Danger, Disability, and Double Age: Precocity and the Misfit Bodymind in the Nineteenth Century

At the age of ten months he could speak and repeat every word that was said to him; when twelve months old he knew by heart the principal events narrated in the Pentateuch; in his second year he learned the greater part of the history of the Bible, both of the Old and new Testaments; in his third year he could reply to most questions on universal history and geography; in the same year he learned to speak Latin and French; in his fourth year he employed himself in the study of religion and the history of the Church, and he was able not only to repeat what he had read, but also to express his own judgment. The King of Denmark, wishing to see this wonderful child, he was taken to Copenhagen, there examined before the Court, and proclaimed to be a wonder. On his return home he learned to write, but his constitution being weak, he shortly after fell ill, and died. . . . ¹

Such was the tale of Christian Heinecker, who—by his untimely death at just four years old—purportedly achieved such wonders. This "remarkable instance" in the "annals of precocity" served as both a representation of and a warning for the problem of precocious intelligence.² In the eighteenth century, Christian was celebrated as a wonder, but by the mid-nineteenth century—when his story and others like it circulated—precocity was instead viewed as a curse.

The boundaries and nature of childhood became an object of both scientific study and sociocultural concern over the course of the nineteenth century in the United States. Physicians and scientists began to investigate the stages of life and development on physical and psychological levels.³ At the same time, social reformers worked to define childhood as a state worthy of further protection through such efforts as age-of-consent campaigns, even as social mores surrounding the role of the child in the white, bourgeois family also transformed.⁴ Within this context, children who failed to conform to the expectations of childhood behavior—whose chronological age didn't match their physical or intellectual development—were labeled as precocious and subsequently became objects of concern among scientists and social commentators alike. Precocity was viewed as pathological: "double age" was a disease that resulted in disability or even death.

Nineteenth-century physiological and neurological research suggested that boys—and to a lesser extent, girls—were overtaxing their brains in ways that endangered their bodies and lives. Anxieties about inappropriate education dovetailed with concerns about the shape of education and the nature of manhood itself at a time when both were challenged and reimagined. Though the stages of child development would become closely tied to specific ages over the course of the twentieth century, nineteenth-century medical and popular notions of childhood development were inchoate, less fixed on milestones linked to specific ages.⁵ Despite the inconsistency, nineteenth-century writers agreed: mental precocity was dangerous to both body and mind.

Precocity, the development of one feature of body, character, or mind in a fashion that outstripped chronological age, could manifest itself morally, sexually, spiritually, and so forth. This article focuses on one form of precocity, early intellectual development, as a case study of double age. Nineteenth-century discourse about precocious intellectual development not only reveals anxieties about double age, but further illuminates the deep-seated relationship between body and mind in nineteenth-century understandings of disability.

Interpretations of precocity hinged on an understanding of a reciprocal relationship between the body and mind, which in turn was affected by race, class, and especially gender.⁶ Representations of the precocious (white, male, bourgeois) child constituted the construction of a bodymind, which Margaret Price defines as "the imbrication (not just the combination) of the entities usually called 'body' and 'mind.'"⁷ Moreover, the precocious bodymind can be understood to be fundamentally "misfit," as defined by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: the term "describes an incongruent relationship between two things. . . . The problem with a misfit, then, inheres not in either of the two things but rather in their...