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

It’s tempting to open a review of Courtney Weikle-Mills exhaustive and at times iconoclastic Imaginary Citizens with a zinger like: given how childish American politics are, such a study is timely and insightful. But this is not a zingy book. Rather, it’s a serious survey unlikely to appeal to average readers, let alone voters, but more to specialists in political science and literary studies.

This narrow attraction is understandable, but disappointing because many of the points Weikle-Mills makes are ones it would behoove a more general readership to consider, particularly her conclusions that “when children and young people have been involved in civic activities outside of voting, their actions have been particularly powerful,” and that a “respect for the imaginary dimensions of children’s citizenship has the potential not only to invigorate their participation when they reach adulthood but also to revitalize and transform citizenship” (217).

Weikle-Mills begins her book with a reminder of the metaphorical frames that have long structured the discourse of citizenship in both Europe and America, including Mother Britain and the Founding Fathers. She argues convincingly that “metaphors that encourage rights-bearing citizens to imagine themselves as affectionate children of a parental state prompted them to recognize their own interests in the law even when they had not participated directly in its making,” (7) as well as that “the concept of childhood provided a rationale for exclusion” not just of actual children, but also of other classes of people—notably women and slaves—from full participation in the governance of what they were still indoctrinated to consider “their” nation. In doing so, she is persuasive in her suggestion that “metaphors of citizens as children allowed Americans to consider the limits and potentials of imagination and the limits and potentials of rights, as aspects of citizenship” (8).

To illuminate her assertions, Weikle-Mills provides thoughtful readings of such texts as Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749) and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Boarding School (1798) among others. She points out how the encouragement of children to love their books was not merely about cultivating literacy, but also about inculcating a respect for the law, and how the depiction of the transition from childhood to adulthood as a simultaneous shift from being a “bad” reader to a “good” one was intended to model the process of maturation into a desirable citizen.

Weikle-Mills also engages—and occasionally respectfully disagrees—with her fellow scholars in the field. She reasonably questions, for instance, Cathy Davidson’s contentions that early American novels “subversively call for the enfranchisement of their readers,” pointing out that these claims are “complicated by the fact that many specifically claim that children and youth are their readership” (5). So too does Weikle-Mills offer a more nuanced evolution of childhood as a concept than Philippe Ariès who famously asserted that childhood was essentially invented in the seventeenth century (10).

In the end, the reader is left to contemplate the limits imposed on children’s citizenship and how similar limits may also constrain the rights of grown-ups in ways more restrictive than most adults care to believe.