Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture

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Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture

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Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture Galia Benziman The Open University of Israel

© Galia Benziman 2012 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–29392–2 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Benziman, Galia, 1968– Narratives of child neglect in romantic and Victorian culture / Galia Benziman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–29392–2 (alk. paper) 1. Children in literature. 2. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Child abuse in literature. 4. Child rearing in literature. 5. Children’s rights in literature. 6. Children—Great Britain—History— 19th century. 7. Child abuse—Great Britain—History—19th century. 8. Child rearing—Great Britain—History—19th century. 9. Children’s rights—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title. PR468.C5B46 2011 820.9'3556—dc23 2011029561 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Yotam

In memory of my father, Ram Evron (1935–2008): a lover of music and literature, and a real Dickensian.


Contents Acknowledgments

viii

Introduction 1 2 3

1

Concepts of Childhood and Adult Responsibility: Locke, Rousseau, More, and Edgeworth

27

Redeeming or Silencing the Child’s Voice: Blake and Wordsworth

69

Child Neglect as Social Vice: Trollope, Tonna, and Working-Class Subjectivity

95

4

The Split Image of the Neglected Child: Dickens

142

5

Aged Children and the Inevitability of Being Neglected: Hardy

186

Notes

214

Works Cited

234

Index

247

vii

Acknowledgments It is appropriate that in a book about children, the author should begin by thanking her own three. Although my sweet daughters Shira, Rotem, and Noga have been too young to read this book, they were constantly aware of its presence and inadvertently contributed to its writing, and to my conceptualization of child–adult relationships, in important ways. I hope that my immersion in the study of nineteenth-century child neglect did not make them feel neglected too often. I have also been deeply fortunate to have had the encouragement of my husband, Yotam, who carefully read every word and whose unceasing intellectual input and love became inseparable ingredients of this book. Going back in time, I am grateful to the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, where this project started years ago. It was in this department that I shaped my skills of reading and studying literature, first as a student and later as an instructor. To Zephyra Porat, a brilliant thinker and devoted teacher, I am indebted for an ongoing dialog that inspired, among other things, the germ of this study – a short paper on Thomas Hardy. Zephyra’s insight, depth of knowledge, and hard questions never ceased to provoke me toward further discoveries. I am also deeply grateful to Robert Griffin, my dissertation adviser at Tel Aviv University (now at Texas A&M), for being such a rigorous, exacting reader, who confronted me with the logical and theoretical shortcomings of my written work. I greatly benefited from Bob’s sound advice, both intellectual and practical, and from his continuous encouragement. I thank many other friends and colleagues at Tel Aviv University for their support, critical merit, and invaluable suggestions along the way – in particular Amy Garnai, Milette Shamir, Hana Wirth-Nesher, and Elana Gomel. I owe especially warm thanks to Leona Toker of the English Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose perceptive suggestions and editorial genius have guided me through various stages in the writing of this book. Besides her indispensable intellectual advice, wide knowledge, and meticulous attention to the smallest of details, I have been continually impressed by Leona’s generosity, reflected (among other things) in her endless willingness to read, reread, and comment on my work. I was extremely fortunate to be able to come to the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Visiting Fellow with the University of California Dickens viii

Acknowledgments

ix

Project for one memorable year, 2008–9. I thank Murray Baumgarten, the Founding Director of the Project, and John Jordan, the Project Director, for their hospitality, sympathy, and practical advice. The academic environment that they provided (deer, red-tree forest, and eminent Victorianists included) was unique. Murray, who had generously invited me to the annual “Dickens Universe” when we had first met in Jerusalem, was the most amiable of hosts. John, whose kindness and patience are truly rare, read much of the book in draft and made many excellent suggestions for which – as also for our conversations on Dickens – I shall always be grateful. For their helpful feedback and advice along the way I am also indebted to Herbert Tucker, who carefully read and commented on earlier versions of some of the chapters; Alex Woloch, who gave me useful suggestions; and Deborah Logan, whose observations on portions of Chapter 3 helped me reformulate and elucidate my argument. I owe many thanks to Monica Flegel, who read the manuscript for Palgrave Macmillan and wrote a thorough, insightful, and constructive review on the first draft of this book. Her wonderful observations and helpful suggestions have served to enrich, revise, and focus my readings. I am also grateful to Editor Paula Kennedy, her assistant, Benjamin Doyle, and the copy-editor, Sally Osborn. I have greatly appreciated their suggestions, support, and patience. Various institutions and research fellowships honored me with their generous support during my work on this book and made its completion possible. I thank the Israeli Council for Higher Education for endowing me with a Nathan Rotenstreich Doctoral Fellowship; the United States– Israel Educational Foundation for a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship; the Dan David Prize for a Postdoctoral Research grant; the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University for an Elizabeth Minden Fellowship for Overseas Research; and the Porter School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University for additional support. An earlier version of Chapter 2 was published as “Two Patterns of Child Neglect: Blake and Wordsworth,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 5.2 ( June 2007): 167–97. Portions of Chapter 3 appeared as “Whose Child Is It? Paternalism, Parenting, and Political Ambiguity in Frances Trollope’s Factory Novel,” The Victorian Newsletter, 118 (Fall 2010): 7–29. I thank the editors of these journals for permission to use the material in this book.


Introduction

Nineteenth-century Britain witnessed an unprecedented interest in childhood as a distinct and formative phase of human life. During this period, childhood and child figures emerged as a prominent theme in British literature. At the same time, childhood was becoming one of the major issues that preoccupied social reformers, legislators, and philanthropists. This new awareness was largely the result of political, socioeconomic, and demographic changes, but it was also the product of theoretical reformulations of old as well as recent assumptions about childhood, its nature, its needs, and the obligations that it imposed on adult society. Social and cultural historians tend to agree that the late eighteenth century saw the growth of sensitivity to childhood as an important phase in life and one of formative function – a sensitivity that grew even further in the century that followed.1 In pre-Romantic literature children seldom speak.2 However, once influential philosophers and poets such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth began to regard childhood as a stage of life to be valued in its own right, poetic constructions endowed child figures with a voice. The appearance of child protagonists in fiction, which became frequent in nineteenth-century novels, and their treatment as morally innocent, sincere, and intuitively wise figures, turned them into means for authorial self-analysis, introspection, and search for origins.3 The popularity of childhood as a literary topic was felt in other genres besides the novel, widely read in their time though less familiar today, such as moral and didactic tales and the religious tracts originating in the evangelical movement. As the works discussed in this book testify, the new literary interest in the child’s subjectivity, the child’s distinct perspective, created a highly sympathetic rendering of the child’s story, and brought to the 1

2


fore the issue of child neglect. The literary interest in this topic was in many respects analogous to the growing public preoccupation with the exploitation and abuse of working-class children in the social sphere, as revealed in parliamentary commissioners’ reports and in the political debates recorded in the press. Yet describing this cultural-social process as one of an increasingly sympathetic interest in the plight of children would produce only a partial picture of an extremely complex and inconsistent development. My study examines discursive patterns related to neglected children in familial as well as public settings, in both fictional and nonfictional texts from the late eighteenth century until the late nineteenth century. I approach the texts with an awareness of two major contexts, one social and the other literary. Thus, I discuss both the sociopolitical implications of the responsibility for children as part of the class conflict in nineteenth-century Britain and the textual representation of the neglected and abandoned child as a poetic image. The parameters of this exploration are the two dominant contemporary ideologies concerning childhood – the Puritan and the Romantic – constructed, affirmed, or subverted by formative literary and theoretical authorities. One major question that emerges as soon as we juxtapose the social and literary contexts concerns the gap between the child’s different status in each sphere. Despite the unprecedented preoccupation with childhood and the growing sensitivity to the intrinsic human value of the child in various nineteenth-century discourses, there appears to have existed a wide discrepancy between some of the prevailing poetic and philosophical views about children and the factual data regarding many children’s actual living conditions at the time. The intellectual representations often tended to admire and idealize childhood as a graceful, innocent, and appealing state of being, which should be protected and cherished, whereas the actual conditions were frequently grim and hopeless to the extent of being regarded as a national problem. There was thus “a gross disparity between the image and the reality of nineteenth century life,” particularly regarding the child (Brown, 1993: 6). In his social history of childhood in nineteenth-century England, James Walvin registers a clash between the ideal of innocence as a feature of childhood (cultivated by “generations of Victorian writers, led by the evangelicals”) and the realities of the bulk of the nation’s children, those who belonged to the lower class. In the “crowded squalor” of urban lower-class life, there was “little place for the ‘innocence of childhood’ even at a very early age.” Walvin points out that middle- and upper-class children “were in almost every respect the negative image of the poor,” hence suggesting a greater

Introduction

3

affinity of the more privileged children with the prevailing image of childlike innocence and with the idea that childhood was worthy of respect and admiration (Walvin, 1982: 15, 43). Yet privileged children were only a minority. In mid-century the lower classes constituted no less than 70 percent of the British population.4 Furthermore, even in upper- and middle-class families children were often treated oppressively, in ways that were quite incongruous with the poetic and philosophical assumptions about the respect to which children were entitled. My reading of the discourses of childhood produced in nineteenthcentury Britain examines their political subtext, treating these discourses, including literary ones, as social texts. I share Fredric Jameson’s objections to the watertight distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not. Jameson maintains that such a distinction is based on the presupposition that there exists “a realm of freedom, sheltered from the influence of history and the social.” The recognition of the political unconscious, on the other hand, enables us to “explore the multiple paths that lead to the unmasking of cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts” (Jameson, 1981: 20). Following previous studies such as Laura Berry’s The Child, The State, and the Victorian Novel (1999) and Laura Peters’s Orphan Texts (2000), which have shown how literary images of endangered children served to expose class anxieties and to reorganize ideas about the role of the child in society, I read fictional representations of child neglect as sharing the function of “socially symbolic acts.” Throughout the nineteenth century, legal, economic, religious, and medical discourses of childhood adopted sensibilities that the writers of poetry, fiction, and philosophy were first to articulate. Rousseau’s harsh critique of the ideological blueprints of the Western educational system in Emile (1762) had an enormous impact on child-rearing practices. Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1839) directly brought about the elimination of the kind of Yorkshire boarding schools it satirized so ferociously.5 It is reasonable to assume that other well-known works of the period, part of its Zeitgeist, had some impact on the treatment of children, although it is hard to measure their direct influence. My purpose, however, is to discuss tensions within the literary representation itself. Rather than exploring the gap between fiction and social history, I read literary works in terms of the poetic interplay of Puritan and Romantic ideologies of childhood, revising the evolution of the topos of the child and tracing the ways in which the poetic construction of child neglect within individual works betrays the same ambiguities and delays that characterized the sociopolitical

4


scene. In broad terms, social and cultural historians describe a process of gradual delegitimization of the Puritan and authoritarian attitude to children during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, accompanied by a simultaneous increase in the influence of Romantic and liberating approaches (Coveney, 1967: 33; Cunningham, 1995: 61–2). My analysis of several representative literary works indeed supports the gradual and setback-ridden character of the transition from a mostly oppressive approach to children to a liberating and empathetic one, yet detects inconsistencies in this very process. The two major and rival conceptions of childhood, the first originating in Puritan and evangelical doctrines and the other shaped by Romantic sensibilities, defined each other by way of contrast. The earlier approach was an epiphenomenon of the belief in original sin: it tended to regard children as morally inferior. It was regulative, objectifying, and nondialogic; it ignored the distinctiveness of the child’s perspective while projecting adult values onto the child. The second, progressive approach, largely informed by the ideas of Romantic writers, was liberating, empathetic, and dialogic; it upheld the idea that children were morally innocent, and treated the child’s subjectivity as valuable, fascinating, and profound. My research reveals, however, that literary works tended to encompass this dichotomy rather than opt for one side of it. My claim is that the two rival concepts tended to overlap and interpenetrate in various ways. Although it was gradually losing its hegemonic status, Puritan ideology – or aspects of it – survived within the progressive discourse of childhood, which professed to uphold dialogic and liberal ideas. The Romantic image of childhood as deserving liberation and rescue from oppression and disregard is nevertheless often represented in literature with some ambiguity, especially in relation to its political dimension (for instance when the child is identified, literally or metaphorically, with the lower class). I trace contradictory approaches to children in works mostly by major authors (and a few lessdiscussed ones). My account of the changing attitudes to childhood in nineteenth-century Britain examines the relationship of the artistic form of representative literary works with the inconsistencies, paradoxes, and gaps that characterized their contemporary stage in the history of ideas and topoi. This discussion also takes into account the potential applicability of neo-Marxist and new historicist views of the dynamics of cultural change to the evolution of these attitudes. Historicist critics see the literary text as history “because it is saturated in its smallest details by a complicated lineage,” and serves as an archive of discourses,

Introduction

5

conventions, and forms (Lentricchia, 1980: 200–5). As Michel Foucault puts it in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), historical investigation of the evolution of discursive formations shows that the buried layers of discourses that at certain times purported to serve as objective knowledge continue to live: discarded notions and residues from previous formations of “knowledge” maintain their influence on later formations that follow in their wake (Foucault, 1972: 186–7). Ideologies, or their articulation as discourses, contain residues of what they oppose; hegemony is constructed via a dialectical interplay of discourses, some of them counter-hegemonic.6 Since the progress of the empathetic and liberating approach to children was part of the growth of liberalism, it is reasonable to expect to discover, in the spirit of Foucault’s findings, a concealed disciplinary position toward children in texts of the period. The variety of situations of child neglect examined in this book – introspective, familial, institutional, and national – undermines the distinction between the private and social aspects of this phenomenon, showing how domestic and internal experiences are embedded in a social set of assumptions. Tracing residues of oppressive attitudes to children and the difficulty in representing the child’s subjectivity as valuable even in texts written by key figures associated with the Romantic cult of childhood, my study inverts the relative positions of ideology (or hegemony) and subversion (or counter-hegemony) as often postulated by neo-Marxist critics. The residues of conservative and authoritarian approaches to children that can be found within the innovative, progressive, liberal discourses of childhood often seem “unconscious,” to use Jameson’s term. Yet, in opposition to his model, the inconsistencies operate as textual sites in which the supposedly discarded hegemony of middle-class Puritan ideology lingers underneath the text’s reformist, counter-hegemonic façade. Thus, despite their declared commitment to children’s rights and their belief in the child’s entitlement to respect, sympathy, and freedom, many nineteenth-century literary works tend to reproduce objectifying attitudes to children, including a wish to curtail the child’s freedom or suppress the child’s voice. This is true for the prominent writers who shaped the Romantic discourse of childhood: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Charles Dickens. The image of the child in nineteenth-century literature, located within – and generating – a moment of historical and cultural change, is therefore often ambiguous, and always political. While in ways associated with their representation of the social conditions of children these works were ahead of their time, they are not free from inconsistencies and

6


anxieties, often similar to those more openly articulated by conservative discourses of childhood. Moreover, the labels “Puritan” and “Romantic” can be misleading. The term “Puritan” is often used to denote an authoritarian stance rather than an affiliation to a particular religious group. The influence of the so-called Puritanical outlook had reached other religious movements, and even nonreligious groups.7 Conversely, over the nineteenth century there were devout Puritans whose attitude to children was romanticized. The term “Romantic” was launched only in the second half of the century as a shortcut to a grouping among earlier writers. Therefore, instead of “Puritan” I shall refer to a regulative and objectifying mode of treating children, and instead of “Romantic” to a liberating, empathetic, and dialogic one. The former was often embodied in the catechism, an authoritarian form of religious instruction whose very form is reflected in some of the poetry of the period; I shall sometimes use the term catechetical for the regulative/objectifying mode, even when there is no direct link to religious matters, to denote authoritarian and nondialogic encounters in which the adult ignores the child’s subjectivity and distinct perspective and projects his or her values on to the child.8 These modes of treating children were not only in circulation within literary and philosophical works of the period, they also shaped the social discourses pertaining to child neglect. Literary representations were inseparable from social processes in this respect as well.

Children’s status: Literary images, social processes Improved understanding and appreciation of the child’s mentality, particular needs, and distinct point of view were achieved gradually during the long nineteenth century. That the status of the fictional child improved much faster than that of the actual child cannot be denied. Thus, the gap between the cultural image of the child and the actual treatment of children continued until the later decades of the century, when the actual status of children started to catch up with its fictional counterpart. Legislation intended to defend children against abuse, hard labor, and illiteracy became effective only following the mid1880s.9 Despite the great progress in the legal protection of children, the pages of The Child’s Guardian – the journal of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), published from the late 1880s – were still replete with shocking testimonies to the widespread brutality against children (Rose, 1991: 242).

