Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640-1868 by Courtney Weikle-Mills (review)

Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640-1868 is Courtney Weikle-Mills’s extensive historical examination of the social perceptions and associations connected to the complex relationship of the child and the citizen. She explores the social attitudes shaping children’s reading habits as well as the texts available to children as indicators that define the idea of an American citizen. Weikle-Mills’s rich investigation of connections between child readers and political empowerment significantly contributes to both the study of children’s literature and the study of American social and political history.

Weikle-Mills identifies the discrepancy between portraying children as citizens within literature and excluding them from actual political participation as the basis for “imaginary citizens.” She asserts: “imaginary citizens [are] individuals who could not exercise civil rights but who figured heavily in literary depictions of citizenship and were often invited to view themselves as citizens despite their limited political franchise” (4). Throughout her text, Weikle-Mills examines how the works of religious, social, and political philosophers such as Cotton Mather, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson have affected the perception of both child and citizen. Her criticism similarly incorporates a range of contemporary insights from social critics such as Jean Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Homi K. Bhabha. Through the varied and frequently contrasting political and social ideas that emerge from her impressive compilation of original sources and scholarly criticism, Weikle-Mills emphasizes her point that the definitions of “childhood” and “citizenship” historically lack clarity and consistency although they may certainly depict an era.

The colonial Puritan focus of Chapter 1 centers on the rarely discussed issues affecting children’s inclusion in the body of the congregation. Weikle-Mills points out how this affiliation was especially dependent on a child’s individual ability to read and interpret the Bible and that church membership was essential to community participation and the individual’s eventual political status as a citizen. With several references to over-looked texts, Weikle-Mills examines how leaders like Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards encouraged independent reading for children. However, she also looks into the Puritan community’s uneasy tension between encouraging an independent reader and demanding obedience to a patriarchal authority that she reads as a permanent and destabilizing conundrum of the child-citizen connection.

The developing revolutionary focus of thought in eighteenth-century America, specifically the opposing ideas of independence and obedience, centers the discussion of Chapter 2. Notably, Weikle-Mills addresses the ambiguity and anxiety surrounding the perception of children and the choices available to them within a Lockean social contract: the belief in natural, individual rights challenges the need for parental authority to govern the child. She investigates how the popular revolutionary metaphor of the colonists as maturing children throwing off the oppression of an overly repressive parent (the King) becomes problematic in a society concerned with creating a model encouraging children’s compliance. With particular emphasis on Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), especially the idea that the child’s relationship to the government parallels the child’s obedience to the parent, Weikle-Mills identifies the concept of “affectionate citizenship” as Locke’s strategy to align the terms of citizen and child. Significantly, in light of this association, Weikle-Mills notes that Locke deserves credit for a shift in children’s literature “from books that were meant only to teach to those that were meant to gain the child’s love” (75). She also expands her application to contemporary society: “entertaining children’s books [are] a crucial link underlying modern political theory . . . children’s books could act as a bridge between the present and the absent, the immanent and representative, enacting the child reader’s gradual initiation into love for things that existed primarily as abstractions, such as the law and the nation” (75). Making particular use of John Newbery’s The History of Little Goody...