and (2) the necessity of institutional change, following the progress of society as a whole, towards an increasingly democratic order.47 In this instance, Godwin should be understood as attempting to communicate his own political philosophy to children, and thus going beyond merely reforming the political inflection of their historical knowledge. Concerning the demand for the redistribution of wealth, when discussing the issue of the debts of the plebeians to the patricians, for instance, Godwin falls squarely on the side of the plebeians, describing them as war heroes and emphasising the justice of their claim to debt relief. In his chapter on the ‘Agrarian Law’, Godwin recognises the appearance of justice in the scheme to redistribute the land of early Roman conquests, but sees that in practice ‘the territories added to the Roman state seemed only to increase the wealth of the rich, without relieving the wants of the destitute’.48 In his narrative, Godwin therefore commends the actions of Spurius Cassius Viscellinus (540–485 BC), despite their eventual failure. This Roman politician proposed an agrarian law that would distribute property more equally and bring about a just redistribution of ‘property

 Godwin, History of Rome, p. 32.  See Book VIII of Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), especially chapters I and II. For the second and third edition variants, see Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings, vol. 4, pp. 306–23. Godwin’s views on property change significantly between the first and third editions of Political Justice. However a sense of the justice of a more equal distribution of wealth remains, despite his move to a more robust defence of property rights in the second and third editions. On this, see Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 134–8. On the second point, concerning particularly constitutions, see Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings, vol. 4, pp. 277–9. 48  Godwin, History of Rome, p. 47. 46 47

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acquired by [the] notorious fraud and deception’ of rich patricians.49 Concerning the necessity of institutional change, it suffices to note the approval with which Godwin describes the inscription in law that ‘one of the two consuls should always be a plebeian’, noting that it was ‘a change due to the increasing virtues and excellence of the Roman people’.50 Thus, we have the communication of Godwin’s views of political, institutional and social progress through a medium aimed at a very different audience than that of Political Justice. Children are shown that the demos must be allowed to reap the benefits of general prosperity, and as the demos becomes virtuous, so it gains more entitlement to political power—and hence institutions must change to reflect this by becoming more democratic. Moreover, the political culture Godwin seeks to foster in children, through his History of Rome, is also distinctly anti-imperialist. This is not only implicit in Godwin’s choice of chronology, but also made explicit when Godwin describes the process of Roman corruption. He pinpoints the moment at which the Romans lose their liberty and republican excellence: at the beginning of the successful expansion of their dominion, and the new riches which that expansion involved. Godwin’s association of luxury and vice was a commonplace in Christianity as well as in republican thought, yet the emphasis in Godwin’s narrative here is specifically on the process of expansion. In a chapter entitled ‘Degeneracy of the Romans’, located shortly after the middle of the book, the child reader begins by seeing that ‘the fall of Rome was as substantially decided by the second Punic war as the fall of Carthage’.51 From the fall of Carthage, following Godwin’s narrative, came the opportunity for the Romans to dominate large amounts of territory and to desire more as ‘the career of conquest and empire, once prosperously begun, is not easily stopped’: Godwin continues, however, by noting the illegitimate dimension of conquest, describing it as a form of ‘usurpation’.52 Due to conquest, moreover, ‘wealth and luxury, and all the evils which crowd in their train, became naturalised in Rome’, and thus ‘the little venerable republic that had bred a Cincinnatus, a Decius, a Curtius, a Regulus, and a Fabricius, was no more’.53

 Godwin, History of Rome, p. 85.  Godwin, History of Rome, pp. 46–7. 51  Godwin, History of Rome, p. 163. 52  Godwin, History of Rome, p. 164. 53  Godwin, History of Rome, pp. 164–5. 49 50

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Great (Republican) Legislators: The Politics of the History of Greece Godwin’s histories of Greece and Rome are politically quite comparable. They lay the same emphasis on the public spiritedness of many exemplary figures and offer strikingly similar comments on the processes and the consequences of republican political arrangements as well as on the benefit of a mixed government.54 There is also much institutional commentary, based on the works of specific legislators. Aside from some introductory comments, the first chapter is in fact dedicated to the ‘Laws of Minos’. Later chapters dedicated to the constitutional politics of ancient Greece include, for example, that on the institution of ‘Republican Government’ in different parts of Greece, qualified by Godwin—borrowing from the French historian Charles Rollin (1661–1741) —as a ‘revolution […], that was perhaps more striking than any other’; a chapter entitled ‘Laws of Lycurgus’; and a chapter soberly entitled ‘Solon’ but dealing largely with his activity as a legislator.55 It was far from uncommon for children’s books on the history of Greece to include some discussion of political reforms. This was perhaps to be expected since the political order of Classical Greece, like that of Classical Rome, was regarded by many as a central model for modern government. Nevertheless, Godwin’s insistence on the importance of civil institutions and the figure of the legislator—which he might have borrowed from The Social Contract (1762) of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78)—set his History of Greece apart from common texts such as Oliver Goldsmith’s History of Greece, Abridged, For the Use of Schools. Furthermore, the sheer length of Godwin’s discussions of Classical institutions makes his History stand out. To take the most striking example: Godwin’s discussion of Lycurgus (c. 820 BC) and the civil institutions of Sparta takes up almost 15 pages out of a 263-page narrative—it is the longest chapter in the book.56 By contrast, Goldsmith’s discussion of the Spartan institutions takes slightly less than 10 pages of a 309 page-text.57  See, for example, Godwin, History of Greece, p. 74.  Godwin, History of Greece, p.  74; drawing on Charles Rollin, Histoire Ancienne Des Egyptiens, Des Carthaginois, Des Assyriens, Des Babyloniens, Des Medes et Des Perses, Des Macédoniens, Des Grecs., vol. 2 (Paris: Estienne, 1740), pp. 18–20. 56  Godwin, History of Greece, pp. 24–38. 57  Oliver Goldsmith, Dr. Goldsmith’s History of Greece, Abridged, for the Use of Schools, Fifth Edition (London, 1804), pp. 15–25. 54 55

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What was Godwin trying to communicate to children by focusing on those legislators? Conservative historians such as William Mitford (1774–1827), commenting on Lycurgus and Solon (640–558  BC), adopted ‘the standard, conservative pro-Spartan line’, to condemn the Athenian mode of democratic governance as leading to unending disorder.58 Did Godwin follow that line? Unlike conservative historians who praise Sparta at the expense of Athens, Godwin is clearly positive about the three legislators whom he discusses in detail, Minos, Lycurgus and Solon. He stresses the ability of their respective constitutions to foster freedom for their citizens, although he is not wholly uncritical.59 Of these institutions, however, it is clearly those of Sparta, as laid down by Lycurgus, which receive most attention and praise. Godwin hails them as ‘one of the two great causes of the admiration in which Greece has been held by all succeeding ages’.60 As in his History of Rome, in his History of Greece Godwin also highlights the benefits of material and political equality, as they appear through the laws of Minos and of Lycurgus.61 This emphasis finds a weaker echo in Godwin’s praise of the abolition of debt slavery in Athens, which he describes as ‘the despotic authority’ of the creditor over the debtor, and in his discussion of the division of political power according to property rules.62 Here again, however, there is a fundamental difference between the way in which Godwin writes about Sparta and the way in which he describes Crete and Athens. Godwin draws a direct parallel between Lycurgus’s reforms and his own time. Although Lycurgus’s act of expropriation, followed by the equal redistribution of land to free citizens of Sparta ‘appears to modern observers a violent measure, and such as would be submitted to by the richer citizens of very few states’, it was in fact a crucial cornerstone to ‘place the equality of his countrymen upon a more 58  See the useful comparisons between Mitford and Grote in James Kirstead, ‘Grote’s Athens : The Character of Democracy’, in Brill’s Companion to George Grote and the Classical Tradition, ed. Kyriakos N. Dēmētriou, Brill’s Companions to Classical Reception (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 161–210; and Paul Cartledge, ‘Grote’s Sparta/Sparta’s Grote’, in Brill’s Companion to George Grote, pp. 255–72. 59  See for example Godwin’s discussion of the ‘practice of the exposing of children, which our principles and our religion teach us to abhor’ (History of Greece, p. 28). 60  Godwin, History of Greece, p. 24. For Godwin’s praise of Minos and of Solon, see History of Greece, pp. 8, 51, 56. 61  See Godwin, History of Greece, pp. 6–8, 27. 62  Godwin, History of Greece, pp. 52–3.

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immoveable basis’.63 By making this kind of argument, Godwin encourages children to compare Classical institutions with their own in order to undermine common contemporary assumptions about the nature and distribution of property. Despite Godwin’s admiration for certain versions of material and political equality, however, he also moderates these points by praising some of the more aristocratic dimensions of Classical Greek constitutions, particularly that of Athens. His History thus espouses a somewhat radical Whiggism, or at most a moderate republicanism, which may again reflect a pragmatic compromise between his own politics and those of his patrons and potential clients. While ‘the general assembly of the people […] possessed, as they had done from the earliest records of Athens, the absolute power of state’, Godwin commends Solon’s attempt ‘in some degree to set bounds to this power, by instituting a senate, or council of five hundred, with whom all laws and public measures were to originate’.64 Furthermore, Godwin reserves his utmost praise for ‘the most admirable of all the institutions of Solon […] the court of Areopagus’.65 The status of its members—archons and former archons—as well as its mode of enquiry was what ‘raised it to the eminence it afterward possessed’.66 In Godwin’s analysis, it is, moreover, because of the limited power of Solon’s more aristocratic institutions ‘upon the powers of the assembly of the people of Athens’ that Athens was liable to ‘violence and excesses’.67 Still, in spite of its elitist bias, of the three histories which Godwin wrote ‘for the use of schools and young persons’, his History of Greece appears to be the most openly political, and Radical, in its defence of the benefits of a republican order, based on relative material and political equality, and on a mixed aristocratic and democratic government. As a final foray into books for children, published when Greece was fighting for independence—with significant support in Britain—the History of Greece also presents children with some more radical politics than were to be found in common schoolbooks.68

 Godwin, History of Greece, p. 27.  Godwin, History of Greece, p. 53. 65  Godwin, History of Greece, p. 54. 66  Godwin, History of Greece, p. 54. 67  Godwin, History of Greece, pp. 55, 74. 68  On the British ‘philhellenes’ see for example William St Clair, The Greece Might Still Be Free. The Philhellenes in the War of Independence (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2008). 63 64

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Taken together, then, Godwin’s three histories ‘for the use of schools and young persons’ deploy a relatively consistent, progressive political discourse, which we can locate between the Foxite Whig and the moderate republican, translated into an idiom appropriate for children. In that sense, the histories should be understood as an attempt to communicate political ideas to children and to foster a progressive political youth culture at a time of reaction against any politics that could be associated with the French Revolution. Perhaps due to its nature as a national history, making it considerably more proximate to the salient concerns of the early years of the nineteenth century, Godwin’s History of England is the most moderate, politically speaking. In contrast, the greater interpretative range offered by Godwin’s histories of Rome and Greece allowed him to advance a more Radical position, and more staunchly to present and to defend republican institutions, which he sees as responsible for the emergence of some of the greatest men—for it is mostly men—in the history of the world.69 In closing, I should note that such apolitical reading of Godwin’s histories is necessarily limited. More can and should be said regarding both the status of the broader youth political cultures Godwin fought against and about those which he was attempting to create. To begin with, Godwin’s three histories and his other historical writings for children (such as the Life of Lady Jane Grey, published in 1806) deserve more attention in broader historiographical contexts. The politics of exemplarity in Godwin’s historical writing (for both children and adults) also deserve greater attention. Considering Godwin’s use of exemplarity, moreover, suggests a different avenue for further research into the broader historical youth culture that Godwin may have wanted to develop. The persistent presence in his texts of artists, scientists and philosophers was unusual in early nineteenth-century history schoolbooks, yet they allow Godwin to ask his child reader (and us) a haunting question: ‘Which was the greater man, Cromwel [sic], the politic and successful lord protector of England, or Milton, his Latin secretary?’70 69  For a study of the proto-feminist response to this and other masculine histories, in the context of children’s literature, see Greg Kucich, ‘The History Girls. Charlotte Smith’s History of England and the Politics of Women’s Educational History’, in Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770-1845, ed. Porscha Fermanis and John Regan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 35–53. 70  Godwin, History of England, p. 151.

CHAPTER 10

Experimenting with Children: Infants in the Scientific Imagination Lisa Ann Robertson

Nestled in volume two of Mary Shelley’s (1797–1851) Frankenstein (1818) lies a thought experiment that encapsulates the fantasy of Romantic-era philosophers of mind and mirrors similar figurative investigations by major Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834). Shelley’s representation of the creature’s emergence from a state of confused sensory perception into a fully rational and feeling being stands as an emblem of the Romantic— both literary and scientific—preoccupation with infancy. As with their Enlightenment predecessors, Romantic writers saw infancy as ‘an important way of understanding […] origins’, and specifically for my purposes,

Thank you to Brianna Wells and the critical faculty at the University of South Dakota—Prentiss Clark, John Dudley, Darlene Farabee, Benjamin Hagen, Heather Love, and Skip Willman—for their astute feedback and comments on various drafts of this chapter. L. A. Robertson (*) University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Domines Veliki, C. Duffy (eds.), Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8_10

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the origin of cognition.1 While this was not the only use to which they put the trope of the infant, this essay concerns itself with how that trope functions within the nascent science of the mind. As Alan Richardson, Noel Jackson, Richard Sha, and others have demonstrated, the emergence of physiology and biology as branches of science distinct from physics instigated new investigations into cognitive functioning and development.2 Given the difficulty of experimenting on human beings, however, these inquiries often took the form of thought experiments. The creature’s account of emerging into sensory perception, thought, and feeling serves as the narrative core of Frankenstein. Situated at the centre of the novel, it raises questions about epistemology, pedagogy, and human nature with which the novel—like other Romantic texts—grapples. Prominent amongst these questions is the role played by nature, language, and society in character formation. While language and society play an important part in determining the creature’s actions in the final volume of the novel, Shelley spends significant time detailing the earliest period of the creature’s development, which is both sensual and preverbal. When he tells his story to his creator, Victor, who abandoned him at ‘birth’, leaving him to wander the woods alone, ‘a poor, helpless, miserable wretch’, the creature’s narrative begins with ‘the original æra of [his] being’.3 He recounts: all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct. A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses.4

In this account, the creature describes how he adjusts to his newly acquired consciousness and embodiment, an ‘æra’ of his ‘being’ that substantially

1  Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 28; original emphasis. 2  See Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Richard C. Sha, ‘Toward a Physiology of the Romantic Imagination’, Configurations 17/3 (Fall 2009), pp. 197–226. 3  Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818; repr. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2012), pp. 121, 120. 4  Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 120.

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predates his ‘“fall” into language and culture’.5 The creature’s account of cognitive development that originates in the body and matures over time mirrors materialist theories advanced by Romantic men of science in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), Thomas Wedgwood (1771–1805), and Humphry Davy (1778–1829), whose work Shelley knew, were each talking and writing about cognition in similar terms two decades before she wrote Frankenstein.6 As in thought experiments advanced by Darwin in Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life (1796) and by Wedgwood and Davy in their unpublished notebooks from the 1790s and early 1800s, the creature’s education begins in nature as he learns to use his body and parse the information from his senses. Shelley represents this period as a distinct stage of development that precedes ‘the distortion of self that his fall into language entails’.7 Prior to acquiring language, reading books, and learning to construe his experience discursively, the creature accrues knowledge by engaging with the sensory world. He tells Victor that at first ‘[n]o distinct ideas occupied my mind; all was confused’, but eventually ‘I began to distinguish my sensations from each other’.8 Soon, he says, ‘my mind received every day additional ideas. My eyes became accustomed to the light, and to perceive objects in their right forms’.9 The sensory assault the creature describes as he ‘saw, felt, heard, and smelt at the same time’ reflects theories of cognition devised by Darwin, Wedgwood, and Davy, and his explanation of how he learns to use his body and to parse and interpret sensations and perceptions also offers a similar ‘thought experiment’ or imaginary phenomenological account of how feeling and thought develop.10

5  John B. Lamb, ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Milton’s Monstrous Myth’, NineteenthCentury Literature 47/3 (1992), p. 303. 6  Shelley may not have known of Wedgwood’s work, since she was eight years old when he died, but he was friends with her parents and had visited and corresponded with both of them. It is certain that she knew Darwin’s and Davy’s ideas, as she had read their published work and discussed them with Percy Shelley (1792–1822) and Lord Byron (1788–1824) on the night in 1816 when Frankenstein was conceived. 7  Lamb, ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Milton’s Monstrous Myth’, p. 310. 8  Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 121. 9  Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 122. 10  Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 120.