Introduction

7

The reasons changes in the social sphere had occurred so slowly can be sought in the historical origins of the process. Seeds of the new social attitude to children can be found in the growth of humanitarianism in the later eighteenth century: it is possible “to trace the idea of children’s rights back in the short term, to the turmoil of the 1790s. [This idea was] undeniably inherent in the wider philosophy of the rights of man” (Walvin, 1982: 198). The interest in the rights of working-class children was originally connected to the humanitarian campaign for the abolition of the slave trade (Parliamentary bills passed in 1807 and 1811), and later for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833.10 Yet nineteenth-century changes in the treatment of children were influenced by a pragmatic agenda in addition to the humanitarian ideals. The modern concept of childhood as a state deserving protection and care owes its origins not only to ethical or philanthropic attitudes, but also to the complex practical problems of coping with an expanding young population. Humanitarian intentions were supplemented by a concern for social control at a time of unprecedented demographic change. During the nineteenth century the British population grew at a previously unparalleled rate, doubling in the first half of the century and nearly doubling again in the second half. The numbers of children grew, and these children were increasingly to be found in cities.11 The great number of street children – neglected, underfed, and barefoot – came to personify the population explosion. Facing the explosive mixture of a swelling population, industrialism, and urbanization, British society managed to maintain its stability largely owing to its pragmatic approach to new social problems as they arose (see Walvin, 1982: 17–18, 167–8; Kane, 1995: 37; Horn, 1997: 1–4; Nelson, 1999: 69). Even the discourse of social reform that attacked child labor envisioned, for the most part, far more restricted targets than the complete abolition of this system. Middle-class observers of the first half of the century – the writers of Bluebooks and the professional witnesses whom they interviewed – found child labor objectionable only when it involved very young children or was accompanied by exceptional cruelty. The legal steps recommended by commissioners were, therefore, restricted in the first place: restricted by mental patterns that did not attach the kind of odium to child labor that is prevalent today, at least in Western societies. Even reformers tended to fall back on pragmatic and utilitarian arguments, stressing the general good to society that would result from curtailing child labor. As early as 1795, John Aikin’s study A Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles around Manchester, the first expression of the humanitarian argument that was to become

8


more common in later decades,12 blends disinterested compassion and empathy for the child with utilitarian considerations. “It is also much to be questioned,” he notes after describing the severe damage to the children’s health, “if society does not receive detriment from the manner in which children are thus employed during their early years” (quoted in Kovacˇevic´, 1975: 83). According to Aikin’s analysis, if a great many children were to die prematurely or lose their physical capacity to work, society would lose some of its productive power. Such utilitarian arguments, which cast children as faceless pawns in the game of economic production, resurface in the discourse of reform throughout the century. In 1871, George Smith’s illustrated The Cry of the Children from the Brickyard of England compares child labor in the London brickyards, where the author himself had been employed as a boy, to the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt described in the book of Exodus. Smith’s compassionate tone is accompanied by a calculated consideration of the issue of “national life.” National life, he explains, deteriorates due to the damage done to these children; the nation may profit if their conditions are amended (Smith, 1871: 7, 3). As late as the 1890s, this kind of double argumentation was still common, for example in the heated debate that broke out over the Home Secretary’s refusal to follow an international demand to restrict juvenile employment, voiced at the 1891 Labour Conference in Berlin. A response published in The Contemporary Review in June 1891, “The Half-Timers” by Henry Dunckley, attacked the Secretary’s refusal to raise the minimum age for laborers. Using arguments pertaining to national efficiency and businesslike imagery, Dunckley states that the children belong to their parents, but they also belong to the nation. In a few years they will enter into the material of which adult society is made, and we have to be on our guard against a damaged article. The nation has recognised its interest as well as its obligations by devoting millions of money every year to the instruction of the young, and it has a right to see that the utmost possible amount of benefit is derived from the outlay. (Dunckley, 1891: 799–800) In other words, children should no longer be regarded as merely their parents’ chattels; they can be regarded as chattels of the state, which, if put to good use, may return better profits. What is at issue, of course, is what “good use” consists in – the utilitarian language may be a de-sentimentalizing cover for a humanitarian belief in children’s right to protection and education. However, the language of high moral motivation can well be read,

Introduction

9

in its turn, as a cover for utilitarian calculation. It is possible to trace utilitarian impulses at the root of the entire program of legislative reform regarding children.13 Although they render contemporary social conditions critically, the literary works discussed in this book are not free from the ambiguities that characterized, considerably more brashly, the sociopolitical domain. Fiction and poetry writers of the period tend to emphasize their child protagonists’ and speakers’ emotional and physical neglect, their abuse by adult figures and systems, and – whenever the lower class is represented – their crude exploitation as a workforce. Yet, notwithstanding their interest in the child’s interiority and point of view, these writers sometimes also construct child figures as anonymous parts of a mass, devoid of individuality, and potentially menacing. The focus of so many nineteenth-century literary works on deserted and abused children draws attention to issues of social responsibility. These figures’ being nobody’s children – because they are virtually parentless – may render them everybody’s children and targets for sympathy. Do they not deserve protection and, if so, of what kind? Can British society simply let them fend for themselves and be exposed to maltreatment and abuse? If not, who is to take care of them? The ideological and political implications of such questions were broadened and complicated by the synecdochic function of child figures, standing as they did for the oppressed and defenseless sectors of society in general. On the other hand, what is signified by literary portrayals of children as distorted, not entirely innocent, even uncanny? To what extent do poetry and fiction writers preserve their critical distance from the contemporary social objectification of the child? When, and why, do prominent writers of the period abandon their once-committed idealization of the child? This book examines a broad spectrum of political, ethical, and psychological beliefs involved in the representation of neglected children in poems and fictional works; it explores the ideological and aesthetic implications of the solutions offered (or denied) by literary works regarding the predicament of these helpless figures. Most importantly, I demonstrate the vital, even if not always consistent, role that literary representations played in constructing the child in terms of his or her own distinct subjectivity and point of view.

Constructing the child’s subjectivity It was mainly in the course of the eighteenth century that childhood came to be recognized as a distinct category, when some new understanding of

10


children’s different moral and cognitive sensibilities, modes of perception, and emotional needs started to emerge.14 Only very slowly did a wide acknowledgment of the child’s status as a distinct and autonomous being come to replace the conservative view of the child as an insignificant extension of the patriarchal family. The latter view was still quite common during the nineteenth century. One of the powerful arguments that served nineteenth-century opponents of reform in their resistance to abolishing child labor, for example, was the dependence of poor families on their children’s earnings. In 1857, Prince Albert expressed the view that to the working man, his children were “part of his productive power,” and therefore to deprive families of the small wages of their offspring would “almost paralyse [their] domestic existence.”15 Such argumentation denied children autonomy as human beings out of consideration for the parents. Reformers often claimed that children were used by both poor families and rich employers for the economic benefits they yielded to both parties.16 Despite the businesslike, utilitarian reasoning employed by the advocates of reform, as cited above, the humanistic argument did play an important part in the discursive manifestations of the debate about child labor. This argument held that children were autonomous human beings and that as such, they were entitled to certain rights and were not to be used by adult society as an economic resource. The most committed reformers declared child labor demeaning not only for the children but for British society as a whole, and the moral standards of both employers and parents came under their attack. The child’s gradual and partial transition from object to subject in the collective nineteenth-century British mind is inseparable from the attribution of point of view to real and fictional children. In this respect, the changing status of children during the period is conceptually connected to the creation of the subjectivity of child figures in the literary imagination, a laboratory of the empathetic mode toward children. Even philosophical texts tend to become more literary (and use metaphoric language, or narrative, or both) when making their claims about the child’s subjectivity. Thus, Emile is a treatise that assumes the form of a novel; and even in the educational writings of John Locke one may observe a tendency to express ideas about childhood in a literary style rather than in the style of rigorous philosophical abstraction. Locke was among the first major thinkers to realize that the child’s subjectivity was distinct, as well as worthy of adult interest, although he was preceded by several less well-remembered educationalists such as Henry Peachman, Obadiah Walker, and Jean Gailhard. In their educational

Introduction

11

thought we may observe the underlying duality of their concept of the child: on the one hand, they discover the child as a subject, one deserving interest and respect; on the other hand, they objectify the child as a means for achieving certain goals, educational and social. In Emile, several decades later, Rousseau offers a new focus: let us, the adults, try to understand the child’s own point of view, needs, and desires at present, and work for them, rather than for the child’s future life as a man. With Blake and Wordsworth after him, Rousseau had initiated what later came to be named the cult of the child, the immensely popular doctrine that saw the child as a figure possessing a genuine self, an innocence as yet uncorrupted by the artificiality of adult society. The subjectivity of the child was now constructed, imagined, invented, and reinvented by these (and other) late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, yet some of the duality and paradoxes with which earlier constructions of the child had been imbued remained. When we refer to child subjectivity we may mean more than one thing. Certainly, the poststructuralist notion of subjectivity as constituted by institutional practices and as an effect of ideological discourse is useful for a study of the construction of a child in Romantic and Victorian texts. However, I follow Regenia Gagnier’s cautiousness in the adoption of this perspective when, in the spirit of Raymond Williams, she proposes to reintroduce agency and allow for the subject’s ability to mediate, even transform, its embeddedness in the discourse of ideology (Gagnier, 1991: 8–11). The concept of “subject” hinges on a person’s being “a subject to itself, an ‘I,’” on the implications of the first-person singular pronoun, yet it includes also the “I”s being a subject “to, and of, others; in fact, it is often an ‘Other’ to others, which also affects its sense of its own subjectivity. This construction of self in opposition to others … is as characteristic of groups, communities, classes, and nations, as it is of individuals” (ibid.: 8). Donald Hall, in his study Subjectivity, addresses the resulting duality of the autonomy of the “I” and its embeddedness when he states: subjectivity implies always a degree of thought and self-consciousness about [one’s imposed social] identity, at the same time allowing a myriad of limitations and often unknowable, unavoidable constraints on our ability to fully comprehend identity. (Hall, 2004: 3) The conflict between the child as an autonomous center of self and its constant positioning as an “other” construed and constructed through adult gazes is my central concern. In fact, the intrinsic inability of the

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subject to be totally free of a labeled identity or of the shaping gaze of others is the reason the dichotomy of an objectifying or catechizing concept of the child on the one hand, and dialogic curiosity about this child’s authentic point of view on the other, is never neat and uncomplicated. The inaccessible otherness of the child to the adult poses an unavoidable (though not often conscious) difficulty for those writers who seriously aim to endow child figures with what they remember or imagine as their own reconstructed childlike self. The belief in subjectivity-as-agency and in the self-creating power of the “I” was a fundamental tenet of Romantic ideology, even though it did not operate with these modern terms. As Andrea Henderson’s Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity demonstrates, the “belief in the depth of human souls” and the ideology of “rich inwardness and individual agency” were the foundations of the Romantic notions of the self (Henderson, 1996: 3–4). These notions underlie the Romantic construction of the child’s subjectivity as supposedly pure and original, free of social determination. Paradoxically, to elevate the child and idealize it also means singling it out, separating it off, and turning it into an other.17 Indeed, the romanticizing/sentimental emphasis on the child’s subjectivity leads back to the child’s distancing from human society – as in the authoritarian, objectifying discourse. I regard this paradox as even more far-reaching. Wordsworth and other Romantic writers do not merely idealize children, but celebrate the idea that the child represents the authentic core of one’s own self – Wordsworth’s development of Rousseau’s social vision, now applied to the introspective adult interiority. In this economy, within each self there is an original part and an added artificial component, the social self that is acquired as one grows up and enters adult society. To present the later self as artificial is to make this part “other,” and this is what Wordsworth repeatedly declares that he is doing. What gives the adult self its true core for Wordsworth is, supposedly, the child within, the natural self. And yet this natural self – the child – is now inevitably an other; not only because it is idealized but also because its perspective can no longer be directly accessed by the adult writer. Despite the position of a vulnerable “social other” to which the child has been moved in the cultural studies of the recent decades, the child’s status as an “other” remains paradoxical. Unlike other subaltern or minority groups defined by gender, ethnicity, class, or race, and even for those who do not adopt Rousseau’s or Wordsworth’s axioms about original and social selves, the figure of the child embodies not only an other but also a self (because everyone was a child once). In this respect,

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since the Romantic period, the image of the child has been constructed as emblematic of one’s early interiority that has nevertheless become inaccessibly othered. The literary child is thus sometimes envisioned as a subjective self, sometimes as an exotic, mysterious, uncanny stranger. In Strange Dislocations, a study of the development of the idea of human interiority, Carolyn Steedman refers to the dominant nineteenth-century concept of the self as formed, under the influence of Wordsworth, by the “laying down and accretion of bits and pieces of a personal history” (Steedman, 1995: 10). One of the chief processes that she observes as part of this construction of a self is the attempt to make the child, initially perceived as unheimlich, more familiar. This is mainly achieved through sentimental depictions of child characters during the Romantic and Victorian period (see ibid.: 21–42, 161–74). Yet a dynamic opposite to that described by Steedman is also at work during the period: the topos of the neglected child estranges the child once again. In Dickens, for example, the child, although initially perceived as signifying the self, undergoes a split that renders some part of it (regarded as a social and psychological inferior other) alien and threatening. This complexity of the subjective, first-person child and the othered, objectified, third-person child demonstrates the extent to which the notion of the self is shadowed by the anxiety about that self’s becoming its own social (and psychological) other, its shady double. The ambivalence regarding the child’s being self or other is built into the very attempt of adult writers to construct a child’s voice. Critics of children’s literature have addressed the problem of adult writers’ inability to represent children and speak for them.18 Can there be such a thing as a convincing voice of a child in a work written by an adult, or is it inevitably a fabricated construct? Does the ambiguity of the child’s status as an other – standing, as it does, for the adult writer’s earlier self – grant this representation any kind of validity? There are no easy answers to these questions, but there are parameters by which we may evaluate the empathetic/dialogic or objectifying/othering stance of a text toward the child that it represents, and by which we may consider its dependence on, or subversion of, period conventions. There are also culture-dependent conventions that shape our own readerly and critical expectations. My discussion of Blake, for example, demonstrates the linguistic features attributed to his child speakers. Many of Blake’s children are almost preverbal, not in full command of the words of adults, and too innocent to perceive irony, and yet sometimes his child speaker can sound strangely adult, his utterances forming a sophisticated political discourse of subversion. It is such moments of poetic inconsistency that I interrogate in this book, as

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they expose the residues of approaches to the child’s subjectivity that are different from the ones on the explicit agenda. In their Introduction to Infant Tongues, a collection of essays about the language of children in literature, Elizabeth Goodenough, Mark Heberle, and Naomi Sokoloff refer to the child as an “alternative subject,” whose consciousness and language are variously constituted as “other” (Goodenough et al., 1994: 1–2). The child, they say, “in naivete or incomprehension, interprets the world and words in a new way” (ibid.: 4). This lingual otherness, however, poses the problem of “the uniquely difficult accessibility of children’s consciousness to the adult imagination, let alone its articulation” (ibid.: 2). What the essays collected in the volume suggest is that the way in which a literary work represents the voice of the child is not to be measured in comparison with any “real” counterpart – it should be read as expressing cultural, political, and psychological assumptions about this voice. As Brian McHale argues in his essay, for instance, “the literary child’s appearance, behavior, psychology, and so forth, are to a large extent ready-mades, pieced together from prefabricated units available in the literary repertoire,” and “so too is the language literary children speak.” However, this “prefabricated” representation acquires its own reality. The subrepertoire pertaining to literary children that is used at each period “actually has an independent existence outside of literary representation, not in ‘reality’ as such – not, that is, in the language that real children really speak – but rather in the … image or stereotype of children’s language” (McHale, 1994: 204). The purpose of this book is to examine how such a repertoire was first constructed just prior to, and during, the nineteenth century, what factors were involved in its formation, and how the social, philosophical, and literary contexts relating to children affected its evolution. The hypothesis that underlies my readings is that this formal repertoire was initially organized around the increasingly riveting image of the neglected child. This was the major topos that served to fashion, and was fashioned by, the dialectics of catechizing and empathetic attitudes. At the same time, I point out the gaps and discrepancies in the repertoire of fictional children’s voices and the inconsistencies of its underlying assumptions even within the corpus of one author, sometimes also within the same work.

Narratives of neglect: Crossing the class divide Child neglect is a concept that covers a wide variety of situations, from mere parental absence to harsh instances of abuse or cruelty.

