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Reviewed by:
  • Child of the Enlightenment: Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary
  • Dorothee Sturkenboom
Child of the Enlightenment: Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary. By Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009. xii plus 556 pp. $158.00).

At ten years old Otto van Eck, a boy born and raised in a well-to-do Dutch family, started a diary that he continued until he was seventeen. Covering the years 1791–1797 and some 1,500 pages, Otto’s words reflect both his own feelings and ideas and those of his parents, who ordered the writing of this diary as a moral exercise and frequently checked on his writing. This appealing boyhood diary, one of the first of the kind that has been preserved, is the subject of Child of the Enlightenment, jointly written by the Dutch historians Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker, who sought to reconstruct Otto’s world in its context. As becomes clear from the well-chosen title, Enlightenment ideas and revolutionary movements in northwestern Europe form the backdrop against which the diary is positioned.

The book is the first in a new “Egodocument and History Series” by Brill Publishers, focusing on all sorts of autobiographical writing and edited by both authors and by Michael Mascuch of the University of California. The original Dutch version (Kind van de toekomst, 2005) was put on the longlist of a Dutch literary book prize and rightly so, because it is written in an engaging style with strong imagery, quotes, and comparisons that help to project oneself into Otto’s world. The 164 (sic) illustrations, many of them taken from contemporary children’s books, have the same effect.

Baggerman and Dekker decided not to tackle the manuscript with a preconceived set of research questions, but rather to “let the diary pose the questions raised by its own world” (p. 1). For historians this seems a noble yet slightly naïve approach. A historian’s mind is not a tabula rasa and inevitably impacts the reading of a source and thus the “questions raised”. The chosen method indeed warrants that enough attention is given to Otto’s personal preoccupations, but several sections in the book are only weakly linked to the content of Otto’s diary and rather speak of preoccupations the authors developed during a decade of research into the context of this primary source. An example is the lengthy section on the genesis of the First Dutch Constitution during the Batavian Revolution in the years 1795–1798 (pp. 371–387). However much this may be a “still-unwritten piece of Dutch political history” (p. 377), it is far too comprehensive for the book and should have been abridged—notwithstanding the involvement of Otto’s father as a representative of the Dutch people.

On the whole, however, Child of the Enlightenment is an intelligent study into the daily life of a charming eighteenth-century boy who longed to become a farmer, while his parents raised him to become a minister. Recurring subjects in Otto’s diary are his relationship with his parents and kin, his lessons, the content of the books he had to read, the elapse of time, his weak health, favorite pastimes, and the struggle to write a diary that met his parents’ requirements—that is, one which not merely reported on daily events but reflected on Otto’s [End Page 559] own behavior, reading, and thoughts. The diary was an instrument that Lambert van Eck and Charlotte Vockestaert used to gain a better understanding of their son’s mind, and to have him develop an inner conscience and become a virtuous citizen—an ideal embraced by the enlightened elite strongly believing in the malleability of humankind. For Otto’s education his parents conscientiously followed the recommendations made by contemporary German Enlightenment pedagogues (the Philanthropinists) who were partly inspired by Rousseau but maintained a critical distance from the philosopher’s more extreme ideas. Thus God, history, and a love of nature played a key role in the books read by Otto and in Otto’s upbringing, which for the major part took place at the family estate in the countryside.

As Otto became older...

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