Time of Beauty, Time of Fear: The Romantic Legacy in the Literature of Childhood ed. by James Holt McGavran, Jr. (review)

James Holt McGavran’s first essay collection, Romanticism and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (1992), heralded a new scholarly focus on Romantic-era literature for children. While the volume included intelligent close readings of canonical adult texts, tracing their conflation of Romantic idealism with the figure of the child, its most innovative contribution came in its challenge to a long-held truth of children’s literature scholarship: that, given its stridently didactic focus, pre-Victorian fiction for children hardly qualified as literature, and certainly did not warrant close analysis. Revisionist work by Mitzi Myers and others in that volume, as well as in McGavran’s second collection, Literature and the Child: Romantic Continuations, Postmodern Contestations (1999), persuasively demonstrated that Romantic-era texts for children were worthy of, and ripe for, critical analysis.

None of the essays in McGavran’s latest collection are likely to usher in a comparable paradigm shift. But with catalog copy terming Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Smith, and Mrs. Molesworth “canonical” (a particularly delicious irony, given Myers’s essay on Edgeworth in McGavran’s first collection), the volume does suggest how far the field has come in twenty years. Naming “the Literature of Childhood” (emphasis added) as its focus, the book’s subtitle indicates the broad range of primary texts its contributors analyze: not only novels, periodicals, and television shows written specifically for children, but poetry, fiction, music, and graphic novels for adults which feature children as characters, or concern themselves with parent-child relationships. Nonetheless, even contributors to this volume seldom recognize the implicit conversations between children’s and adults’ texts, except when they treat an individual author whose oeuvre includes both. Whether focused primarily on works for grown-ups or for children, however, each contributor is guided by a “dual awareness,” a drive to push the conversation past the construct of the child purportedly bequeathed by Romanticism. Wordsworth’s babe “trailing clouds of glory” may be its most persistent embodiment, but Wordsworth and his literary successors also shared a “concomitant awareness of the toils and dangers children—and their parents—have always had to face” (p. xiv). The Romantic child (or, perhaps, Romantic Children) proves far more complex than its popular culture reduction would suggest.

McGavran arranges his diverse material chronologically, from late eighteenth-century poems and stories to twenty-first century texts from genres not even dreamed of in the days of Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth. Four essays each fall within the traditional disciplinary categories Romantic, Victorian, and Modern/Postmodern. McGavran himself opens the collection by considering Wordsworth’s “Michael” and Coleridge’s “Christabel” not as glib acts of worship to childhood, but as destabilizers of “any simplistic reading of Romantic childhood to call parenting and ultimately kinship itself into question” (p. 2). Malini Roy asks readers to move beyond Wordsworth when considering Romantic childhood, for his constructions cannot account for the “angry girls” in Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. No feral children of nature, as in The Prelude, Wollstonecraft’s girls “simmer in ‘resentment’ at their lived experiences within the divisive gender politics of their society,” pointing to the possibilities of using the child as a figure of political resistance (p. 23). (Placing Maria in the context not just of Rights, but also of Wollstonecraft’s earlier children’s text, Original Stories from Real Life [1788] would have improved Roy’s intelligent discussion). The two essays analyzing Romantic-era children’s texts also point to the Romantic child’s political uses. Andrew Smyth’s discussion of Edgeworth’s “The Rabbit” and her unpublished essay “On the Education of the Poor” recognizes the writer’s ambivalence about educationally-based class mobility. Elizabeth Dolan demonstrates how Charlotte Smith’s Rambles Farther teaches children how to develop an ethical response to slavery and how to prepare themselves...