Abstract

Most scholarship that links John Locke’s ideas with eighteenth-century representations of childhood approaches children as Lockean pedagogic subjects ready for moral and intellectual education. This article instead brings to bear on Daniel Defoe’s representation of children Locke the political thinker, who articulates in Two Treatises of Government (1689) a person’s right to “liberty and property.” Locke’s influential theories of ownership are partly responsible for the eighteenth-century investment in distinguishing between property and persons, and often reduce children to a state of compromised personhood. The numerous children who lurk in Defoe’s densely textured narrative worlds are evidence of a cultural sidelining of the child in new models of selfhood based on property rights. The child in Defoe’s fiction is persistently framed as a problematic economic entity. Such reduction of children to a bare economic function is of a piece with emergent notions of Lockean Man as a bearer of fundamental property rights. The many children born in the course of Defoe’s narratives are consistently marginalized, pointing to their complex narrative function in stories about protagonists who are intent on property accumulation.

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