Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689-1789 (review)

In 1960, French historian Philippe Ariès transformed child studies with the publication of L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime, translated into English two years later by Robert Baldick as Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. One of the attractions of annales school criticism was its ability to historicize cultural norms by examining social change over vast sweeps of time, and in this case Ariès challenged the assumption that attitudes towards childhood were primarily governed by natural impulses, concluding that in the early eighteenth century western culture experienced a radical shift in the value attached to the child. Fifty years on, his work remains the starting point for many studies of childhood, including this one, but Anja Müller's analysis of the multiple representations of childhood found in periodicals and prints in the eighteenth century demonstrates just how far our under standing of the cultural construction of childhood has progressed.

Müller draws on a wide range of theoretical approaches, touching on the work of Butler, Culler, Foucault, and Simmel, among others, but adopts the concept of the "frame" as the unifying metaphor for her study, commenting that she "prefer[s] the terms 'frames of reference' and framing to the idea of context, because [she is] particularly interested in the processual implications of these terms, such as the creation of closure, in- and exclusion, focalization, selection or generative power" (10-11). Such an approach "singles out childhood as a field of interest," and, following the introductory chapter that establishes the scope of her analysis, Müller offers four others that focus on childhood from different perspectives. Chapter 2, "Fashioning Children's Bodies" (though the running title reads "Framing Children's Bodies"), examines the multiple discourses addressing the body of the child in eighteenth-century print culture; chapter 3, "Framing Children's Minds," explores the most familiar territory, charting competing theories of education and personality set forth in periodical literature; chapter 4, "Family Matters," turns attention to "the representational processes and strategies deployed by these media to conceptualize and popularize particular notions of the child within the family" (114); and chapter 5, "Public Children," argues that "contrary to Ariès's segregational thesis, children did participate in eighteenth-century public life" (183), drawing evidence from a varied group of prints to document the variety of possible meanings attached to the figure of the child in the period. Müller concludes that "periodicals and prints provide evidence of the contingency of different childhood concepts in eighteenth-century mass media, thus resisting the homogenizing view that pervades the greater part of critical studies on children and childhood in the eighteenth century" (231).

Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints is ambitious in its vision and reveals both the strengths and vulnerabilities of so all-encompassing an approach. Müller's study is invaluable for the wealth of graphic materials it makes available, and it is at its best when she is examining the gap between the high art rendering of eighteenth-century families on which many of our conceptions of childhood are based and the varied perspectives on the child offered by mass-produced print media. This book is also important for the conversation it provokes with the reader. I imagine that, like me, you will not find yourself in agreement with every nuance of every reading; and yet, chances are equally good that you will be fascinated by the range of representations and competing discourses of childhood elaborated in these pages.

Perhaps one example will serve to illustrate the complexity of Müller's approach and the difficulties it occasionally presents. In chap ter 4 she examines H. Bunbury's A Family Piece (1 April 1774—though she makes no comment on whether this dating has significance). The comic print, which also appears on the dust jacket of Müller's book, shows...