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In some respects, Shelley’s narrative of the creature’s early development reinforces the claims made by various scholars that childhood was ‘discovered’ or ‘invented’ in the Romantic period.11 Judith Plotz, for example, contends that the Romantics produced a vision of childhood that ‘universalizes and essentializes the child as a figure of nature rather than culture who is therefore the guardian of human nature’.12 Yet, as Frankenstein’s creature stumbles around ‘confused’, learning to ‘distinguish between the operations of [his] various senses’, he does not operate as a nostalgic or idealized figure who inhabits a utopian state of being, even though he does learn from nature. Instead, he functions similarly to the Romantic infant as defined by D.B. Ruderman, who is ‘an inchoate subject, always in the process of becoming and thus capable of challenging narrative trajectory and calling forth new poetic genres, forms, and effects’.13 Indeed, not only does the creature—as a being of exquisite sensibility and deep feeling—disrupt the Enlightenment notion that reason is the defining characteristic of humankind; he also, as some critics argue, calls into being a new genre—science fiction. Ann Wierda Rowland notes that Romantic writers ‘powerfully condensed and encapsulated new ideas of childhood that had been circulating and gaining over the course of the [eighteenth] century’.14 She argues that infants and children ‘served as rhetorical and conceptual tools in the long process of re-thinking human history, language, [and] development’.15 In a similar vein, I contend that the creature functions as a thought experiment that allows Shelley to explore questions of human nature, the origins of language, and cognitive development in ways that are comparable to earlier investigations by men of science and poets. The creature illustrates developmental cognition in the first stages of human life and, in Ruderman’s terms, offers ‘phenomenological accounts of feeling and thought’ that are 11  While the idea that the Romantics discovered childhood was advanced during the Victorian period, Michel Foucault’s discussion of epistemic shifts during the late eighteenth century reinforces it. See Horace E. Scudder, ‘Childhood in English Literature and Art’, The Atlantic Monthly 56/336 (October 1885), pp. 471–84; and Michel Foucault The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) and The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 12  Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 6. 13  D. B. Ruderman, The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry: Romanticism, Subjectivity, Form (New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 2. 14  Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 9. 15  Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 6.

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inaccessible to adult consciousness.16 As such, Shelley’s creature functions analogously to the infant in the early Romantic mind-matter debates. Her fictional character functions as a child, but without a protracted childhood, thus enabling her to raise the very philosophical questions being debated by scientific and literary cognitive theorists. The creature experiences a period of mental growth that happens more quickly than in human children. Evolving from a state of infancy to literacy in a few short months, he provides insight, though imagined, into the phenomenology of perception, particularly the preverbal period of human development. The creature’s foreshortened period of maturation permits him to remember and to narrate his cognitive development such that his subjective experience transforms him into an object of self-study, not unlike the men of science whose theories he reflects. This impossible object of research figuratively solves a persistent, but literal problem for scientific researchers: the difficulty of tracing cognition back to its origin in infancy. From Darwin to Coleridge, Romantic thinkers believed that if they could understand cognitive development in infants they would understand the human mind. However, the physiological fact of childhood hindered their efforts. Adriana Benzaquén notes that eighteenth-century thinkers interested in cognitive development were dogged by the problem ‘that adults do not recall the origin of their ideas and knowledge, nor can they directly observe the contents of children’s mind’.17 In tracing the origin of perception and cognition, Wedgwood laments that ‘it is impossible to make the just allowance for the growth to perfection each ingredient of sensation in the long interval between infancy & manhood—still more impossible to recollect first developments and earliest natures’.18 Though he hoped that it might ‘be possible to ascertain the truth of any hypothesis of the associative powers of Mind by experimenting with children’, it was difficult to convince parents to turn their children over to scientific experimenters.19 Hence, like their literary colleagues, these men of science they had to make do with imaginary infants. In keeping with Rowland’s project to track ‘images of infancy and childhood [that] emerge as a pervasive historical rhetoric in British  Ruderman, The Idea of Infancy, p. 3.  Adriana S. Benzaquén, ‘Childhood, Identity and Human Science in the Enlightenment’, History Workshop Journal, 57 (2004), p. 38. 18  Thomas Wedgwood, MS Notebooks E40-28478, Wedgwood Collection, Albert & Victoria Museum, Barlaston. 19  Wedgwood, MS Notebooks E40-28451. 16 17

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Enlightenment and Romantic writing’, in this essay I examine how the infant functions figuratively in the work of three scientific thinkers clustered in the English Midlands—Darwin, Wedgwood, and Davy—who imagined that infants and children could reveal the workings of the human mind.20 Where Rowland focuses on infancy as an ontogenetic analogy for the phylogenetic development of human civilization, I interrogate how these cognitive theorists use the trope. Each of these thinkers had a different interest in understanding infant cognition. For Darwin, a practicing physician, understanding cognitive processes allowed him to understand and cure disease, but it also enabled him to speculate about the origins of human culture. Wedgwood, who suffered from poor health for most of his short life, thought it offered the possibility of equipping humanity with the knowledge to eradicate suffering caused by weak nerves and ill health. Davy, a chemist who speculated about cognition only briefly at the start of his career, hoped it would hasten the process of human perfectibility promised by political radicals. The infant in the theories of these men, I argue, functions as a blank slate that allows them to validate their hypotheses by providing an illustration of how cognition develops. The infant serves as an empty signifier onto which these men can inscribe their scientific speculations. Though the infant illustrates a different postulate for each man, like the creature in Frankenstein, it remains in the realm of the thought experiment. In this respect, their work throws into relief the scientific function of infants in Romantic poetry.

Romantic Cognitive Science The late eighteenth century saw a groundswell of interest in cognitive science as thinkers from a range of disciplines participated in debates about the workings of the human mind. Though philosophers had been vigorously debating the mind-matter question since René Descartes (1596–1650) and John Locke (1632–1704) advanced their paradigm-­ shifting ideas about cognition in the seventeenth century, the debate intensified during the Romantic period when Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) published Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind (1775).21 David Hartley’s (1705–57) original publication, Observations on Man (1749), offers a  Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 27; original emphasis.  See John W.  Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 20 21

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detailed physiological account of cognition that advances the admittedly speculative hypothesis that cognition is not a function of an immaterial soul, but rather an embodied process. Hartley attempts to explain how sensory data might be transferred from objects in the world to the human mind via the body and its nervous system. Though Hartley, according to Richardson, ‘attempted no less than to explode post-Cartesian dualism and reground philosophy of mind in the brain and nervous system’, his work received little recognition when it was initially published.22 Priestley’s abridged edition of Hartley’s theory and his follow-up defence of materialism, Disquisitions Related to Matter and Spirit (1777), significantly changed the tenor of the mind-matter debates during the Romantic period as philosophers became particularly interested in the mind’s relationship to the body and its physical environment.23 In addition to his account of cognition as an embodied process, Hartley wanted to know how cognition, as a response to external stimuli, factors into character formation. Interested in theology, he wondered what makes some people virtuous, striving after good and God, and others vicious, pursuing lives of pleasure and sin. According to his doctrine of association, a child’s environment and the stimuli to which it is exposed determine its disposition and actions in adulthood. He believed in the application of an empirical method to the study of childhood development, arguing that ‘the Affections and Passions should be analysed into their simple compounding Parts, by reversing the steps of the Associations which concur to form them’ so that science could discover how to foster virtue and eliminate vice.24 Hartley’s influence was widespread. While many thinkers of the period rejected Hartley’s materialist theory of mind, Darwin, Wedgwood, and Davy did not. Richardson notes Darwin’s debt to both Locke and Hartley along with significant deviations from their theories.25 Nearly a decade earlier, Richard Matlak argued that Darwin’s tenet that ‘diseases of the body’s physical systems lead to mental

 Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, p. 9.  For more information about Hartley’s and Priestley’s contributions to the science of mind in the late eighteenth century, see Lisa Ann Robertson, ‘Soulful Sensorium: The Body in British Romantic Brain Science’, La Questione Romantica: Rivista Interdisciplinare Di Studi Romantici 3/1 (2011), pp. 17–28. 24  David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, 3 vols. (London, 1749), vol. 1, p. 81. 25  Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, p. 14. 22 23

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disturbance’ influenced Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798).26 Despite the recognition by these critics that Darwin participated in the mind-­ matter debates, most scholars see him as a physician, the father of modern biology, and a skilled inventor.27 Similarly, Mike Jay points to Davy’s early participation in mind-matter debates through his research into nitrous oxide, which ‘seemed to stimulate the mechanisms of perception and sensation, and thus had the potential to reveal the material cause that underlay them’.28 Yet Davy’s most recent biographer, Jan Golinski, focuses almost exclusively on his career as a chemist.29 Wedgwood died in 1805 with an archive of still-unpublished notebooks and receives little critical attention. The attention he does receive tends to focus on his connection with other, better-known contemporaries. As Francis Doherty boldly states: ‘the point of interest is here not Tom, but Coleridge’s relationship with him’.30 While these thinkers are generally not regarded as central to the Romantic mind-matter debates, each of them thought and wrote about cognition for at least part of their careers. Following Hartley, each believed that understanding how cognition develops would give him the information he desired, and their published and unpublished work takes up the implications of embodied cognition in different ways. As Benzaquén notes, finding a method to experiment with children was difficult, so Darwin, Wedgwood, and Davy made do with imaginary infants and children.

Erasmus Darwin: The Origins of Human Culture Though Darwin was dead by the time Frankenstein was published, the novel’s preface informs readers that the ‘event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin […] as of not impossible

26  Richard Matlak, ‘Wordsworth’s Reading of Zoonomia in Early-Spring’, Wordsworth Circle 12/2 (1990), p. 77. 27  For example, see the essays in C. U. M. Smith and Robert Arnott (eds.), The Genius of Erasmus Darwin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 28   Mike Jay, ‘The Atmosphere of Heaven: The 1799 Nitrous Oxide Researches Reconsidered’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 63 (2009), p. 303. 29  See Jan Golinski, The Experimental Self: Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 30  Francis Doherty, ‘Tom Wedgwood, Coleridge, and Metaphysics’, Neophilologus 71 (1987), p. 305.

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occurrence’.31 Where the novel acknowledges its participation in a philosophical conversation, however, Darwin insists that he is not interested in that aspect of the mind-matter debates. In Zoonomia, he claims that he simply wants ‘to unravel a theory of diseases’ so as to ‘capacitate men of moderate abilities to practise the art of healing with real advantage to the public’.32 His goal is to advance medicine in order to reduce chronic illness and early death. For Darwin, understanding disease is predicated on understanding health. It must, he claims, be based on a ‘theory founded on nature, that […] bind[s] together the scattered facts of medical knowledge, and converge to one point of view, the laws of organic life’.33 Darwin opposed Enlightenment theories of medicine that adopted an iatromechanical approach to medicine by applying Newtonian physics and mathematics to the body in an attempt to explain its operations. He complains of writers who ‘considered the body as an hydraulic machine’, rather than as a living organism governed by a set of laws different from mechanical physics.34 To rectify this problem, Darwin laid out a theory of organic life, which required him to account for cognition since, following Hartley and Priestley, he viewed it as an embodied process. Furthermore, he saw the mind and body as functioning reciprocally, such that, as Matlak notes, if one were out of balance the other would be as well. To formulate his catalogue of diseases and their proposed cures, Darwin advances a theory of cognition that explains how ideas and emotions are formed, and, according to this theory, everything begins in infancy. As a practicing medical doctor and father of twelve children, Darwin had ample opportunity to observe infants in health and sickness.35 His speculations about early development were undoubtedly influenced by his interactions with the mothers (and wet nurses) who were his patients. However, the section of Zoonomia that discusses infant development in both humans and animals refutes the Scottish Common Sense philosopher Thomas Reid’s (1710–96) claim that the ‘involuntary signs of the passions and dispositions of the mind […] are a part of the human constitution’ and that the ‘signification of those signs is known to all men by nature,  Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 49.  Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, Or, the Laws of Organic Life, 2 vols. (1794; Teddington: Echo Library, 2007), vol. 1, p. 10. 33  Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, p. 10. 34  Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, p. 10. 35  Smith and Arnott, The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, p. 15. 31 32

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and previous to all experience’.36 Darwin imagines the effects of infants’ first sensations upon exiting the birth canal to argue that emotions and involuntary reflexes are not innate, but caused by contact with the environment. Tracing the origins of ‘the natural or universal language of grief’ to birth, infancy, and early childhood, he observes that the ‘sudden transition from ninety-eight degrees of heat [in the womb] into so cold a climate’ causes shivering, sensations of cold, and pale skin.37 These physical symptoms attend the feeling of fear later in life, Darwin argues, because they originate in this birth trauma. Similarly, the dryness of the air ‘disagreeably affects the aperture of this lachrymal sac’, thus causing tears.38 Combined with the snivelling caused by new odours ‘throughout our infancy’ and ‘according to the laws of early association’, these universal experiences account, according to Darwin, for the common human physiological responses to grief and fear.39 Darwin also focuses on emotions that are formed through pleasurable experiences, locating all emotional responses that we have later in life, even our aesthetic sensibilities, in our experiences as infants. For example, he attributes most positive emotions and their physiological manifestations to breastfeeding. The ‘first most lively impression of pleasure, that the infant enjoys after its nativity’, he claims, ‘is excited by the odour of its mother’s milk’.40 Smiling results from the action of ‘the antagonist muscles of the face’ when they relax after sucking.41 Notwithstanding Darwin’s circumspection about his materialism, he clearly sees emotion in terms of embodied reactions to the environment that begin when the infant body is tabula rasa, having only known the womb. In many ways, Darwin considers pleasurable embodied experiences more productive than painful ones because they lead to the very things that make us human: language, sympathy, and art. He builds on early experiences of pleasure to theorize passions of greater complexity, such as sentimental love and the appreciation of beauty. Shortly ‘after it is born into this cold world’, the infant feels the warmth and softness of its

 Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man (Edinburgh, 1788), p. 191.  Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, pp. 103, 102. 38  Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, p. 103. 39  Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, p. 103. 40  Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, p. 103. 41  Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, p. 104. 36 37

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mother’s breast.42 It associates pleasure with its mother and develops a love that becomes the basis for aesthetic feeling: Delighted by the softness and smoothness of the milky fountain […] the infant embraces with its hands, presses with its lips, and watches with its eyes; and thus acquires more accurate ideas of the form of its mother’s bosom. […] And hence at our mature years, when any object of vision is presented to us, which by its waving or spiral lines bears any similitude to the form of the female bosom, whether it be found in a landscape with soft gradations of rising and descending surface, or in the forms of some antique vases, or in other works of the pencil or chisel, we feel a general glow of delight, which seems to influence all our senses.43

