Time of Beauty, Time of Fear: The Romantic Legacy in the Literature of Childhood

The End Was Not Ignoble? Bird-Nesting between Cruelty, Manliness, and Science Education in British Children’s Periodicals, 1850–1900

jochen petzold • The End Was Not Ignoble? Bird-Nesting between Cruelty, Manliness, and Science Education in British Children’s Periodicals, 1850–1900 At first sight, the topic of “bird-nesting”—a term that can refer to the search for birds’ nests, the removal of eggs or young birds from a nest, or the taking of a whole nest with or without eggs or birds—as presented in children’s literature may seem marginal, even obscure. Yet references to it abound in children’s magazines in the second half of the nineteenth century. This essay is based on more than seventy articles that primarily deal with bird-nesting, and there are many more passing references to the practice in stories printed in these magazines. Thus, the available evidence suggests that as a practice bird-nesting was widespread through much of the nineteenth century, growing in cultural and medial importance as the century progressed.1 Furthermore, closer analysis will reveal that bird-nesting provides an interesting focal point for the study of childhood , since it ties in with various debates about the nature of childhood, the proper behavior of children, and their education. And while it may seem marginal, it is in fact a topic with a literary tradition reaching back at least to the late seventeenth century, when the first-person narrator of John Dunton’s A Voyage Round the World (1691) tells his readers that he will not trouble them “with every Expedition I made a Nutting, or Birds-nesting” (59, emphasis in the original). The End Was Not Ignoble? 129 While few readers today will have heard of Dunton or his text, not all references to bird-nesting are as remote. Arguably the most famous literary representation occurs in the first book of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude ([1805] ll. 336–50, in Wordsworth 20–22): [ . . . ] was I a plunderer then In the high places, on the lonesome peaks Where’er, among the mountains and the winds, The Mother Bird had built her lodge. Though mean My object, and inglorious, yet the end Was not ignoble. Oh! when I have hung Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock But ill sustain’d, and almost, as it seem’d, Suspended by the blast which blew amain, Shouldering the naked crag; Oh! at that time, While on the perilous ridge I hung alone, With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind Blow through my ears! the sky seem’d not a sky Of earth, and with what motion mov’d the clouds! What Wordsworth describes in the last lines of the excerpt is a vision of a “supernatural” nature that goes beyond normal perception, apparently induced by the imminent danger of falling and seriously injuring himself . Interestingly, in this reminiscence Wordsworth himself classifies his “object” as “mean” and “inglorious,” an act of “plunder”—and yet he insists that “the end was not ignoble.” The choice of the word “end” here is significant in its various levels of meaning. The phrase “the end was not ignoble” would, in most contexts, refer to the purpose of an action, the intention behind it. In the present context, however, this reading would be paradoxical, since this purpose—the taking of eggs or young birds—has already been denigrated as inglorious. Thus, the word “end” would have to refer to the actual outcome of his action, which was clearly not intended, namely the supernatural vision of nature. And yet, the more usual meaning seems to linger somewhat uneasily, as if the speaker was trying to justify an activity that he knows “should” be condemned. 130 Jochen Petzold In fact, when Wordsworth wrote his Prelude, bird-nesting had been criticized for decades, in countless texts written for young readers. A Little Pretty Pocket-Book is an important case in point. Printed (and probably written) by John Newbery in 1744, this text marks the starting point for a British publishing industry specifically aimed at entertaining children (Thwaite 2f.), and it was reprinted repeatedly in the eighteenth century. It includes a short poem on bird-nesting (95): Birds-Nesting Here two naughty Boys, Hard-hearted in Jest, Deprive a poor Bird Of her Young and her Nest. Moral Thus Men, out of Joke, (Be’t spoke to their Shame) Too often make free With others good Name. The poem is accompanied by a rather simple woodcut...