Moral majorities?: reconceiving the literary world we have lost

The practice of piety was also a play of power relationships, a theater for social drama, and a cultural mechanism for change and continuity. Historians have only begun to read the clues of human interaction behind the face of piety.

(Dailey 455)

In the three decades since its inception, historical investigation of childhood and the family has generated a formidable number of studies—and a formidable array of incompatible explanatory models. ¹ Is the social history of childhood a teleological narrative of progress, a tragedy of decline, an unpredictably discontinuous cyclical chronicle, or a timeless tale of emotional continuities dressed up in period costumes? Is the cultural construct of childhood a “discovery,” an “invention,” or just something that’s always been there? Should we helplessly wring our hands, pat ourselves on the back, or set to work to clean up the mess? While we ponder, postmodern theorists deconstruct the developmental notions that shape the stories of childhood we thought we knew: isn’t development itself an invention, just another fictional plot, a Lyotardian metanarrative that has lost its explanatory power? Troublingly and/or exhilaratingly, maybe what we see when we look in the baby’s face is what the baby sees when it looks in the mother’s face, the viewer’s own self-confirming reflection: I spy me! Lies, myths, or mirages, stories of childhood nevertheless still seem necessary to knit us into human and (what may come down to the same thing) narrative communities. ² It is odd that so little sympathetic attention has hitherto been paid to the earlier narrative consequences of childhood’s social and cultural history. In developing their variant mythologies of origin, historians have ignored the literary dimensions of the sources they cite to prove that somebody (or nobody) was first in the field. Equally neglectful, historians of children’s literature, conditioned by Romantic definitions of childhood’s desire, have been almost universally unsympathetic to the religious incunabula of juvenile literature. In their quite different ways, the three books under review set out to fill this gap. Although their strategies and arguments (or lack thereof) are dissimilar, they all offer a warm and long overdue welcome to the godly precursors who had a larger, more lively, and more lasting impact on writing for children than most professors and parents have thought. If not quite the pioneer recognitions of Puritan and religious heritages that their authors and publishers claim, three studies with something good to say about religious ideologies and genres appearing inside a brief time span do perhaps signal the start of a paradigm shift: a willingness to discard Romanticism’s green spectacles and take another look at the prehistory of and pretexts for children’s literature as we’ve conceived it. If Wordsworth wasn’t Daddy, the Puritans weren’t Nobodaddy either.

What, then, to bend Peter Laslett’s classic title, did this juvenile literary world that we’ve lost look like, and how might what we learn from these researchers help us in the ongoing task of reconceptualizing childhood and children’s literary studies? It may well be that for classroom teachers, the least ambitious, least physically attractive, and most specific of the studies will turn out to be the most useful—another Ugly Duckling. Ruth K. MacDonald has long been known as a specialist in this country’s earlier juvenile literature, and Christian’s Children: The Influence of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress on American Children’s Literature capably develops several of her previous interests, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century genres and Louisa May Alcott. Although, as MacDonald’s preface points out, Bunyan’s allegory appeared for generations in an amazing array...