In Darwin’s account, then, the infant’s first pleasure is oral and tactile, but as its visual perceptions become clearer it begins, like Shelley’s creature, ‘to perceive objects in their right forms’.44 In this case, it ‘acquires more accurate ideas of the form of its mother’s bosom’, which serves as an analogy for other objects that bear a similar shape. As a cognitive materialist, Darwin locates aesthetics within the entire complex of sensory perceptions that characterizes the human cognitive apparatus. The visual, in Darwin’s view, cannot be separated or considered in isolation from the rest of the body. Taking a psychoanalytic approach, Ruderman argues that ‘Darwin’s aesthetic […] is primarily incorporative’ in that it leads to a ‘desire to put art objects into one’s mouth’.45 While Darwin claims that certain beautiful objects provoke a desire to embrace or ‘salute’ them ‘with our lips’, this response relates to sentimental love. According to Edmund Burke (1729–97), with whose physiological theories in Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) Darwin clearly engages, our aesthetic response to beauty is tied to social affection and the formation of society. Though Ruderman contends that ‘Darwin replaces existing aesthetic theories such as Burke’s’, in fact, the ‘soft gradations of rising and descending surface’ that Darwin describes are similar to Burke’s definition of the beautiful as

 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, p. 100.  Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, p. 100. 44  Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 122. 45  Ruderman, The Idea of Infancy, p. 76. 42 43

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soft, smooth, and round.46 Furthermore, in Burke’s theory, the sublime and beautiful elicit deeply embodied responses, and Darwin’s account of aesthetics draws on much of the same medical discourse that Burke did.47 For Darwin, not only does the appreciation of art and nature originate with embodied experiences in infancy, but so does all human culture. Ruderman’s claim that ‘while our human uniqueness is importantly related to our capacity for language [in Zoonomia], our more astonishing powers are primarily animal’ registers Darwin’s emphasis on bodily experience as both the ontogenetic and phylogenetic origin of human beings.48 Like many eighteenth-century moral philosophers—Adam Smith (1723–90), for example—Darwin argues that sympathy is the foundation of society, but his focus is on the reciprocity of the body-mind rather than on a disembodied mind. Darwin contends that babies develop sympathy by observing and imitating the emotions they see expressed by others. In a similar fashion, Wordsworth’s ‘babe who sleeps/Upon his mother’s breast […]/Doth gather passion from his mother’s eye’ or his ‘darling of pygmy size’, who mimics everyone around him ‘As if his whole vocation/Were endless imitation’ learns how to feel through mimesis.49 Darwin takes mimetic emotion further, claiming that it forms the basis of language. These ‘natural signs’, he asserts, found ‘all human language’, which he sees as one of the three mainstays of human culture along with sympathy and art.50 Tracing emotions back to an infant’s exposure to a new environment and its interactions with other people allows Darwin to account for the physiological manifestations of emotion—tears, smiles, laughter, and so forth—later in life as well as for the origins of human culture. The infant 46  Ruderman, The Idea of Infancy, pp. 76, 99 and n. 9. Julia List discusses Darwin’s engagement with Burke’s aesthetics: see ‘Erasmus Darwin’s Beautification of the Sublime: Materialism, Religion and the Reception of The Economy of Vegetation in the Early 1790s’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 32/3 (2009), pp. 389–405. 47  See Aris Sarafianos, ‘Pain, Labor, and the Sublime: Medical Gymnastics and Burke’s Aesthetics’, Representations 91/1 (2005), pp. 58–83. 48  Ruderman, The Idea of Infancy, p. 74. 49  William Wordsworth, ‘The Two-Part Prelude of 1799’, quoted from The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), Bk. 2, ll. 270–71, 273; ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1807), ll. 87, 107–8; quoted from The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008); unless otherwise indicated, all references to Wordsworth’s work are to these editions. 50  Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, p. 101.

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in Zoonomia has an anthropological as well as physiological function, and even though as a physician Darwin observed babies first-hand, the infants that he discusses are decidedly imaginary. They bear the weight of history and evolution as Darwin inscribes the inception of civilization and our transition from animal to human being onto the infant’s tiny, rhetorical body.

Thomas Wedgwood: ‘The child is the father of the man’51 Thomas Wedgwood’s interest in cognitive science was personal. Where Darwin saw the origins of society in the new-born child, Wedgwood wanted to understand the effects of society on the infant. In the early 1790s, Wedgwood’s health sharply declined for no apparent reason. From 1792 on, he suffered from ‘blinding headaches and crippling stomach pains’ accompanied by ‘long depressions and fits of acute despair’.52 Wedgwood believed that his debilitating ailments developed in childhood, though he did not know from what cause. As an adult, he wanted to find out what enervates the nervous system and makes children prone to chronic illness and depression later in life. First, however, he needed to understand how cognition develops. Having read Zoonomia, Wedgwood did not agree with Darwin that emotions develop from muscular motion. He thought it happened the other way around, that ‘the first muscular efforts […] are originally caused by Feeling’.53 He believed that children’s emotional responses to their environments caused the muscles and the body to move in certain ways. If a child has the same reactions repeatedly, embodied patterns develop, and these lead to mental and physical health or disease later in life, depending on the stimuli. For this reason, Wedgwood wanted to trace the relationship between the ‘Association of Feeling, Idea, & Motory Action […] back to its earliest & rudest beginnings’.54 Wedgwood’s private notebooks are filled with hypotheses about cognitive development, but poor health prevented him from organizing and publishing them. Though he observed his ‘brother’s children from the  William Wordsworth, ‘My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold’, l. 7; quoted from Major Works.  Mike Jay, The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr Beddoes and His Sons of Genius (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 83–4. 53  Wedgwood, MS Notebooks E40-28451; original emphasis. 54  Wedgwood, MS Notebooks E40-28451. 51 52

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very hour of their birth’ and ‘his greatest pleasure was to watch children play’, the infants in his speculations are largely imaginary versions of himself.55 He closely observed his internal states, and made notes in his journal of ‘feelings associated with images of various places and times, and speculated on connections between them’, often remarking on the origins of his feelings in childhood.56 Building on Darwin’s notion that love develops from an infant’s pleasurable interactions with its mother during breastfeeding, Wedgwood noticed that this gratifying encounter also frequently causes babies to cry. He wondered, ‘Why shou’d the association of a pleasurable feeling occasion crying?’, and he wanted to understand how a practice which Darwin claimed led to aesthetic appreciation and social sympathy could also lead to misery.57 Wedgwood theorized that, like Mary Shelley’s creature, infants are born with undeveloped mental and sensory faculties. He claims that ‘the Child sees nothing with any distinctness—nor hears, tastes &c’ because its senses are ‘unexercised before birth’.58 The infant’s body, as well as its mind, is tabula rasa, which means that a different experience of nursing could lead to an outcome other than aesthetic appreciation. Rather than observe the process of breastfeeding, Wedgwood formulated an experiment as outlandish as Victor Frankenstein’s. He proposed to have ‘a boy suckled out of a teapot’ that is ‘concealed behind the nurses [sic] apron’.59 He thought that somehow this teapot experiment would answer the question of how pleasure transforms into pain. Presumably he could not get his sister-in-law’s consent to such a plan, so Wedgwood conducted this experiment, conjecturally, on an imaginary infant. Wedgwood’s infant, contrary to Darwin’s, does not smile as it sucks or gazes at its mother’s breast. Instead, it cries when it cannot be fed right away because it experiences disappointment. Wedgwood uses this scenario to understand the relationship between pleasure and disappointment, which he surmises is linked by desire. Pleasurable experiences ‘generate 55  Margaret Olivia Tremayne and Mary Everest Boole, The Value of a Maimed Life: Extracts from the Manuscript Notes of Thomas Wedgwood (London: C.W. Daniel, 1912), p. 72; Jay, Atmosphere of Heaven, p. 83. 56  Alan Barnes, ‘Negative and Positive Images: Erasmus Darwin, Tom Wedgwood and the Origins of Photography’, in The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, ed. C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 250. 57  Wedgwood, MS Notebooks E40-28452. 58  Wedgwood, MS Notebooks E40-28451. 59  Wedgwood, MS Notebooks E40-28452.

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desire’ because when a nursing infant is hungry it experiences ‘unsatisfied desire’, which if not satiated right away leads to ‘impatience which wou’d set a child a crying’.60 Breastfeeding, in Wedgwood’s analysis, entails dissatisfaction because it triggers a desire that cannot always be satisfied immediately. He asserts that ‘Pleasure & Desire are always coexistent’ and defines desire as ‘a faint state of feeling which is always attended with a craving for increase’.61 When an infant tries to satiate its desire, this undertaking throws its body into ‘more perfect activity’, which paradoxically intensifies the feeling.62 According to his theory of development, the more an infant uses its body, the more it develops its motor skills and perceptive and cognitive abilities. As the infant tries repeatedly to obtain the object of its desire, its nervous system and muscles become more proficient at a motion that increases its agitation and leads to disappointment. Eventually, ‘this effort occasion[s] a sensation of despair’.63 Through repeated exertion, the feeling of despair becomes perfected, as it were. If, as Wedgwood conjectures, ‘Disappointment can only succeed Desire’, pleasurable experiences entail the possibility of disappointment because they generate a desire for continued pleasure that may not always be satisfied.64 Wedgwood thinks that the connection between pleasure, desire, and disappointment is important because situations that exacerbate disappointment and desire create unnecessary pain. Unnecessary pain, in turn, causes ‘the sensation of despair’ that could haunt a child into adulthood. In order to mitigate the development of despair, adults need to ensure that infants do not undergo undue pain. Furthermore, they need to teach children how to appropriately respond to and manage pain in order to ‘prevent the faculty of suffering developing’.65 Wedgwood’s speculations about cognitive development are closely tied to his theories of education.66 In his notes on education, he offers suggestions for shifting children’s relationship to pain so as to reduce desire and, consequently, to reduce  Wedgwood, MS Notebooks E40-28452.  Wedgwood, MS Notebooks E40-28452. 62  Wedgwood, MS Notebooks E40-28452. 63  Wedgwood, MS Notebooks E40-28452. 64  Wedgwood, MS Notebooks E40-28457, original emphasis. 65  Tremayne and Boole, The Value of a Maimed Life, p. 14. 66  See Lisa Ann Robertson ‘“Hints & Speculation on Education”: Tom Wedgwood’s Materialist Pedagogy’ Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons (1 May 2016) at https://www. rc.umd.edu/pedagogies/commons/romantic_education/pedagogies.romantic_education.2016.robertson.html (last accessed February 2018). 60 61

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suffering in childhood and later in life. His goal was to discover a way to ‘engineer a child’s nervous system to recognise and dwell on pleasure more readily than pain’.67 Like Frankenstein, which links the creature’s violent behaviour to his painful experiences, Wedgwood thought that shaping a child’s cognitive development could mitigate much of its suffering in adulthood. In Shelley’s novel, the creature’s formative experiences are marked by abandonment and rejection. Well before he learns to speak, the creature ‘felt cold, also and half-frightened, as it were instinctively, [at] finding myself so desolate’, and ‘feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept’.68 After being rejected by his creator, the creature experiences violence in his other two interactions with humans. He also discovers his hideousness, as compared to the De Lacey’s, when he knows only a few words. By reading books, he eventually learns how to manipulate the justice system and learns that he should—like Adam—expect better treatment from his creator. What he does with this knowledge, however, is determined in part by his preverbal experiences. How a person responds to culture is largely, according to Shelley as well as Wedgwood, a function of one’s formative years. Elsewhere, Wedgwood recommends abolishing private property in the nursery to teach children to understand equality on an embodied level before they enter society.69 Wedgwood, like Darwin, adds to the Enlightenment concept of tabula rasa by extending it to the embodied mind. His thought experiments imagine how to equip infants and toddlers for adulthood, which includes preparing them to withstand the vagaries of life and negative cultural influences. Where Darwin sees the infant body as the key to understanding humankind’s past, Wedgwood sees it as the key to individual health and wellbeing. He imagines generations of adults free from unnecessary pain and suffering. He projects his fantasy of the mental and physical health that he lacked onto the infant’s rhetorical body.

 Jay, Atmosphere of Heaven, p. 84.  Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 121. 69  Robertson, ‘Hints & Speculation on Education’, para. 41. 67 68

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Humphry Davy: The Future of Humanity Davy’s exploration of human cognition was relatively brief, dating primarily from the mid-1790s until the early nineteenth century when he was working at the Pneumatic Institution established by Dr Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808) in Bristol in 1799. The notebooks Davy kept in Penzance, where he grew up, and in Bristol reveal that he grappled with the debates surrounding embodied cognition. His Penzance notebooks show him working through both the materialist and dualist arguments about cognition. For example, two fragmentary essays appear after the heading ‘Hints toward a future attempt towards the Theory of Mind’, in which Davy first considers the dualist position that the immaterial, immortal soul is responsible for thought, and then ‘examine[s] the Arguments for Materialism’.70 While Davy’s precise position remains unclear, his ruminations combine Darwin’s interest in the social with Wedgwood’s interest in the individual. Unlike Darwin and Wedgwood, Davy had no children of his own and spent little time with his nieces and nephews. Though his letters reveal that he had some contact with children, the infants and children that figure in his notebooks and other private writings are largely abstract. He frequently uses the terms ‘infant’ and ‘infancy’ in letters to indicate a period of inexperience attended by a process of maturation, that is, in a sense more in keeping with Enlightenment than Romantic conceptions of infancy. In a letter to Davies Giddy dated 22 February 1799, Davy writes that ‘I was quite the infant in speculation’, referring to his early theories about heat and light.71 A later letter to Francis Basset written on 29 June 1811 states that the ‘science of Electricity is still in an infant state, but it is making rapid progress’, and elsewhere he refers to his own experiments and inventions as infants and children.72 In his Bristol notes, however, he links the concept of infancy to social progress. Davy wanted to understand the social instinct in human beings, or why people universally seem to form social bonds, and how that might be directed towards the benefit of society. In his notebook, he expresses a desire ‘to investigate the social passions, to trace Man [sic] as a social being from the moment of his existence, a weak, a feeble unprotected being into 70  Humphry Davy, MS Notebooks HD/13/f (1795–1802; London: The Royal Institution of Great Britain). 71  Quoted from Letters: Humphry Davy and his Circle, http://www.davy-letters.org.uk/?s= 72  See, for example, Davy’s 1804 letter to William Clayfield or his 12 July 1815 letter to Rev. John Hodgson.

