Culturing the Child, 1690-1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers (review)

The penultimate contribution to this festschrift in honour of Mitzi Myers, the influential American literary historian and critic, is a brief memoir by Myers's sister, who recalls Myers as an omnivorous reader, cogent mentor, and inspirational teacher. The essays in this volume testify to these qualities and to Myers's profound influence on scholars working in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women's writing and children's literature. While her reputation was established through her work on Georgian women writers for children, particularly her groundbreaking work on Maria Edgeworth, Myers's many penetrating essays and reviews ranged over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, covering topics as diverse as moral tales, war writing for children, and the impact of cyberspace on contemporary child readers and children's literature. Of particular interest to readers of Victorian Studies is her insightful rereading of the didactic writing by women for children in the late-eighteenth century, much of it still being read and imitated a century later. She was among the first scholars in the field to read these texts as products of particular social, cultural, and historic contexts—to see them not as pedantic, formulaic pieces produced by women to earn pin money from religious publishers, but as creative and reforming texts that carried the injunction for children to think for themselves while simultaneously urging adults to improve the way they instructed and interacted with the young.

The twelve pieces in this collection are intelligently grouped in four sections, the last of which is dedicated to Myers's scholarly legacy. Readers who embark on Culturing the Child without previously having encountered her work may assume that this tribute is primarily for those already familiar with Myers's writing, but after reading any one of the essays in this collection I suspect most will use Donelle Ruwe's bibliography to track down unfamiliar essays. Before then, readers will have sampled from the eclectic essays by many leading scholars in the fields of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women's writing and children's literature, each of which calls attention to Myers's shaping influence.

Part one, "Creating the Contexts of Children's Literature," includes a piece by Ruth Bottigheimer on the need for a comprehensive catalogue of early children's books and a comparison by Karen E. Rowe of moral tales and fairy tale fantasy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This section culminates with Julia Briggs's overview of the work of early women writers for children, in which she argues that women increasingly took over from men as educators of children, whether as mothers, school mistresses, or governesses, at the same time that they were establishing themselves on the literary scene and contributing an "ethos of moral sensibility, of fine distinctions and discriminations that defined itself in the novel as the study of character, motives, and morals" (67). Briggs offers detailed examples from Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740–41), Goody Two-shoes (1755, usually attributed to Oliver Goldsmith), Sarah Fielding's The Governess (1749), and a range of educational materials (including the many hand-made items produced by Jane Johnson, a mother in the 1740s); she reads these examples in relation to each other and as responses to the ideas put forth in John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). In this way, Briggs responds to Myers's injunction to understand texts in their contexts, and in the process offers engaging new readings of familiar texts. The discussion of Pamela, for instance, shows Pamela disagreeing with Locke on practical grounds— she knows what it is like to be in a nursery, which, she points out, he clearly did not. She dismisses Locke's suggestion that children be encouraged to make their own toys on the grounds that "whatever be the Good . . . it cannot be equal to the Mischief Children may do themselves in making these Playthings" (74). Pamela eventually writes...