Beyond a Reading Primer: Children's Marginalia in Little Charles

In her 1798 essay "What Is Education?" published in The Monthly Magazine, Anna Letitia Barbauld presents a pedagogical approach that every parent implements with their children. She explains to her reader how a child's education is a continuous aspect of their life, and she focuses on the powerful effects of education of circumstance: "This education goes on at every instance of time; it goes on like time; you can neither stop it nor turn its course" (323). An education of circumstance, she explains, is comprised of what children learn through their experiences in life—not in their set lessons. Her essay emphasizes how children ultimately learn through example and how they emulate behavior that they see in others. Rather than confining education to the schoolhouse or set lessons with a tutor, governess, or parent, Barbauld demonstrates how children learn constantly by observing the behavior and actions of others.

Barbauld has long been considered famous as a pedagogue, essayist, and poet, celebrated in her lifetime and made an object of scholarly attention from the 1990s to the current day. The past few decades have also witnessed an increase in scholarship on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century children's literature and female writers that have helped establish female-written children's literature in academia and paved the way for subsequent works in the field. For instance, Anna Laetitia Barbauld was well-known during her lifetime for her poetry and her political and pedagogical writings. Barbauld first received widespread academic interest in 1994 following William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft's The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, which made Barbauld's poetry more accessible. McCarthy has been profoundly influential in Barbauld's recovery, having also written an extensive biography of her life, titled Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (2008) and co-edited with Olivia Murphy the first volume of essays dedicated to Barbauld, Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives (2014). Today, Barbauld is regarded as a canonical Romantic author who is featured in anthologies, and articles about her works are published with increasing frequency. While Barbauld and her authorial works have received robust scholarly attention, little work has been done on the abridged and unauthorized versions of her children's books that appear in America throughout the nineteenth century.

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, her children's books were republished throughout Britain, and, in America, they appeared in pirated and abridged versions. While there is robust work on alterations and abridgements of Barbauld's four-volume children's book Lessons for Children, there is little scholarship in regard to the book Little Charles, an alteration and severe abridgement which focuses on one of the protagonist Charles' many adventures that has been versified and illustrated. Both William McCarthy and Sarah Robbins acknowledge the existence of this text, but it is little more than a few sentences in their published works. Robbins discusses many of the American adaptations and abridgements of Lessons in her essay "Remaking Barbauld's Primers: A Case Study in the Americanization of British Literary Pedagogy," and Little Charles is one of the Americanized texts that she examines. She notes that "This much-abridged version of what was by then Barbauld's 'classic' text depicted only one brief interlude from the multivolume original" (166). McCarthy also recognizes Little Charles as an American adaptation of Lessons for Children. In his 2005 essay "Mother of All Discourses: Anna Barbauld's Lessons for Children," he explains "Little Charles is the title of one American edition from the 1830s that, like many nineteenth-century editions, rewrote and versified selections from Lessons" (92, n.1).

Comprised of eight leaves, Little Charles is a mere fraction of Barbauld's original four-volume text that spans well over one hundred pages. In this book, Charles, a young boy, is sent to school by his mother, but he instead goes to play with various animals that he meets outside. Each animal tells him that they cannot play with him because other living beings depend on them to get their work done, and Charles concludes that, like these animals, he too cannot...