Introduction

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The common denominator of these situations is the tension between the objectifying/catechetical and empathetic/dialogic modes. “To neglect,” according to Webster’s Dictionary, is to “give little or no attention or respect to”; to “consider or deal with as if of little or no importance”; and to “fail to attend to sufficiently or properly.” Thus, besides cases of physical neglect, in which the basic needs of children such as housing, food, health, and security are denied, the term also applies to instances of emotional carelessness, when adults relate to children with no respect or attention. The latter kind of neglect can occur even when parents or surrogate parents attend fully to the child’s physical needs, and sometimes when they believe that they do much more than that. However, identifying situations of physical or emotional neglect is culture dependent and often misguided. Monica Flegel has shown, for instance, that in late Victorian England, a great many cases of child neglect by starvation led to accusations by the NSPCC against indigent parents; these people, hungry themselves, had no means to feed their children, yet they were publicly denounced and sometimes convicted in court as cruel and neglectful parents (Flegel, 2006: 12–16). As for emotional neglect, it was often perceived not as mere indifference, but rather as unwarranted attention of the wrong kind, one that is blind or even hostile to what was construed as the child’s real needs. This kind of neglect was impossible to define in objective terms: who was to say what the child’s “real” needs were? As we shall see in some of the texts discussed in this book, the distinct vocabulary of each discourse, whether regulative or liberating, tends to represent the attention given to children by devotees of the rival approach as outright neglect. To treat children with affection and leniency is to neglect their moral education according to some; to discipline them harshly and counter their wishes is just as neglectful according to others (a prominent dispute of this kind, which went on between Rousseau and Hannah More, is discussed in Chapter 1). However, since the conceptual differences between the conflicting approaches are not as clear-cut as they might seem, it would be more accurate to regard the rival theories about the correct ways of treating children as dialectically related rather than diametrically opposed. The question of the intrinsic interest of a child’s subjectivity is central to my definition of child neglect in this book. The liberating mode is usually empathetic and dialogic, attempting to fathom or imagine the child’s point of view and responding to it, whereas the catechetical/ objectifying mode does not acknowledge, and sometimes actively resists, the child’s perspective. The notion of neglect – besides obvious cases of

16


physical and mental ill-treatment and abuse, or gross carelessness – is here also applied to cases of lack of empathy toward the child’s needs and wishes. However, as my reading of Wordsworth and others shows, empathy with the child, and granting her total freedom through deregulation, can also be experienced as neglect, as it dehumanizes the child by exempting her from the restrictions that are part of human interaction. It is therefore useful to define neglect as a stance that disregards the child’s interests not merely as a child but also as a fellow human being. Much can be said about the discursive function of the experience of neglect in shaping the interiority of the literary child.19 For the introspective adult narrator, this experience produces a reconstructed earlier self that is represented as a righteous victim, a deserving recipient of sympathy and compassion, and a dramatic starting point for a Bildung narrative. In Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), for instance, neglect serves as a tempering ordeal that shapes one’s personality and against which one’s moral and mental capabilities are tested. Toward the end of the novel, David, the adult narrator, looks back with satisfaction and comments on how the endurance of his dismal childhood days has “done its part to make [him] what [he is]” (Dickens, 1985a: 888); that is, a successful writer and a respectable, middle-class adult. Early deprivation and neglect become all but indispensable for the construction of the adult writing self. This is a reprise of the Wordsworthian paradigm of achieving poetic inspiration through the poet’s resurrection (or invention) of the original self. In Dickens in particular, but also in the work of social-problem novelists and to some extent in nonfictional prose, such a resurrection involves the staging of neglect as a central motif. The last chapter of this book shows that, by contrast, Thomas Hardy’s bleak representation of early neglect as perpetually crippling leads to an ironic inversion of the conventions of the Bildungsroman. The connection between the theme of child neglect and the development of literary forms representing child subjectivity can be seen in the context of social history. Initially, it was the increasing interest in child neglect on the social level that accompanied the emerging first-person narratives of childhood. The subjectivity of the neglected child was popularized in autobiographical writings even before Dickens; the neglected child’s point of view was a major interest for social activists who collected and distributed evidence about the conditions of child laborers. The frequent appointment of Parliamentary commissions starting with 1830 and the broad interest in their findings regarding children, published in detail in Bluebooks and summarized in the daily

Introduction

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press, testify to the increasing public attention to the horrific reality of child labor. As a reaction against the statistical and unindividuated nature of such reports (what Dickens’s Sissy Jupe calls “stutterings”), as well as the tendency to see children as pawns in the economic power struggle, the official reports were soon followed by private memoirs in which adults recounted their days as child laborers. A famous and particularly shocking example was Robert Blincoe’s Memoir (1832; Brown, 2007), a catalog of horrors inflicted on the child Blincoe by his sadistic master in the mills. This book served to arouse strong public opinion against the practices of child employment and instigated an influential subgenre of autobiographical writing. The influence of this subgenre extended to fiction as well. Around 1840, social-problem novels – a new genre that soon became both popular and controversial – started functioning as an additional source of information for the reading public; its narratives were based on facts from Bluebooks and on interviews with social activists and factory workers. The two earliest full-length instances of this genre focus on child operatives: Frances Trollope’s 1840 Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s 1841 Helen Fleetwood. These works demonstrate the extent to which social documentation and fiction were inseparable in the discourse on suffering children. These social-problem novels had a great deal of influence on Dickens and on other major novelists. In various Victorian realistic novels, the oppressed and/or abandoned child serves as a major site for exploring the development of one’s interiority as valuable, vulnerable, and in constant need of protection. In these works, both the original and the social selves – constructs that are the legacy of Rousseau and Wordsworth – are defined against harsh early experience often constructed as both private (familial and interpersonal) and social (associated with class). Thus, the generic repertoire of both the Bildungsroman and the social-problem novel – probably the two most popular genres in nineteenth-century English fiction – regularly resorted to early neglect as a key narrative event. Like Trollope and Tonna’s factory novels, canonical Victorian fiction – for example Dickens’s David Copperfield, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss – portrays an initial and largely formative state of innocence and natural freedom, an early shattered, yet ever fondly remembered, state of childlike bliss. Two shared assumptions about child neglect as a social phenomenon underlie these narratives, despite the great ideological and aesthetic differences between them: that the phase of innocence – or what we may refer

18


to as the child’s initial happiness, oneness with nature, purity, and authenticity – is objectively “real,” and that this blissful state is shattered by the intrusion of external, social forces into the child’s domain. These oppressive, uncaring, and injurious forces may originate in family figures or in broader social factors; but in all these cases their being external to the child implies that the destruction of innocence is, at least ideally, not inevitable. The Bildungsroman, characterized by a back-and-forth movement from the private to the social, was a central arena for the exploration of child neglect and child subjectivity in fiction. Its biographical structure – recounting the development of a protagonist whose point of view dominates the text from young age to maturity – processes themes such as success, socialization, and the interaction between self and society. This is an optimistic genre: the traditional pattern of the Bildungsroman involves a parentless hero’s “effort to adjust the private self to function within the social realm,” which entails a “basically optimistic view of both the individual and society. … In this faith the early Bildungsroman reveals its roots in the Romantic optimism about personal development and social progress” (Giordano, 1972: 587). However, we should note that in affirming the social self, this genre deviates from the Romantic denunciation of the social self as artificial and sterile. Socially conformist, in delineating the formation of a young protagonist who overcomes obstacles and hardships on the way to happy middle-class maturity, the Bildungsroman indicates that child neglect is no more than a series of such obstacles and that its consequences are, therefore, amendable. The latter view was shared by nonfictional texts advocating social reform: the harm of child neglect could be cured once the child’s inferior and unprotected social positioning was altered. The nonutilitarian facet of the rhetoric of social reform regarding children’s rights derived its justification from humanist ethics and Romantic ideologies of childhood, and shaped its depiction of the social sphere according to the same pattern that fashioned the Bildungsroman. In this respect it often tended to be optimistic about the chances of effecting a change and providing restitution for deep-rooted social vices. I shall show how the Bildungsroman, the discourse of reform, and memoirs of former child laborers all betray a mixed social outlook. On the one hand, they censure social norms that allow the cruelty to children to continue; on the other, their optimism about society’s ability to recompense its wronged children endorses the foundations of the existing social order. A famous later example of such an optimistic narrative is John Robert Clynes’s Memoirs: 1869–1924, which recounts the horrors of his employment as

Introduction

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a child piecer at a textile mill in the 1870s, when he was daily under the risk of mutilation or death by the heavy machinery beneath whose moving parts he had to collect broken threads. The Memoirs go on to recount how the little piecer eventually rose to be Britain’s Home Secretary. The first renderings of the child’s point of view, then, focused on suffering children oppressed by employers, parental figures, or the entire adult society. These vulnerable figures, meant to arouse compassion and guilt among readers, were usually either lower class or impoverished and de-classed children of the middle class. The adult readers were, for the most part, middle class. The major importance of class for these representations, even when they do not directly address this issue, raises questions about the extent of sociopolitical orientation in nineteenthcentury concepts of child neglect and of the ways in which it was understood and resisted as part of class relations. Class-bound views of a child’s poverty often treated it as a sign of its parents’ criminality: sexual abuse and other forms of mistreatment, child murder among them, became dominantly associated with the lower class. Monica Flegel shows how even the NSPCC, toward the end of the century, failed to recognize “the extent to which social conditions played a part in parents’ ability to provide what the [Society] saw as an adequate childhood for their children, or the extent to which that concept of childhood was modeled on middle-class ideology.” Thus, the NSPCC “inevitably relegated itself to the … project … of infiltrating and policing the lower-class home” (Flegel, 2006: 16). Josephine McDonagh discusses the widespread belief held by middle-class writers that working-class parents insured by burial societies murdered their children for monetary gain; rumors of widespread infanticide among the poor assured middle-class commentators of working-class overall degeneracy (McDonagh, 2003: 110, 116). Louise Jackson shows how, in matters pertaining to child sexual abuse, “notions of sexual morality were intertwined with perceptions of social class,” so that the “socioeconomic standing of victims and defendants played an important role in sex abuse trials.” The reports of social investigators and parliamentary committees “portrayed brutality, immorality, incest and, therefore, deviance as the norm amongst the poorest sections of society,” whereas the middle classes were depicted as morally righteous (Jackson, 2000: 7). Lydia Murdoch reveals a “startling disparity” between the popular, simplifying accounts of lower-class parents as abusive and neglectful, and the recorded histories of Victorian social welfare institutions. She points out the “erasures” and “vilifications” of poor parents in the dominant child welfare narratives (Murdoch, 2006: 1–3).

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The two major, ongoing public debates regarding children – on child labor and on mass education – both focused on the condition of children whose deprivation was the result of their class. My readings in the following chapters testify that this association was reflected in the contemporary imagination, as the ideas of child neglect and of class blended together. However, the nineteenth century saw a growing awareness that not only lower-class children were neglected and that children of the middle and upper classes may also be systematically uncared for. Charles Booth, in Life and Labour of the People in London (1889), declared that the poor normally loved their children and wanted to make them happy. He believed many of them to be better parents than the rich, because poor children were “free from the paraphernalia of servants, nurses and governesses” and enjoyed a greater intimacy with their parents (Booth, 1902: I, 160). Booth’s observation touches on the norms of Victorian middle- and upper-class family life, according to which children usually had minimal contact with their parents. Before the age of 7, when boys were sent to preparatory or public schools, most children were raised by “specialists”: wet-nurses, nursemaids, governesses, tutors, and other servants employed to supervise them. In fact, wealthy parents were often relieved of the need to play any part in their children’s early upbringing and could feel less responsible if the child turned out badly (Rose, 1991: 222; Kane, 1995: 39; Nelson, 1999: 71). The association of middle- and upper-class children with the servants, both in the physical proximity of their quarters and in the many hours they would spend together as part of their daily routine, was an indication of the inferior position assigned to children by wealthy parents. As Lionel Rose demonstrates, many children were raised to feel that physical distance from their parents was right and proper. He cites Gwen Raverat, who recalled: “I can never remember being bathed by my mother, or even having my hair brushed by her, and I should not at all have liked it if she had done anything of the kind. We did not feel it was her place to do such things.” However, he adds, there were many other children who “keenly felt their parents’ remoteness and suffered mental dereliction from cold and perhaps uncaring parents” (Rose, 1991: 222). Despite the financial standing of such families, relatively little concession was made to children’s comforts. Memoirs describing Victorian nurseries often recall their spartan conditions. Often there was no carpeting, and the bedrooms had no fires. The children were underclad at night in winter, and in mid-century might still be washed in cold water in order to harden them against ailments (ibid.: 223–4). Unlike the luxurious dinners served in the dining room below, the children’s

Introduction

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diet was simple and monotonous. John Ruskin recounts how, as a child, he was once permitted to come down for desert. He was then forced to crack nuts for the guests without getting any for himself.20 These practices were not considered “neglect” by either the law or the established norms of the period, yet in the last decades of the century there were signs of a change of climate, as long-accepted modes of parental behavior came under the attack of writers and intellectuals. Novels, autobiographies, and educational and social studies – among them that of Charles Booth cited above – tended to adopt a more empathetic approach to the child’s distress and to represent the formality and distance typical of many parents as overly authoritarian, uncaring, and damaging to the child’s development. Neglect within the family was a phenomenon that cut across the class divide, yet in literary representations, cases in middle- and upper-class families were often registered in terms derived from the social domain, with the child being put in the metaphoric position of an obedient or unruly lower class, and the parents (primarily the father) put in the role of hegemony and social control. The social structure was thus reproduced in the domestic hierarchy. A fascinating example of the way in which a wealthy child’s emotional neglect is constructed, metaphorically, in terms of class inferiority is that of Florence in Dickens’s Dombey and Son. Both on the level of language and imagery and on that of narrative technique, Florence is time and again emblematically associated with the lower class, her neglect by her father turning her into a “piece of base coin that couldn’t be invested” (Dickens, 1997b: 5). At the other end of the social spectrum, the association of the child with the working class and of the working class with the child in contemporary imagination helped to dismantle the stereotypical labeling of the poor as brutal, menacing, and licentious, yet reaffirmed the view that the lower classes were less cognitively and morally developed than their social superiors, hence in constant need of their guidance.

Structures of feeling: How to historicize the child Despite the historicist approach of this study, it does not consider literary works as mere documents of the social and political blueprints, aspirations, and anxieties of their period. I also examine the literary work in terms of its own space of artistic freedom. The following chapters illustrate, among other things, the power of literature to construct complex individual interiorities that interact with the social in terms of what Raymond Williams has named “structures of feeling.” Works of art,

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writes Williams, by their “substantial and general character, are often especially important” as sources of evidence for the transformational processes of the hegemonic in motion (Williams, 1977: 113–14). We shall be better able to see this, he argues, if we develop modes of analysis based on the concept of “structures of feeling,” a term that should be distinguished from more formal concepts of “world-view” or “ideology” and that indicates a social experience that is still in process, often “not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis … has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics” (ibid.: 132). This unrivaled ability of the literary to construct interiorities as constituting social change is what allows us to assume that the social and literary discourses of child neglect communicate a shared experience. My study shows how the poetic reworking of social concerns illuminates contemporary “structures of feeling” through internalizing the social and re-socializing the internal. I bring into relief the contradictions within literary representations of neglected children, while being aware of the generic differences between literary and nonliterary texts, yet at the same time I acknowledge the entanglements of the literary and nonliterary types of representation. The topos of the neglected child is located at the very juncture of what is considered the “private” domain of family life and personal relations, and the public sphere of social life. A guiding principle in the selection of texts for discussion has been the standing of the works in literary and social history and the presence of the two sets of binaries in them, the catechetical/empathetic and the private/social. One of my main findings is that such works partly subvert the oppositions that they set up, turning dichotomies into dialectics. Chapter 1, discussing theoretical concepts of childhood and views about education and the treatment of children from practical, ethical, and religious perspectives, examines texts from early modernity until the early nineteenth century. It focuses, in particular, on works by four influential writers on childhood and education – John Locke, JeanJacques Rousseau, Hannah More, and Maria Edgeworth – works that provide my basic operative concepts, especially those of the catechetical/ regulative and empathetic/liberating modes. These texts already betray some of the inconsistencies traced in the following chapters. Thus Locke and his immediate precursors’ educational treatises are innovative in acknowledging the child’s difference from the adult and in calling the reader’s attention to the child’s point of view. Their approach does not merely imply a rejection of the religionist view that renders all children indistinguishable replicas of the original sin; it is also

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ground-breaking in its recognition of each child’s uniqueness. Despite the “blank slate” metaphor, Locke’s assumption is that each child is born with certain faculties and inclinations of his own, with which the adult ought to become acquainted. This view indicates a newly increased sensitivity to any child’s specific emotional and developmental needs. And yet, for seventeenth-century educationalists, the child’s perspective is far from being idealized, as it would be for Rousseau and Wordsworth toward the end of the following century. Locke and his immediate precursors are not interested in the child’s perspective per se; for them, to recognize the child’s individual traits is a means for ensuring greater success in the pedagogic enterprise. By listening to the child and understanding his point of view, parents and tutors may find easier and more efficient ways to inspect, manipulate, and control him (I am using the male pronoun because Locke and his precursors write exclusively about the education of male children). Since the ultimate purpose of teachers and parents should be to socialize the child – that is, to create a degree of uniformity – they eventually aspire to lead him to surrender the very idiosyncratic perspective they have initially striven to understand. The adult interest in the child’s subjectivity thus remains limited: harnessed to pragmatic considerations, geared up to the pupil’s future character as an adult. Empathetic attention is synthesized with its antithesis, the regulative (or catechetical) project. In this vein, both Rousseau and Maria Edgeworth’s late-eighteenth-century theories about and literary representations of the child–adult relationship betray gaps between empathetic theory and less empathetic practice. Whereas their educational philosophy underlines the invaluable originality, morality, and intuitive wisdom of the child’s perspective, their depiction of actual encounters with children demonstrates an inadvertent authoritarian disregard of this very perspective on the part of an enlightened adult. Besides an indication of the lingering middle-class disciplinary assumptions in reformist texts, these gaps seem to signify that the liberating and dialogic ideology of childhood, though theoretically appealing, is not entirely realistic in daily encounters with children; at least, not in the Romantic era. Chapter 2 explores the complex staging of the child’s subjectivity in the poetry of Blake and Wordsworth, and argues that while promulgating the child’s freedom, both poets reveal an inclination to subordinate the child’s voice to the perspective of the adult. The chapter offers a reading that unravels the residues of catechetical thinking in the work of these two early advocates of the child’s perspective as a valuable human quality and a rewarding poetic device. Although formally and

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grammatically the voice of Blake’s poetic child is sometimes restored, what is put in its mouth in other cases is a sophisticated and emphatically adult discourse of political radicalism. For Wordsworth, the unresolved yet suppressed paradox of the child’s status as an idealized “other” who is at the same time the core of one’s authentic, presocial self causes anxiety about the child’s otherness. Such otherness renders the child’s admirable perspective inaccessible to the adult writer, and this leads Wordsworth, time after time, to affirm the child/adult sameness, notwithstanding his declared belief in the treasured distinctness of the child. Furthermore, Wordsworth’s construction of the child as a necessary layer in the uncovering of the poetic autobiographical self does not fully follow the poet’s own creed regarding the child’s being a free, productively unsocial being. The ideal of the child’s unbounded solitary freedom is questioned, as it is implicitly associated with parental desertion. This suggests that even for Wordsworth, more adult regulation and authority over the child may be a sign of parental care, hence desirable after all. As I show in the following chapters, this ambiguity transpires in the representation of children in the works of novelists such as Dickens and the writers of industrial novels. The bulk of the book deals with major canonical authors, yet Chapter 3 discusses the work of two largely forgotten ones, Frances Trollope and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna. These authors’ early social-problem novels, unlike subsequent works of this genre, interrogated the issue of child labor. Though widely read at their time, Tonna and Trollope’s works on children under industrialism were never reprinted in the twentieth century (a new edition of Trollope’s Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy has recently been published, a sign of reawakened interest). The emblematic association between the child and the working class created in these novels is evidenced in the synecdochic function of the child laborer as a representative of its class. Like the working-class autobiographies I discuss in this chapter, Trollope and Tonna’s fictional works are didactic, almost propagandist, in their commitment to the attempt to shape public opinion in order to negotiate a change in the living and working conditions of the poor. In their devotion to the cause of the oppressed child, they clearly echo the sensibilities of both Blake and Wordsworth. Yet the two novels’ project of rehumanizing the lower-class child, and their ambiguous use of literary and social conventions of adoption and rescue to challenge and satirize middle-class paternalism, still reaffirm oppressive assumptions, almost inadvertently. In these novels, as also in working-class autobiographies by former child laborers, the severe attack on legal and social institutions, and the rehabilitation

