Enterprising Youth: Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century American Children's Literature (review)

Enterprising Youth, in the Children's Literature and Culture series edited by Jack Zipes, makes a timely and important contribution to the burgeoning field of childhood studies and children's literature. Diverse essays about canonical and noncanonical nineteenth-century American texts reflect developments across a range of fields and works, presenting children not as passive receptacles of adult desires but "as active participants in the political and social arenas" who absorb adult teachings and "become the promulgators of culture for future generations" (xvii). The volume's subtitle, Social Values and Acculturation, announces the book's polemical intent. Some essays operate along a familiar subversive-to-conventional continuum, but many transcend these classifications to show readers how the dynamic tensions between the imaginative and the practical, the romantic and the real, the religious and the scientific, the adventuresome and the safe all interact "in the creation of enterprising children" (xviii).

Class, gender, and capitalistic practice form the nucleus of essays in the first section. Lorinda B. Cohoon argues that Lydia Huntley Sigourney's and Catharine Maria Sedgwick's periodical publications work at the intersection of the private and public spheres to intervene in the civic and moral education of children. Monika Elbert's well-argued analysis of Louis May Alcott's Christmas stories describes a writer who addresses social and economic inequality through sympathetic but condescending charity that aggrandizes the middle-class giver and posits the underclass as essential to successful capitalism. Similarly, Janet Gray and Melissa Fowler astutely analyze contradictory bourgeois adaptations of romantic views of childhood by contributors to St. Nicholas Magazine, who assuage concerns over advancing capitalism with retold classics, charitable plots that leave the class structures intact, and gender and racial stereotypes that encode "literary whiteness" (41). Roxanne Harde argues that Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's depictions of orphans codify prevailing ideologies while "work[ing] against them in the spirit of reform" (56).

Race takes center stage in the volume's second section. Martha L. Sledge argues that the abolitionist Anti-Slavery Alphabet overtly challenged the politics of slavery while excluding slaves from literacy. Two essays show nineteenth-century writers directly challenging the status quo. Jeannette Barnes Lessels and Eric Sterling persuasively document Jacob Abbott's efforts to overcome racism in his depictions of black characters in the Stories of Rainbow and Lucky series. Rita Bode similarly shows that Harriet Prescott Spofford's Hester Stanley stories undermine racist attitudes by making race indeterminate, challenging racial hierarchies that privilege whiteness, and questioning accepted distinctions between "savage" and "civilized." Lesley Ginsberg's well-researched essay posits that in her postbellum fiction, Harriet Beecher Stowe "retreat[s] into a regressive fantasy of domestic harmony" by infantilizing slaves and aligning them with beasts of burden (99). Her provocative analysis points to the significance of child-pet relationships, a point also taken up by Joan Menefee, discussed below.

Essays in the third section discuss sentimentality as a bridge to the realist period. Shawn Thomson's study of masculinity explains that the Robinson Crusoe figure both "directed the energies of young men into the emergent marketplace and channeled sentiment toward … the home" (135). Maria Holmgren Troy also focuses on boyhood, noting the linguistic playfulness in Elizabeth Stoddard's Lolly Dinks's Doings, which challenges the notion of the child as knowable and presages modernism by questioning the constructedness of identity. Melanie Dawson's perceptive essay shows how memoirs by Zitkala-a, W. D. Howells, and Henry James recuperate affect, associated with sentimentality, as part of a realist sensibility. Anne Lundin discusses Kate Douglas Wiggin, a pioneer in early childhood education, who appropriated romantic rhetoric to achieve reform.

Developments in science, technology, and psychology inform essays in the final section. Eric S. Hintz argues that biographies of inventors, an often-maligned genre, helped to resolve late-nineteenth-century tensions created by industrialization. J. D. Stahl describes the blend of science and reverence promoted...