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a being of superior […] thinking, wise & intelligent’.73 He wanted to know how humans transform from helpless, dependent creatures into beings capable of higher order cognitive functioning. His use of the modifier ‘social’ indicates that he is curious about the interdependence of humans upon each other. His ideas about the relationship between infancy, social feeling, and society have resonances with the stadial theories of history which, according to Rowland, were popular in the Enlightenment, but which were articulated in two, contradictory ways. In the first version of stadial theory, the evolution of civilization and cultural progress mirrors the child’s development from infancy into a mature adult. In its other formulation, the evolution of society depends upon children, as objects of education and cultural inheritance. By the early nineteenth century, Rowland claims, these two views combined to ‘produce the figure of a child who is simultaneously ancestor and progeny, past and future’.74 The infant in Davy’s notebooks functions in both of the earlier ways, sometimes as evidence of social advances and sometimes as a model for human perfectibility. Davy’s Bristol notebook entries and a little-known poem that he composed around the same time, ‘The Life of the Spinosist’, consider how human infancy relates to social formation.75 Initially, the infant’s origin as ‘a weak, a feeble unprotected being’ necessitates dependence on other human beings at the beginning of its life.76 As in Darwin’s theory, the infant’s first relationship is with its mother, but rather than learning emotion, according to Davy, the infant imbibes ‘social passions’ from her. He claims that ‘laws of our existence order us in new connexion with society to search for our individual pleasure’.77 While Davy does not specify in this entry what the laws or the pleasures are, his Spinosist poem indicates that the law is the infant’s reliance on its mother for sustenance and the pleasure is breastfeeding. In this poem, Davy describes human beings as the ‘wild form of mortal things’ that: […] feel the form Of orbed beauty through its organs thrill To press the limbs of life with rapture warm  Davy, MS Notebooks HD/13/e.  Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 32. 75  Thanks to Sharon Ruston for bringing this poem to my attention. 76  Davy, MS Notebooks HD/13/e. 77  Davy, MS Notebooks HD/13/e. 73 74

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And drink the transport from a living rill.78

Here, Davy imagines a scenario in which the infant learns ‘To feel the social flame’ by pressing the ‘orbed beauty’ and drinking from ‘a living rill’.79 As in Darwin’s work, the ‘orbed beauty’ is a mother’s breast and the ‘rill’, or rivulet, is breastmilk. In this early version of the poem, the infant not only depends on its mother for nourishment, but it also learns to form social bonds, similar to Wordsworth’s ‘infant babe’ in the The Prelude. The ‘poem’, as Sharon Ruston notes, ‘imagines an individual’s life, from infancy to death’.80 Its central preoccupation is the cycle of life and death and the material transformations the human form undergoes, ‘from sordid dust awaken[ing]’ to giving back ‘to Nature all her stolen powers’.81 Yet, the part of the cycle that Davy represents as infancy, the suckling babe whose organs ‘thrill’ with warmth and pleasure, confirms the ideas in his notebooks about the origin of social feeling in infancy. The infant’s first compulsory but presumably pleasurable social interactions with its mother stimulate the desire to engage in social life as it matures into adulthood. In the Bristol notebook entry, Davy speculates that the ‘laws of our existence’ dictate that ‘our private pleasure is wisely connected to that of our fellow creatures’.82 His analysis and conclusions bear similarity to Scottish Common Sense moral philosophy formulated by the likes of the Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), and Smith, who theorized that human happiness is largely connected not only to our social situations, but is also directly related to taking benevolent action towards others. Davy claims that ‘Man is impelled to be a social being, is impelled to promote the happiness of his fellow creatures’ and ‘On account of its connexion with his own happiness, he is obliged to be benevolent. He is obliged to cultivate philanthropy’.83 However, despite these natural laws, human intervention is required. In a fragment of an essay titled ‘Hints towards a Treatise […] on Education & the formation 78  Quoted from Sharon Ruston, ‘From “The Life of the Spinosist” to “Life”: Humphry Davy, Chemist and Poet’, in Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities, ed. Margareth Hagen and Vibe Skagen (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2013), pp. 96–7. There are no line numbers in the text in Davy’s notebook, nor does Ruston assign any. 79  Quoted from Ruston, ‘From “The Life of the Spinosist”’ to “Life”, p. 97. 80  Ruston, ‘From “The Life of the Spinosist” to “Life”’, p. 90. 81  Quoted from Ruston, ‘From “The Life of the Spinosist”’, pp. 96–7. 82  Davy, MS Notebooks HD/13/e. 83  Davy, MS Notebooks HD/13/e.

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of the Human Intellect’, Davy offers advice to caregivers for encouraging social feeling in children. Here, he sees the infant in terms of stadial theory, as ‘an object of education’ that is ‘located in the present and future’ of social evolution.84 His instruction to parents revolves around the goal of making sure children’s upbringing will ensure that they grow up to be benevolent members of society. In ‘Hints’, Davy traces the origin of cognition further back than the moment of birth to the infant’s experience in utero. He speculates that ‘ideas formed in the womb’ form the basis of ‘the conscious being, the undefinable something called I’.85 This ‘I’, or the self, grows into the individual who, as in Hartley’s theory, has the propensity to act virtuously or viciously. Thus, Davy’s essay, ‘designed for the use of parents & instructors’, considers the relationship between sensation and character formation.86 In Frankenstein, the creature has no in utero experience, but he does undergo a prolonged period in which his body is assembled. Unlike an embryo, however, the creature’s tissue was not alive and, therefore, not sensible during his ‘gestation’. Even so, the novel concerns itself with character formation and moral action, and the creature demonstrates Davy’s thesis that moral development and pleasure are connected. The creature’s relationship to Victor, or rather the lack thereof, leads to his immoral actions in the final volume of Shelley’s novel. Though he suffers when the De Lacey family rejects him because of his appearance, the creature recalls: ‘I could have torn him [Felix] limb from limb […] But my heart sunk within me as with bitter sickness, and I refrained’.87 It is repeated rejection by his creator, and Victor’s refusal to provide him with any form of companionship, that leads the creature to violence. By consistently connecting himself with painful experiences, Victor not only fails to ‘prevent immoral actions’ in his creature, he actively nurtures the desire for revenge. Along similar lines, Davy reasons that care must be taken to appropriately manage an infant’s encounters with pain. While discomfort is unavoidable, he cautions that ‘pain should be either counteracted by some pleasure, such as that of sucking or it should be deconnected from moral agents’.88 Davy is less concerned with the effect of pain on a child’s  Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 33.  Davy, MS Notebooks HD/21/b. 86  Davy, MS Notebooks HD/21/b. 87  Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 148. 88  Davy, MS Notebooks HD/21/b. 84 85

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mental health than with the association of painful experiences with caregivers who teach children right from wrong. He worries that such a connection will undermine their ability to inculcate morality and ‘prevent immoral actions’.89 He censures in parents the ‘miserable habit of punishing children by anticipating pain’, through spanking or other like punishments, because the association of pain with those responsible for imparting morality could lead to rebellion, as it does with the Frankenstein’s creature.90 Davy’s concern with the individual is ultimately tied to social progress. The evolution of society, according to Davy’s logic, depends on raising children who connect morality with pleasure rather than pain and, therefore, willingly engage in virtuous behaviour. He ties society’s development to the evolution of humankind, such that the individual and the social are inextricably connected. In 1823, Davy significantly revised ‘Life of the Spinosist’ and published it anonymously under the title ‘Life’ by Joanna Baillie.91 In this version, he analogizes the infant to society. According to Ruston, Davy now ‘imagine[s] humanity as a child being breast-fed by “its” mother’.92 In ‘Life’, the infant qua humanity is ‘imagined first appreciating nature’s beauty and then the beauty of fellow humans’.93 Furthermore, the experience of being breastfed ‘awakens “sympathy” and compels “love”’.94 Even earlier, in a notebook entry written sometime between 1801 and 1802, Davy writes that the ‘human mind has lately been active & growing but there is very little reason for believing that it has attained its adult state […] it has been gradually gaining new powers & faculties, but it is as yet incapable of using [them] to produce the greatest possible effect’.95 This idea that the human mind is evolving phylogenetically is based on the assumption that the infant is born with an undeveloped cognitive system. As it ‘advances in years the Nerves become firmer and the Brain stronger’,

 Davy, MS Notebooks HD/21/b.  Davy, MS Notebooks HD/21/b. 91  Ruston notes that the poem was published under the title ‘Life of the Spinosist’ once during Davy’s lifetime and in two memoirs published in the 1830s after he had died. The revised version, ‘Life’, was published once in Joanna Baillie, A Collection of Poems, Chiefly Manuscript, and from Living Authors (London, 1822), pp. 156–62. 92  Ruston, ‘From “The Life of the Spinosist” to “Life”’, p. 92. 93  Ruston, ‘From “The Life of the Spinosist” to “Life”’, p. 92. 94  Ruston, ‘From “The Life of the Spinosist” to “Life”’, p. 92. 95  Davy, MS Notebooks HD/13/c. 89 90

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Davy contends, until it eventually shows ‘Judgement’ and ‘Intelligence’.96 Again, this mirrors Shelley’s creature, whose cognitive development follows the same process as human beings, albeit expedited. Society too, in Davy’s theory, follows a similar trajectory. Once human beings fully develop their mental capacities, society will achieve greater harmony. Similar to earlier stadial theorists, Davy assumes that ‘the progresses of species [are] parallel and comparable, but they are also understood as reinforcing and extending each other’.97 Hence, attending to the optimal growth of the individual inevitably advances the progress of society. Contrary to stadial theory, however, Davy does not concern himself with the decline of civilizations. He does not extend his analogy to old age, as does Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), for example.98 This makes the infant an apt analogy for thinking about William Godwin’s (1756–1836) notion of human perfectibility in scientific terms. While Davy undoubtedly knew about Godwin’s theories through Beddoes, in 1799 Coleridge ‘took him to dine with the anarchist philosopher’ for an evening that Richard Holmes describes as ‘memorable’.99 Where Wedgwood concerned himself with the individual, Davy’s interest in moulding character relates to the composition of society. In his discussion of social pleasures, Davy defines ‘morality as the law of gaining the greatest possible sum of pleasurable sensation’.100 This relationship between morality and pleasure is Godwinian. The introduction to An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) states that ‘intellectual or moral pleasure is infinitely preferred to those which are precarious and transitory’.101 Davy wanted to cultivate social feeling in children so that humanity could hasten its evolution towards perfection. In this respect, Davy shares Mary Shelley’s concern with community and ideal social systems.102 Before he turned his attention  Davy, MS Notebooks HD/13/f.  Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 52. 98  See Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, pp. 49–57. 99  Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London: Harper Press, 2008), p. 267. 100  Davy, MS Notebooks, HD/13/e. 101  William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (Dublin, 1793), pp. 1–2. 102  According to Laura E. Crouch, ‘while she was working on Frankenstein […] Shelley recorded in her Journal that she was reading Sir Humphry Davy’s “Chemistry”’. See Crouch, ‘Davy’s A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry: A Possible Scientific Source of Frankenstein’, Keats-Shelley Journal 27 (1978), p. 35. 96 97

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entirely to chemistry, the young Humphry Davy inscribed human perfectibility onto the infant body.

The Infant in the Literary Imagination Despite the infant’s various significations in the theories of Darwin, Wedgwood, and Davy, it shares an important commonality that is, moreover, indicated by its variability. It serves as an empty signifier onto which these writers inscribe their theories of cognition and then imagine how cognitive development affects the development of human beings and their social institutions. Like the mid-eighteenth-century conjectural historians of the Scottish Enlightenment, they extrapolate ‘human origins […] through the rhetorical and conceptual lens of infancy and childhood’.103 These texts also have important similarities to Shelley’s Frankenstein in the way they deploy the trope of the infant, despite the generic differences between scientific writing and science fiction. In Frankenstein, Shelley imagines a grown infant who can speak about and theorize his developmental experiences and the ways in which they affect his character, behaviour, and actions. Though she narrates a story rather than detailing a scientific explanation, the rhetorical function of the imaginary infant is similar—another telling instance of the pre-disciplinary nature of much Romantic writing. Though Shelley leaves open the philosophical questions she raises, she creates a character whose mental and emotional development is directly connected to his embodied experiences prior to his acquisition of language. The creature, like infants and children in the scientific theories, suggests how experiences in early childhood can affect the quality and tenor of social relations as a whole. The novel argues that the mental and emotional wellbeing of adults determines how just a society will be, depending on whether or not its members acquire social sympathy and mental and physical balance early in life. In this view, truly ‘the child is the father of the man’ and, collectively, children are the progenitors of society. Scientific speculation about infants intersects with Romantic-era literary engagements with the child, just as the disciplinary boundaries between these genres overlapped. The distinction between science and poetry was less rigid in the Romantic period than today. After all, Darwin was the

103

 Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, p. 49.

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premier poet in England before the publication of Lyrical Ballads, and Davy saw the second edition of Ballads through the publishing process. The infant in Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798) functions analogously to those in the scientific texts discussed above. Both of these poets knew Darwin’s work and were friends with Wedgwood and Davy, and both were interested in and familiar with cognitive theories of the day. In The Prelude’s well-known infant-babe passage, Wordsworth imagines a breastfeeding infant that simultaneously represents himself and humanity in order to trace the origin of the imagination. His account of infant development shares similarities with Darwin’s and Wedgwood’s theories. In ‘Frost at Midnight’, Coleridge compares his childhood with the one he imagines for his infant son as the poem establishes a space for the thought experiment, with ideas about childhood cognitive development based on the premise of embodied cognition. These imaginary infants in canonical Romantic poetry have the same rhetorical functions as those found in Romantic-period scientific writing. Ironically, though the infant remained an imagined object in the writing of the scientific figures considered, the poets actually implemented experiments of sorts on children.104 Wordsworth was given the care of Basil Montagu’s (1771–1851) young son, whom he and his sister Dorothy (1771–1855) reared and educated for a few years. When asked to describe the system they used to educate the four-year-old Basil, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote, ‘We teach him nothing at present but what he learns from the evidence of his senses’.105 The Wordsworths, it seems, reared Basil as a child of nature. Coleridge’s notebooks record observations regarding his son Hartley’s (1796–1849) responses to various phenomena. In one well-known incident, Coleridge answers Hartley’s question about the mountains by showing ‘him the whole magnificent Prospect in a Looking Glass […] so that the whole was like a Canopy or Ceiling over his head’.106 Startled, the boy struggled to describe his reaction to seeing 104  It should be noted that Beddoes developed toys that his children and the Edgeworth children played with; Darwin developed a curriculum for the Wedgwood children, including Tom, and for a girls’ boarding school; and both men were acquainted with Thomas Day, who famously adopted two orphan girls, one of whom he hoped (unsuccessfully) would become his wife. 105  Quoted in David Erdman, ‘Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Wedgwood Fund, Part II’, Bulletin of The New York Public Library 60/10 (1956), p. 490. 106  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), vol. 1, sec. 923.

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the mountains outside the window and simultaneously reflected in the room. His father remarked that he had ‘never before saw such an Abstract of Thinking as a pure act & energy’, a sentiment that would preoccupy Coleridge for the rest of his life.107 However, as neither of these experiments were sustained, the poets relied on imaginary infants to articulate their theories of cognition as much as the men of science did. In The Prelude and ‘Frost at Midnight’, the tabula rasa infant functions no differently than in Zoonomia, in Wedgwood’s and Davy’s unpublished notebooks, or in Frankenstein, for that matter. The infant allows Wordsworth and Coleridge to speculate about cognitive processes and develop their theories. Both men saw their poetry as philosophical and scientific endeavours that responded to the prevailing theories of the day. The figure of the infant reveals that the work performed by the imagination was wide ranging. It allowed writers to explore scientific theories in their poetry, but it also enabled men of science to develop theories in the absence of an experimental object. Both groups wanted to understand how cognition develops, and because they could not remember their own infancy or otherwise gain access to infant phenomenology they were forced to resort to imagining how their theories would operate in its earliest stages. The child has long been recognized as a significant trope in Romantic poetry, but it figures as heavily in scientific discourse and has a similar rhetorical function. Thus, the infant calls scholars not only to reconsider the relationship of science and poetry in the Romantic period, but the shape of scientific and poetic labour as well.

107

 Coleridge, The Notebooks, vol. 1, sec. 923, emphasis in original.

