Literature and the Child: Romantic Continuations, Postmodern Contestations

Romanticism and the End of Childhood

Alan Richardson ROMANTICISM AND THE END OF CHILDHOOD A dolescents regularly bring weapons to school, and the daily violence occasionally erupts into knife fights; a thirteen year old beats another student to death at a prestigious academy. Less affluent urban children spend more time on the streets than at school and drift unthinkingly into criminal activity, and an anxious public allows children to be prosecuted and sentenced as adults. Gangs of inner-city children battle one another for turf, so economically desperate that they fight over scavenging rights to the scrap metal at burnt-out building sites. Teenage pregnancy is epidemic; alarmingly large numbers of unplanned, unwanted infants stand at severe risk of undernourishment, neglect, and abuse. In rural areas, impoverished children of casual agricultural laborers, who often lack literacy skills and political rights, are shamefully and openly exploited , working alongside their parents beginning at ages as young as six or seven. This list, which could easily be extended, sounds all too familiar and might have been culled from a month’s reading of any major urban newspaper in the United States. It provides ample evidence (if any further evidence is needed) of the fall, disappearance, or erosion of childhood which sociologists, social historians, and educationalists have been warning us about for the past dozen years or so (Sommerville , Postman, Suransky). Yet all these examples are taken from accounts of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England, a period during which the modern notion of childhood as a discrete, protected, innocent state devoted to schooling and recreation rather thanproductivelaborwasfirstbeingwidelydisseminatedacrossclass lines (Chandos 133–54; Pinchbeck and Hewitt 2: 351–53; Place; Liu 251–66). Ironically, as the Romantic ideal of childhood loses its social purchase, the condition of contemporary children begins to resemble more and more that of the majority of their real Romanticera counterparts. A Romantic childhood may soon again become an 23 elite experience, mainly limited to middle- and upper-class families with the economic and cultural capital to afford it—as it was until our own century.1 In its threatened dissolution, childhood brings us up against the limits of certain canonical forms of Romanticism even in registering their cultural force. It may equally, however, raise questions regarding both the limits of a postmodern devaluation of Romantic values and the potential for finding something to recuperate in a discourse that, as it recedes from us in time, throws our own cultural practices into sharper outline. Not everyone would agree, of course, that the demise of the Romantic child is anything to lament. Before considering the case against cultural nostalgia (if not exactly for social complacency), however, I should be more specific about why I use the adjective “Romantic,” a notoriously vexed term which recently has again come under assault (Perkins 85–119). After all, an extended childhood considered as a unique period of life, intimately bound up with schooling and other forms of intellectual and moral development, can be traced back to Renaissance humanism or even earlier and had already succeeded in generating a new world of children’s toys, books, games, and clothing in eighteenth-century England (Ariès, Plumb). This notion of childhood, perhaps best called “educative,” was still, however, an avant-garde ideal largely confined to a social elite (the upper and, especially, the “middling” classes) at the beginning of the Romantic era. What was it that enabled and propelled the democratization of this ideal, particularly at a time when, because of industrialization, children’s labor was becoming more rather than less economically valuable (Zelizer)? In his recent and important study The Children of the Poor, Hugh Cunningham suggests that the extension to all children (in theory if not always in practice) of the rights and enjoyments previously associated with the children of the dominant group was inextricably bound up with a “change in the representation of childhood” (7) in the early nineteenth century. More specifically, it was the emergence of a “romantic concept of the child” and a “sensibility and rhetoric” among social reformers “unquestionably informed by an internalized acquaintance with the Romantic poets” that made this unprecedented and (in crudely economic terms) unlikely extension of the educative ideal viable (Cunningham 51, 90). What was novel about the representation of childhood in canonical Romantic writing? In many ways, nothing. The literary “senti24 Romanticism Continuing and Contested mentalization” of childhood, which may have been a necessary condition for...