Two Recent Critical Approaches to Eighteenth Century Children's Literature

The American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies not long ago gave its Clifford Prize for the best scholarly article of the year to Isaac Kramnick for "Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology: Observations on Culture and Industrial Capitalism in the Late Eighteenth Century." Such evidence that the scholarly establishment is beginning to take serious interest in the study of historical children's literature is encouraging. However, a careful reading of Kramnick's piece may trouble scholars interested in children's literature as literature. For in his effort to demonstrate that from its very beginnings in the late eighteenth century children's literature in English has been designed to serve ideological objectives, Kramnick often misses the essential meaning of texts he is attempting to interpret.

Kramnick describes the emergence of a liberal bourgeois creed in the late eighteenth century holding that "merit, talent and hard work should dictate social, economic, and political rewards, not privilege, rank, and birth" (p. 206). He traces a number of influences which, he maintains, combined to foster the creation of literature for children in this period which "self-consciously expressed the values of . . . the middle class and served as an important vehicle for the socialization of children to these values" (p. 211). The major part of Kramnick's paper consists of interpretive summaries of such works as The History of Goody Two-Shoes, The Robins, Sandford and Merton, Harry and Lucy, and Little Jack; in each case, the work is seen essentially as an attempt to disseminate the bourgeois ideology and spread "the new stereotypical roles of men and women, of boys and girls, which were emerging in the bourgeois family" (p. 204).

The main strength of Kramnick's lively and well written article lies in his description of the intellectual background of the industrious English middle class of the late eighteenth century. He suggests some interesting connections between the ethical doctrines of businessmen like Wedgewood, the training offered in the dissenting academies, the teachings of intellectuals like Priestley, and the sort of homely advice on the conduct of daily life offered by children's books of the period. Unfortunately, his readings tend to reduce very individual—though sometimes odd and flawed—literary texts to the status of mere vehicles for rather simplistically conceived social and economic propaganda.

The strengths and weaknesses of Kramnick's approach are evident in his treatment of one of the works he studies in detail, " The History of Little Goody Two-Shoespublished in 1765 by John Newberry [sic]" (p. 216). Kramnick sheds light on possible sources of some of the practical wisdom about getting ahead in life which school-mistress Margery Two-Shoes presents to her students, but his citation of her schoolroom maxims is highly selective, designed to reflect only themes "of an interesting ideological nature" (p. 218), and overlooking much of her more unworldly advice. For Kramnick, the message conveyed by Margery's story is simply that "success comes to the self-reliant, hardworking, independent individual" (p. 217). But both Margery's teaching and the thematic development of her own story are susceptible of quite different readings. In his search for evidence to support his thesis, Kramnick overlooks the full force of the religious dimension in the book; its echoes of the Job story; its stress not on individual effort, but Divine Providence; and the extent to which it presents reading itself as an activity which will bring not only financial but spiritual profit.

Kramnick's interpretation of the interpolated story of Mr. Lovewell will illustrate the shortcomings of his approach. Lovewell is a London servant who...