Gingerbread for the Mind: A Review of John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-Century England

That you are what you eat, literally and metaphorically, physically, emotionally, and morally, is one of the most well-received of ideas. That you can be whom you choose if you choose to eat right is a popular modern variant. Optimistic free-willers are more vocal, these days, than determinists: it is not unusual for sparring opponents of salt and sugar to square off and spoil a dinner party, or, on another level, for unregenerate munchers of Big Macs to join vegetarian label-readers in condemning television programs and/or advertisements that change the children who take them in. Pointing at the food they were given early on, some people shrug off responsibility for the state of their teeth, manners, or morals; more resolve to change everything by changing their diet. Many find in food-watching a strategic focus for incipient paranoia; others thrive on the energizing fantasy of molding themselves or their children, and monitor physical and spiritual nourishment to create the illusion of controlling their lives. Our heightened awareness of what we ingest surely relates to the current keen interest in children's literature. Partly because we tend to think so much about what makes us think the way we do, we are curious about what we read when we were very young.

John Locke's idea of the mind as an "empty cabinet" that is furnished with ideas through "sensation" and "reflection" is fundamental to theories about the force of formative impressions, and to most theories of education. Locke's Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) were influential works in the eighteenth century, when the ideas of England's "first philosopher" permeated English thought. Historians have noted their effect on the creation of a literature specifically for children, which, according to the authoritative historian of the genre, was not "a clear but subordinate branch of English literature until the middle of the eighteenth century."¹ In John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-Century England (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1981), Samuel F. Pickering, Jr. argues that Locke's view of sense data as the source of ideas, his vision of the child as father of the man, and his insistence on the importance of education inspired and strongly marked a literature that was deliberately designed to form young minds, habits, attitudes, and Christian souls.

By insisting on the significance of what young people take in, and advising that because children's minds tend to wander, they should be pleased in the process of being taught, Locke set in motion a commercial and cultural phenomenon. Such a story as the one John Newbery published in 1764, The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread, depends on a very literal Lockean sense of the effect of the outer world on the inner. Since Pickering has a gift for conveying the flavor of the stories he relishes by a judicious mix of quotation and summary, it makes sense to quote his version. Giles, he reports,

decided to learn to read when his father, who was a gingerbread baker, baked a gingerbread alphabet to cozen him into knowledge. After Giles learned the letters, the alphabet quickly became an edible reward. Next, Old Gingerbread baked a hornbook on which he wrote a syllabary. This did not last very long either. When Gaffer Gingerbread returned from his rounds, he discovered Giles "had eat up one Corner of his Book." "Hey day Giles, says he, what do you love learning so well as to eat up your Book? Why Father, says Giles, I am not the only Boy who has eat his Words. No Boy loves his Book better than I do, but I always learn it, before I eat it. Say you so, says the Father, pray let me hear you say your Lesson"—whereupon Giles "sung the whole Cuz's Chorus," which the publisher pointed out, "the sly Rogue had got out of Mr. Newbery's pretty Play Thing." Gaffer Gingerbread was so pleased with Giles's progress that he baked him another book...