Reading Lessons from the Eighteenth Century: Mothers, Children and Texts (review)

In Reading Lessons from the Eighteenth Century, Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles are able to explore fully the cultural, historical, and literary implications of the relatively recently discovered box of educational ephemera created by the eighteenth-century mother, Jane Johnson. The published academic material on this maternal writer and pedagogue can be traced back to the 1995 "Scrapbooks and Chapbooks" conference held at Homerton College in Cambridge from which a collection of papers was produced, Opening the Nursery Door: Reading Writing and Childhood (1997), edited by Mary Hilton, Morag Styles, and Victor Watson. In her introduction to the facsimile edition of Jane Johnson's A Very Pretty Story (2001) Gillian Avery also acknowledges the "Scrapbooks and Chapbooks" conference as a key influence on her work on Johnson.

Reading Lessons is the first book-length study to concentrate solely on these exciting and unique archives. Through this study the writers reclaim maternal domestic educators as vital constituents in discussions of eighteenth-century education and childhood. This is a concern which has gained critical support following Harvey Darton's suggestion, in Children's Books in England (3rd rev. ed., 1983), that by focusing debates regarding literature for and about children on the publication of John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and the "first children's book," John Newbery's A Little Pretty Pocket Book (1744), critics were ignoring the domestic parental educational methods and presenting published works as the only works of significance.

Reading Lessons serves a dual purpose for Arizpe and Styles. It is not only an erudite discussion of why Johnson's carefully constructed and preserved reading cards, games, and mobiles, along with her more private commonplace book, are significant for those interested in the development of the concept of childhood in literature, but also "an informal tale of researchers researching" (v). Describing the avenues followed and journeys made on the trail of the Johnsons, Arizpe and Styles inspire the reader with the excitement and affection that they clearly feel for Jane Johnson and her family. They present the results of their research and provide a very thorough analysis of the significance of these findings, but deliberately leave inviting openings for further research, discussion and contextual expansion, thus encouraging other academics to take up their lead.

Most of this book is devoted to the lesson cards and reading games created by Johnson, and the collection of quotations in her commonplace book. Chapter 3 provides a detailed examination of the reading schemes and teaching strategies she employed in her various nursery reading materials. The various materials employed are described in detail, from games and rhymes to rather crude preprinted illustrations. Arizpe and Styles hypothesise on how the Lockean reading games might have been played, and what resulting lessons might be learnt.

In order to pinpoint how the Johnson family's experience is significant for studies of reading practices and educational methods, chapter 1 locates the family socially through a genealogical exploration providing as much detail about the lives of the central characters as can possibly be gleaned from public records and private commonplace book entries. By situating the family in "polite society" (13), Arizpe and Styles place them firmly within the tradition of domestic educational methodology that developed throughout the eighteenth century, and show that Johnson was not exceptional for a woman of her social standing. Chapter 5 looks at Johnson's reading by examining what books she quoted from and referred to in her commonplace book and in letters to friends and relations, and examines how her reading habits may have shaped her thinking and educational methods. Chapter 6 provides an interesting and original way of exploring childhood educational methods by examining the reading habits and opinions of the adult Johnson children, asking the question: Did Jane Johnson's education of the very young Johnson children affect their adult cognition?

A brief overview of current debates about eighteenth-century reading practices is provided in...