Terms for Order in Some Late 19th Century Fiction for Children
Buy Issue for $35 at JHUP- Terms for Order in Some Late 19th Century Fiction for Children*
For the last century and a half, Americans appear to have been peculiarly concerned with matters of childhood and youth. European visitors to the United States in the nineteenth century frequently commented on the American child, whose independent behavior, in comparison to his English or French counterparts, was at once refreshing and disconcerting.1 Moreover, youth and innocence have seemed, to American historians and novelists alike, to symbolize essential qualities distinguishing the cultural experience of the New World from that of the Old. The apotheosis of the American Adam is Huck Finn. However unpersuasive these engaging metaphors may be, it is clear that the successful transmission of a group's culture to its young is a sine qua non of social continuity, whether the group be a whole society or only a part. The link between the generations is at once supremely important and peculiarly vulnerable.
During the latter part of the nineteenth century, one social group in America left an especially rich tradition of children's literature in which the problem of cultural transmission may be examined. This group, termed by Professor Stow Persons the "gentry," roughly equivalent to the well-known "genteel tradition," has received considerable attention from historians, though seldom on its own terms.2 The moral idealism of the genteel tradition has been widely noted, but its preoccupation with a particular social type—the gentleman—and its function as a culture bearing class or elite are less widely understood.
The following brief essay is abstracted from my longer study, "Mother Was a Lady, Strategy and Order in Selected American Children's Periodicals, 1865 1890."3 Using theoretical concepts drawn from cognitive anthropology and the sociology of knowledge, this study examines the most characteristic form of children's literature in the period (the children's magazine) to illuminate the problems faced by the "gentry elite" in transmitting their culture. Narrative fiction is analyzed for the terms of the gentry's world view and for the logic or "strategy" of persuasion which they adopted in their efforts to transmit intact their vision of social order and democratic possibilities during a period of dramatic and turbulent change in American life.
Initially, a child is introduced to one world of meanings, presented as if it had the authority of nature; but in a pluralistic society, alternative modes of behavior and cognitive orientation are available which may eventually compete for his allegiance. In practice, a variety of influences contribute to the socialization of children. For centuries stories expressly created for tender minds and budding consciences have been an accepted means of winning (or trying to win) the young [End Page 58] to essential truths. Moreover, books aimed at the edification of Young America, unlike the actual behavioral patterns associated with child-rearing in the past, are conveniently accessible for research. Fiction created for children thus exists at one of the most potentially illuminating intersections in American culture, for it is here that the remembered past, the apparent present, and the desired future meet and interpenetrate. Functioning as both persuasion and confirmation, such literature may be studied both as an effort to attract converts to a particular point of view by means of a carefully controlled experience and as a structure of meanings capable of sustaining the allegiance of those already persuaded of the truths intended by the fiction. Given this nation's religious and cultural diversity, American children's literature may be expected to reveal variations in value and expectation as well as divergent definitions of success, of character, and of the promise of democracy.
Historians of American thought have been particularly drawn to the works of Horatio Alger, and their explanations and interpretations of his popularity are well known.4 Alger enjoyed no hegemony over widely held values, however; the group of authors who wrote regularly for St. Nicholas and the Youth's Companion, for example, offered alternative versions of the American dream which insisted on different priorities and rested on different assumptions.
In the formula stories characteristic of these periodicals, the traditional social type of the gentleman provides the central model for youthful emulation...