Introduction

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of the child’s point of view, are mixed with an authoritarian impulse that leads the authors to justify the child’s passivity and mute endurance. Praising this figure’s martyr-like silence, it is especially Tonna’s intriguing use of the motif of the child’s self-silencing that reveals the catechetical residues that are still at work in these socially subversive constructions of lower-class child characters. The Romantic-evangelical image of the child as an innocent, redemptive, hallowed figure shows us that for a mid-nineteenth-century devout writer like Tonna, the idea of original innocence is not merely acceptable but warmly embraced, as it serves her in critiquing the materialism of industrial society. Yet, Tonna is in many ways closer than others of her generation to the catechetical assumptions of a Puritan author like Hannah More, who saw the child as innately sinful. Ideological fusion with empathetic discourses notwithstanding, the motif of the child’s self-discipline and self-imposed silence serves to represent both a desirable manifestation of Christian humility and an authorial affirmation of conservative gender and class roles. Chapter 4 is devoted to Dickens, whose fictional and discursive works exerted a formative influence on the relatively new tolerance and empathy toward the child. Influenced by Romantic writers, and somewhat ambiguous about the emerging genre of social-problem writing, even Dickens represents suffering children inconsistently. Along with calling for compassion and empathy toward abandoned or exploited children, his texts also betray a response marked by anxiety, a sense of strangeness, and rejection. Despite Dickens’s well-known adamant protests against child neglect, his treatment of this theme demonstrates his wavering between a critique and an endorsement of hegemonic ideology. This duality is reflected in his split concept of child neglect: the child may be represented as a middle-class self, or else she may be perceived as a lower-class other, whose equal human status is compromised because of socioeconomic difference. Dickens’s deep interest in the child’s subjectivity is thus sometimes abandoned, as the marginal figure of the working-class child implicitly threatens to devour the middle-class child protagonist’s distinct identity. By presenting itself as the protagonist’s shady double, the marginalized child is constructed as an other whose interiority and point of view cannot be represented. Chapter 5 argues that Thomas Hardy’s work offers a critical reworking of the empathetic, dialogic ideology of childhood and uncovers its suppressed contradictions and gaps. Hardy’s poetical and fictional work, in technique as well as in themes and ideology, marks a cultural transition. Indeed, his last novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), reveals, more than any

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other work, his unique relation to the Romantic tradition that precedes him and infiltrates his writing. The novel establishes a link between parental neglect and the child’s subsequent refusal to grow up as an ethical resistance to the shortcomings of adult life, a refusal that is translated into an urge for self-destruction. Rather than romanticizing the childlike state, however, the novel makes ironic use of Wordsworthian imagery, Blakean social critique, and Dickensian Bildung conventions, while rejecting some of the assumptions of social-problem constructions of child neglect. Instead, Hardy represents childhood as an inherently disadvantaged and unhappy state, which even reformist and Romantic optimism can neither prevent nor mend. By diminishing the seemingly detrimental impact of social conditions and deconstructing the empathetic, liberating idealization of childhood, which he exposes as deaf to the child’s needs, Hardy’s work shows a critical awareness of the inconsistencies found in the works of earlier writers. My study contributes to exploration of the evolution of the modern concept of childhood since its inception in the late eighteenth century by tracing some of the processes that allowed the Romantic image of childhood to develop and gain the immense social and poetic influence that it still has today. At the same time, it challenges certainties about the totality of this cultural-historical change. The philosophical, social, and poetic constructions of child neglect that I discuss are engaged in a continuing and complex dialog with each other, and also with the dominant concepts, ideologies, and social debates in nineteenth-century Britain. My book reveals a movement from conceptualizing children as objects, through representations of their interiority that tend to reduce its distinct features, to an increasing attempt to render the child’s voice as linguistically and mentally distinct, valuable, and deserving to be defended against silencing and neglect. Though the poetic interest in representing the child’s voice is connected to progress in the social concern for children’s rights, the complex dynamics of catechism and empathy on the one hand, and the ineluctable challenges of the poetic project of constructing the child’s voice on the other, point to the ambiguities of the cultural moment in which this voice begins to emerge.

1 Concepts of Childhood and Adult Responsibility: Locke, Rousseau, More, and Edgeworth

By the end of the eighteenth century, the concept of childhood informing British educational thought was a mixture of diverse theoretical assumptions. The legacy of previous generations produced conflicting definitions not only of the nature of childhood, but of the responsibilities of adults to children. This chapter examines the coexistence of opposed ideas about childhood in key philosophical and educational texts, whose influence on nineteenth-century thought was substantial. Cultural historians tend to offer too rigid a view of late-eighteenth-century concepts of childhood as divided between a disciplinary, catechetical approach on the one hand and a liberating, empathetic, dialogic approach on the other. The texts discussed in this chapter indeed appear to be sharply divided, keen to formulate clear-cut theories about the correct ways of raising children, yet there are also unacknowledged continuities between their conceptualizations of childhood. The work by major authors discussed in this chapter ranges from the late seventeenth century to the turn of the nineteenth, from an examination of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s educational treatises to a reading of didactic texts by the highly influential Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth written around 1800. Offering various paradigms of the adult–child relationship, each of these four writers addresses fundamental questions that were to intrigue not only future generations of educationalists but also poets, novelists, cultural critics, and social reformers: Is childhood a distinct psychological and moral category of being? What are children’s needs, what are their ethical or legal rights, and what does them harm? What are a parent’s duties, and how ought adults in general, as individuals but also as organized society, to treat children? 27

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The concept of childhood Locke and Rousseau’s work on childhood was formulated in, and against, a certain context. The widely accepted narrative among social historians of childhood is progressive, suggesting that “childhood” as a distinct category was a Romantic, hence rather late, invention. Only by the last decades of the eighteenth century did children come to be viewed as autonomous beings rather than as mere extensions of the patriarchal family. Philippe Ariès, in his highly influential Centuries of Childhood, argued that prior to the seventeenth century there had been no general concept of childhood. By the end of the seventeenth century, emotional ties between parents and children had been strengthened, with the child seen as an “imperfect adult” who needed to be carefully guarded and educated to develop its reason. The new interest in children led first to severe discipline, which replaced the previous indifference (see Ariès, 1962: 128–32, 261–6, 353, 368–9, 403–4, 411–15). Hence, as David Grylls puts it, according to Ariès’s theory children were less miserable before they were “discovered” (Grylls, 1978: 18). However, most historians, Ariès included, agree that during the eighteenth century the attitude to children, though still attentive, became more lenient. According to the largely accepted account that follows Ariès’s, the eighteenth century gradually turned from the Christian doctrine of original sin to the cult of original virtue in the child, and the Puritanical, oppressive approach to children was replaced by a Romantic and liberal one (see Coveney, 1967: 33 and Cunningham, 1995: 61–2). Rather than being treated as inferior or as mere objects, since the late eighteenth century children have been regarded as subjects in their own right, worthy of respect and protection, and even idealized. Influential as it has been, Ariès’s thesis is controversial. There are historians who claim that the discovery of childhood was a far more gradual process than he supposes. Grylls asserts that Ariès overestimates the rapidity with which ideas about the special nature of childhood achieved general recognition (Grylls, 1978: 18). Lawrence Stone argues that the evolution of the attitude to children was not linear, but rather one of fluctuating and dialectical change, affected by alternating conditions of geography, social class, and interests: The only steady linear change over the last four hundred years seems to have been a growing concern for children, although the actual treatment has oscillated cyclically between the permissive and the repressive. (Stone, 1977: 683)

Concepts of Childhood and Adult Responsibility 29

Stone emphasizes the social stratification of cultural values, which makes one status group – for example the elite – hold a totally different set of familial values and behavior patterns from those held by another group – for example the peasantry (ibid.: 20). However, although emphasizing the dialectical nature of the changing attitudes to children, even Stone describes a gradual evolution over the centuries. Despite the differences, Ariès’s critics adopt, as he does, a progressive narrative. Exceptional in that, and probably the most prominent opponent of Ariès, is Linda Pollock. She argues that Ariès and others, Stone among them, make the interest in children appear far too sudden and recent. Pollock’s evidence indicates, on the other hand, that there was very little change from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Her examination of private diaries and autobiographies of parents reveals a surprising continuity. Rather than progressing linearly over time, attitudes to children in all periods as reflected in Pollock’s sources are consistently inconsistent. She claims that the treatment of children had always been ambivalent, and that the allegedly innovative Romantic attitudes of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not new.1 Although the texts presented in this chapter largely corroborate the established progressive narrative that Pollock rejects, her emphasis on the continued ambivalence regarding children, combined with Stone’s awareness of the coexistence of conflicting attitudes at the same period, offers valuable hypotheses that may help us undermine the rigid assumptions underlying the progressive narrative of the history of childhood. Similar support for such an approach is provided by Margaret Ezell and Claudia Nelson.2 My reading of the texts indeed shows that the regulative and liberating approaches were not so distant, and would sometimes coexist. Rather than an orderly process, in which one hegemonic doctrine terminated its career and gave way to a new one, the texts reveal a dialectical and self-contradictory dynamic. The conflicting concepts continued to struggle for expression not only in rival texts, but sometimes even within a single text, which operated as a compressed discursive site for the ongoing controversy. Puritan, authoritarian, and disciplinary ideas about children lingered, often under the surface, even in discourses that rejected regulative ideology and denied both its practical and its ethical validity. For a brief chronological survey that begins in the Middle Ages, the progressive account is indispensable. Ariès’s claim that no concept of childhood existed before the seventeenth century is perhaps radical, but historians tend to agree that in the medieval period childhood was not considered significant. Relying on an analysis of medieval art,

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Ariès contends that until the twelfth century childhood was an unknown category, as demonstrated by the fact that child figures were not painted at all. In the following centuries, pictures of biblical scenes with child characters in them depicted the latter as little adults. Ariès’s conclusion is that “there was no place for childhood in the medieval world” (Ariès, 1962: 33). According to Melvin Tucker, the medieval idea that “children were not terribly important” persisted into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A medieval proverb says “Who sees a child sees nothing,” and other aphorisms compare children to senile old men, foolish women, and doddering drunks.3 A thirteenth-century poem describing the life cycle states that “the child six summers old / Is not worth much when all is told.”4 Such notions must have added to the child’s feeling “that it counted for little and that childhood was a state to be endured rather than enjoyed” (Tucker, 1974: 229–30). Nevertheless, in an account of the practical treatment of children from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, Mary Martin McLaughlin brings evidence that children did seem important even during these early periods. This, we should note, was not always for the child’s benefit. According to her study, the attitude of medieval parents and nurses to the children under their charge was mixed. If infants were peevish and crying this sometimes encouraged thoughts of their being demonically possessed, which in radical cases might have resulted in their being turned out of the house. Such instances of neglect seem to originate in fear rather than indifference, although clearly this kind of projection reflected a denial of the child’s status as a human being in her own right. Besides such cases, however, McLaughlin cites examples in which young children were shown to arouse an affectionate interest, manifested in adult curiosity about early stages of development and in parents’ involvement in games (McLaughlin, 1974: 117–18, 152). In early modern times adults generally “thought about children, if at all, in hierarchical terms. Children were at the bottom of the social scale.” That children were “human beings with human needs seldom entered [the] minds” of the adults (Tucker, 1974: 229–30). It is probable that infants’ high mortality rate prevented parents from emotionally attaching themselves to “something that was regarded as a probable loss” (Ariès, 1962: 38). Thus, Montaigne could write in 1580: “I have lost two or three children in their infancy, not without regret, but without great sorrow,” and add that children had “neither mental activities nor recognizable bodily shape.”5 There is evidence, however, that as of the sixteenth century more attention was given to the nature of childhood out of a growing religious concern with human nature. This attention was informed by the Calvinist


view of man as a born sinner. William Spellman argues that the impact of Calvin’s doctrine on English religious thought should not be underestimated. The theological interpretation of suffering held by Protestantism saw it as the direct result of man’s sinfulness, and Spellman argues that all factions of English Protestantism inherited from Calvin a firm conviction in man’s depravity (Spellman, 1988: 26–9; cf. Robison, 1983: 322–3). As a result of the immense impact of the Puritan doctrine of original sin, the treatment of children in the seventeenth century was predominantly autocratic, some say ferocious. Constrained in swaddling bands and habitually flogged, children’s “common lot was fierce parental discipline” (Plumb, 1975: 65). Lloyd DeMause reports that the earliest records of lives he has found of children who may not have been beaten at all date from 1690 (DeMause, 1974: 40–42). The origin of this physically violent attitude was a spiritual concern of parents and religious instructors for the corrupt soul of the child. William Perkins, whose books on practical divinity instructed generations of seventeenthcentury Puritan theologians and clergymen, wrote in 1608: “Every man is by nature dead in sinne as a loathsome carrion.”6 John Owen, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, declared in a sermon presented in the 1650s that “[t]he mind of man by nature is wholly vain, under the power of vanity, and is an endless, fruitful womb of all malicious births” (quoted in Spellman, 1988: 29, my emphasis). “By nature” – a formulation used by both theologians – means that through good works and divine grace man may overcome his natural sinfulness. It is implied that the child, still in the natural state, is in the worst spiritual and moral condition possible. In a typical Puritan description of the child’s moral nature, Richard Allestree wrote in 1658 that “[t]he new born babe is full of the stains and pollutions of sin which it inherits from our first parents through our loins.”7 In A Godly Form of Household Government (1621), Puritans Robert Cleaver and John Dod wrote: The young child which lieth in the cradle is both wayward and full of affections; and though his body be but small, yet he hath a reat [wrong-doing] heart, and is altogether inclined to evil. … If this sparkle be suffered to increase, it will rage over and burn down the whole house. For we are changed and become good not by birth but by education. … Therefore parents must be wary and circumspect. (quoted in Illick, 1974: 316–17) In order to suppress their inborn maliciousness, then, children and even infants had to be punished continually. A certain definition of parental

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responsibility emerges from this ideology, in the spirit of “spare the rod and spoil the child,” according to which a lenient and affectionate education is neglectful, because it is detrimental to the child’s afterlife. According to this system, the attitude that adults had to foster in the child was “one of constantly questioning himself, making himself feel inadequate, and engendering self-doubt” (Illick, 1974: 317). However, in The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England, Charles John Sommerville criticizes historians of childhood and the family for interpreting Puritan writers “in the most unsympathetic sense possible” (Sommerville, 1992: 7). Defending a stance similar to the one presented by Pollock, he claims that there had been much more continuity over the early and late modern periods than most scholars have assumed. Ambivalence regarding children, he maintains, was a constant feature of their treatment even among the Puritans (ibid.: 8). This ambivalence had to do with issues central to the Protestant interpretation of Christianity, which examined the child’s moral nature and debated whether it was good or evil. The doctrine of original sin clashed with other Christian images, primarily that of the Christ child. To this sanctified image were added the assumptions that children had no sexual desire and that they were ignorant of evil in the adult sense. Thus, Tucker notes that a common visual image in fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury England presented the child as a model of purity, a Christ figure; child angels decorated the fringes of frescoes; and children were very often represented in white, the color signifying innocence and purity (Tucker, 1974: 231–3). Influential as the Puritan doctrine was, not all parents and educators necessarily abided by its tenets. Parents’ diaries retrieved by Pollock indicate that in the private sphere, many families were reluctant to embrace the Puritan ethos. The journal of Grace Mildmay, a late-sixteenth-century mother (1552–1620), supplies a definition of parental responsibility that, although informed by a strong religious sentiment, allows for a wider spectrum of feelings: “Parents have much to answer for before God, who neglect their duty in bringing up their children, or prefere any care, labour or delight in the world before that natural and most necessary imployment.” Mildmay regrets the carelessness with which well-to-do parents appoint unsuitable “governors” and servants to look after their children. The dedication of their utmost and primary energy to their children is, according to her, the sacred duty of parents. Whether parental attention is invested in chastisement or in play is a question she does not address; yet the references made in her journal to child rearing tend to be affectionate rather than harsh.8


Locke and his precursors Accounts of the history of educational theory often present John Locke as the first thinker to introduce a more liberal approach toward children, and the first to reject the requirement to save children’s souls by chastising them continually for a sin they did not commit.9 However, Locke did have a few precursors, as well as contemporaries, whose voices have been marginalized but who nevertheless offered a more benign treatment of the child than had existed before. Historians of early modernity who do not restrict their discussion to the hegemonic religionist ideology, and are not won over by an anti-Puritanical bias, indicate that already in early modernity, long before Locke, more tolerant and affectionate approaches to children were in existence. Even the belief in the child’s moral innocence and purity, usually taken to be a Romantic idea, was already entertained by some early writers, marginal as they may be. The contribution of these educationalists has been dwarfed by the immense influence of Locke’s writings in general, and the unique authority he has enjoyed.10 As early as 1628, John Earle wrote: [The child] is the best copy of Adam before he tasted of Eve or the apple; and he is happy whose small practice in the world can only write this Character. He is nature’s fresh picture newly drawn in oil, which time, and much handling, dims and defaces. His soul is yet a white paper unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith, at length, it becomes a blurred notebook. He is purely happy, because he knows no evil. … The older he grows, he is a stair lower from God. … He is the Christian’s example, and the old man’s relapse; the one imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his simplicity. Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got eternity without a burthen, and exchanges but one Heaven for another.11 Earle was not alone. According to Plumb, there was a “current of antipathy to the strict Calvinist view of the child throughout the seventeenth century” (Plumb, 1975: 68–9). This antipathy produced the belief that, given the right environment and the proper course of education, compassion, and benevolence, the essential goodness of the child should triumph over its propensity for evil.12 Earle’s view of experience as carrying a negative, “blurring” impact, and of growing up as amounting to a spiritual decline from initial moral perfection and proximity to divinity, are ideas to be taken up – or independently conceived of – a century and a half later by writers

