History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children’s Literature (review)

Children’s fiction of the Enlightenment provided its young readers with exemplar characters. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, all fiction and history for children sought a moral purpose, explained in Sara Fielding’s The Governess (1749) as “the true Use of Books [being] to make you wiser and better.” These books provided flat characters whose clearly illustrated behaviors were to be either emulated or shunned by child readers; these sorts of characters were mostly a result of Romantic notions of childhood. This didacticism was the environment of children’s fiction before Alice arrived and ushered in the Golden Age of children’s literature precisely in 1865.

Such, at least, is how critics and historians of early British children’s literature have tended to understand and explain their subject before Jackie C. Horne’s History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children’s Literature. Originally hoping to identify how adventure novels published between 1800 and 1840 depict constructions of masculinity differently from their Victorian counterparts, Horne instead discovered that many of these early novels are experimenting with, rather than conforming to, conventions of gender, genre, and character construction. This experimentation as it appears in adventure stories and historical fictions—as opposed to the more popular domestic story—drives her study.

Horne begins with a question: “How did the ‘flat’ characters of eighteenth-century children’s literature become ‘round’ by the mid-nineteenth?” While previous studies have turned to Romanticism for an explanation, Horne finds a more convincing answer by situating adventure novels and fictionalized histories within the discipline of history. She is interested in the “Early-Victorian favorites,” texts that were published “after the rise of the moral tale but before the onset of mid-Victorian Golden Age fantasy” (21). But, as Horne explains, in order “to understand how children’s literature made the transition from idealized moral exemplar to sympathetically engaging characterization, it is vital to study the messy, conflicted texts that struggled to negotiate the often contradictory demands of the old exemplar character and the new, emotionally evocative one” (21). Critics have generally understood the shift away from exemplar characters toward realistic ones to be simultaneous with a shift away from didacticism; but Horne looks askance at such generalities, instead arguing that these early fictions depict the move from flat to realistic as being “entirely compatible with the goal of teaching children moral lessons” (24). Instead of discussing exemplarity and realism as a binary, then, she offers a more contiguous model that reveals the compelling ways in which the construction of both the “ideal” and “ordinary” child creates a bond between the reader and the protagonist that “foster[s] a desire for emulation” (24). Horne’s primary goal, however, is to articulate authors’ “means of achieving” such emulation (24).

Each of Horne’s four chapters explores this “shift” from “exemplar to sympathetic identification in a different type of adventure story” (24). The first two chapters discuss children’s fiction set outside the domestic sphere—specifically, on deserted islands. These distant locations permit authors to experiment with the sort of gender and character construction that might otherwise threaten the realistic sphere. Interestingly, it is in these unrealistic settings that realistic characters begin to emerge. Chapter one, “The Emergence of the Ordinary: Parents and Children on the Deserted Isle,” traces the emergence of a new construction of childhood as it occurs in family robinsonade stories. Horne explores British robinsonades by Barbara Hofland and Ann Fraser Tytler within the context of Johann David Wyss’s The Family Robinson Crusoe (1814); she suggests that these texts use islands as the “ideal space for experimenting with a new construction of the child” that is not an idealized exemplar, but one combining good and bad qualities to render an “ordinary child” (25). In chapter two, “The Failure of the Ordinary: The Function of Death in the Family Robinsonade,” Horne turns to robinsonades by Frederick Marryat and...