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

These are heady times to be a scholar of the eighteenth century. The advent of databases like the Gale Group's Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and more focused web-based archives like The Spectator Project and The Orlando Project have opened up exciting new avenues of research. Eighteenth-century conferences have become host to lively discussions about attribution, adaptation, and the significance of texts that were once considered profoundly obscure. In the context of this proliferation, it is encouraging to come across a book like Anja Müller's Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689-1789, which seamlessly weaves the old and the new parameters of research.

On the one hand, Framing Childhood is a tradition-based product of hours spent in the depths of archives housed at Cambridge University and Yale's Lewis Walpole Library, which analyzes respected, canonical authors like Addison and Steele, the author-editors of The Tatler and The Spectator. On the other hand, this illustrated book conscientiously lists online editions in its "Primary Printed Sources" and suggests that readers peruse the volume with their computer browsers open, to call up images that didn't make the final cut. Müller helpfully gives directions in the Preface and throughout the text for finding online images of the more obscure texts, and any savvy Google user will be able to locate the rest. In this way, Framing Childhood becomes not necessarily the final word in the presentation of child-images in eighteenth-century texts, but rather, something more valuable: a work that invites readers to begin their own quests for a new, more complex understanding of eighteenth-century childhood that goes beyond the traditional view supplied only by literary and educational texts.

Müller notes that most work on eighteenth-century childhood in literature and art tends to "focus on novels, children's literature, poetry, or painting" (14); in contrast to these sources, which are allied with elite classes, periodicals and prints function as mass media, reaching a wider audience that is more diverse in terms of social and economic class. Thus, periodicals and prints can be said to have played a major role in both reflecting and helping to create the social perceptions of the time. As Müller points out, "moral weeklies" like The Tatler, The Spectator, and The Guardian have long been viewed as "instrumental for the formation of tastes and the shaping of English morals, manners, and ideologies" (15). Yet the role of satirical prints in shaping images of childhood in the midst of their primary roles as commentators on adults' "political, educational, social or moral" (16) activities has been largely overlooked. By considering the "constructive work performed by these two mass media" (235), Müller offers a more balanced view of the way childhood was configured, directly challenging assumptions that continue to be made about the "myth of the origin of childhood in eighteenth-century England" (18).

Müller divides her work on childhood into four major categories: "Fashioning Children's Bodies," "Framing Children's Minds," "Family Matters," and "Public Children." In each category, she offers an overview of the relevant discourse presented in the periodicals and chooses popular prints to read closely. "Fashioning Children's Bodies" includes periodical essays and shorter references that discuss a wide range of topics: whether children's natures are the result of heredity or of post-conception environmental influences; debates about childcare topics like breast-feeding and exercise; the appropriate gendering of children; and the nature of children's sexuality. A segment on "Illness and Sexuality" provides memorable cautionary tales of girlhood, including the story of "Aliena," who dresses as a cabin boy with near-disastrous results, and "Sharlot Wealthy," whose education focuses on enhancing her attractiveness, making her "a brainless ornament" (33). This section juxtaposes radically different ideas on controversial topics, which appeared concurrently in popular sources, thus discouraging a simplistic image of a smooth "evolution" of ideas about children. For example...