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such as Rousseau, Blake, and Wordsworth. Even more conspicuously, Earle anticipates here the terminology to be used within several decades by Locke, who, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), would adopt the tabula rasa or white-paper metaphor in order to describe the child’s mind.13 Since Earle compares the child to the prelapsarian Adam, it is clear that he rejects the doctrine of original sin in favor of a concept of original innocence: it is only the mark of experience that makes the child tainted. Like Locke, Earle assumes that initially the child’s mind is a blank. It knows nothing, and knowledge is acquired through experience. However, unlike Locke, who does not cultivate a doctrine of original innocence, Earle sees the experience acquired by the child as corrupting. Thus, his use of the white-paper metaphor is different from Locke’s. Locke’s educational ideas were not conceived of in isolation. Ezell presents his views in the context of three concepts of the child that coexisted in his era. One saw the child as innately evil; another regarded it as innately pure; and the third considered the child as a blank (Ezell, 1983–84: 140). The first view was held by the believers in original sin; the second by marginal thinkers such as John Earle; and the third by the educationalists, Locke among them. According to their concept, the child was a malleable being. Educational treatises from the seventeenth century prior to Locke, such as Henry Peachman’s The Compleat Gentleman (1622), Obadiah Walker’s Of Education, Especially of Young Gentlemen (1673), and Jean Gailhard’s The Compleat Gentleman (1678), present educational ideas quite similar to those later entertained by the English philosopher. Rather than the salvation of children’s erring souls, all these writers share a far more material object: they aspire to form the child’s character in order to socialize him (these treatises, like Locke’s and largely also Rousseau’s, are exclusively devoted to the education of male children). The result is a certain relaxation of domestic discipline and educational authoritarianism. Peachman, Walker, and Gailhard all tend to recommend a lenient attitude. Walker instructs parents to guide their children “as much as is possible, with kindness and affection, endeavouring to convince and perswade them” (emphases in the original). A tutor should be gentle and persuasive in correcting his young scholar, with the purpose of improving his “natural parts as much as he shall be able.”14 The notion that the child’s “natural parts” should be improved indicates that Peachman, Gailhard, and Walker do not share Earle’s belief in the child’s original perfection. However, nor are they followers of the doctrine of original sin, and they do not see the child as inclined to evil. Children may have undesirable qualities, but these are not deemed “bad” in any metaphysical sense.15


These educational treatises imply a redefinition of adult responsibility. Unlike the religionist view of all children as indistinguishable replicas of the sinfulness inherent in the species, these writers require, as Locke would do later, a new sensitivity to each child’s individuality. As they point out, children differ greatly from one another in nature and disposition. Rather than metaphysical and demonic, children’s flaws are attributed to each child’s particular character, which can be improved. Rather than oppressing the child and vanquishing his self-confidence, parents and teachers are now encouraged to be attentive to each child’s peculiar pace and individual capabilities. And yet, these relatively liberal writers – not unlike their severe Puritanical contemporaries – do put a strong emphasis on the importance of curbing and controlling the child’s passions and desires. In this respect, their proposed education aims to regulate rather than liberate. Hugh Cunningham claims that for educationalists such as Locke and his precursors, the goal of containing the child’s conduct has a different purpose from that of the Puritan emphasis on breaking the child’s will; their purpose is to produce a rational man (Cunningham, 1995: 63). Rather than saving the child’s soul in the afterlife, these writers’ primary concern is to socialize him in this world, and the way to achieve that is by teaching him self-control. As a reading of Locke’s writings may suggest, this kind of regulative approach seems to be much milder than its religionist counterpart, but this is perhaps because its disciplinary aspects are less outspoken. John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) is not a systematic theory of education. It was composed out of a series of letters originally written to a friend who had asked for advice. As Locke himself states, the letters “were rather the private Conversation of two friends, than a Discourse designed for publick view”; they were published since people had “pressed to see them” and only because the author had been told that this “rough Draught … might be of some use” (Locke, 1989: 79). Late-seventeenth-century parents – at least those Locke had encountered – seem to have been in need of sound educational advice. The circumstances of its composition indeed made this treatise not purely theoretical, but also a practical guidebook. Locke’s ideas in Some Thoughts (as occurred later with Rousseau’s Emile) were not only read and contemplated but actually put to the test by many of his readers in their daily practice as parents.16 Cultural historians describe it as the premier child-guidance book of the eighteenth century, which exercised immense influence from the moment it was published (Plumb, 1975: 69; Ezell, 1983–84: 147; Cunningham, 1995: 65). It was reprinted

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19 times before 1761 and went through several editions in French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish during the eighteenth century. Locke’s attitude to the child tends to be relatively liberal and lenient: he objects to corporal punishment (except for extreme cases in which there is no other way); supports a broader curriculum that would be suitable to life’s practical needs; and encourages breastfeeding by the mother. Because of Locke’s empirical method (he sticks to an examination and analysis of actual situations and modes of behavior, and usually does not put forward untested theoretical assumptions), we must infer what his ideas about the child’s nature and the parent’s responsibilities are from the examples and pieces of advice that he gives. What are a parent’s duties according to Locke’s educational philosophy? In section 34 of Some Thoughts he refers to the damaging habit of indulging one’s children. Besides the importance of this passage in showing us that Puritan severity was not all too powerful in familial daily life, this section is of interest because of an observation that Locke makes here in passing. He remarks that it is a “Duty” to love one’s children. Parents, he says, are “wisely ordain’d by Nature to love their Children. … They love their little ones, and ’tis their Duty: But they often, with them, cherish their Faults too” (103). It is a parent’s obligation, then, to love her or his offspring, and it is a natural law that a parent should feel so. Such a view might be seen as discrepant with any view of love as a natural and spontaneous emotion. For Locke, however, duty, natural law, and natural feeling are one and the same.17 It is a natural feeling to love one’s children, because it is a law of nature, which in Locke’s vocabulary means God’s law. As natural as this feeling may be, to define it as a religious duty implies that there might be parents who do not love their children, and that such a deficiency is a moral one. This assumption is of great value. To present love as a parental duty constitutes a progressive innovation in the way the parent–child relationship is imagined, even in Locke’s own writing. It is much richer, and more complex, than the technical and almost bureaucratic demand that the father should merely nourish and provide for his children, which Locke himself gives in his earlier writings as the exclusively necessary natural law defining parental obligations.18 However, the emphasis put on parental love, as well as the relative leniency of the methods proposed in Some Thoughts, do not make the book’s approach to children a liberating one. The ultimate goal of Locke’s education is to produce a moral, rational, and socialized adult. In order to do that, it is necessary to teach the child how to “deny himself his own Desires, cross his own Inclinations, and purely follow what Reason directs


as best, tho’ the appetite lean the other way” (Locke, 1989: 103). This training, not unlike Puritan instruction, should begin at an extremely young age. Since habits are formed early, “Children should be used to submit their Desires, and go without their Longings, even from their very Cradles” (ibid.: 108). If we fail to demand this of them, we “neglect” our offspring (ibid.: 104), because when they grow up it will no longer be possible for them to submit to the “Rules and Restraints of Reason” (ibid.: 105). Again, as in the writings of his precursors, there is something oppressive for the child in the severity of Locke’s educational demands. The relationship that he envisions between adults and children is one based not on mutual respect and relative freedom but on hierarchy and coercion. He recommends that parents demonstrate their authority and inspire awe from infancy, and only as the child approaches maturity admit him into the parent’s familiarity and friendship: So shall you have him your obedient Subject (as is fit) whilst he is a Child, and your affectionate Friend when he is a Man. … For, Liberty and Indulgence can do no Good to Children: Their want of judgment makes them stand in need of Restraint and Discipline. (ibid.: 109) Although he is concerned with the child’s character as an adult rather than with the condition of his soul in the afterlife, it is debatable whether Locke is indeed free of the religious aspect of the original-sin doctrine. Interestingly, although education for him is first and foremost a moral project, he never addresses the question of original sin directly. Interpreters therefore differ in evaluating his view on the matter. Most scholars claim that Locke rejected the doctrine of original sin and saw the child as neither virtuous nor evil by nature. John Passmore, for instance, argues that the crucial importance of Some Thoughts lies exactly here, in its rejection of original sin.19 The metaphor of the mind as white paper or blank slate, which appears first in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and is taken up again in Some Thoughts, seems to support this interpretation and suggest that Locke rejects the belief that children are inherently sinful.20 However, the Essay also implies that according to Locke’s theory of development, even though ideas and concepts are acquired by experience, some faculties and inclinations are innate. Unlike John Earle’s use of the white-paper metaphor to illustrate the child’s initial perfection that later becomes blurred by experience, Locke believes that the writings of experience on the blank page may improve the child’s character and allow him to become a moral person. It is still possible, then,

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to reconcile the doctrine of original sin with the white-paper metaphor. In John Locke and the Problem of Depravity, William Spellman challenges the usual interpretation of the kind offered by Passmore, and argues that Locke did accept some version of original sin. He maintains that Locke saw sin as a threat to the adult efforts to mold the child into a moral human being. Although sin remains for Locke a matter of choice, throughout his writings “there exists a definite strain of pessimism about human nature,” which reveals that his essential premise was quite congruent – much more than the majority of interpretations would allow – with the idea of original sin.21 Some Thoughts indeed reflects Locke’s pessimism about human nature. However, his assumptions about the child’s moral disposition, as expressed in sections 104, 105, and 116 of the book, show that the evil to which he refers is ethical, and operates on the level of human relations rather than on the impersonal metaphysical level. Even though the child, according to Locke, possesses no metaphysical goodness and reveals no ideal moral perfection of the kind postulated by Earle, it carries no metaphysical sinfulness either. Children have two major faults, Locke contends: We see Children (as soon almost as they are born, I am sure long before they can speak) cry, grow peevish, sullen, and out of humour, for nothing but to have their Wills.… Another thing wherein they shew their love of Dominion, is their desire to have things to be theirs. … [These are the] two Roots of almost all the Injustice and Contention, that so disturb humane Life. (ibid.: 164) A parent who fails to realize that it is his or her job to weed out these roots of tyranny and acquisitiveness “neglects the proper Season to lay the Foundations of a good and worthy Man” (ibid.: 164). Locke also warns against children’s delight in cruelty toward those who are weaker or inferior, such as servants, and against their habit to torment small animals. Significantly, he assumes that these signs of cruelty do not originate in the child’s own nature, but are rather the result of the bad example given by adult society: [T]he Pleasure they take to put any thing in Pain that is capable of it, I cannot persuade my self to be any other than a foreign and introduced Disposition, an habit borrowed from Custom and Conversation. People teach Children to strike, and laugh, when they hurt, or see harm come to others: And they have the Examples of most about them, to confirm them in it. (ibid.: 181)


The seeds of children’s wicked propensities, then, are not innate but originate in parents or other adults, whom they tend to imitate. Such a view implies that parents, instead of continually scrutinizing and purging their child’s soul, as Calvinism-oriented ideology advises, should examine their own behavior first. Furthermore, despite these examples of children’s faults, it would be wrong to define Locke’s attitude to the child’s moral nature as altogether pessimistic. Despite the cruelty and desire for tyranny that they may exhibit, in Some Thoughts children are not presented as guilty creatures but as unknowing and unaware. In a passage that anticipates the ideas of Rousseau and Wordsworth, Locke describes children’s ignorance about the ways of this world as a valuable asset; and again, as in the caution against giving bad ethical example, he insinuates here that it is the parents who might destroy their children’s potential for good: [Children] are Travellers newly arrived in a strange Country, of which they know nothing: We should therefore make Conscience not to mis-lead them. And though their Questions seem sometimes not very material, yet they should be seriously answer’d. … And perhaps to a grown Man, such Conversation will not be altogether so idle and insignificant, as we are apt to imagine. The native and untaught Suggestions of inquisitive Children, do often offer things, that may set a considering Man’s Thoughts on work. And I think there is frequently more to be learn’d from the unexpected Questions of a Child, than the Discourses of Men, who talk in a road, according to the Notions they have borrowed, and the Prejudices of their Education. (ibid.: 184–5) So far we have seen that Locke, though emphasizing the necessity to curb the child’s will and regulate his desires, departs from the Puritanical insistence on the child’s innate sinfulness, and restricts his concern about the child’s moral character to the ethical dimension of interpersonal relations. Stressing the corrupting power of bad example in his discussion of children’s cruelty, he implies that children are not morally inferior to adults. He even goes on to suggest that the child’s innocent, fresh, and defamiliarizing outlook contains wisdom and may be valuable for the adult. Although Locke’s ultimate goal is to discipline the child and contain the child’s “undesirable” qualities, both his methods and his rhetoric are much milder than those of the firm Puritans, and the relationship that he envisages between parents and children is more benign, liberal, and down-to-earth. Locke, then, is located between the regulative and the liberating modes. Frances Ferguson, who sees Locke’s

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attitude to children as relatively liberal, defines what he offers in Some Thoughts as “enlightened despotism”: he tries to create a more lenient equilibrium between the child’s freedom and the adult’s authority than existed before, as shown for instance in his criticism of the use of physical force; and yet he preserves an authoritarian stance that he attempts to make as legitimate as possible.22 However, Locke’s approach to children should not be examined only in relation to the regulative/liberating binary, but also in relation to the other pair of modes presented above: that of the objectifying versus empathetic attitudes. Here we see greater complexity. As stated above, the objectifying mode ignores the distinctive and individual nature of the child’s perspective, whereas an empathetic mode attempts to understand this different perspective and identify with it. Locke is considered innovative, and justly so, in his offering to be more sensitive to the child’s emotional and developmental needs. He understands, for example, the importance of play, and demands that children be provided with the means and opportunity to enjoy recreational activity: I say not this [i.e. that it is necessary to restrain children’s desires], as if Children were not to be indulged in any Thing; or that I expected they should … have the Reason and Conduct of Councellors. I consider them as Children, who must be tenderly used, who must play, and have Play-things. (ibid.: 108) He also justifies the child’s different point of view, and emphasizes the importance of treating children with respect even when they act or speak without reason. Unlike claims raised by critics against Locke’s exaggerated emphasis on reason, in his dealings with children he neither ignores nor despises the child’s irrational side, because he is aware that this irrationality is part of human nature. Yolton and Yolton add that he knows how important it is “for the tutor to be able to work with the emotions and desires of children” (Yolton and Yolton, 1989: 20) in order for the educational project to be successful. Aware of the child’s different ways of seeing and thinking, Locke counsels parents “[n]ot to check or discountenance any Enquiries [that the child] shall make, nor suffer them to be laugh’d at; but to answer all his Questions, and explain the Matters, he desires to know, so as to make them as much intelligible to him, as suits the capacity of his Age and Knowledge” (Locke, 1989: 183). Yet, it would be wrong to locate Locke entirely on the side of the empathetic attitude to children. As innovative as his sensitivity to the child’s


perspective is, his chief motivation for recommending it is not an interest in the child per se. When he says that children’s questions should be answered, he explains that this would increase their “pleasure, in learning and improving their Knowledge” (ibid.: 183). Responsiveness to the child’s inquiries is not required of the adult simply because the child is worthy of it as a fellow human being; it has a strategic function in advancing the child’s learning. This kind of interest in the child’s questions, harnessed to rendering the process of instruction more successful, cannot be separated from Locke’s project of shaping and curbing the child’s desires. Both these goals – to instruct and to curb – reveal a wish to control the child’s way of thinking. By listening to children and understanding their point of view, parents and tutors may find it easier to inspect, manipulate, and control them.23 Rather than originating in pure intellectual and emotional curiosity, Locke’s innovative attentiveness to the childlike perspective paradoxically serves his project of training the child to surrender this very perspective, in order to become a rational adult. His penetration into the child’s subjectivity is not entirely empathetic, as it preserves the position of the child as a passive and flexible object, which the adult mind aims to shape. Another indication of this appears in the “Epistle Dedicatory” that precedes Some Thoughts, where Locke states that a good education of children is not only “the Duty and Concern of Parents” but also something on which “the Welfare and Prosperity of the Nation so much depends” (ibid.: 80). He has decided to make the manuscript public, he states, because it is “every Man’s indispensible Duty, to do all the Service he can to his Country” (ibid.: 79). It is the improvement of the country that lies at the center of Locke’s attention, not the particular needs of any individual child. The educational effort should be made, it seems, in order to assist the British nation and provide it with more rational and moral adults. That is why Locke’s advice, like that of his precursors, refers exclusively to the upbringing of young gentlemen. He does not write about the education of middle- or lower-class children, or about girls. Although many of his principles may apply to all children, regardless of gender and social position, we cannot separate the implied audience he addresses in his treatise – upper-class parents – from the impersonal, objectifying desire to shape the components of the future ruling elite according to a pattern. It is this objective that comes first, and renders the interest in the child’s individuality secondary and instrumental. Locke’s views about education form an important stage in the gradual process of secularization in the attitudes to childhood. As Hugh

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Cunningham argues, for Locke and his followers children came to be seen to a greater degree as endowed with the capacity for development and growth, whose driving force was nature rather than God. After Locke, Cunningham claims (1995: 61–2), the art of child rearing gradually became one of listening to nature and giving free rein to growth, rather than bending twigs to a desired shape. Locke only showed the direction; the central figure marking these changes was Rousseau.

