History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children’s Literature (review)

Early nineteenth-century children’s literature is hardly every scholar’s darling. With the exception of the works of Maria Edgeworth, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, or Sarah Trimmer, children’s literature of that period is given comparatively little scholarly attention, and if attention is given, the critics’ verdicts tend to be rather dismissive: didacticism and flat characters are commonly lamented shortcomings that are attributed to those early specimens of British children’s literature.

Jackie C. Horne’s History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children’s Literature sets out to explore precisely this neglected period in the history of British children’s literature. The title of the monograph is slightly misleading insofar as “early” suggests a time before 1800. Nevertheless, Horne is right to pinpoint the gap that is still to be closed, between the by now better-researched children’s literature of the Enlightenment and the well-tilled field of the Golden Age in the second half of the nineteenth century. With her perceptive readings, Horne opens up a range of long neglected but apparently fascinating books and adds fresh insights to the emergence of children’s texts in the literary field.

In her introduction, Horne concisely records the current state of the art in both the history of eighteenth-century childhood and Enlightenment children’s literature. She shares with her fellow scholars the assumption that a new ideology of childhood had developed by the mid-nineteenth century. She also identifies the shift from exemplary, “flat” characters to round ones, which invite identification as a central change in the genre development of children’s literature. Contrary to existing research, however, Horne suggests a new approach to explain this shift, namely by reading early children’s literature alongside history writing of the time, instead of contextualizing the genre exclusively with the novel. Her argument for doing so—the common insistence on exemplarity and truthfulness in children’s literature and historiography—sounds convincing. What is more, Horne’s presupposition allows her to assess her material free from preconceived ideas about character construction that have been determined by novel writing. This is an important step, because children’s literature was, by that time, far from being an established literary genre. And by drawing its legitimation mainly through extra-textual references (morality, exemplarity, truthfulness) it had indeed defined its contours more in distinction from the novel than by embracing the rival genre. Horne is therefore absolutely right in her caution not to apply aesthetic precepts—such as round, individualized characters—that may have been anachronistic to the genre at the time examined. As she scrutinizes a period of generic development and change, she does not dismiss exemplary children’s literature for its didacticism, but inquires “[w]hen, and more importantly, why did this dramatic shift away from idealized exemplar characterization occur?” (5).

Horne is careful enough not to assume that her material will yield a clear trajectory, a smooth transition from one concept of childhood, history, or children’s literature to another. Instead, she again and again reminds her readers that the period is a conflicting one and that her texts ought to be considered experimentations with new models. With this proviso, she counters possible objections that her selection of texts is not representative enough (e.g., most examples saw only one edition, thus were apparently not very successful among readers). Her intention is not to set up a new paradigm, but to arrive at a more differentiated understanding of how early children’s writers sought to accommodate shifts in the function of children’s literature—and how they creatively experimented with existing modes such as the novel, history, or romance. Horne consequently grounds her argument not on the better researched domestic tales, but on what she loosely puts together as adventure stories or history for children. Her four chapters are largely organized according to the examined text types.

Chapters 1 and 2 deal with robinsonades...