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  • The Children’s Book Business: Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century by Lissa Paul
  • Andrew O’Malley (bio)
Lissa Paul. The Children’s Book Business: Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century. Routledge. xxvi, 28. US$141.00

Lissa Paul’s intelligent and informative look at the children’s book industry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries inventively adopts the New Historicist approach of employing a close investigation of an overlooked figure or cultural artifact to gain broad insight into the culture of a period. Here, the figure is author Eliza Fenwick, and the artifact is her Visits to the Juvenile Library (1805), long dismissed as a mere extended plug for the wares in Benjamin Tabart’s bookshop. Paul engagingly reveals Fenwick’s place and connections within the progressive, even radical intellectual networks of her age; following such critics as Mitzi Myers, Paul takes up the vital work of recuperating the work and critical reputations of women who wrote for children in the ‘late Enlightenment.’ More ambitiously, she proposes the ‘knowing and feeling child’ (Godwin’s [End Page 616] phrase) these authors cultivated as an antidote to the disabling Romantic ideal of childhood innocence, characterized by ignorance and otherworldliness, that enjoyed cultural dominance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ‘In the twenty-first century,’ with its rapid pace of technological and social change, ‘the fading images of those Romantic innocents haunt us and make us uneasy, which is why turning to the thinking and knowing child of the eighteenth century offers attractive possibilities for renewal,’ Paul argues.

Paul’s goals are laudable: the innocence so cherished in (even demanded of) children has shortchanged them, keeping them from worlds of experience in the name of ‘protection.’ (Part of Paul’s inspiration for the book comes from her discovery of a beautiful but terrifying modern German picture book, Die Menschenfresserin, about an ogress who accidentally eats her own child, and her speculation on why it would never be published in North America.) As well, the often female children’s authors of the period – along with Fenwick, Paul discusses Edgeworth, Barbauld, Wollstonecraft, and others – were indeed dismissed unfairly by male historians in the twentieth century who embraced a historical narrative celebrating the perceived progress in children’s literature ‘from instruction to delight.’ Dismantling such false binaries and hierarchies as imaginative-pedagogical and entertaining-educational is central to Paul’s objectives here.

While the book makes an important and provocative argument about both children today and women writers two centuries ago, it relies occasionally on some debatable premises. Paul paints the history of children’s books in pretty broad strokes: her model of a ‘Romantic period of innocence … suspended between two active periods of thinking, knowing, and engagement [the late Enlightenment and the twenty-first century]’ does not hold up particularly well to closer scrutiny. The ideal of innocence tended over two centuries to coexist with (albeit uneasily, perhaps) rather than displace more practical pedagogy in children’s letters: the popularity of Peter Parley books at the height of ‘Golden Age’ Victorian imaginative children’s fiction attests to this, as does the fact that many of the authors Paul admires (Barbauld and Edgeworth, for example) remained widely available in print until the end of the nineteenth century. As well, while there is certainly much to celebrate in the changes shaping childhood in the late eighteenth century, the ‘thinking and knowing child’ is hardly the whole picture. The child of the period was at least as often defined by incapacity, irrationality, and ‘passions’; David Hartley spoke of the shared ‘Erroneousness of Judgment in Children and Idiots,’ an opinion even the kindliest of eighteenth-century educators and writers would have shared to some degree at least.

Paul rightly points out that there is much to lament in a modern children’s culture characterized by ‘endumbment’ (a Jack Zipes-ism she [End Page 617] borrows), but long-eighteenth-century books for children did not always hold their readers and protagonists in so high regard either; the dubiously edifying visit Mrs. Sherwood’s Fairchild Family pays to a hanged corpse on a gibbet comes to mind. Many writers, importantly women writers, of the late Enlightenment...

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