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  • Inspired Lyric, Ponderous Prose, and the Promise of Salvation
  • Ruth B. Bottigheimer (bio)
Heaven upon Earth: The Form of Moral and Religious Children's Literature, to 1850, by Patricia Demers. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993.

Patricia Demers is a pioneer in treating moral and religious children's literature on its own terms. In the small notice given religious texts in the past, collectors and historians of children's literature have usually scorned its often dreary substance and sympathized with its long-dead readers. When Charles Lamb railed at Mrs. Barbauld's moralizations, his criticism was, perhaps, less a literary evaluation than an oblique testimony to the fact that he himself had no children with jeopardized souls; that, more significantly, he wrote in a period during which child mortality had been greatly reduced, even among the poor; and that parental vigilance against early death and eternal damnation no longer craved the salvational promise held out by moral and religious literature.

In the early modern period, when moral and religious literature for children took on its lineaments, a grim infant and child mortality rate brought nearly 50 percent of the young to their day of judgment before adulthood, and an even grimmer theology engaged a vivid rhetoric to contrast the torments of hell with the bliss of heaven. Mortality and theology together persuaded parents to believe that it was a matter of desperate necessity to do everything possible to snatch children from the eternal flames to which their inborn iniquity condemned them. Once moral and religious literature for children had flowered in England, printer-publishers, preferring to copy rather than to compose anew, kept the genre alive well into the nineteenth century, by which time it had become epigonal to both the religious rhetoric and social conditions that had originally spawned it.

Demers's first chapter treats optimistic post-Reformation views that heaven could be achieved on earth by and for people who lived godly [End Page 188] lives and eschewed the ways of "a certayne kynde and sorte of chyldren . . . which have smothe chynnes and toughe myndes" (13). But between the 1500s and the 1800s, Demers concludes, "the concept of a transformed, divinized earth [changed]. Although instructional, reformative efforts hardly slackened, the prospects of this domain of heavenly splendor became less global and more personal, individualized, and private" (154-55). That is, no longer a "heaven upon earth," but a personal purging—or perhaps a purgatory?—on earth in preparation for celestial reward.

Religious literature integrated children into a doubled family: the domestic unit that rendered earthly life orderly and the family of God that promised eventual entry into the mansions of the heavenly father. It was the function of religious and devotional literature to move children from home to heaven by training them to make moral choices that would lead directly to a happy eternity.

This is an alien literature, Demers writes, "because the distance between postmodern readers and these past spiritual mandates is . . . very great, [and] we must admit that we read these neglected works first with contemporary eyes and that their at times harrowing righteousness triggers questions that emerge necessarily from the present" (28). It is also a literature with many subgenres—general education, catechisms, reading primers, poetry, emblems and allegories, stories, novels, and drama.

Schooling was required to produce Christian virtue, and success in British charity schools meant effectively inculcating subjection, meekness, and gratitude, habits useful to industrial employers. It was a tutelege that William Godwin excoriated and that exerted so expelling a force that at least one child needed fourteen-pound weights tied to his legs to keep him from running away (30–31). Universal elementary education would not be mandated until 1870, and until then religious education took shape in class-specific and -distinct surroundings: in shabby Sunday schools for the poor or amid dancing and drawing instruction for the children of the well-off.

In early modern England, Protestant and Catholic ideology contended vigorously and often violently for the souls of English men, women, and children. Demers, however, like many recent historians of the early modern period, regularly emphasizes functional similarity rather than doctrinal difference. Her discussion of catechetical variations (69–75), for...

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