A Bounty of Nineteenth-Century American Children's Literature
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As Monika Elbert notes in her smart and informative introduction to Enterprising Youth, the essays in this collection examine nineteenth-century American children's literary texts with attention to the messages their authors consciously and unconsciously promote to child readers. How do the (predominantly, but not solely, female) authors of these texts envision social responsibility, authority, and change? Are their perspectives ultimately more progressive or conservative? Do readers of these texts adhere to or resist their messages, and in what proportion? Written by women for children (that is to say, by the disenfranchised for the disenfranchised), in what way(s) are these texts attentive to issues of race and class? How thoroughly do the authors engage with meaningful and possible solutions to the shortcomings of American society? For many of the authors whose essays are included here, the answers are complex and fascinating.
The collection of sixteen essays is organized by Elbert into four sections. The first, "Civic Duties and Moral Pitfalls," examines "the question of civic responsibility in children's fiction" (xxii). Opening the section, Lorinda Cohoon usefully examines the poetry and stories contributed by Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Catharine Maria Sedgwick to the early nineteenth-century magazines The Juvenile Miscellany and The Youth's Companion. Cohoon focuses on the way these authors "drew on the domestic sphere to meditate on public issues that connect to citizenship and national identity" (3). I was especially intrigued by the brief overview of the magazine editors' predilections and positions, and how these shaped what they published. I also appreciated how Cohoon touches on texts that are not especially well-known to demonstrate the authors' awareness of policies that worked to disenfranchise not only African Americans but also Native Americans. (Indeed, I would have loved to see additional evidence in this respect.) Cohoon ultimately concludes that Sigourney's and Sedgwick's articles and poems "do to [End Page 263] some extent participate in upholding the dominant culture, but they do so while subtly critiquing inequities in citizenship systems" (15); she also finds them "positioning readers to reconsider accepting their citizenship complacently and inviting them to be 'open' to changing the citizenship 'ills' that they and their children face" (15).
Editor Elbert's own contribution to the volume, "Charitable (Mis)givings and the Aesthetics of Poverty in Louisa May Alcott's Christmas Stories," draws on a wide range of Alcott's literary works, from the well-known Christmas episodes of Little Women to scenes in less familiar stories such as "The Quiet Little Woman" or "Tessa's Surprises." Elbert shows that Alcott's stories consistently demonstrate "sympathy mixed with condescension" (32) toward the poor, and that charity in her fiction operates more meaningfully for the giver—the spoiled middle-class child—than for the recipient. One wonders how the limited space and format of the short stories might account for some of Alcott's attitudes; only Little Women is referenced, and only in terms of the March and Hummel interactions, for the most part. Would an examination of the other novels for young readers offer any variety on this theme? (Is Nurse Hummel of Little Men merely another example of the type represented by Patty in "The Quiet Little Woman" or Becky from "Becky's Christmas Dream"?) How does Rose Campbell's participation in charitable giving compare with what Elbert perceives in the short fiction? (This moves away from the Christmas focus of Elbert's essay, but because I find her argument so intriguing, I find myself considering how to extend it to Alcott's other more substantive works.)
The third essay in this section, "'Hints Dropped Here and There': Constructing Exclusion in St. Nicholas, Volume I," by Janet Gray and Melissa Fowler, articulates the agenda of St. Nicholas Magazine (originated in 1873): "Upper-middle-class values would trickle down: the lower-middle classes would assimilate them, and, in turn, transmit them to those below" (40). Inspired by a graduate seminar in which the authors and other classmates examined sample...