CHAPTER 11

‘A wretch so sad, so lorn’: The Feral Child and the Romantic Culture of Infancy Rolf Lessenich

Writing about infants and children during the eighteenth century tended, unsurprisingly, to reflect and to participate in the wider debates ongoing in contemporary ‘natural philosophy’. Foremost amongst such debates were those concerning how knowledge is formed and how the human might be defined. Hence, key treatises about infant education, such as Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) by John Locke (1632–1704) or Émile, ou De L’Éducation (1762) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), can in a very real sense also be considered (at least in part) as treatises on the nature of perception and cognition. Recent work by Ann Wierda Rowland and Anja Höing has similarly shown how literature written for children during the late eighteenth century reflects broader contemporary enquiry not only into how human and animal natures might be distinguished, but also into whether it was possible to distinguish between

R. Lessenich (Deceased) (*) University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Domines Veliki, C. Duffy (eds.), Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8_11

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different kinds of human nature.1 The use of infancy as a trope in the stadial paradigms of societal development formulated by Enlightenment historians and philosophers such as Adam Fergusson (1723–1816) in his influential Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), for example, ensured that parallels between human infants and supposedly primitive societies and racial groups were common in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-­ century cultural texts. Nor was it only the subjects of contemporary ‘natural philosophy’ which found their analogues in writing about and writing for infants and young children. In The Making of the Modern Child, for example, Andrew O’Malley notes that such writing also adapted many of the methodological paradigms of contemporary ‘natural philosophy’, notably including that of ‘the individual case study’, which, as O’Malley points out, ‘replaces, to an extent, allegory’ across a range of different infant-focused discourses.2 For the most part, when it came to speculation about infants and young children, thought experiments substituted for actual, empirical case studies. Hence Lisa Ann Robertson, in her chapter in this volume, documents the rhetorical or hypothetical case studies involving children in the writings in natural philosophy of Humphry Davy (1778–1829), Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) and Thomas Wedgwood (1771–1805). But on very rare occasions, other kinds of case studies presented themselves. This chapter will consider one such kind: those feral children who for one reason or another had been left to develop alone and without human guidance only subsequently to be found and returned to society. Such ‘wild children […] became’, as Adriana Benzaquén puts it, ‘involuntary participants in the gradual formulation and consolidation of human science’.3 But responses to them at the time also illustrate some key tensions in the emergent, Romantic reconfiguration of ‘infancy’. 1  On the investigation of the human-animal boundary in eighteenth-century writing for and about children, see Ann Wierda Rowland, ‘Learned Pigs and Literature Children: Becoming Human in Eighteenth-Century Literary Cultures’, in Andrew O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods (London: Palgrave, 2018), pp. 99–115; and Anja Höing’s essay in this volume, pp. 159–182. In The Making of the Modern Child, Andrew O’Malley reminds us of the recurrent tendency, in eighteenth-century writing, to use stadial models of societal and personal development in which supposedly less-advanced cultures or individuals were represented as infant in relation to a European, adult norm (Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 4–5). 2  O’Malley, Making of the Modern Child, pp. 12, 13. 3  Adriana Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006), p. 143.

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The quotation in my title is taken from a poem about one such child: ‘The Savage of Aveyron’ (1800), by Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson (1757–1800). As Judith Pascoe, the most recent editor of Robinson’s work, observes, Robinson composed this poem in October 1800 having earlier read a report in the Morning Post of the discovery, on 25 July 1799, of a feral boy who had been living in the woods in Lacaune, in the south of France—and who came to be known as Victor of Aveyron.4 In the following, I read Robinson’s poetic representation of this ‘savage’ as exemplary not only of the ways in which Romantic-period literary texts focus the diverse, contemporary cultures of infancy, but also of the extent to which those cultures have their own discursive roots in influential earlier systems of thought. Benzaquén suggests that ‘straddling two centuries, [Victor] appeared when one way of formulation questions about people was dissolving and another one was taking shape’ and made an ‘unwitting contribution to the rise of the new conceptual framework (which is still our own).5 But seen in the context of the Romantic cultures of infancy, responses to Victor make clear that the transition from the stadial paradigms of infancy associated with Enlightenment cultural texts towards the genetic configuration now commonly associated with Romanticism was neither clear-cut nor complete in the early nineteenth century. In his chapter in this volume, Robert Davis talks of the need to further historicise the eighteenth-century cultures of infancy.6 In fact, since late antiquity and the early Christian period, two conflicting and irreconcilable images of the child had existed in European thought: that of the child as an ignoble savage, an incomplete adult in need of correction and chastisement; and that of the child as noble savage close to its origin, a model for adults who have been corrupted by experience and lost awareness of their natural and spiritual home in the world and beyond. As the work of Judith Plotz, Ann Wierda Rowland, David Ruderman and others has shown, the parallel of child and savage was common in the late eighteenth century and Romantic period.7 The German thinker Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) spoke, in his Auszug aus einem Briefwechel über Ossian und 4   Judith Pascoe (ed.), Mary Robinson: Selected Poems (London: Broadview, 1999), pp. 332–3; unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from the poem are from this edition. 5  Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children, p. 144. 6  See pp. 91–113. 7  See Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and D. B. Ruderman, The

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die Lieder alter Völker [Selection of Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples] (1772–3) and Vom Geist der erbräischen Poesie [On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry] (1782–3), of ‘Kinder und Kindernationen’ [children and child nations], and Ann Wierda Rowland has recently re-­ contextualised in impressive detail Percy Shelley’s oft-cited assertion, in his ‘Defence of Poetry’ (1820), that ‘the savage is to ages what the child is to years’.8 In parallel with these differing configurations of infancy, there also existed two conflicting kinds of pedagogy: one educator-centred (authoritarian) and the other child-centred (reformist). The training of children into obedience and submission to the pre-established patriarchal order of the old world was a prevailing trend in Classical antiquity, both in Athens and Sparta. In his Politics, for example, the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–22 BCE) recommends that disobedient children be dishonoured by beating (e.g. Politics VII 17), and the Roman rhetorician Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (35–100) takes a similar position in his Institutes of Oratory (e.g. I 3). Such attitudes persisted well into the eighteenth century, with the rod often thought indispensable, even in the education of princes.9 Contrary to this view of infancy, which negates any conception of infancy as a valuable developmental stage in its own right, there developed a Platonic-Gnostic tradition, exemplified by the Corpus Hermeticum, which was appropriated by many church fathers.10 This tradition generated a correlation of infancy with innocence, marking a clear precursor to similar correlations in the work of English Romantic poets like William Blake (1757–1827) and William Wordsworth (1770–1850). On the basis of Plato’s doctrine of the world of forms and its anamnesis in the material world, this Gnostic tradition inverted the prevailing conception of infancy. Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry: Romanticism, Subjectivity, Form (London: Routledge, 2016). 8  Quoted from Percy Bysshe Shelley, Selected Poems and Prose, eds. Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy (London: Penguin, 2017), p.  652; unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Shelley’s work are from this edition. See Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, pp. 25–66 passim. 9  For examples, see Philippe Ariès, L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime (Paris: Plon, 1960). The shifting during the Enlightenment of the understanding of patria potestas from a natural law to a natural duty still positioned the child at the rational distance of a subject from a ruler, at a cane’s length, as it were. 10  Joachim Ritter (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 13 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971–2007), vol. 4, pp. 827–8. The Corpus Hermeticum gained influence through the Latin translation by Marsilio Ficino (1471).

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Instead of the infant standing in need of instruction and correction from the father, the ‘Child’ became, in Wordsworth’s often-cited dictum, the ‘Father of the Man’: a model of orientation and correction for adults, because the infant was understood to be closest in time to human pre-­ existence in the world of forms, and because its ‘pigmy size’, as Wordsworth puts it, would not allow a preponderance of body over mind.11 The adult, as Wordsworth conceived it in his seminal Romantic re-evaluation of the relationship between childhood experience and adult identity, the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807), could not totally reconnect with infant consciousness, but the infant was a reminder not to forget the ‘clouds of glory’ from which it emerged into the world.12 Hence the justness of Andrew O’Malley’s emphasis on the role of ‘sentimental and nostalgic ideas’, in Romantic engagements with infancy as the counterpart (and sometimes complement) of Enlightenment ‘ideas of progress and improvement’.13 In this Romantic inflection of the Platonic-Gnostic conception of infancy, then, the infant was innocent, prophetic, intuitive and naturally philosophical—and not to be warped by authoritarian pedagogy. In the view of the American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), intuition was superior to tuition, and already in the middle of the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had argued, in his Émile, that education was superior to, and to be separated from, mere instruction.14 Although Wordsworth argued in detail against the educational philosophy of Rousseau’s Émile, both authors in fact defended a reformist education based on the supposed natural innocence and perceptiveness of the

11  William Wordsworth, ‘My heart leaps up when I behold’, l. 7; ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, l. 86. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Wordsworth’s work are taken from Stephen Gill (ed.), William Wordsworth: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008). For more on Wordsworth’s famous formulation and the extent to which it both embodies the Romantic conception of the infant and as influenced subsequent studies of that conception, see Aleida Assmann, ‘Wordsworth und die romantische Krise: Das Kind als Vater’, in Das Vaterbild im Abenland, ed. Hubertus Tellenbach (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1978), pp. 48–61; and Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, pp. 25–9. 12  Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, l. 86. 13  See Andrew O’Malley (ed.), Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods (London: Palgrave, 2018), ‘Introduction’, p. 3. 14  See Emerson, ‘Nature’ (1836) and ‘Divinity School Address’ (1838). For the influence of Platonism on Rousseau’s thought, see David Lay Williams, Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007).

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infant.15 The imagery of enslavement which both Rousseau and Wordsworth (to say nothing of Blake) use to figure traditional educational practices is, in addition to its obvious political resonances, an indicator of their Platonism.16 These two, irreconcilable conceptions of infancy and education existed side by side and occasionally clashed over the centuries. They came into conflict again in the course of the eighteenth century when Enlightenment progressivism began to be complemented by primitivism, when a cult of sensibility forbidding the infliction of pain gained ground over rational pragmatism, and when development began to be seen as more important than the finished product (natura naturans versus natura naturata). The tilting of the Neoclassical balance between imagination and reason in favour of the imagination, increasingly represented as the natural gift of children and savages, began to rehabilitate Plato and Platonism from the low esteem in which they were, for the most part, held by the down-to-­ earth Augustans. Samuel Johnson’s (1709–84) rejection of the idealist philosophy of George Berkeley (1685–1753) and his advocacy of the corporal punishment of children, for instance, were challenged by Rousseau and his many followers throughout Europe, who were re-engaging with Platonic ideas. Equally, the increasing separation of the professional and the domestic spheres led to the latter being configured more and more as a private space, centred on procreation and on the education of children. In her essay in this volume, Lorner Lerner examines the changing representation of mothers and infants in the public iconography of the French Revolution.17 But it is also true that in Britain and Germany, the idealisation of mothers and children enabled by their increasing exclusion from the male public sphere contributed, in part, to the infantilisation of women in various contemporary discourses.18

15  See James Chandler, ‘Wordsworth, Rousseau and the Politics of Education’, in Duncan Wu (ed.), A Companion to Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 57–83. 16  See Williams, Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment, pp. 142–6. 17  See pp.??-?? 18  On this transformation and its consequences for the representation of infants and women, see Meike Sophia Baader, Die romantische Idee des Kindes und der Kindheit: Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Unschuld (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1996), pp. 27–8. On the importance of ‘iconic figures of mother and child’ in Antiquarian and Romantic literary culture, see Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, pp. 169–77, 189–92 (189).

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The Romantic valorisation of infancy in, for example, William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789), Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ and The Prelude (1805), and the collection of fairytales Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–22) edited by Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–185), thus had a significant pre-history in the eighteenth century.19 As Rowland and others make clear, this pre-history involved, in Britain, many of the key discourses of the eighteenth century. And a similar trajectory can be traced in other European countries, as in Rousseau’s Émile and, in Germany, Friedrich Schiller’s (1759–1805) Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795); Herder’s writings on infancy and the primitive in the history of mankind and the evolution of language; Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s (1775–1854) philosophical lectures on an original unity of man and nature as preserved in the child; and the writings of Friedrich Fröbel (1782–1852), founder of the modern kindergarten. Through writings of this kind, in other words, it came increasingly to be argued across a range of different areas of enquiry that adults and ‘adult’ civilisations should not move too far away from the regulative or constructed idea of an imagined, primitive original. And hence, again, the justice of O’Malley’s perception of ‘nostalgia’ as a ‘suture’ by which the past and present, of individuals and societies, could be figuratively ‘bound together’ in a coherent subjectivity.20 But this new, ‘Romantic’ culture of infancy was neither unproblematic nor universally accepted. The German Romantic poet Novalis (1772–1801), for example, often admires the wisdom of childhood with express Romantic Irony: for Novalis, the child connects the here and the hereafter (life and death), but also wisdom with inexperience, and sensitivity with cruelty, thereby evoking both nostalgia and wariness in the adult.21 Moreover, considerable doubts remained in contemporary thought as to whether or not the increasing isolation and estrangement of the individual could be overcome by a Platonic Romanticism which pointed the way 19  In the popular fairy tale, children restore the natural order of the world that chaos and evil had temporarily made invisible; see Volker Klotz, Das europäische Kunstmärchen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985), p. 15. 20  See Andrew O’Malley, Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe (London: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 11–12. 21  See Roderick McGillis, ‘Irony and Performance: The Romantic Child’, in Adrienne E. Gavin, The Child in British Literature: Literary Constructions of Childhood, Medieval to Contemporary (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 101–15.

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towards an apokatastasis, a universal reintegration of man in nature and a reunion with a world beyond.22 The anecdote told of Percy Bysshe Shelley by his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792–1862), that he, having diligently read Plato, pulled an infant boy from his mother in order to interrogate him about the world of forms, of which he ought to have had a fresh memory, and who subsequently sought to calm the mother by lecturing her on the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis, shows how unworldly and quixotic such Platonism could appear in a post-Enlightenment age, the regulative nature of the primitivist ideal notwithstanding.23 After all, the progressivism of Augustan culture was still alive, surviving in both anti-Romantic satire and in anti-Platonic, Romantic disillusionism, Romanticism’s dark underside.24 Much of the Romantic culture of infancy was, of course, based on speculation in natural philosophy and other disciplines. As noted, in her chapter in this volume, Lisa Ann Robertson documents the rhetorical experiments performed upon children by Davy, Darwin and Wedgewood, as well as in the poetry of William Wordsworth, while Ann Wierda Rowland, in Romanticism and Childhood, has described the similar, rhetorical experiment conduction by Adam Ferguson in his Essay on the History of Civil Society, in which he imagines a ‘colony of children transplanted from the nursery and left to form a society apart, untaught, and undisciplined’.25 But in the specific case of the developing conception of infancy, practical experience was one of the key drivers of Romantic disillusionism and dissent from the Romantic conception of the infant: the daily experience of children and the time-honoured custom of dressing children like adults, the finished products that they were expected to become through an active, authoritarian education. Overall, a problematic gap still existed, between, on the one hand, the Enlightenment view of man as a wild  Assmann, ‘Wordsworth und die romantische Krise’, p. 57.  For Hogg’s story, see James Sutherland (ed.), The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 190–1. 24  For the persistence of Augustan progressivism in Romantic satire, see Rolf Lessenich, Neoclassical Satire and the Romantic School 1780-1830 (Göttingen: Bonn University Press, 2012). For Romantic Disillusionism as the antithesis of Platonic Romanticism, see Rolf Lessenich, Romantic Disillusionism and the Sceptical Tradition (Bonn: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht (for Bonn University Press), 2017). 25  Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1767), p. 4; see Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, pp. 54–6. 22 23

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animal (homo ferus) made human only by education and civilisation—as argued, for example, in the works of the Swedish natural philosopher Carl Linnaeus (1707–88) and the French physician Jean Marc Gaspard Itard (1774–1838) —and, on the other hand, the Romantic culture of infancy which increasingly represented the infant as a noble savage liable to be corrupted by education and civilisation. Against the background of the discursive conflict between these two cultures of infancy, the high-profile cases of two feral children discovered during the Romantic period caused intense speculation across Europe. The first of these—on whom I will focus, primarily, here—was Victor of Aveyron (c. 1788–1828), a mute boy who was discovered by hunters in the woods near Saint-Sernan-Sur-Rance, in the Aveyron, in southern France, in the late 1790s; he was given the name Victor by Jean Itard, who eventually took responsibility for his care and attempted to educate him.26 The other was the Bavarian boy Kaspar Hauser (c. 1812–1833), who appeared in Nuremberg in May 1828, claiming to have spent the early part of his life confined in a dungeon.27 Both children were visited, examined and to an extent experimented on by people working in various branches of natural philosophy in the hope of substantiating their own theories about human development and refuting any opposing theories. Itard, for example, who seems to have helped ‘Victor’ considerably, and who became, in consequence, a pioneer of modern methods of education for disabled and disadvantaged children, was asked to send regular reports on his successes and failures to the French Minister of the Interior who, in turn, wrote reports to the French Institute.28 Decades later, in 1844, another feral child, Johannes Seluner (1828–98), who was fifteen or sixteen years of age, was found in the Swiss Alps and was submitted to comparable examinations. In view of the strong interest that the Romantic Period took in human development in general, and in child development in particular, feral children had by then long been a literary subject, generating both legends and myths. Robinson’s poem, I argue here, is 26  For a detailed account of circumstances surrounding the discovery, (re)education, and (re)integration of ‘Victor’ into society, see Harlan L.  Lane, The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); and Benzaquén, Encounters, pp. 143–214. Benzaquén mentions Robinson’s poem in passing in her account of Victor’s ‘afterlives’ (p. 157). 27  For an account of Kaspar Hauser, see Elisabeth Frenzel, Stoffe der Weltliteratur, eighth edition (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1992), pp. 301–4. 28  See Lane, Wild Boy of Aveyron, pp. 165–7.

