Children, Parents, and the Rise of the Novel (review)

REVIEWS 107 or more than a team member about a given topic. Finally, where secondary sources are concerned, it is extremely difficult, even in the age of computers, to keep abreast of and especially to assess the value of all the scholarship that is constantly produced all over the world in a wide variety of publications and languages. Not unexpectedly then, as soon as we begin to examine our own limited areas of expertise and those of the colleagues with whom we work, we discover defects, some trivial, some important. For example, the general editor of the Graffigny Correspondance is not E. Schowalter [sic] but J.A. Dainard. In the article on the history of the book (see "Livre") there is no mention, under discussion of publishers in The Netherlands, of Etienne Roger, Michel Le Cène, to name but two, and, more serious, no reference to me outstanding bibliographical work of LH. van Eeghen. In the bibliography to the article on Helvétius, unaccountably preceding the article on his father, the seminal book by D.W. Smith, Helvétius: A Study in Persecution (1965), since reprinted, is notable by its absence. In a work that purports to be up to date, one might have expected to see, in the article "Sauvage (Le Bon)," an allusion to S. Cro, The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom (1990). And the bibliography for Brissot, since it ignores several articles by L. Loft, is well behind the times. One would have thought this a good opportunity to correct some of Grente's errors in chronology. In his series, for example, he placed Nicolas Gueudeville in the seventeenth century despite the fact that nearly all Gueudeville's publications belong to the eighteenth. But the opportunity was not taken. I will not use up any more space with many similar instances of negligence (such as the failure to cite M. Cranston on Rousseau, die neglect of major articles published in EighteenthCentury Fiction, or the switch from Arabic to Roman numerals in die pagination of 1059-1075), but I have no doubt that every specialist will identify significant errors and omissions in his or her field. One astonishing weakness of the Dictionnaire is to be found in the limited attention devoted to Diderot as compared with that given to Rousseau and Voltaire. Grente may have had his prejudices but this failure to appreciate the importance of Diderot passes understanding. Despite these defects, largely inevitable in a project of such magnitude, it has to be recognized that François Moureau and his team have achieved much more than could be reasonably expected. If tiie results are not perfect, they still constitute a triumph. Aubrey Rosenberg University of Toronto T.G.A. Nelson. Children, Parents, and the Rise ofthe Novel. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995. 252pp. US$37.50. ISBN 0-87413- 5583. T.G.A. Nelson has written a book examining Philippe Aries's notion that childhood was "invented" in the eighteenth century and Lawrence Stone's contention that in England "between about 1660 and 1800 there was a remarkable change in ... standard childrearing practices, and in affective relations between parents and children" (p. 21; Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800 [1977], p. 405). To this end, he collects and runs through examples from eighteenth-century fiction of how children were treated—by their mothers, their fathers, their nurses, their tutors—to determine 108 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:1 whether children are present or absent in literature and whether, between the Restoration and 1750, there is a "break widi authoritarian attitudes and a transition to a more open and empathetic approach to children" (p. 29). What he finds is that "In the 1720s Moll Flanders and Roxana agonize over the fates of their children; in the 1740s the second part of Richardson's Pamela dwells on Pamela's responsibilities as a mother; in 1751 Fielding's Amelia has Captain Booth babysitting (and enjoying it) while his wife fulfills engagements elsewhere. Even the formidable Squire Western in Tom Jones (1749) becomes so fond of his two grandchildren that 'he spends much of his Time in die Nursery , where he declares the tattling of his...