Missed Opportunities and Critical Malpractice: New Historicism and Children's Literature

If what's being termed the New Historicism is fashionable enough in Romantic and Renaissance studies these days to provoke the inevitable backlash (as the May 1987 PMLA indicates), its avant-garde methodologies and insights remain curiously neglected by recent critics of eighteenth-century children's literature. Bette P. Goldstone's Lessons to be Learned: A Study of Eighteenth-Century English Didactic Children's Literature is the principal subject of this review, but because they survey similar subjects and evince related problems of historical orientation, two other reappraisals of pre-Romantic fiction need to be briefly considered: Sharon Marie Scapple's The Child as Depicted in English Children's Literature from 1780-1820 and Robert Leeson's Reading and Righting: The Past, Present, and Future of Fiction for the Young. The first two works are standard American academic overviews limited to what is usually called, however uninformatively, the "moral tale"; Leeson's is a quick dash from a romanticized oral culture specializing in heroic images of folk virtue through middle-class hegemony into a hopefully revolutionary future, where old heroisms will be updated to rescue a too effete children's literature for post-TV, post-video generations. Different as are their purposes and authors (Leeson is among the most important contemporary British socialist writers for children), each offers a guidebook to little-mapped territory and each falls prey to the geographer's original sin, tracing old boundaries on trust—or in literary terms, reproducing yet again the old polarity of instruction versus delight, primer versus pleasure, which still hamstrings critical attention to the key period that first produced novels for the nursery. (Goldstone's failure to evade this paralyzing dichotomy is the more instructive because it is her professed intent to do so.) The American studies demonstrate the persistence of older ways of thinking about history and literature, Scapple's work being the more impressive of the two. Leeson's is an unabashedly ideological appropriation of children's literary history for present purposes, engaging it in a struggle between factions that might be labeled childist versus elitist. None of the three really forwards the in-depth primary research the period requires or manifests attention to the culturally specific formal properties of the works categorized, summarized, or dissolved into lists of lessons taught and attitudes toward family, education, or whatever.

Despite their stress on historical periodization, despite their genuflections to Lawrence Stone and Philippe Ariès and new conceptualizations of the family and the child on the one hand or to revisionary socialist ideology on the other, these literary tours miss opportunities to revitalize their subject. They lack the sophisticated critical awareness that could wed theoretical approach to historical particularity, and they fall short of those discriminating specificities that arise only after thorough exploration of the literary landscape. The historical samplings from which they would construct a case are painfully skimpy at best, sometimes derived from second or third-hand sources—Leeson is fond of relying on Tuer's old books of quaint excerpts—and their facts too often downright wrong. They do not connect historically conditioned instruction with its equally conditioned literary structure; here is no conception of reciprocity or interplay, just "vehicle" and extractable moral or lesson. Here typically too is a blithely unproblematized distinction between "literature" and historical "background," between text and context; the notion of history is mirror, reflection, frame, or backdrop—history or culture is something a literary work reproduces or can be set against. Never a narrative akin in its construction to fictional narratives, history here is just there, a history and not a plurality of histories. Not recognizing "history" as itself a social construct, this historicism cannot contribute to the cultural poetics that would foreground...