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e­ xemplary of the ways in which literary texts functioned in the Romantic cultures of infancy as discursive nodes, bringing together viewpoints and arguments from what would, today, be considered different areas of enquiry and genres of knowledge. In England during the Romantic period, the greatest stir was caused by the finding and examination of—and, to a certain extent, experimentation with—the boy in the south of France, who acquired the sobriquet ‘Victor of Aveyron’. The find was widely noticed in the English papers, including the Morning Post for 3 October 1800, which reported: He lived on potatoes, chestnuts, and acorns […] His features are regular, but without expression; every part of his body is covered with scars; these scars attest the cruelty of the persons by whom, it is presumed, he has been abandoned; or perhaps they are attributable only to the dangers of a solitary existence at a tender age, and in a rude tract of country.29

As Judith Pascoe observes, it was the account in the Morning Post which seems to have provided Mary Robinson with her primary source for ‘The Savage of Aveyron’, the poem on which the remainder of this chapter will focus.30 A widely read poet, novelist, and dramatist, Robinson, who had been involved with the Morning Post since the departure of Robert Southey (1774–1843) as poetry editor in 1799—and who had been earned some early notoriety as an actress and as the first acknowledged mistress of George IV of England (1762–1830) whilst he was still Prince Regent— was now confined to a wheelchair and in the last months of her life.31 In many respects akin to Lord Byron (1788–1824), who laments that the ‘visionary scene of bliss’ of his childhood was a mere ‘splendid dream’ from which he woke to the ‘Truth’ of misery and loneliness, Mary Robinson’s outlook on life exhibits what I have elsewhere described as  The Morning Post (3 October 1800), p. 3.  Pascoe, (ed.), Selected Poems, p. 333. ‘The Sage of Aveyron’ was first published, posthumously, in Mary Elizabeth Robinson (ed.), Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, 4 vols. (London, 1801); and again in Mary Elizabeth Robinson (ed.), The Wild Wreath (London, 1804). 31  For a detailed account of Robinson’s life, see Paula Byrne, Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson (London: HarperCollins, 2005). The exact nature of Robinson’s connection with the Morning Post has been the subject of some debate, though most scholars now agree that she could not properly be considered the ‘literary editor’, since such a post did not really exist, at least not in the terms which we might now understand. 29 30

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Romantic disillusionism.32 Pyrrhonic scepticism was Platonic Romanticism’s ever-present ‘other’, its dark underside. Mary Robinson’s Gothic novels and poems such as Vancenza (1792), ‘The Haunted Beach’ (1800) and ‘All Alone’ (1800), all attest to this disillusionism, her admiration of the poetry of Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and her personal friendship with Coleridge notwithstanding. And indeed, although Robinson’s own Lyrical Tales (1800) was based on Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), Robinson’s poem ‘The Haunted Beach’ contradicts Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), just as her poem ‘All Alone’ contradicts Wordsworth’s ‘We are Seven’ (1798), emphasising the alienation of both children and adults in a world without divine superintendence. Robinson’s poem ‘The Sage of Aveyron’ was written two years before Wordsworth’s seminal, Romantic assessment of infancy in his ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’. Nevertheless, Robinson’s poem reads like a point-by-point refutation of Wordsworth’s Platonic estimation of the metaphysical divinity of the infant and of the place of humanity in a benevolent nature. Indeed, in this respect, Robinson’s poem anticipates not only the Romantic disillusionism of Heinrich Von Kleist’s (1772–1811) orphan tale, ‘Der Findling’ [The Findling] (1811), casting doubt on the supposedly natural goodness of the infant, but also Matthew Arnold’s (1822–88) explicitly anti-Wordsworthian poem on child loneliness, ‘To a Gipsy Child by the Seashore’ (1849), which encapsulates that Victorian distrust of the Romantic configuration of infancy which Arnold branded as Wordsworth’s ‘bad philosophy’.33 When Robinson’s daughter Mary Elizabeth published ‘The Savage of Aveyron’ for the first time in her Memoirs of The Late Mrs. Robinson, she added this lengthy gloss: The following Poem, which by the date the Reader will perceive to have been written a very short time previous to the dissolution of its excellent Author, will require no apology for its insertion in this publication. The 32  George Gordon, Lord Byron, ‘I Would I Were A Careless Child’ (1808), ll. 21–32; quoted from Jerome McGann (ed.), Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), vol 1., p. 122; unless otherwise indicated, all references to Byron’s work are to this edition. 33  See David Ruderman, ‘Reforming the Space of the Child: Infancy and the Reception of Wordsworth’s “Ode”’, in Romanticism and Parenting, ed. Carolyn Weber (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), pp. 103–27.

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c­ orrectness of the metre, and the plaintive harmony which pervades every stanza, clearly evinces the mild philosophy with which a strong mind can smooth its journey to the grave. This LAST offspring of MRS. ROBINSON’S Muse was produced at intervals of favourable symptoms of her fatal malady. The subject was interesting to her heart. She adopted it with all the enthusiasm of mournful ANTICIPATION. The story first suggested itself to her after perusing various accounts of a SAVAGE BOY, lately discovered in the Forest of Aveyron, in the department of Tarn, and said to be then existing at PARIS. Frequent instances of this kind have occurred in the history of Man, and conjecture has almost uniformly been bewildered respecting the origin of such fugitives. In countries where BANDITTI have been known to reside, imagination may be allowed the exercise of its powers; and Reason may ruminate on the possibility, as well as the probability, of such an interesting history as that of ‘THE SAVAGE OF AVEYRON’.34

The insistence on the biographical resonance of the poem here (‘the subject was interesting to her heart’) is suggestive, given that it was written by Mary Robinson’s daughter, emphasising not just Perdita’s continued adherence to ‘mild philosophy’ in the face of illness and death but also her ‘anticipation’ of abandoning her own child to a lonely world through her death, just as the ‘Savage’ Victor had been abandoned following the murder of his mother. In this respect, it is surely significant that Mary Elizabeth remarks on the ‘plaintive’ tone of the poem whilst looking away from its bleak assessment of the infant’s condition. Mary Elizabeth’s gloss reads her mother’s poem as an existential parable—we are all lost children, wandering alone in the woods of life—rather than seeing it as a specific engagement with debates about the Romantic culture of infancy. But the poem can and should also be read in that context. The ‘exercise’ of ‘imagination’ in ‘The Savage of Aveyron’ is visible from the outset. The poem opens with a conventional, Gothic scene. The speaker recalls walking in a dark forest on a December night, thinking themselves alone: O! mazy woods of Aveyron! O! wilds of dreary solitude! Amid thy thorny alleys rude I thought myself alone! I thought no living thing could be  Mary Elizabeth Robinson (ed.), Memoirs, vol. 3, pp. 173–4; original emphases.

34

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So weary of the world as me, – While on my winding path the pale moon shone. (ll. 9–15)35

Unrelieved loneliness becomes the dominant motif of the poem and is reinforced by a varying refrain at the end of nine of the fourteen stanzas; the word ‘alone’ occurs no fewer than eighteen times in the poem. No Platonic train of thought nor Wordsworthian nostalgia intervenes over the course of the 174-line poem to redeem, dialectically, this scene of paradise lost with visions of a potential paradise regained. On the contrary, the final refrain takes up again and extends the ‘solitude’ of the first: Dark wilds of dreary solitude, Amid your thorny alleys rude I thought myself alone. And could a wretch more wretched be, More wild, or fancy-fraught than he, Whose melancholy tale would pierce a HEART OF STONE! (ll. 169–74)

But even as the poem opens, the speaker’s loneliness has already been interrupted (again, in Gothic fashion), by a moaning which has aggravated rather than eased that loneliness: ‘a melancholy tone:–/It seem’d to freeze my blood […]/While terror-fraught I stood!’ (ll. 3–4, 8). These sounds, of course, are produced by the ‘wretched’, ‘wild boy’ (l. 28). But Robinson’s characterisation of the ‘wild’ noises made by the child takes on added significance, of course, when we remember—as Martina Domines Veliki and Cian Duffy point out in their introduction to this volume—that the relationship between animal noises and the development of language in infants and so-called primitive peoples had been the subject of sustained speculation during the eighteenth century, for example by James Burnett (1714–99) in his Of the Origins and Progress of Language (1773–92) and Johann Gottfried Herder in his Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772). Robinson’s speaker confirms that the child ‘could not speak’ (‘of words he nothing knew’) but only ‘shriek’ the words ‘Alone, alone’, which the speaker tells us that the ‘wretch’ was imitating from his dying mother, who was murdered in front of him by ‘three barbarous ruffians’—details which Robinson’s speaker does not learn from 35  The ‘pale’, distant moon is a frequent symbol of Romantic disillusionism as in, for example, the works of Byron and the natural philosopher and author Karl Georg Büchner (1813–37).

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the boy himself, but seems to know in advance (ll. 40, 68, 43, 134).36 Neither, the speaker affirms, does the ‘wild boy’ have any sense of time: ‘to a wretch so sad, so lorn,/All days alike would be!’ (ll. 82–3). On the contrary, the speaker compares the child to ‘lorn maniac’, with a ‘dark and sunken’ ‘eye’ and a ‘scorch’d brain that throbb’d alone’ in ‘wild dismay’ (ll. 12–13, 98, 77). Far from the kind of noble savage which might have been predicted or envisaged by the Romantic culture of infancy, then, Robinson’s ‘Savage of Aveyron’—and the title of the poem is instructive—is closer to the disconsolate child of Robinson’s anti-Wordsworthian lyrical tale ‘All Alone’, who spends his time in a churchyard after his parents (and even his dog!) have died. In contrast to the optimistic little girl in Wordsworth’s ‘We are Seven’, who believes in the continued presence of the departed, Robinson’s infants cannot find happiness in a natural, Platonic awareness of the unity of this world with that beyond. The absence of this metaphysics means that there is no single trance of a Wordsworthian ‘despondency corrected’ just as there is no single glimpse of spring in the bleak winter scene of Robinson’s ‘The Savage of Aveyron’.37 ‘Nature’, as Benzaquén puts it in her brief mention of Robinson’s poem, ‘is represented in its alternative Romantic form  – not nurturing but sublime’.38 Indeed, nothing in Robinson’s poem—despite the ‘mild philosophy’ which her daughter detected—approaches Wordsworth’s church-anthem like theodicy in his ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’: O joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, That nature yet remembers What was so fugitive! (ll. 130–3)

Robinson’s savage boy of Aveyron is the very contrary of Wordsworth’s infant as ‘Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!’ (l. 115) and all the more so since he is, effectively, mute. Any assumption that the seeds of language and poetry are as natural to little children and savages as the integrative 36  These details, together with the speaker’s observation that the wild boy has survived on ‘chesnuts [sic] wild’ (l. 101), and that he is covered in ‘scars’ (l. 103), confirm, as Pascoe observes, that Robinson drew on the account of Victor published in the Morning Post. 37  ‘Despondency corrected’ is, of course, the title given by Wordsworth to the fourth book of The Excursion (1814). 38  Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children, p. 157.

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imagination—a hypothesis promoted, for example, by Herder in his afore-­ mentioned Treatise on the Origin of Language—is denied in Robinson’s reduction of the ‘wild’ boy’s communication to ‘frantic’ ‘shrieks’ (l. 18). Robinson’s representation of ‘The Savage of Aveyron’ has, then, less in common with any Romantic configuration of infancy than it does with the rather more bleak assessment of Victor’s condition given by Itard in his Mémoire et Rapport sur Victor de l’Aveyron (1801), first translated into English in 1802 as An Historical Account of the Discovery and Education of a Savage Man: Or, the First Developments, Physical and Moral, of the Young Savage Caught in the Woods Near Aveyron in the Year 1798— although Robinson is unlikely to have read the French original and could not have read the English translation. Instead of ‘trailing’ any Wordsworthian ‘clouds of glory’ (l. 65) from an ante-natal existence not entirely forgotten, ‘remembrance’ for Robinson’s ‘wild boy’ is the occasion of trauma because he remembers only the ‘beauteous form’, ‘angel face’ and ‘dying groan’ of his murdered mother, now forever lost to him, a loss embodied in his single word, ‘Alone’ (ll. 130, 135). Hence, although the ‘wild boy’ seems to the speaker to have been, to an extent, incorporated into the natural world—‘Before the step of his rude throne,/The squirrel sported, tame and gay;/The dormouse slept its life away,/Nor heard his midnight groan’—the greater truth which the speaker learns from the fate of the child and his mother is that nature does not afford any special privileges or protection to the young, or to anyone, for that matter (ll. 111–15). This conclusion directly contradicts, of course, Wordsworth’s famous dictum, in ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ (1798), that ‘Nature never did betray/The heart that loved her’ (ll. 123–4). In contrast to Wordsworth’s confidence, in Robinson’s poem, the consequence of the mother’s trust in nature, in her walk with her child through a beautiful summer forest, has been her murder and his abandonment. Blakean ‘experience’ follows Blakean ‘innocence’, but without, however, the possibility envisaged by Blake of any eventual synthesis of the two states. ‘Shades of the prison-house’, to use Wordsworth’s terms, do not slowly ‘close/Upon the growing boy’ who still ‘beholds the light, and whence it flows’ (‘Intimations of Immortality’, ll. 68–70). Rather, Robinson’s ‘wild boy’ experiences this world as a dark, alienated and alienating place from the moment of his mother’s death, when his ‘summer’ is turned abruptly to permanent ‘winter’ (ll. 154–5).

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Robinson’s ‘The Sage of Aveyron’ therefore shares with other Romantic Disillusionist writing the conviction that Platonic idealism and faith in a Christian or Hegelian dialectic of history is not supported by the brutal facts of everyday experience nor by the reality of infancy and infant development. Robinson’s speaker is a quintessentially disillusioned Romantic: a solitary wanderer in the forest who is not conversing with what Percy Shelley called ‘the universe of things’ but is rather alienated both from nature and from human society, lost in what the German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) would later call the individual’s Geworfenheit, or ‘thrownness’.39 Robinson’s speaker and the ‘wild boy’ find no new company in each other. Both remain, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, ‘Alone, alone, all, all alone’, with ‘never a saint’ taking pity on their ‘soul in agony’.40 In a God-created universe under a benevolent divine Providence, however, the Ancient Mariner can pray, repent, atone and be reconciled, underscored by the favourite Platonic-Romantic imagery of marriage. Coleridge’s Gothic is a Christian and optimistic Gothic, like that later developed by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64): in this Gothic, there is a God to save heteronomous man in his helplessness. Meeting the Marriage-­ Guest on his way to a wedding ceremony—and warning many other potential sinners with his Wandering Jew narrative of guilt—Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner regains his social reintegration and assumes a redemptive function. Robinson’s speaker and ‘wild boy’, by contrast, remain isolated, lonely in the child’s as well as adult’s Geworfenheit. In Robinson’s anti-­ Enlightenment, Gothic universe, there is no God to save and no divine childhood to which one can have recourse, either rhetorically or in actuality. Far from being capable of steering the course of his life through his reason, let alone progressing towards perfectibility or recollecting an ante-­ natal existence, man, in this world-view, is exposed to the destructive forces of the ‘savage’ from within and from without. Robinson’s poem underscores, then, the conflicts which the Romantic cultures of infancy 39  Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc’ (1816), l. 1. Heidegger coins the phrase in Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] (1927) to describe the arbitrary nature of being. 40  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’, ll. 232–5; quoted from William Keach (ed.), The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Penguin, 2004).