Rousseau, education, and parenting Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education (1762) is for most historians the main signpost of the changing attitude to children in the modern era. It has had its enthusiasts and its opponents, but no one has debated its pivotal position. Despite its originality, Emile is indebted in many ways to Locke’s Some Thoughts, even though Rousseau strives very hard to distance himself from the educational ideas of his precursor.24 This distancing has to do with his wish to emphasize the great innovation that his text introduces to the field of education and to discussions about childhood. In his Preface, Rousseau raises a fundamental question, which he believes previous writers on education have never seriously asked before: What is a child? We know nothing of childhood; and with our mistaken notions the further we advance the further we go astray. The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning. They are always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man. (Rousseau, 1986: 1) Rousseau offers here an entirely new focus: let us, the adults, try to understand the child’s own subjective needs and desires, and work for them rather than for the child’s future life as a man. Indeed, Locke’s treatise has already called parents and educators to be more attentive to the child’s point of view, and to respect his desire to play and ask questions. Locke also called his readers to remember that the child’s capacity to understand what we teach him changes according to age, stage of development, and individual skill. And yet, as we have seen, this attention to the child’s perspective, although progressive, was both incomplete and instrumental – incomplete, because of its wish to restrain and reshape the child’s own wishes; and instrumental, because harnessed to the primary


goal of producing a certain kind of adult out of the child. Rousseau declares in his Preface, by contrast, that his primary obligation as tutor is to the present-day child rather than the future adult. In Book Two of Emile, Rousseau expresses the same idea again, and justifies it in words that seem to refer directly to Locke’s reason-oriented educational doctrine: Nature would have them children before they are men. If we try to invert this order we shall produce a forced fruit immature and flavourless, fruit which will be rotten before it is ripe. … Childhood has its own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling; nothing is more foolish than to try and substitute our ways. (ibid.: 54) The child’s different ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling, already acknowledged as legitimate to some extent by Locke (to whom Rousseau gives no credit), is what parents and tutors need to recognize and respect. A certain inversion in the traditional way of seeing the child–adult relationship occurs here: the adult, who has conventionally been the superior and knowledgeable party, needs to humble himself and invest no little effort in understanding the child’s inner workings, studying his subjectivity and mental capacities, and responding to his emotional needs. The child is no longer an inferior, passive object to be shaped and catechized by an adult instructor, but a human being in his own right whose particularity and wishes are of the highest value. Emile’s call for a greater and more sympathetic interest in the child’s interiority (what I term the empathetic mode) leads to an attack on conventional education, which crams the child with useless facts and tenets that he cannot understand, instructs him to repeat by rote given answers that are dictated by the adult, and disregards his distinct point of view (the catechetical mode). Emile creates an implicit link between catechetical education and the neglect of children by careless and selfish parents. Religionist (especially Calvinist) and rationalist (Lockean) educational systems pay a great deal of attention either to the soul or to the character of the child, yet not out of intrinsic interest but for the purpose of improving this child according to the educators’ beliefs. In this respect, these two approaches involve catechetical assumptions, since neither of them can be fully empathetic to the child as an equally valuable fellow being with a distinct subjectivity. We should now look at Rousseau’s opinions about good parenting. Despite his famous criticism of overprotective parents, his wish to make the child self-reliant, and the harsh measures he proposes for hardening

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children from infancy (by ice-cold baths, exposure to physical pain, and so forth), Rousseau also voices a deep concern about what he sees as the neglectful carelessness of so many modern parents. He begins his book by declaring that the root of all defects in education is the initial inattention to and mistreatment of children, characteristic of contemporary Western society: Since mothers have despised their first duty and refused to nurse their own children, they have had to be entrusted to hired nurses. Finding themselves the mothers of a stranger’s children, without the ties of nature, [these nurses] have merely tried to save themselves trouble. A child unswaddled would need constant watching; well swaddled it is cast into a corner and its cries are unheeded. So long as the nurse’s negligence escapes notice, so long as the nursling does not break its arms or legs, what matter if it dies or becomes a weakling for life. … These gentle mothers, having got rid of their babies, devote themselves gaily to the pleasures of the town. Do they know how their children are being treated in the villages? If the nurse is at all busy, the child is hung up on a nail like a bundle of clothes and is left crucified while the nurse goes leisurely about her business. Children have been found in this position purple in the face, their tightly bandaged chest forbade the circulation of the blood, and it went to the head; so the sufferer was considered very quiet because he had not strength to cry. (ibid.: 11) There is evidence that supports the existence of practices similar to the ones Rousseau is describing, although they were probably not as prevalent among nurses as his account suggests. Rousseau also believes that the child needs its mother’s love as much as her milk: Other women, or even other animals, may give him the milk she denies him, but there is no substitute for a mother’s love. The woman who nurses another’s child in place of her own is a bad mother; how can she be a good nurse? She may become one in time; … but the child may perish a hundred times before his nurse has developed a mother’s affection for him. (ibid.: 13) It is impossible not to refer here to the biographical scandal that made quite a few readers of Emile wary of its author’s moral reliability. Rousseau was notorious, among other things, for having consigned his own five illegitimate children by Mlle. Le-Vasseur to a foundling home.


In The Confessions (written in 1765, published posthumously 1781–8) he publicly confessed this act and expressed his deep regret (Rousseau, 1954: 320–22). He had done so previously in a private letter to Mme. La Maréchale de Luxembourg, dated June 12, 1761. Describing his belated compunction for the desertion of his children, he stated in this letter that “the ideas with which my mind was filled as a result of my error [were] to a large extent responsible for my writing [Emile],” published the following year.25 However, as Rousseau’s autobiographical accounts are known to contain many falsehoods, the actual existence of these five infants has been under debate. True or false, Rousseau’s story about the abandonment of the children, and possibly his bitter childhood memories as well, led him to ascribe all the vices of the existing social system to child neglect, a phenomenon that subverts the moral order of the entire Western world. 26 “Every evil follows in the train of this first sin” of parental neglect, he states in Emile (ibid.: 13), significantly echoing the biblical original sin, still so central to the educational thought of his day. For Rousseau, the first and primary sin of humanity is not that of Adam, inherited by little children, but the sin of the parents, committed again and again against their blameless offspring. Like John Earle, Rousseau rejects original sin adamantly: “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil” (ibid.: 5). Therefore, “there is no original sin in the human heart,” and “the how and why of the entrance of every vice can be traced” (ibid.: 56). The child’s self-love, lamented by conservative and devout educators, “only becomes good or bad by the use made of it and the relations established by its means”; and the child’s own will, rather than being curbed, should serve as a moral guide. The importance of the child’s agency and freedom is asserted again and again. Rousseau demands that the child ought to do nothing because adults are watching him, nothing because of other people, “but only what nature asks of him; then he will never do wrong” (ibid.: 56–7). A shift of imagery occurs here, as not only the child but Nature, too, changes its signification. Rather than being the marker of the soul’s corruption, Nature, or the natural state, now stands for all that is good. This is the point at which Rousseau’s attack on neglecting parents coincides with his critique of what I have referred to as the catechetical mode. Catechetical education assumes that the child’s will and opinions need not be attended to or acknowledged as valuable. For Rousseau, this attitude is uncaring and negligent. Emotional abuse might occur even when the child, rather than being heartlessly sent off to an indifferent or sadistic nurse, is kept at home with his loving parents. Parents who

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fail to realize that their child’s perspective is different from theirs and that his natural wishes are legitimate are guilty of neglect. Rousseau reminds his readers that it is crucial, “even at the earliest age, to discern the secret meaning of the [child’s] gesture or cry,” because if we do not understand what it signifies, the child will feel that his will is constantly thwarted. He will sense the depth of his weakness and dependence, and out of this helplessness will spring vexation, unmanageability, and rebelliousness – “moral results whose causes are not in nature” but in the frustrating response of the parents (ibid.: 33). As part of his appreciative perception of the child’s subjectivity, Rousseau is certain that children have an “innate sense of justice and injustice”; even small infants, whose tears and screams are received with impatience because mothers and nurses fail to understand them, feel rage and despair at the unjust treatment they receive (ibid.: 32–3). Rather than dismiss children’s tears as caprice, good parents, as well as nurses and tutors, should study the language children use before the acquisition of speech. Although inarticulate, this preverbal language has “tone, stress, and meaning” (ibid.: 32). Rousseau sees Western education as authoritarian and unsympathetic; instead of responding to the child’s real needs, it is antagonistic to them. It is the kind of education that stifles the natural self and nurtures an artificial self dictated by adults. The young child’s memory is burdened by “words he cannot understand and by things that are of no use to him.” His tutor “teaches him everything except self-knowledge.” He thus becomes “crammed with knowledge but empty of sense, feeble alike in mind and body” (ibid.: 16). This is the kind of education that aims to produce a man out of the child; it is a “cruel education which sacrifices the present to an uncertain future, that … begins by making [the child] miserable, in order to prepare him for some far-off happiness which he may never enjoy” (ibid.: 42–3). When moving from theory to practice, through the fictional narrative describing the education of young Emile, Rousseau uses as narrator a character called Jean-Jacques, who is made to embody all the qualities that the author has ascribed to an ideal tutor (or father). As Emile’s tutor, Jean-Jacques knows that in his dealings with the child he should be “a child himself, that he may be the companion of his pupil and win his confidence by sharing his games” (ibid.: 19). He knows that his relationship with the boy should not be authoritative but one based on friendship: Emile and himself “must always live together” and therefore must “love one another” (ibid.: 20). Jean-Jacques should be called “master” rather than “teacher,” “since it is a question of guidance rather than instruction. He must not give precepts, he must let


the scholar find them out for himself” (ibid.: 19). The child should not be commanded and ordered about; the very words “obey and command will be excluded from [Emile’s] vocabulary, still more those of duty and obligation” (ibid.: 53, emphases in the original). As part of the respect he is entitled to, young Emile’s questions must always be given truthful answers. Even a single untruth on the part of the adult might “destroy the results of [the boy’s] education” (ibid.: 177). And yet, when put to the practical test, the theoretical principles of Emile are repeatedly ignored, thwarted, or turned upside down by JeanJacques himself. Although critics have commented on Rousseau’s tendency to contradict himself – in this work as in many others – what has generally been overlooked in discussions of Emile is the considerable incongruity between the professed ideal of the work and the actual relationship between Emile and his tutor.27 What most followers, opponents, and critics respond to when they talk about Emile is, largely, the theoretical foundation rather than the fictional staging of its implementation. The wish to make the child happy at present instead of disciplining his feelings in order to prepare him for adulthood; the idea of treating him as a friend, never telling him a lie, never making him feel inferior; the aim of producing a natural man who would be free of the bourgeois dependence on what other people think – all these noble aspirations for which Rousseau is famous are repeatedly belied by the conduct of Jean-Jacques the tutor toward the boy. To begin with, in order for his natural self to be preserved in its purity, it is decided that Emile should be removed from society and its artificial influences, and live in seclusion – the company of his tutor excepted – until late adolescence. His relationship with Jean-Jacques is therefore his central, if not single, human contact. This circumstance creates in Emile an almost total dependence on his adult companion, much greater than in any conventional child–adult relationship, even one shaped after the authoritative model. Therefore, although in terms of technical skill, physical strength, and resourcefulness the project of making Emile self-reliant can eventually be declared successful, on the emotional and psychological level this is not the case. Rather than allowing the boy, and later on the young man that he becomes, to develop an innerdirected personality, Jean-Jacques creates in him an other-directedness, oriented toward the all-knowing and all-too-influential master. The two chief innovations proposed in Emile are counteracted by the master’s conduct. First, he is shown to be constantly aware of, and working toward, the shaping of the boy’s future character. Secondly, he remains, despite all declarations to the contrary, a figure of authority

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who enjoys his superior knowledge and does not feel any scruples about manipulating the child. His gift for understanding the boy’s point of view is influenced, then, by the instrumental use he is making of it. In that, he does not differ much from the tutor that Locke envisions. However, in the case of Emile the tutor is also guilty of deceit and concealment, because of his pretense of behaving openly. Thus, although Rousseau declares, as cited above, that the very words “obey” and “command” will be excluded from Emile’s vocabulary, Jean-Jacques sees no problem in asserting, just before he undertakes the task of Emile’s education, that the boy “must obey me. That is my first and only condition” (ibid.: 20). Whenever Emile asks him something, Jean-Jacques condescends to respond only if it is “time to reply to his questions” (ibid.: 68), meaning that there are times when Emile is not free to ask questions, times when his queries are ignored. Such arbitrary regulations do not apply well to the loving friendship between master and trainee about which Rousseau has been talking. Through the utter dependence that he creates in his young scholar, Rousseau’s tutor struggles to control the child’s actions and external circumstances, as well as his innermost feelings and desires: Is not this poor child, without knowledge, strength, or wisdom, entirely at your mercy? Are you not master of his whole environment so far as it affects him? Cannot you make of him what you please? His work and play, his pleasure and pain, are they not, unknown to him, under your control? No doubt he ought only to do what he wants, but he ought to want to do nothing but what you want him to do. He should never take a step you have not foreseen, nor utter a word you could not foretell. (ibid.: 84–5) Rousseau is famous for his emphasis on the value of the child’s freedom to follow his own wishes. His entire book is an attack on the traditional infringement of such liberty. And yet, his adult desire to mold the child’s character is just as strong as that of traditional educationalists. Both as a child and as a young man, Emile is indeed free of the chains of conventional society, but he is unknowingly chained to the overpowering will of his master. Here is an example of Rousseau’s proposed method for manipulating a child’s will: in describing the process of arousing Emile’s desire to learn how to read, Jean-Jacques makes arrangements to send the child certain notes of invitation from his usually absent parents, in order to arouse his curiosity. He then takes care to disappear, so that the boy cannot find him and is left helpless in his attempts to make sense


of the notes. Jean-Jacques deliberately returns too late: the boy learns to his regret that he has just missed a rare dinner or a walk with his father, because he could not read the invitation and write back with his reply (ibid.: 81). Following a few occurrences of this kind, Emile indeed becomes eager to learn how to read. His eagerness, however, is the result of manipulation. Jean-Jacques’s conduct – scheming with the parents behind the boy’s back, going into hiding when Emile is looking for him – is a breach of confidence and an exploitation of innocence. This devious course of action, which is recurrent in Jean-Jacques’s interaction with Emile, is all the more strange because of Rousseau’s repeated emphasis on the value of telling the truth. The manipulative methods of his ideal tutor are again exposed in the garden episode (ibid.: 62–3), which recounts how Emile was encouraged to plant beans in a seemingly empty plot of ground, water them, and watch their daily growth. The tutor knows, however, that the plot had not been vacant; and soon after the beanstalks appear the gardener returns after a week’s leave, and angrily tears them down because he had previously planted there seeds of Spanish melons. Emile is grieved and offended, but he also learns a lesson – out of pure experience, and without being crammed with facts and terms that he cannot understand – about the meaning of property (whose plot is it?) and about the complexity of matters concerning moral behavior and justice. Critics have referred to this episode as an illustration of Rousseau’s great skill as an educational thinker. Frances Ferguson claims that it shows that Rousseau’s way of educating his pupil according to the child’s distinct capacity for understanding is superior to Locke’s (Ferguson, 1984: 80–81). Allan Bloom praises Jean-Jacques’s method of teaching the child the meaning of property, in a way so valuable for his moral education; he sees Emile as a whole as an example of a “healing education which returns [Man] to himself” (Bloom, 1978: 145, 135). Alan Richardson refers to Emile’s overall experience as a Rousseauvian “idyll,” and to the tutor as “benevolent.”28 What is overlooked in all these readings is the tutor’s systematic deceit. In the garden scene we have two adults (Jean-Jacques and the gardener) who have schemed against a child, in the belief that it was for his own good. This is precisely the conventional educational approach to which Rousseau is so hostile on the theoretical level.29 Similar scenes – the one in which Jean-Jacques is at work vanquishing the child’s vanity (Rousseau, 1986: 135–6), or the one in which he pretends to have lost his way in the forest in order to make the fearful and hungry child realize the usefulness of a compass (ibid.: 143–4) – involve such offensive humiliation, such sadistic exploitation of the child’s inferiority,

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that it is hard to take no notice of the place that the tutor’s own emotional needs occupy in the relationship. In order to cure Emile of his vanity, JeanJacques is using the child’s own vain impulses against him by making him feel “shame and disgrace” (ibid.: 138). The tutor gains, in the meantime, a rewarding sense of power. The Protestant ethos of shame and guilt, though vociferously rejected, holds its sway over this innovative and revolutionary educational treatise, whose professed goal is to release the child from the inferior and defective position assigned to him by conservative thinkers. Perhaps the substantial gap between philosophy and practice in Rousseau’s text is an indication that the child–adult relationship can never be one based on equality, and can hardly be free of at least some degree of coercion and domination. As the Edgeworths note, the fact that Rousseau’s fictional pupil never suspects his master’s intrigues – and, we may add, never questions his behavior or rebels against his intrusive presence – makes the boy a trusting dupe. This characterization is revealing in terms of the author’s ambiguous concept of the child. The child for him is, despite all declarations to the contrary, of inferior intelligence and weaker will, and no less elastic in the dominant hands of his adult supervisor than is Locke’s child. The case of Emile suggests that an adult, even when aspiring to appreciate the child’s point of view and feel empathy for it, may not be capable of doing so. Few books have had a greater immediate impact on English educational thought than Rousseau’s Emile, and no other treatise on education has ever aroused such powerful and continuing enthusiasm or condemnation (see Evans, 1955: 15–16 and Stewart and McCann, 1967: 23). An English translation of Emile first appeared in the same year as the original French publication, 1762. Two other translations were published in 1763. Further editions, translations, and critical comments came out within the next ten years. The success was immediate. During the late eighteenth century, a growing group of authors, intellectuals, and educationalists challenging evangelical dogma adopted and promoted progressive, liberating ideas of the kind expressed in the theoretical sections of Emile. Although some of these thinkers were enthusiastic about Rousseau’s book while others were partly critical, they all shared a growing dissatisfaction with the conservatism of orthodox religionists, whose ideology now came to be seen as fettering human development. William Godwin commented that “Emile is upon the whole to be regarded as the principal reservoir of philosophical truth as yet existing in the world.”30 Lord Morley, Rousseau’s biographer, described Emile as “the most influential treatise on education that has ever been written” and a work that


