| The Making of the Modern Child: Children's Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge, 2003; pp. 1-189. ISBN 0-415-94299-3 Review by Ann Lawson Lucas, University of Hull, UK. Anyone living outside Britain who embarks on a consideration of the English class system, as Andrew O'Malley does, is to be congratulated on his courage. His title lacks geographical definition, but that of the Introduction, “The English Middle Classes of the Late Eighteenth Century and the Impetus for Pedagogical Reform”, provides a clearer impression of the book's general orientation. Not truly the subject of the book but providing evidence for its argument, it is doubtful whether “children's literature” should appear on the cover: “Childhood and Children's Culture” would be better (he includes toys, games, diaries, as well as class attitudes, morality, education and discipline). For, strangely, coming from an Assistant Professor of English (at the University of Winnipeg, Canada), this is really a book of social history, not literary history or criticism. It is a fact universally acknowledged that publishers' cover blurbs sometimes serve nobody's interests by arousing expectations inappropriately: “With unprecedented breadth of perspective and textual focus, this authoritative study illuminates at long last the complex making of the modern child”. It's a bold blurb-writer who does not rank Roy Porter and John Rowe Townsend as long-established precedents, when both are acknowledged in the text. And then there's the notion that the modern child was “made” in a couple of decades; yet the author cites Raymond Williams' condemnation of the epochal view of culture (26-7). The volume bears witness to specialized research, varied secondary reading and detailed knowledge of some aspects of English (note, not British) society in the late eighteenth century. The book is short for such a hefty project at only 135 pages of text, including 14 black-and-white figures. There are nearly 30 pages of good, interesting endnotes, plus useful bibliographies and index, though some of the material in the notes could have enlivened the text, and endnotes are more user-friendly if numbered consecutively throughout. It is a pity that the somewhat heterogeneous substance of the work loses both continuity and persuasiveness because of inappropriate organization, making the book lack a sense of direction and a cohesive argument. The Introduction barely mentions any children's books. It is concerned with the new rationalist-minded middle classes and with the history of ideas, taking John Locke as presiding genius. There is no clear explanation of why, as implied, Locke's thoughts on education (1693) and on the tabula rasa of children's minds were still potent after a hundred years, or why advanced thought (often represented here by Joseph Priestley, the Edgeworths, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft) tended – if it really did – to prefer old Locke to newer Rousseau ( Émile , 1762). And how far was the middle-class moral minority in step with the progressives? The author does not always provide sufficient historical perspective or contextualization: at the beginning, a few more lines on the development of the middle classes would have helped, as also something on the general nature of Enlightenment culture, while Chapter 1 could have outlined the past history of the chapbook. The ordering of the main chapters (1-5) is chiefly responsible for the discomforts of the reader. After two chapters which give prominence to books for children (chapbooks and “transitional books”, and “class relations” in children's books), there is a major interruption at the heart of the volume when chapter 3 (about medical history and midwifery) proves not to be concerned with children's literature at all and barely indeed with children, while chapter 4 (on some pedagogical theories and discipline) is so only to a limited extent. The most attractive and fluent in the book, Chapter 5 returns to literature, including instructional books, and the gender roles promoted by book production and content (more egalitarian than you might think: Arithmetic and Zoology were for both boys and girls). The shorter, forward-looking Conclusion, which addresses poetry, is the most wholeheartedly literary chapter of all. To my mind, the discussion of maternity and midwifery is a mistaken inclusion, but it would be better located directly after the non-literary Introduction, along with the successful (fourth) chapter on pedagogical systems. There would then be an uninterrupted flow of four chapters which use children's books to illustrate societal change: 1) “plebeian” chapbooks and middle-class transitional books, 2) “class relations” (or more accurately, middle-class attitudes to the poor) as treated in middle-class children's books, 3) the cultural shaping of middle-class gender roles, plus, in the Conclusion, the character of early nineteenth-century children's literature and the move from the rational to the fantastic, from Blake to Roscoe. Many matters of detail invite comment. Newbery's view that fairies are “the Frolicks of a distempered brain” (25), echoed by rationalist writers of the late Enlightenment, ought to be qualified by the fact that the literary fairy tale (both Occidental and Oriental) experienced a “golden age” in the eighteenth century. Its condemnation as the culture of the poor needs to be accompanied by an awareness of its courtly origins in Italy and France, and of upper- and middle-class translations in England. (Incidentally, neither the Comtesse de Genlis nor Lady Ellenor Fenn would have considered themselves as middle-class: 35, 40.) Under the rubric of “Class Relations”, the author neglects middle-class views on the aristocracy: out of 26 pages, only 3½ address attitudes to the upper classes, and these passages are simplistic, anecdotal and apparently prejudiced (61-2). It is not always clear whether the author is speaking in his own voice or is reflecting a general opinion of the time: the statement that “The upper classes owed their degenerate and weakened condition in large part to their absolute dependence on the lower orders for their survival” (61) clearly does not refer to the Pitts and the Wellesleys among the ruling classes, some of them pioneers of Empire and military leaders as well as politicians. There are insufficient dates of publication in the text, in social history a crucial part of books' significance. The reasons for the inclusion of a French writer (Madame de Genlis) and an Indian system of education (Bell's at Madras) needed to be made more explicit. Usually cogent, the language is not always felicitous. The frequent reiteration of “plebeian” to replace “of the poor” is irksome since it now carries something of a pejorative and urban connotation. Personally I loathe the self-conscious use of the pronouns “she” and “her” to represent any person or any child, and I say this as a feminist – and egalitarian: in the parlance of the nursery, “two wrongs don't make a right”. Besides, is the author saying that only girls possessed Newbery or Darton personal organizers? The answer is “No” (105). Modern idioms may be intended to lighten the academic tone, but instead tend to trivialize the thought: was “hands-on” of male midwives' training a joke or not? (71) Derivatives of “Enlightenment” need a capital E, as in the remark that “many enlightened physicians” argued that midwifery should be practised by male specialists (69). I flinched at the repeated use of the expression “lottery mentality” to describe the cultural preferences of the poor: the author means that they liked fairy tales because their only hope of relief from a life of unimaginable toil and deprivation was a stroke of improbable luck. The separate parts of this book are often interesting and illuminating, but an opportunity was missed for a more thorough-going analysis of the period's middle-class culture of childhood or conversely a comprehensive examination of its children's books (no Robinsonnades or Sandford and Merton here, though the latter would have contributed admirably to the scrutiny of class). Under both heads, the book offers thought-provoking glimpses, as well as some revealing detail. Ann Lawson Lucas |