In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Instruction and Delight Revisited
  • Susan R. Gannon (bio)
McGavran, James Holt, Jr. Romanticism and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1991.

The stories we tell ourselves about the history of culture change in fascinating ways as we acquire new perspectives on the past. For a long time scholars and writers saw the dramatic changes in children's literature that took place in the nineteenth century as a process in which children's books were gradually liberated from a grim didacticism by a new and essentially Romantic appreciation for imagination and the marvelous. But this stress on a dichotomy between imaginative and moral concerns, between fantasy and didacticism, now seems dated. The essays in James McGavran's Romanticism and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century England avoid the usual clichés as they trace the complex interaction between "instruction" and "delight" in children's books of the time, and as they present an account of the way a cross-section of writers from Coleridge to E. Nesbit envisioned children as subjects and as audience. The first five essays in this thought-provoking collection focus on the Romantic period, the final six on the Victorians. Most touch, in one way or another, on Romanticism's impact on children's literature and on the ways in which childhood was perceived in the nineteenth century.

The way adult writers depict children in their work depends on the image they have of themselves, their relationship to the lost children of their own personal histories, and their attitudes toward a present audience of children and adults. McGavran introduces the work of his contributors with a quotation from Coleridge's poetic description of his contradictory feelings toward his young son Hartley and then uses the passage to frame "a Romantic dilemma of consciousness and expression that is equal parts beauty and fear, exaltation and abuse, love and 'pretty' hypocrisy." It is this tension that, McGavran suggests, "expressed repeatedly in Romantic texts . . . both lovingly engendered and relentlessly shadowed the efflorescence of imaginative children's literature in the Victorian period" (2).

That Coleridge's sympathy with his son's intuitive way of knowing could co-exist with doubt and concern about the child's spiritual and mental development seems clear. Such ambivalence may explain some of the virulence of the early nineteenth-century debate about what children should read, and perhaps some of the confusion and incoherence of that debate as well. In "The Raven: A Christmas Poem': Coleridge and the Fairy Tale Controversy," Jeanie Watson suggests that for Coleridge fairy tales are deeply moral because they lead "to the spiritual truths upon which morality is based" (15). But she amply documents the objections to the tales of many of Coleridge's contemporaries who felt sure such reading would overwhelm and confuse the young and give them a permanent distaste for the "supernatural." For Coleridge, of course, fairy tales enlarged the mind. Mrs. Trimmer may have worried about the terror and excitement, the dread, the fear, the confusion between fact and fancy such reading might arouse in children, but Coleridge happily acknowledged that such delightfully unsettling responses were vital to his own spiritual development.

Historians of children's literature, looking back from a Romantic perspective, have often identified imaginative literature for children with the literature of fantasy and have proposed an antagonism between the impulses to instruct and to entertain which would certainly puzzle the admirers of such adult writers as Pope, Swift, Johnson, or Austen. Two contributors to this volume make vigorous cases for a revaluation of this stock opposition. Alan Richardson urges a "rethinking of the role of childhood in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century culture," and "a profound revaluation of Romantic attitudes toward education and children's reading" (49). He suggests that a new history of children's literature of the period would need to give "greater attention to Jacqueline Rose's analysis of the special 'contradictions and difficulties' involved in addressing 'how our culture constitutes and reproduces its image of the child'" (49) as well as to recent, more sympathetic, reappraisals of didactic writers, to feminist critiques of the fairy tale, and to a more sophisticated...

pdf

Share