“filled parents with a sense of dignity and moment of their task.”31 Emile Legouis tells us that in the 1790s, the young Wordsworth and Coleridge moved in a circle of enthusiastic Rousseauphiles, including Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas Poole (Legouis, 1921: 56, 365–6). Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Erasmus Darwin, and David Williams (a radical deist who was to organize a school on principles derived from Emile) met Rousseau himself (Stewart and McCann, 1967: 31). Evans states that the English translations of Emile were followed by “a spate of pedagogical treatises,” of which the best known were those of the Edgeworths, Thomas Day, and David Williams (Evans, 1955: 17). To these names we may add those of Caroline Southwood Hill, an admired educational theorist of the 1820s and 1830s, whose Notes on Education was strongly influenced by Emile,32 and Ann Taylor, author of Reciprocal Duties of Parents and Children (1818). Taylor’s work presents, in the spirit of Emile, a mother’s attention as superior to that of any nurse’s, even for the youngest infant. Taylor refers to the baby as an epitome of innocence, a “lovely cherub.” According to her principles, the major duties of parents are to create mutual respect between their children and themselves, to preserve familial harmony, and at the same time to be aware of the dangers of selfwill and resist their children’s whims (Taylor, 1818: 1–2, 5–6). A number of educational novels, with Emile as their model, described with admiration the supremacy of natural over artificial education. Stewart and McCann (1967: 24–5) cite among these Henry Brook’s The Fool of Quality (1766), David Williams’s History of Philo and Amelia (1774), Maria Edgeworth’s unfinished Harry and Lucy (1778), a translation of Madame de Genlis’s Adèle et Théodore (1783), and the extremely popular adventure story Sandford and Merton (1783–9) by Thomas Day, the most reprinted children’s book of the eighteenth century (see Wordsworth, 1996: ii). Attacks on mothers who refused to breastfeed were now popular, and appeared not only in child-rearing guides but in many fictional texts as well, accompanied by severe warnings against wet-nursing and its dangers, in the spirit of Rousseau (Kane, 1995: 119). Anthony Trollope, for example, portrayed in his 1858 novel Doctor Thorne the amiable character of a small-town physician, whose application of Rousseau’s principles not only makes him a beloved figure among the aristocratic Gresham children, but actually contributes to the preservation of their lives – lives made precarious (four daughters die in infancy), it is implied, by the mother’s shortcomings: Of course Lady Arabella could not suckle the young heir herself. Ladies Arabella never can. … Nature gives them bosoms for show,

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but not for use. So Lady Arabella had a wet-nurse. At the end of six months the new doctor found that Master Frank was not doing quite so well as he should do; and after a little trouble it was discovered that [the wet-nurse] … was fond of brandy. (Trollope, 1953: 28) Besides his medical accomplishments with the family, the doctor’s entire attitude toward children is derived from Rousseau almost verbatim: [Thorne] had a great theory as to the happiness of children; … [and] argued that the principal duty which a parent owed to a child was to make him happy. Not only was the man to be made happy – the future man, if that might be possible – but the existing boy was to be treated with equal favour. (ibid.: 38). An extraordinary phenomenon that testifies to the sweeping success of Rousseau’s book was actual experimentation with its principles by individual parents. However, those admirers who tried to follow Rousseau’s educational program to the letter were eventually disillusioned. David Williams described in 1789 one child of his acquaintance who had been raised as a noble savage: at the age of 13 the boy slept on the floor, spoke “a jargon he had formed out of the several dialects of the family,” could neither read nor write, and looked like “a little emaciated figure; his countenance betraying marks of premature decay, or depraved passions.” Rousseau himself, said Williams, would have made “some dreadful exclamation” at the sight.33 Richard Lovell Edgeworth attempted to bring up his eldest son Richard (Maria’s elder brother) according to the major principles of Book II of Emile. In his Memoirs the father recounts how between the ages of 3 and 8 the boy led a hardy, open-air life, becoming “bold, free, fearless, generous,” and considered by all as very clever. He even passed the scrutiny of Rousseau himself, with whom he had a long conversation when Edgeworth visited Paris in 1777. However, as the boy grew up, he became increasingly unruly and refused to obey anyone but his father. Eventually, Edgeworth declared the experiment a failure and packed the boy off to boarding school. He felt that the poor results were partly due to his own mistakes, and partly to errors in Rousseau’s theory, about which he thereafter became less enthusiastic.34 Thomas Day, who considered Emile to be “the most important book in the world after the Bible,” made similar experiments (Evans, 1955: 17). Jonathan Wordsworth (1996: iii) relates how Day, who had not had much luck in finding a wife, decided to create one for himself. In 1768 he went down to London, selected two orphan girls (aged 11 and 12), gave


them new pastoral names (Lucretia and Sabrina), and set about bringing them into line with Emile, according to the principles of a natural education. It did not work, and both girls were eventually dismissed. In her Life of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell refers to this incident and notes that the reason for Sabrina’s removal within weeks from the time fixed for her and Day’s wedding was that “she was guilty of the frivolity, while on a visit from home, of wearing thin sleeves” (Gaskell, 1947: 43). Gaskell adds that Patrick Brontë, too, had formed some of his educational ideas from a reading of Rousseau and Day, although his practice “was not half so wild or extraordinary” as that of others (ibid.: 43). Perhaps due to the disappointing results of such experiments, and perhaps because of the growing suspicion of French philosophy following the Revolution, a wider reaction against Rousseau gradually began to gain ground. Eventually, nineteenth-century British education turned its back on Emile, a reaction that was “almost as sudden and powerful as the favourable [early] reception”; and as a result, Rousseau’s doctrines had no effect on public and grammar schools (Evans, 1955: 16). However, there is no doubt that Rousseau’s impact on British nineteenth-century intellectual, cultural, and social life was continuous. His ideas had an immense influence on prominent poets and fiction writers, and, more obliquely, on social reformers, all sharing a great interest in childhood, and attempting to adopt a liberating and empathetic stance toward the child. As far as religionist educationalists were concerned, much of the early response to Emile was already hostile. The great impact of the book in English intellectual circles alarmed orthodox readers who supported traditional Anglican methods. John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement and the religious leader who launched the evangelical revival, described Emile as “the most silly, injudicious thing that a selfconceited infidel wrote.” He advocated as a response a stronger emphasis on religion and a stricter control of children, and reiterated the Calvinist dogma of the innate depravity of the child.35 Wesley, like other British defenders of established educational practice such as Hannah More, John Brown (Vicar of Newcastle upon Tyne and author of Sermons on Various Subjects, 1764), and Vicesimus Knox (headmaster of Tonbridge School and author of Liberal Education, 1781) held a strongly evangelical attitude that rested on the propositions that the child was evil by nature and that education must consist of that which will be useful to the child when he becomes a man.36 Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century evangelical tracts for children focused largely on the heavy price paid for common vices and on what the child must do

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in order to achieve salvation. As Nelson notes, during that period plenty of didactic examples of error and punishment were given to children (Nelson, 1999: 75). This doctrine was associated with a highly conservative stance in social and political matters; besides obedience to parents, it also preached a willing acceptance of one’s lowly position in society (Brown, 1993: 42). This conservative political stance – of which we shall say more in the following chapters – held strong disciplinary, catechetical educational principles. Besides its standard operation in church instruction, during the eighteenth century catechism also became a literary form. It was used either in didactic tracts and poems for children, for the purpose of religious and ideological indoctrination, or in radical and subversive literature, for parodic and politically critical purposes. As a pattern of teaching that instructs the child to repeat answers learned by rote, catechism is based on obedience, leaving no room for subjectivity, individual thinking, doubt, or any deviation from the set formulations. Literary applications of this kind of instruction served to indoctrinate children not just in matters of religion, but in social and political matters as well. Richardson sees catechism as “a hegemonic discourse designed to impart a knowledge always purchased with the loss of power” (1989: 866). The loss of power, needless to say, is on the part of the child, who is simultaneously also denied an acknowledged interiority or subjectivity of her own. Discussing Anna Barbauld’s didactic works for children, Lisa Zunshine makes a similar point by showing how eighteenth-century catechetical discourse aspires to socialize children and inculcate in them the hegemonic ideology. It does not merely teach them obedience to their social superiors and adults in general, but also positions them as functional objects (Zunshine, 2002: 124–6, 130). A good example of catechism’s subduing function appears in Isaac Watts’s mid-seventeenthcentury “Second Catechism: Of the Principles of Religion,” reprinted in the 1820s and widely read to children, where the question “How must you show your love to your neighbour?” is answered: “By honoring and obeying those that are set over me.”37

The narratives of More and Edgeworth Because of the pivotal role of Rousseau’s book, it is safe to argue that all didactic works for parents and children published during the last decades of the eighteenth century respond to Emile, whether directly or indirectly, favorably or with hostility. Two highly influential turn-of-the-century authors of didactic tales for children, Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth,


are positioned in the two extremes of the varied response to Emile. Their works may be read as representative of the two major approaches to children just prior to and during the emergence of Romantic poetry, which had a sweeping influence on the cultural image of childhood. As the writings of More and Edgeworth reveal, contemporary religious and liberal discourses of childhood also had sociopolitical implications concerning the status of children in society. In this respect, but in other senses as well, the assumptions of the Puritan educationalist More and the Rousseauvian educationalist Edgeworth are often not diametrically opposed. Rather than a binary divide between the catechetical/regulative mode on the one hand and the empathetic/dialogic approach on the other, we may find a dialectical blend of ideas in each writer’s conceptualization of the child. Childhood innocence, the newly celebrated ideal of Rousseau’s disciples, is, according to Hannah More, a “fundamental error” (More, 1995: I, 64). In a direct refutation of Rousseau’s doctrine, More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) describes the entire object of education as counteracting the innate depravity of children: Is it not a fundamental error to consider children as innocent beings, whose little weaknesses may perhaps want some correction, rather than as beings who bring into the world a corrupt nature and evil dispositions, which it should be the great end of education to rectify? (ibid.: I, 64) Before we examine More’s Strictures any further, we should look at two of her didactic tales, which exemplify her educational ideology. “The Story of Sinful Sally” and “Betty Brown, the St. Giles’s Orange Girl” were both published in 1796 as part of the monthly Cheap Repository Tracts series, written alternately by several authors (More being the chief of them) between 1795 and 1798. Both stories promote traditional Puritan assumptions about human nature, children’s capacity for evil, and the moral instruction that parents should provide. “The Story of Sinful Sally,” written in verse, opens with a description of an apparently protected childhood. Sally’s early days are happy, spent in gay meadows among innocent little lambkins: “Then I tasted many a Blessing, / Then I had an honest fame; / Father Mother me caressing, / Smil’d, and thought me free from blame” (More, 1996: ll. 17–20). Unlike what we may suppose at this point, this is no song of innocence. Some educational error is already hinted at in these lines. The parents thought that their child was free from blame, but no child is. The tentative

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quality of the verb “thought” implies what is later revealed as fact: they were wrong. Their caresses should have been replaced, or at least accompanied, by strict moral instruction. As a result of their error, Sally, rather than innocent, grows up to become “the Child of Hell” (ibid.: l. 74), a sinner on the road to damnation. What follows after the pastoral yet morally neglected childhood of the first lines is a grim account of the young girl’s fall, her sinful life as a rich man’s mistress, and her dismal end as a wretched drunkard. More’s ideas about parental duties are revealed in her representation of Sally’s parents. Their love, smiles, and affection are given plentifully. For Rousseau, who regards parental indifference as a major vice, this would have been a blessing; but not so for More. The reader is led to understand that the parents’ idealization of their child’s natural moral condition has led them to neglect their obligations. This tale in verse is meant to teach parents, not necessarily children, an important lesson: that instead of lavishing caresses and approval, they must perform their Christian parental duty by actively improving their children’s character and contending with their liability to sin. The tale suggests that affectionate parenting, which perceives one’s children as innocent and free from censure, amounts to moral and emotional neglect, whereas a more active interference in the child’s natural desires is an indication of care. “Betty Brown, the St. Giles’s Orange Girl” is the story of an abandoned and homeless orphan, born “nobody knows where, and bred nobody knows how.” Her earliest memory is that “she used to crawl up out of a night cellar, stroll about the streets, and pick cinders from the scavengers’ carts” (ibid.: 49). After being exploited by an artful and unscrupulous woman who offers her work as a fruit seller and teaches her how to cheat her customers and steal from them, Betty’s encounter with a rich and pious lady offsets the corruption instilled into her by her first employer. She turns into a good Christian, and her reward is that at the end of the story she rises to the position of an independent orange seller, proudly driving her own barrow in the streets of London. She now also attends Sunday school once a week. In this story, More’s characterization of the child is not as strictly opposed to Rousseau’s educational philosophy as we might have expected. The tale reveals certain assumptions about children’s moral nature, and especially the idea of natural goodness. First, the narrator states that Betty’s intuitive honesty and faithfulness to her devious employer were “extraordinary, considering … her utter ignorance of good and evil” (ibid.: 50). In other words, despite More’s assertions about the child’s natural depravity, Betty, a neglected child who has received


no education, is characterized as having a natural bent for goodness. Yet this is “extraordinary”; that is, most street children are not like that.38 Even in Betty’s case, despite her inborn bent for good, the lack of proper instruction and commendable role models quickly turns her into a sinner. This is not very far from Rousseau’s claim that children’s evil propensities are acquired: Betty learns evil ways from her corrupt employer. After being first advised how to cheat her customers, she sets off to work “proud and happy.” The narrator explains that “[p]oor Betty had not a nice conscience, for she had never learnt that grand but simple rule of all moral obligation, ‘Never do that to another which you would not have another do to you’” (ibid.: 52). The assumption here is that one’s moral sensibility does not grow naturally or intuitively. It is not part of one’s interiority but the product of instruction, rules instilled into one by others. Without being properly instructed, there is no chance of a child’s being able to tell right from wrong. However, there may also be an inborn bent for goodness that precedes moral instruction: “Betty had a sort of natural good-nature, which made her unwilling to impose [and cheat], but she had no principle which told her it was a sin” (ibid.: 52–3), and therefore she does impose on and cheat her customers according to her employer’s orders. The story also reveals certain assumptions about the appropriate role of adults toward neglected children like Betty. Adult help is represented in More’s narrative by a rich lady, whose intervention saves Betty from a life of sin. Being struck by the girl’s “honest countenance and civil manner,” indications of her moral potential, the lady questions her about her history and current way of living and decides to help her. However, her philanthropic assistance is not given as free charity; all her gifts are conditional. The rich lady first makes the girl a present of a gown and a hat, “on the easy condition that she should go to church” (ibid.: 56). As we are shown, Betty’s “constant attendance at church, joined to the instructions of the lady” (ibid.: 57) make her recognize her sinfulness and lead to her moral improvement. According to this tale, charity and philanthropy are valuable only as long as they are accompanied by religious education. The same could be said about the function of parental affection as it emerges from “Sinful Sally”: smiles and caresses are not bad in themselves, but, like philanthropy and charity, might be detrimental to the child’s future if not founded on rigid moral principles. More opens and ends her story with a rosy description of society’s treatment of neglected, homeless children such as Betty Brown. In the first paragraph we are told that when Betty was born there was “no

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Charitable Society … as there is now, to pick up poor friendless children in the streets, and put them into a good house, and give them meat, and drink, and lodging, and learning. … Whereas, this now is often the case in London, blessed be God for all his mercies” (ibid.: 49). This is a flagrantly optimistic account: in 1796, the year More is writing this tale, huge numbers of London street children had been abandoned to their fate and were led to stealing, prostitution, or starvation. More’s reference to the evangelical Charitable Society’s activity, besides its disregard of the vast majority of children who could not enjoy the organization’s services, also assumes that the existence of such philanthropic institutions is the best solution possible. Clearly, as the idea of a welfare state was yet a long way off, there is no hint in the text that the state may be accountable for providing shelter, food, and schooling for the nation’s waifs and strays, although this far-off idea was famously upheld by at least one contemporary writer in the 1790s, William Blake, as also by Daniel Defoe in Moll Flanders (1722) before him. Several critics have shown how More’s religious tracts serve to promote conservative ideology not only in educational but also in social and political matters.39 The happy ending of the story, portraying proud little Betty as an independent orange seller, is an endorsement of a social reality in which poor children must struggle in order to survive, and be grateful if they manage to do so. Neither the philanthropic lady nor More’s narrator thinks that more could have been done for Betty. She is offered no schooling, no adoptive family, no home, and she remains a child laborer; though now one endowed with moral instruction and enhanced means of survival. The ideology of extolling obedience as a virtue is revealed here in its wider social implications, as an instrument for upholding the existing inequality and subordination of the lower class. In her treatise Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, which followed in 1799, More articulates her assumptions about the moral character and required education of children explicitly and systematically. She describes the preeducated state of the child – the “natural and unbelieving state” – as a state of guilt, placing the child “under the displeasure of Almighty God” (More, 1995: 264). Those who are “in the flesh” cannot please God, and only those whose hearts have been changed by divine grace are no longer in the flesh, but in the spirit (ibid.: 265). In other words, something should happen to human beings in order to deliver them from their natural, depraved state. Such a change, or deliverance, is achieved through grace, which depends on God’s mercy; but it is also up to the individual to strive to achieve this change, and to be worthy of grace. More refers to this change in terms


of regeneration, or a rebirth (ibid.: 266). Proper Christian instruction is what those who are still in their natural state (children, heathens) should receive in order to allow the change to happen, and it is the parents’ chief duty to give such instruction to their child. What should such an instruction look like? One of the recurrent motifs is the importance of inculcating in children (and perhaps also in parents) the recognition of the children’s inferiority. More states that little girls should be “first taught that important truth, that as needy creatures they want help.” They should understand that they are “offending creatures”; and the act of confession should awaken their sense of “personal humiliation,” exciting their own “peculiar and individual faults” (ibid.: 283). The adult that More’s book is addressing is clearly superior in terms of knowledge, morality, and piety to the ignorant, intuitive, sin-inclined child who needs constant guidance. If parents do not discipline their children and caution them against sin, as Sally’s parents failed to do, they will cause them great harm. More’s rhetoric is stiff, and the instruction is presented in clear-cut, precise terms; using rules, set examples, and general claims about the children’s disposition, she does not talk about emotions, personal experience, or the child’s subjectivity and individual traits. Although More’s orthodox education produces a definition of child neglect contrasted to the one presented by Rousseau and his followers, both camps share a similar interest in the accountability of parents. For both, parental indifference is a great vice. Although they define parental love differently, they nevertheless agree that parents should be aware of their moral obligations and should be advised as to how to treat their children. As observed above, the considerable distance between theory and practice in Emile diminishes its author’s explicit controversy with the Puritan didactic project. However, certain syntheses of ideas occur in the opposite direction as well, as Romantic sensibilities infiltrate into the works of Puritan writers. The Puritan conceptualization of original sin as embodied in the child and the Rousseauvian belief in original innocence are indeed diametrically opposed, yet when dealing with concrete examples and characters, the educational philosophy of both sides becomes far less consistent and rigid. While Rousseau’s depiction of the ideal instructor is far more authoritarian and manipulative than his model of dialogic fraternity allows for, More’s characterization of the little fruit seller in “Betty Brown” as intuitively good and naturally honest is much closer to Rousseau’s assumptions than to More’s own declared belief in the child’s innate depravity.