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had inherited from the Classical world and which remained unresolved during the heyday of canonical Romanticism’s investment in childhood— and which were, indeed, exacerbated by developments in natural philosophy such as the discovery of feral children. Both Robinson’s speaker and the ‘wild boy’ are ‘wretched’, thrown into a condition of being ‘whose melancholy tale would pierce A HEART OF STONE’.

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Index1

A Adams, Richard, 163n12 Adulthood, 4, 7, 22n2, 27–30, 37, 38, 43, 75, 131, 176, 177, 181, 183, 186, 209, 217, 218, 221 Aesop, 55 Fables, 55 Aesthetic, 16, 74, 93, 104, 115–117, 119–121, 123, 128, 129, 132, 133, 148, 212–214, 216 Agamben, Giorgio, 101 Age of Sensibility, 138, 156 Ancien Régime, 85n29 Anglican Metaphysicals, 95 Animal, 9, 17, 18, 45, 55, 55n34, 56, 76, 83–85, 83n23, 98, 125, 131, 159–182, 211, 214, 215, 229, 237, 241 Ariès, Philippe, 232n9 Aristotle (384–22 BCE), 117, 232 Politics, 232

Armstrong, Charles, 10, 17 Arnold, Matthew (1822–88), 99, 239 ‘To a Gipsy Child by the Seashore’ (1849), 239 Astronomy, 39 Aubry, Etienne, 75n14 Farewell to the Nurse (1776–7), 75n14 Augustine of Hippo, 28 Augustus, 194 Austen, Jane, 149 Autobiography, 14, 23, 28, 37, 177 Ayres, Philip, 192n34 B Baillie, Joanna, 223 Baker, Steve, 166 Balducci, Temma, 78n20 Ball, John (1338–81), 190

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Domines Veliki, C. Duffy (eds.), Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8

267

268 

INDEX

Barbauld, Anna Laetitia (1743–1825), 55, 56, 58, 59, 97 Hyms in Prose, 58; ‘Hymn VI’, 58 Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), 55 Basset, Francis, 219 Battle of Actium (31 BC), 194 Battle of Philippi (42 BC), 193 Battle of Waterloo, 15 Beauharnais, Hortense de (1783–1837), 68 Beddoes, Thomas (1760–1808), 219, 224, 226n104 Benzaquén, Adriana S., 207, 210, 230, 231, 242 Benziman, Galia, 47 Berger, John, 162, 162n10, 172 Bergson, Henri, 30 Berkeley, George (1685–1753), 49, 50, 234 Siris (1744), 49, 50 Bernardin de St. Pierre, Jacques-Henri (1737–1814), 150 Paul et Virginie (1788), 150 Bewell, Alan, 60 Bible, 48, 50 Bill of Rights (The), 188 Blake, William (1757–1827), 7, 7n21, 8, 15, 31, 35, 43–63, 164, 232, 234, 235, 243 ‘A Cradle Song’, 52, 53 ‘A Dream’, 56 Europe (1794), 62 For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793), 62 ‘Infant Joy’, 43–63 ‘Infant Sorrow’, 59–63 Jerusalem (1804), 49 ‘The Lamb’, 51, 57, 58 Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), 63; ‘Proverbs of Hell’, 63

‘Myrtle Tree’, 60 ‘Nurse’s Song’, 59 Songs of Experience, 60 Songs of Innocence, 45, 46, 54, 55, 59, 60, 63 ‘Spring’, 59 There is NO Natural Religion (1788), 54 Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), 59 The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1798), 54 Bloom, Harold, 35 ‘myth of memory’, 35 Boilly, Louis-Léopold, 75n14 Game of Billiards (1807), 75n14 Bonaparte, Charles (1802–7), 67 Bonaparte, Josephine (1763–1814), 67, 68 Bonaparte, Napoleon (1769–1821), 15, 67 ‘Napoleonic Wars’, 18, 66, 101 Bonnet, Charles (1720–93), 83 Borch, Gerard ter (1617–81), 81 Boucher, François (1703–70), 69, 75 Bouliard, Marie-Geneviève, 72n9 Portrait of M. Olive and His Family (ca. 1791–92), 72n9 Boullier, David Renaud (1699–1759), 83 Breastfeeding, 65, 66, 72n9, 75, 76, 81, 82, 84–86, 89, 212, 216, 217, 220, 226 Brown, Bill, 145n38 Brown, Laura, 83, 83n23 Brutus, Marcus Junius (85–42 BC), 193 Büchner, Karl Georg (1813–37), 241n35 Burke, Edmund (1730–97), 143, 156, 213, 214 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1757), 143

 INDEX 

Burnett, James (Lord Monboddo) (1714–99), 17, 241 Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773–92), 17 Butler, Marilyn, 136–137, 142 Byrne, Paula, 238n31 C Carlyle, Thomas, 110n46, 116 Carroll, Lewis Through the Looking Glass (1871), 139 Caruth, Cathy, 25 Chandler, James, 139, 153 Charles I (1600–49), 93, 187, 188 Child destructive, 136 exploitation, 7, 32 feral, 229–245 labour, 45 otherness of, 10 ‘Romantic child’, 16, 44, 117, 128–130, 132, 133, 137, 160, 166, 167 sensibility of, 17, 55 Childhood Christian models of, 16 configuration of, 4, 22 discourse of, 10 early, 16, 44, 46, 49, 93, 96, 103, 108, 112, 212, 225 Enlightenment models of, 16 Children’s literature The Infant’s Friend … A Spelling Book (1797), 56 The Infant’s Miscellany: or Easy Lessons, Extracted from Different Authors (1778), 56 The Infant Tutor; or, An Easy Spelling-Book, for Little Masters and Misses (1776), 56

269

Civil War, 185–189 Claeys, Gregory, 110n46 Clair, William St., 200n68 Clark, Prentiss, 203 Clark, Timothy, 167 Clayfield, William, 219n72 Clyde, Edward (1609–74), 186 History of the Rebellion (1702–4), 186 Coats, Karen, 165, 169 Coburn, Kathleen, 125 Cochin, Charles Nicolas, 77 Cognition, 19, 204–211, 215, 219, 222, 225–227, 229 Cognitive science, 208–210, 215 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 16, 22, 22n2, 46, 108, 115–133, 203, 207, 210, 224, 226, 227, 239, 244 Biographia Literaria (1817), 22 ‘Frost at Midnight’, 46, 116, 125–127, 226, 227 ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), 131, 239 Comenius, John Amos (1597–1670), 94 Didactica Magna (1638), 94 Janua Linguarum Reserata [The Gate of Tongues Unlocked] (1631), 94 Commonwealth (The), 188 Conduct books, 18, 159, 164, 165, 168 for children, 18, 164, 165 Corner, Julia (1798–1875), 194 Cosslett, Tess, 161, 165, 166, 170, 179, 181 Courbet, Gustave (1819–77), 86 The Painter’s Studio (1855), 86 Coveney, Peter, 5 Croker, John Wilson (1780–1857), 189

270 

INDEX

Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658), 188 Cultural history, 5, 12, 27, 65 Cuvier, Georges (1769–1832), 39 Théorie de la Terre (1813), 40 D Dale, David (1739–1806), 108 Darwin, Erasmus (1731–1802), 18, 19, 153, 205, 205n6, 207–216, 218–221, 225, 226, 226n104, 230, 236 Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life (1796), 205, 211, 214, 215, 227 Daumier, Honoré (1808–79), 86, 87 The Third-Class Carriage (1862–4), 86 David, Jacques-Louis (1748–1825), 15, 66–68 The Coronation of Napoleon (1807), 67 Davidson, Julie, 97 Davis, Robert A., 11, 16, 231 Davy, Humphry (1778–1829), 18, 19, 205, 205n6, 208–210, 219–227, 230, 236 ‘The Life of the Spinosist’, 220 Davys, George, 189 Day, Thomas (1748–89), 59, 97, 150, 226n104 The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–89), 59 De Quincey, Thomas, 14, 21–42, 116 ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, 23, 24, 24n9, 31–33 ‘Autobiographical Sketches’, 21, 26 Confessions of an English Opium-­ Eater, 14, 21, 28, 32 The English Mail-Coach, 14 ‘Infant Literature’, 26, 28, 37, 38

‘Letters to a Young Man whose Education has Been Neglected’ (1823), 37 Suspiria de Profundis, 14, 21, 23, 25, 30, 31, 35 ‘System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes’ (1846), 38 Defoe, Daniel (1660–1731) Robinson Crusoe (1719), 177 Deism, 54 Demographic crises, 16 Descartes, René (1596–1650), 83, 167, 208 Dobrin, Sidney I., 163 Dodd, Elizabeth Z., 94n5 Doherty, Francis, 210 Domines Veliki, Martina, 4, 14, 43, 54, 241 Donnachie, Ian, 108n42 Donovan, Jack, 9n30, 232n8 Duclos, Antoine-Jean, 67 La Fontaine de la Regeneration sur les debris de la Bastille, le 10 avril 1793 (1794), 67 Dudley, John, 203 Duffy, Cian, 4, 9n30, 14, 43, 54, 232n8, 241 Dutch painting, 15, 66 of seventeenth century, 15, 66 E Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), 221 Edgerton, Samuel Y., 70n5 Edgeworth, Maria (1768–1849), 17, 98, 135–157 Belinda, 17, 137, 149–153, 156 ‘The Bracelets’, 137, 143, 144, 147, 149, 155 ‘The Little Dog Trusty; or, The Liar and the Boy of Truth’, 139

 INDEX 

The Parent’s Assistant, 17, 137, 140, 143, 144, 147, 148, 154 Practical Education (1798), 17, 98, 136, 143, 152, 153, 155, 156 ‘The Purple Jar’ (1796), 147, 148 ‘Waste Not, Want Not; or Two Strings to Your Bow’, 137, 154–156 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell (1744–1817), 97, 98, 135, 136, 142, 152, 153 Practical Education (1798), 17, 98, 136, 143, 152, 153, 155, 156 Education, 7n21, 9, 15–18, 35, 44, 54, 54n29, 55, 63, 68, 75, 76, 91–113, 135–157, 183, 205, 217, 220, 229, 232–234, 236, 237 Educational theory, 2, 13, 54, 112, 156 Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82), 233 English Civil War, 93 Enlightenment, 1, 7, 9, 12, 13, 15–19, 24, 27, 38–42, 45, 54, 55, 69n4, 72, 83, 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 101, 110, 110n46, 112, 113, 137, 151, 160, 162, 164–167, 182, 203, 206, 207, 211, 218–220, 225, 230, 231, 232n9, 233, 234, 236 Episteme, 3, 3n5, 13, 41 Erdman, David, 56 Eugenics, 109 Evangelical revival, 15, 44, 50 Experience, 4, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 22–33, 35–37, 41, 43, 44, 48, 74, 98, 99, 104, 117–121, 125–127, 132, 133, 140, 144, 153, 155, 159–161, 164, 166, 168, 173, 175, 177, 205, 207, 212, 214,

271

216–218, 222, 223, 225, 231, 233, 236, 243, 244 embodied, 12, 212, 214, 225 F Falke, Cassandra, 141 Family, 15, 31, 66, 68, 69, 72, 75, 75n14, 76, 79, 81–83, 85, 86, 89, 98, 102, 104, 106, 138, 140, 142, 149, 151, 154, 160, 165, 170, 176, 222 Farabee, Darlene, 203 Fass, Paula, 8 Female domestic culture, 15 Feral children, 19, 230, 237, 245 Fergusson, Adam, 9, 230 Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), 9, 230 Flaccus, Quintus Horatius (65–27 BC), 194 Foucault, Michel, 3, 3n5, 206n11 Fox, Henry Vassall (1773–1840), 189 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré (1732–1806), 68, 69, 71, 74 Fragonard, Marie-Anne (1745–1823), 68 French Impressionism, 15 French Revolution, 15, 18, 66, 67, 78, 89, 142, 185, 201, 234 French Revolutionary festivals Festival of the Supreme Being (1794), 66 Festival of Unity and Indivisibility (1793), 66 Frenzel, Elisabeth, 237n27 Freud, Sigmund, 30, 130 Fröbel/Froebel, Friedrich (1782–1852), 105, 235 Frye, Northrop, 56 Fudge, Erica, 161

272 

INDEX

G Garlitz, Barbara, 99 Gavin, Adrienne, 3–6, 13, 43, 91, 92 Gender, 6, 8, 9, 145 Genre, 2, 7, 9, 13–15, 17, 22, 24, 28, 55, 66, 68, 71–85, 89, 104, 137, 156, 159, 161, 206, 225, 238 Geology, 39 George III of England (1738–1820), 47 George IV of England (1762–1830), 238 Gérard, Marguerite (1761–1837), 15, 65–89 First Steps (Le premier pas de l’enfance) (ca. 1788), 74 The Interesting Student (L'Elève intéressante) (1786), 69, 71 Maternal Pride (La Fierté maternelle) (1815–1820), 85 Motherhood (La Maternité) (1795–1800), 79–84 The Nurse (La Nourrice) (1802), 85 The Nursing Mother (La Mère nourrice) (1804), 72, 74–76, 74n12, 78, 79, 85 Giddy, Davies, 219 Gill, Stephen, 233n11 Glorious Revolution (The), 185–189 Godwin, William (pseudonym Edward Baldwin) (1756–1836), 18, 97, 98, 100, 109, 183–201, 224 The Enquirer (1797), 183, 193 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness (1793), 18, 224 Fleetwood (1805), 186 History of England (1806), 18, 184, 186 History of Greece (1822), 18, 184, 198–200

History of Rome (1809), 18, 184, 193–195, 197, 199 Life of Lady Jane Grey (1806), 201 Goldman, Albert, 35 Goldsmith, Oliver (1728–74), 194, 198 History of Greece, Abridged, For the Use of Schools, 198 Roman History (1769), 194 Golinski, Jan, 210 Graham, Kenneth W., 192n32, 195n43, 195n44 Granata, Silvia, 180 Green, Matthew, 63 Grenby, Matthew O., 184 Greuze, Jean-Baptise (1725–1805), 72n11 Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–85), 235 Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–22), 235 Gruen, Lori, 167n31 H Hagen, Benjamin, 203 Hansson, John-Erik, 10, 18 Hartley, David (1705–57), 19, 98, 208–211, 222 Observations on Man (1749), 19, 208 Hauser, Kaspar (c. 1812–1833), 237 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–64), 244 Hazlitt, William (1778–1830), 109, 129, 142 Hecimovich, Gregg A., 47n13 Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976), 244 Helme, Elizabeth, 189, 194 Helvétius, Claude Adrien (1715–71), 110

 INDEX 

Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803), 17, 104, 231, 235, 241, 243 On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782–3), 232 Selection of Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples (1772–3), 231 Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772), 17, 241, 243 Hill, Rosemary, 71n7 Historical writing, 13, 184, 185, 201 Hodgson, John, 219n72 Hogg, Thomas Jefferson (1792–1862), 236 Höing, Anja, 9, 17, 18, 229, 230n1 Holmes, Richard, 224 Hooch, Pieter de (1629–84), 81 Horace, 194 Hume, David (1711–76), 185–187 Humour, 116, 121, 122, 124, 126 Hunt, Peter, 139 Hutcheson, Francis (1694–1746), 221 I Iconography, 15, 66n2, 234 Ideology, 10, 15, 45, 116, 132 middle-class, 10 Imagination, 18, 71, 101, 115, 126, 128, 132, 137, 138, 143, 144, 148, 149, 163–165, 181, 184, 203–227, 234, 240, 243 Industrialisation, 16, 162 Infancy constructions of, 8, 100, 182 cultures of, 1–19, 30, 39, 91, 92, 156, 164, 182–201, 231, 237, 238, 244 genetic understanding of, 7 hauntology of, 104

