Reading Lessons from the Eighteenth Century:
Lichfield, UK: Pied Piper Publishing, Ltd., 2006 In this engaging and imaginative book, Morag Styles and Evelyn Arizpe, with a deeply intelligent contribution from Shirley Brice Heath, open up the domestic schoolroom of Jane Johnson, an upper-middle-class woman who lived in the English Midlands and Norfolk Broads in the early eighteenth century with her clergyman husband, daughter, and two sons. In their account, Johnson exemplifies a maternal dedication to a child-centered pedagogy designed to ‘make learning fun’ and allow its lessons to bed in deep. The book is written in a lively, accessible, and informal style; academic language is eschewed in favour of a conversational tone befitting an exploration of the homely and personal teaching materials created by Johnson for her children. The book opens with a fascinating detective story, as Styles narrates her efforts to root out, with amazing diligence, details of Johnson’s family and life that had been obscure for generations. The impetus, an equally obscure though potentially fascinating collection of nursery ephemera held at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, was the generous gift of Heath, who introduced British scholars to the collection in 1994. For the next several years, Styles and Arizpe explored record offices, private school libraries, and family archives to piece together the biography of Johnson and her family. The fairy-tale nature of the adventure is emphasized by Styles’ ‘once upon a time’ opening, and Heath’s presence as a benevolent fairy godmother. Any reader interested in domestic history, eighteenth-century family life, or the developing history of female literary invention will be caught by the Prologue to this book and much of the information of the subsequent chapters. Styles and Arizpe use the Johnson archive to speculate about many aspects of maternal and wifely identity in the mid-eighteenth century. Their emphasis is that the Johnson archive reveals details about reading and learning practices hitherto unknown, and confirms other speculations about the role of mothers in their children’s education, especially in the very early years. As phrased by the authors: “Her case study, together with that of her children, highlights the relationship between the history of domestic pedagogy and the history of reading” (1), demonstrated by evidence that Johnson’s lessons, emphasizing play and experiment, were retained by her children into their adult lives. The Introduction sets out the book’s ambitions: to elucidate from the Johnson example larger conclusions about “women’s and girl’s literate practices” (1) as well as men’s and boy’s, and to establish the relationship between early learning and the preparation for adult gender roles. Thus the Introduction covers “domestic histories”, “mothers as teachers”, and “histories of reading”, while chapters explore the Johnson family history as representative of a specific class, the rise of literacy as associated with the mid-century boom in publishing, and Enlightenment modes of thinking. Johnson’s own literary output is also examined, as are the letters her children exchanged as adults. The texts studied operate to inform conclusions about “the intersection of gender and literacy, culture and religion” in the eighteenth century. The authors provide a wealth of thought-provoking information about Johnson, and particularly welcome are the twenty-three color photographs of a selection of Johnson materials, ranging from alphabet cards to illustrated nursery rhymes to complex illustrated epigrams and verses. This allows the reader to appreciate the sheer artistry of Johnson’s nursery library, as well as the time (and expense) it must have taken to assemble it. Here is where class becomes an important issue: as involved as Johnson seems to have been in her children’s care, she nonetheless could not have produced “361 mounted cards, each with hand-lettered texts, a box of ornamental words, [and] two miniature books, all with decoupage and carefully hand-lettered manuscript text” (vi) without the kind of domestic assistance only available to the very comfortably-off lady of a village manor. I think Styles and Arizpe underplay this aspect; although they are careful to describe Johnson’s background and lifestyle, the tendency to generalize from her example means that some of their larger conclusions about mothers and reading practices elide the leisure and income level necessary to achieve Johnson’s results. This in turn leads to the book’s unfortunate weakness, a reliance on speculation and invention that sees an overuse of “could have”, “might have”, “perhaps”, “must have”, etc. Although Styles’ truly impressive literary detective work uncovered a wealth of biographical information, nonetheless much remains unknown, and Styles and Arizpe try too hard to create a narrative based on their convictions of what “must have” been the case (but could so easily not be). For instance, “Jane’s sense of humour, which shines out of her teaching materials and letters, may have led to purchasing or borrowing some ‘pleasant’ books to divert the whole family …. Perhaps Jane even permitted some of the more ‘popular’ literature traded by ‘chapmen’ … to enter the house, although one imagines she kept a watchful eye on what was read by her children and probably the servants as well” ( 60-61, emphasis added). Or then again, perhaps not. Throughout the book, this habit of supposition undermines the text’s strengths, which reside in the descriptions of the sheer inventiveness of the archive and the opening up of one family’s approach to learning. In attempting to make the Johnson material generally meaningful, the authors overlook some of the specific meanings her writings offer: the fearful emphasis on death, for instance, or the anger that shadows what Styles and Arizpe characterize as wit. And I was truly surprised to read, on p. 137, that “it is impossible for those of us writing in the early twenty-first century to imagine life as it might have been more than two hundred years ago”, since this is what the book does via Johnson and her family throughout. As interesting and informative – and genuinely groundbreaking – as their uncovering of Johnson’s history is, Styles and Arizpe miss their opportunity to develop their enthusiastic and affectionate reading of her life into a more subtle analysis of her texts. Heath’s closing chapter to the book, however, does just that: it lifts its comprehensive understanding of the contents of the Johnson archive to the level of a subtle, nuanced, informed and informative interpretation of textual meaning. Her meticulous analysis of the methodology and thematics of Johnson’s work suddenly transforms a domestic library into a textual treasure. Under Heath’s handling, Johnson becomes a writer: not simply someone who transcribed, but an author of a rich collection laden with interpretative possibility. Reading this chapter, I became convinced of the value of Johnson’s writing beyond its decorative appeal and homely virtues. Heath’s essay shows that it is not necessary to insist that Johnson’s ephemera somehow illuminates “mothers, children, and texts” in order for it to reward close study. It seems to be enough that it demonstrates the authorial aspirations and something of the abilities of one mother, writing not only for her children but also, as the book suggests, for herself. Fortunate enough to enjoy leisure and education, Johnson ensured her children did as well. The texts she made to introduce them to reading allow us to begin to read Johnson as author. As for the other mothers and children and texts, they have their own stories to tell. Review
by Professor Jacqueline Labbe |