273

rhetoric of, 11, 173 stadial understanding of, 12 tropes of, 10, 12, 18, 44, 160, 230 Infant infant-animal tropes, 17 Jesus, 79, 93, 107 sensibility, 19, 22n4, 24–37 trauma, 29 Innocence, 4, 5, 15, 32, 33, 36, 43–45, 48–54, 56, 59, 60, 94, 128, 132, 137, 164, 167, 168, 173–175, 232, 233, 243 Institute for the Formation of Character, 110 Iseli, Markus, 30 Itard, Jean Marc Gaspard (1774–1838), 237, 243 An Historical Account of the Discovery and Education of a Savage Man Or, the First Developments, Physical and Moral, of the Young Savage Caught in the Woods Near Aveyron in the Year 1798 (1802), 243 Mémoire et Rapport sur Victor de l’Aveyron (1801), 243 J Jackson, Noel, 204 Jay, Mike, 210 Jefferies, Richard, 168n37 Jensen, Heather Belnap, 78n20 Johnson, Joseph (1738–1809), 55 Johnson, Samuel (1709–84), 234 A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), 40n63 Jordan, John E., 22 Juvenile Library (The), 184, 188, 188n22, 189, 191

274 

INDEX

K Kant, Immanuel, 1, 7, 38, 39, 42, 117, 143 Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels [‘Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens’]) (1755), 38 Beantwortung der frage: Was ist Aufklarung? [Answering the question: What is Enlightenment?], 1 Kennedy, David, 56, 94 Kennedy, Thomas C., 56 Kidd, Kenneth B., 163 Kilner, Dorothy (1755–1836), 17, 159, 160, 162, 165, 169, 170, 171n49, 173–178, 180–182 Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1783), 159 Kindergarten, 235 Kingsley, Charles The Water Babies (1863), 139 Kleist, Heinrich Von (1772–1811), 239 ‘Der Findling’ [The Findling] (1811), 239 L La Mettrie, Julien Offray de (1709–51), 83, 84 Machine Man (1747), 84 Treatise on the Soul (1745), 84 Labille-Guiard, Adélaïde, 71n6 Self-portrait with Two Pupils (1785), 71n6 Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, 81n22 Lamb, Charles (1775–1834), 184 Tales from Shakespeare (1806), 184 Lambert, Cornelia, 186 Language, 7, 11, 14, 17, 17n48, 22, 60, 81, 100, 104, 117, 120, 124,

125, 127, 140, 142, 168n37, 172, 179, 193, 204–206, 212, 214, 225, 235, 241, 242 Launay, Robert de, 77 l’Éducation de l’Homme commence à sa naïssance, 76, 77 Le Brun, Louise Élisabeth Vigée, 71n6 Self-portrait (1781), 71n6 Lerner, Loren, 11, 15, 234 Lessenich, Rol, 4, 9, 19 Levin, Susan, 29 Linear theories, 12, 14, 25, 40 of progress and development, 12, 14, 25, 40 Linnaeus, Carl (1707–78), 75, 76, 237 La nourrice marâtre, ou Dissertation sur les suites funestes du nourrissage mercenaire (1770), 76 Literary and Philosophical Society, 110 Locke, John (1632–1704), 45, 53, 54, 75, 91–101, 110, 163–168, 208, 209, 229 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), 53 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), 54, 91, 164, 229 Longinus, Gaius Cassius (85–42 BC), 193 Loo, Carle Van (1705–65), 69 Lord Byron, George Gordon (1788–1824), 205n6, 238, 239n32 ‘I Would I Were A Careless Child’ (1808), 239n32 Love, Heather, 203 Ludlow, Edmund (1617–92), 186 Memoirs, 186 Lunar Society, 153 Lycurgus, 198, 199

 INDEX 

M Macaulay, Catharine (1731–91), 185, 186 Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1800–59), 185 Maitland, James (1759–1839), 189 Manly, Susan, 154 Marcus, Laura, 93 Maria, Henrietta (1609–69), 93 Maro, Publius Vergilius (70–19 BC), 194 Marx, Karl (1818–83), 148 Matlak, Richard, 209, 211 Maza, Sarah, 78n20 McClintock, Anne, 94 McDonagh, Josephine, 23n7 McGann, Jerome, 6, 6n18, 138 McGillis, Roderick, 4, 44, 136n4, 144, 159 McInnes, Andrew, 16 Mellor, Anne, 25, 60 Memory, 7, 11, 12, 25, 35, 40, 74, 129, 236 Methodism, 44, 50 Metsu, Gabriël (1629–67), 81 Michals, Teresa, 10 Milam, Jennifer D., 72n8 Mill, John Stuart (1806–73), 99 Minos, 199 Mintz, Stephen, 5, 10 Mitford, William (1774–1827), 199 Monstrosity, 96, 151, 156 Montagu, Basil (1771–1851), 226 Morisot, Berthe (1841–95), 86–89 The Cradle (Le Berceau) (1872), 86, 88 The Wet Nurse Angele Feeding Julie Manet (1880), 87 Mosnier, Jean-Laurent, 72n9 The Young Mother (ca. 1770–80), 72n9

275

Motherhood, 85, 86, 104 Müller, Anja, 10 Myers, Mitzi, 149 Myth, 35, 74, 175, 237 of Venus and Cupid, 74 N Nationalism, 66 Nativity, 93, 212 Natural philosophy, 2, 13, 18, 39n59, 229, 230, 236, 237, 245 New Lanark method, 108 village, 108 Newbery, Francis (1743–1818), 55n35 Nicholson, William British Encyclopedia (1809), 40 Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900), 104 Nikolajeva, Maria, 179, 181 Nostalgia, 13, 24n9, 162n10, 172, 235, 241 Novalis (1772–1801), 235 O Ochtervelt, Jacob (1634–82), 81 O’Malley, Andrew, 2, 3, 3n6, 8, 10–13, 17, 24n9, 44, 55n34, 56n36, 91, 135, 167, 230, 230n1, 233, 235 Origins, 8, 11, 16, 17, 19, 43n1, 55, 84, 100, 103, 204, 206–208, 210–216, 220–222, 225, 226, 231, 240 of cognition, 204, 222 Orphan, 97, 149, 226n104, 239 Owen, Robert (1771–1858), 16, 92, 101–107 Ozouf, Mona, 66n2

276 

INDEX

P Parsons, William, 38 third Earl of Rosse (1800–67), 38 Pascoe, Judith, 231, 238, 242n36 Paulson, Ronald, 66n2 Peasants’ Revolt, 189 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich (1746–1827), 16, 92, 101–107, 111, 112 ‘Christmas Oration’ (1810), 106, 107 How Gertrude Teaches her Children (1801), 102, 103 Leonard and Gertrude (1781–87), 102 Phenomenological, 8, 112, 205, 206 Phillips, Mark Salber, 187n17 Philp, Mark, 196n47 Pickering, Samuel F., 54n29 Pinch, Adela, 138 Play, 14, 21, 22n2, 51, 59, 79, 89, 117, 121, 124–126, 129, 133, 136, 142, 147, 148, 155, 177, 187, 204 Plotz, Judith, 5–7, 7n21, 32, 94, 123n20, 171n49, 206, 231 Pneumatic Institution, 219 Pocock, John G. A., 193 Political agenda, 15 writing, 95 Port-Royal-Des-Champes, 94 Priestley, Joseph (1733–1804), 19, 40, 208, 209, 209n23, 211 Disquisitions Related to Matter and Spirit (1777), 209 Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind (1775), 19, 208 Socrates and Jesus Compared (1803), 40 Proust, Marcel, 30 Proto-utilitarianism, 148

Psychoanalytic, 213 Putti, 69, 71, 71n6, 74 Pyrrhonic scepticism, 239 Q Quarles, Francis (1592–1644), 45 Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man (1634), 45 Quintilianus, Marcus Fabius (35–100), 232 Institutes of Oratory, 232 R Race, 8, 9, 9n31 Raphael (1483–1520), 79, 79n21, 81, 82 Regan, John, 201n69 Regnault, Nicholas-François (1746–1810), 69 Reid, Thomas (1710–96), 211 Reign of Terror (1793–4), 67 Representation, 3, 8, 13–16, 44, 66, 89, 103, 116–119, 121, 128–130, 132, 160, 161, 163, 166, 168n37, 189, 193n35, 203, 231, 234, 234n18, 243 of children, 14, 103, 116, 118, 121, 128, 132, 166, 168n37 Republicanism, 18, 188, 189, 193, 195, 200 Richard II (1367–1400), 189–191 Richardson, Alan, 57n43, 99, 204, 209 Richardson, Brian, 47 Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich, 16, 115–118, 122, 124, 125, 133 Ridiculous, 16, 115–133, 174 Rix, Robert, 7n21, 15 Robertson, Lisa Ann, 18, 19, 98n15, 156n87, 230, 236

 INDEX 

Robespierre, Maximilien (1758–94), 67 Robinson, Fiona, 146n44 Robinson, Mary ‘Perdita’, 19, 231, 237–240, 242 ‘All Alone’ (1800), 239, 242 ‘The Haunted Beach’ (1800), 239 Lyrical Tales (1800), 239 ‘The Savage of Aveyron’, 19, 231, 238–240, 242, 243 Vancenza (1792), 239 Robinson, Mary Elizabeth, 239 Memoirs of The Late Mrs. Robinson, 239 Rococo style, 69 Rollin, Charles (1661–1741), 198 Roman republic, 192–197 Romantic period, 2–13, 6n18, 15, 16, 18, 19, 24–37, 24n9, 39, 40, 95, 115, 116, 119, 121, 129, 132, 161, 164, 176, 177, 185, 206, 208, 209, 225–227, 231, 237, 238 poetry, 4, 48, 164, 208, 226, 227 Romanticism German, 104 Platonic, 235, 236n24, 239 Roscoe, William, 24 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78), 9, 28, 29, 59, 62, 67–69, 75, 76, 78, 79, 82–84, 86, 89, 91–103, 111, 128, 141, 150, 156, 163–168, 175, 198, 229, 233–235 Confessions, 28 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1750), 95 Émile, or On Education (1762), 9, 59, 69, 89, 91 The Social Contract (1762), 67, 198 Rowland, Ann Wierda, 4, 6, 7, 11–13, 24n10, 40, 68n4, 94–95, 142,

277

160, 162, 173, 206–208, 220, 229, 230n1, 231, 232, 235, 236 Rudd, David, 166 Ruderman, David B., 6, 8, 11, 12, 14, 21, 25, 40, 41, 99, 206, 213, 214, 231 Ruston, Sharon, 221, 223, 223n91 Ruwe, Donelle, 128 Rzepka, Charles, 22, 23n5 S Sachs, Jonathan, 192 Savage, 9, 12, 95, 231, 234, 237, 240, 242, 244 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (1775–1854), 235 Schiller, Friedrich (1759–1805), 235 Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795), 235 School, 18, 94, 99–102, 104, 105, 107–111, 126, 175, 178, 184, 191, 194, 200, 226n104 Nursery, 111 Seluner, Johannes (1828–98), 237 Sewell, Elizabeth (1815–1906), 194 Sha, Richard C., 204 Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), 164, 177, 184 Cymbeline (1623), 177 Shelley, Mary (1797–1851), 19, 109, 109n44, 151, 203–207, 213, 216, 218, 222, 224, 224n102, 225 Frankenstein (1818), 19, 109, 109n44, 151, 203–205, 208, 210, 218, 222, 224n102, 225, 227 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822), 9, 9n30, 12, 232, 236, 244 ‘A Defence of Poetry’, 9, 9n30 Sheridan, Alan, 66n2

278 

INDEX

Smith, Adam (1723–90), 147, 150, 152, 156, 214, 221 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), 147 Snow, Charles Percy, 3n7 Social class, 78, 78n20, 81, 140 Solon, 198–200 Söntgen, Beate, 81n22 Southey, Robert (1774–1843), 123, 238 Spence, Thomas, 32 The Rights of Infants (1797), 32 Spencer, Jane, 161, 162, 169 Spirituality, 15, 63, 93, 103, 128 Stables, William Gordon (1840–1910), 168n37 Stonehouse, James (1716–95), 61, 61n57 The Religious Instruction of Children Recommended (1770), 61, 61n57 Subjectivity, 11, 14, 24, 24n9, 27–31, 33, 35–37, 41, 101, 135, 235 as palimpsest, 35, 36 Sublime, 16, 105, 115–130, 132, 133, 143, 144, 214, 242 Summerfield, Geoffrey, 171, 181 Sympathy, 112, 135–157, 214, 216, 225 T Tabula rasa, 45, 54, 212, 216, 218, 227 Talford, Thomas Noon, 32 Final Memorials of Charles Lamb (1848), 32 Thornton, Robert John (1768–1837), 50 Todd, Janet, 138 Toys, 136, 138, 226n104

Trimmer, Sarah (1741–1810), 17, 159–162, 165, 166, 169–171, 171n49, 172n52, 173, 176–182, 186–190, 194 Concise History of England, 186 Fabulous Histories Designed for the Instruction of Children, Respecting their Treatment of Animals (1798), 17, 159 Tullius, Servius (575–535 BC), 195 Turner, Beatrice, 97 Tyler, Wat (1341–81), 189–191 V Vaudeville, 82 Vaughan, Henry, 101 Victor of Aveyron (c. 1788–1828), 19, 231, 237, 238 Virgil, 194 Viscellinus, Spurius Cassius (540–485 BC), 196 Visual arts, 2, 13 W Waller, Jennifer, 60 Warbeck, Perkin (1474–99), 189 Watt, James (1736–1819), 153 Watteau, Jean-Antoine (1684–1721), 74 Watts, Isaac (1674–1748), 52, 53, 57 ‘The Advantages of Early Religion’, 57 ‘A Cradle Hymn’, 52 Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715), 52, 57 Wedgwood, Josiah (1730–95), 153 Wedgwood, Thomas (1771–1805), 18, 19, 205, 207–210, 215–219, 224–227, 230

 INDEX 

Wells-Robertson, Sally, 72n9, 72n10 Wesley, Charles (1707–81), 48, 50–52 Lamb of God, I look to Thee, 51 ‘O mercy divine, O couldst Thou incline’, 50 Wesley, John (1703–81), 48, 50 Whale, John, 22n3 Whiggism, 18, 200 White, R. S., 32 Whitefield, George (1714–70), 48, 50 Wilde, Joseph, 50 Infancy, 50 William of Orange, 188 Wit, 116, 118, 124, 144 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 9, 105, 128, 151 Original Stories from Real Life, 9 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 9 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 9 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), 139 Wordsworth, Dorothy (1771–1855), 22n2, 108, 226

279

Wordsworth, William, 1, 4, 5, 7, 14, 22, 22n4, 24–26, 24n10, 28–35, 41, 42, 48, 49, 99–101, 121, 128, 141, 142, 144, 164, 203, 210, 214, 226, 227, 232–236, 233n11, 239, 242, 243 ‘Anecdote for Fathers, Shewing How the Art of Lying May be Taught’ (1798), 35 The Excursion (1814), 28, 33, 34, 34n41 Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (1798), 243 ‘My heart leaps up’, 1, 4 ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1802), 4, 25, 48–49, 99, 233, 235, 239, 242 The Prelude (1805; 1850), 22, 28, 29, 34, 121, 144, 221, 226, 227, 235 ‘We Are Seven’ (1798), 32, 35, 239, 242