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The works of Maria Edgeworth demonstrate even further the ideological fusion of the two rival schools and the dialectical negotiation of seemingly opposed ideas within the work of individual authors. Maria Edgeworth and her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, were probably the most prominent followers of Emile among English educational theorists. Their joint book, Practical Education (1798), emphasizes the child’s distinct perspective and the need to acknowledge her mental, emotional, and physical difference from adults. It is in this sense that they are regarded as Rousseau’s disciples. However, I suggest that we regard the Edgeworths as Rousseau’s followers not just in this respect, but also in their inconsistent application of some of his most sacred principles, which we can also observe in the ideological incoherence of Emile itself. Since the greater part of the book was written by the daughter alone (the father merely contributed certain chapters dedicated to the teaching of scientific subjects), in this discussion I shall refer to Maria Edgeworth as the author. Her educational method is based on attention, patience, and a willingness to observe the child’s own ways of seeing and feeling with empathy. The way the book is structured seems to be the product of such a method. Based “entirely upon practice and experience” (Edgeworth and Edgeworth, 1996: v), it is centered on the words and deeds of real children in numerous anecdotes gathered in daily life. The Edgeworth household provided ample resources from which to draw material, because Richard Lovell fathered twenty-two children by his four wives, many of whom were raised by Maria – a shaping experience that influenced her writing. The discourse of Practical Education creates a “dialogic space foregrounding ‘the simple language of childhood’” (Myers, 1999: 236).40 Indeed, one of the main targets of Practical Education is to grant children respect and promote interaction and reciprocity in parent–child relationships. Edgeworth claims that children are often erroneously believed to be saying senseless things, only because they have a lesser ability to find words that can explain their chain of associations. She provides many examples that show how, if only given enough attention and space to explain what they mean, they may be found to possess acute understanding.41 Like Rousseau, Edgeworth resists catechetical instruction and condemns the practice of forcing children to recite by rote facts and ideas that they cannot comprehend. She also objects to the custom of making children sit still, with their heads held up and their feet dangling from chairs that are too high for them. She wishes that children could be encouraged to participate in social intercourse and allowed to express their ideas without fear of ridicule (Edgeworth and Edgeworth, 1996: i, 147; see Robison, 1983: 320).


Echoing Rousseau, Edgeworth argues that even younger children, whose bad temper is taken as mere caprice, do not usually cry without a reason. It takes a lot of patience and intuition to find out why they are crying, but children are entitled to this kind of effort on the part of adults. As part of her empathetic approach, Edgeworth believes that if parents fail to discover what it is that the child wants and see him as merely peevish, if they disregard his distress and try to silence its audible expression, they do him harm: It requires some ingenuity to discover the cause and cure of those long and loud fits of crying, which frequently arise from imaginary apprehensions. A little boy of two years old used to cry violently when he wakened in the middle of the night, and saw a candle in the room. As children are more apt to cry when they waken in the dark, pains were taken to discover the cause of his uneasiness: it was observed that the shadow of the person who was moving about in the room frightened him, and as soon as the cause of his crying was found out, it was easy to pacify him. (Edgeworth and Edgeworth, 1996: i, 240) In a chapter dedicated to obedience, Edgeworth again rejects the catechetical, authoritarian approach and speaks in favor of a liberal stance based on trust and mutual respect. The child’s perspective is again at the center: To determine what degree of obedience it is just to require from children, we must always consider what degree of reason they possess: whenever we can use reason, we should never use force; it is only whilst children are too young to comprehend reason, that we should expect from them implicit submission. … When children begin to reason, they do not act merely from habit; they will not be obedient at this age, unless their understanding is convinced that it is for their advantage to be so. (ibid.: i, 275–6) However, the pragmatism of Edgeworth’s educational system leads her to adopt some of the doctrines that she supposedly rejects. These regulative aspects conflict with her repeated emphasis on empathy. As befits an educational guide oriented toward a fulfillment of the child’s emotional needs, Practical Education attaches much importance to play. Nevertheless, as occurs in Emile, any activity in the child’s life – including play, outside walks, hobbies, or any other spontaneous pastime – is harnessed to achieve

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educational goals. Regardless of the child’s own wishes and present-day emotional needs, Edgeworth, as educator, sees all of her activities, and especially play, as an instrument for teaching through experience. Rather than allowing the child to choose her own leisure activity freely and enjoy it without constraints, an adult superior authority should direct her to be active only in ways that may improve her skills, teach her useful information, and make her industrious. In Edgeworth’s story “The Good French Governess” (Moral Tales, 1801), the only toys recommended for children are miniature gardening tools, a tiny printing press, and kits containing materials for weaving baskets. As Robison argues in her discussion of this story, for Edgeworth a toy is always an educational tool; it is never perceived as a focus of emotions, imagination, and associations (Robison, 1983: 320). Stewart and McCann maintain that Edgeworth took Rousseau toward far more didactic directions than he had intended. Instead of being allowed to develop at their own pace in natural surroundings, as Rousseau proposed, for Edgeworth “children became the object of zealous study, and the teacher more intrusive, directing the children’s attention to specific aspects of the world around them” (Stewart and McCann, 1967: 27). We have already seen that even in Rousseau, despite what he professes, the teacher is quite obtrusive, to put it mildly. In Edgeworth’s work, as in Rousseau’s, there is some unresolved inconsistency between the professed ideal of listening to the child and responding to her needs on the one hand, and, on the other, the adult desire to supervise her conduct, mold her future character, and regulate her leisure hours according to pragmatic principles. An examination of Edgeworth’s didactic fictional stories not merely substantiates such a cautious reading of her educational treatise, but suggests that her empathetic approach operates much better in theory than in practice. We saw that Rousseau’s inconsistencies were to be found in the transition from theory to practice, and a similar discrepancy exists in Edgeworth’s works, too. Although Practical Education is full of living anecdotes, it still contains more theory than practice, because the examples given are selective and fragmentary, intended to validate the author’s guidelines. The tales, on the other hand, although consciously written for a didactic purpose, present a fuller picture of imagined children’s lives, and therefore serve as a testing ground for the educational ideas of the author. Like the fictional part of Emile, where Jean-Jacques and the young boy are given wide textual scope to try the system out, Edgeworth’s stories reveal her difficulty in sticking to her theoretical principles.


Mitzi Myers contends that Edgeworth’s stories refute the critical paradigm inherited from the Romantics, which regards didactic fiction as preachy and one-dimensional. Edgeworth’s moral tales, she argues, are open-ended and complex despite their genre, borrowing conventional narratives and adapting them to imaginative ends (Myers, 1991: 97–8). However, many of Edgeworth’s tales in The Parent’s Assistant (1800) do seem didactically utilitarian, offering the reader an interpretive closure and a useful lesson for life rather than an inviting space for ingenious readings.42 Two of the stories in this collection, “The Orphans” and “The Basket Woman,” describe parentless, neglected children. Compared with More’s, these stories seem to validate the critical claim that Edgeworth’s child characters “more nearly approximate to real living creatures” than the “little automata of much didactic fiction” of her period; and yet, they are all cast in a similar mold (Brown, 1993: 19, 23). The fictional children of these stories resemble adults in their seriousness, rationality, sense of responsibility, and self-reliance. The narrator, though omniscient, hardly recounts events from their point of view or describes their thoughts and feelings; in this respect, the authorial presence in the tales does not manifest the same curiosity about the childlike perspective as the writer of Practical Education demonstrates. As the title of The Parent’s Assistant indicates, the stories have an educational function. The characters are portrayed schematically, being either hopelessly bad or ideally perfect. In “The Orphans,” four children are left destitute after the death of their widowed mother. Mary, the eldest, is 12, and it is now her responsibility to provide for the homeless family, with some occasional help from the younger ones. Neither social institutions (the parish) nor private organizations (a foundling home) are mentioned. No distant relatives or any kind of adoptive family are sought after. This state of affairs reflects a reality in which orphaned children might perish of hunger and cold without any questions asked or accusations made. Neither characters nor narrator expect things to be different. Although the neighbors feel for the children, none offers to take them in, being poor themselves. We should note that even the neighbors’ compassion is not to be taken for granted, but has to be morally justified: “These children were well thought of and pitied, because their mother was known to have been all her life honest and industrious. ‘Sure,’ says one of the neighbours, ‘we can do no less than give a helping hand to the poor orphans, that are so ready to help themselves.’” Thus the neighbors help the children feed their cow and give them some buttermilk and potatoes (Edgeworth, 1897: 8). The mere fact of the children’s parentless, homeless condition in not sufficient to

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arouse their neighbors’ sympathy; it is the knowledge of the deceased mother’s industriousness and the children’s own self-reliance that entitles them to the pity and potatoes of the families next door. Structurally, this kind of conditional fellow feeling, granted to the “deserving poor” exclusively, resembles the qualified and restricted support that the rich lady in Hannah More’s “Betty Brown” gives the destitute child. For the evangelical More, charity should be granted to homeless children only as part of their moral education; for the utilitarian Edgeworth, it should be given only if the child is also willing to work hard. By contemporary standards, in neither case does the child deserve protection per se, just because she is a child; furthermore, in the last decade of the eighteenth century the issue of child labor does not yet seem to pose any social or moral problem, as the representations of this phenomenon by both Edgeworth and More testify. And thus, the penniless orphans are thrown into the street because they cannot pay the rent. Literally homeless, they manage – thanks to Mary’s resourcefulness – to make themselves a provisory home in the ruins of an ancient castle. The attitude of the story, throughout, is one that commends self-reliance; the children’s neglect serves as an opportunity to demonstrate the great worth of diligence and self-denial. Mary spins; Edmund, aged 9, leads cart horses and goes on errands; and even the two little ones, Peggy and Nancy, aged 6 and 7, assist with their puny earnings at the paper mill, where they are occupied in sorting and cutting rags. Their work makes all four children cheerful and proud. Edmund performs his tasks “with so much cheerfulness” and sings “so merrily at his work” (ibid.: 12) that idle children from the vicinity – who have parents to take care of them – begin to envy the lot of the untiring orphans and beg to be given permission to assist in their work. The gratifying aspect of child labor, granting the lower-class child a new sense of agency and rewarding self-reliance, is also central in the conclusion of More’s “Betty Brown.” The idea that child labor was morally valuable, teaching poor children the necessity of industry, self-reliance, and social order, had been succinctly expressed in 1757 by the poet John Dyer. In his poem The Fleece, he gives vent to the pleasure he had felt at seeing children at work in textile factories: The younger hands Ply at the easy work of winding yarn On swiftly circling engines, and their notes Warble together, as a choir of larks: Such joy arises in the mind employed.43


Sheer romanticizing of child labor, even in its milder version in More and Edgeworth’s tales, was no longer often heard in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Nevertheless, many working-class parents opposed the 1870 Education Act, regarding schooling as “a kind of idleness incongruous with the organizing principle of family life” (Lassonde, 1996: 840). They supported the continuation of child labor out of a lingering ethic that work was the best discipline for a child (Rose, 1991: 216). More than a century after the publication of Dyer, Edgeworth, and More’s texts, the 1902 Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on the Employment of School Children recommended regulating, rather than entirely prohibiting, child labor. To work from an early age, the committee argued, was a “benefit,” lower-class schoolchildren’s “vacant hours [being] too long and the inducements to idleness too many.” Besides, the commissioners added, work is good because many children actually “enjoy it.”44 This last hypothesis, it must be emphasized, was not entirely groundless. According to some evidence, marginal as it is, child labor was not always as tormenting and injurious as the larger part of the evidence suggests. From the point of view of the children themselves, going out to work was not necessarily a misfortune: following their parents’ encouragement, many of them felt proud to be employed and earning money, and their new status was seen as a rite of passage. Frequently, it also granted them a privileged status at home (Horn, 1997: 101–2). The commissioners’ reference to the children’s enjoyment of work, even if too rosy when juxtaposed with the mass of contrary evidence, indicates a shift in focus, the child’s own feelings now being considered important. In Edgeworth’s “The Orphans” there is another echo of “Betty Brown,” as two upper-class young ladies decide to help the children. Here, too, the kind of philanthropic interest they exhibit is inseparable from an educational project; in this case, utilitarian tenets substitute for Puritan doctrine. The kind and wealthy Isabella and Caroline supply the children with working materials for their spinning and knitting. The children thus receive assistance, but of kind that does not undermine their selfreliance. They “did not expect that, because the ladies did something for them, they should do everything. They did not grow idle or wasteful” (Edgeworth, 1897: 12, emphasis in the original). The implication is that charity might cause idleness and dependence; children whose rank in society is low should work from an early age so that when they grow up they can become useful and contented working-class adults. Nor is education supplied, so as not to interfere with the future social positioning of the young laborers.

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In Edgeworth’s “The Basket-Woman,” a similar situation is depicted. The major difference, however, is that here the little orphans, two children left perishing with hunger after their mother’s death, are kindly taken in by a poor old woman. This act of kindness is far from likely; in the social environment that this story and “The Orphans” depict, it is more reasonable for orphans to look ahead to homelessness and starvation. Indeed, the little boy and girl “thought themselves very happy when the good old woman first took them into her hut and bid them warm themselves at her small fire, and gave them a crust of mouldy bread to eat” (ibid.: 451). Again, as in the previous story, the generosity of an upper-class donor – a gentleman this time – is offered, but only as a reward for, and conditional on, the children’s industry and self-sacrifice. Again, the money given does not go into the children’s own hands (nor even those of their penniless old benefactress). Instead, it is used for teaching them a trade, basket knitting, so that they may support themselves in the future. Edgeworth’s self-denying orphans, depicted as model children to be imitated by young readers, serve their author – as young Emile does for Rousseau – as a site for projecting adult ideology and disciplining strategies. In both Edgeworth and More’s tales, it is interesting that lower-class child figures are set as icons for readers who are primarily, if not exclusively, middle class. The metaphoric association of childhood with the lower class is a recurrent (though usually implicit) motif in later texts as well, as I discuss in the following chapters. Although as working-class orphans Edgeworth’s characters go though experiences that do not apply to children of other classes, the values that are recommended are meant to concern all children, even those who are well provided for. Besides values such as humility, industry, obedience, and unselfishness, they may also learn from Edgeworth and More’s tales that the existing social order is justified and desirable. In her Preface to The Parent’s Assistant, Edgeworth states that children belonging to different ranks of society have different ideas and should be educated differently, “their ambition [being] to be directed to different objects” (ibid.: 2). Yet, she adds, values such as “justice, truth, and humanity are confined to no particular rank, and should be enforced with equal care and energy upon the minds of young people of every station” (ibid.: 2). Besides the emphasis on the equal humanity of the different classes, which is far from trivial in 1800, the implication as far as the concept of the child is concerned is that humanity, justice, and truth – fundamental moral qualities – are inculcated (“enforced on the minds of young people”) rather than inborn. Here, Edgeworth diverges


from Rousseau’s golden rule about the child’s innate goodness, whose great spontaneous value needs anything but inculcation of moral standards by the adult. Unlike Locke and Rousseau, who talk about upper-class children, More and Edgeworth both depict the lives of working-class children. In their concept of charity and philanthropy, entangled for both with the inculcation of Puritan creed or utilitarian ethics, these two authors preclude any solution that may involve upward social mobility for their child characters. In that they differ from later writers, for whom middleclass intervention is constructed in terms of class transformation of the working-class child. The fact that such a solution, popular in midnineteenth-century fiction, was not yet available to the late-eighteenthcentury literary imagination is an indication of the rapid socioeconomic changes that were to occur during the first half of the coming century. Yet the idea of interclass, blended identities was not yet a simple one even in the representation of child characters in mid-century, as my readings in later chapters suggest. The redemption of the working-class child from her class inferiority through inheritance, adoption, or education, though envisaged by fiction writers such as Charles Dickens and Frances Trollope, is still treated with ambivalence. Despite their considerable ideological difference from More and Edgeworth, these later novelists’ conceptualization of the child’s otherness in terms of both point of view and social class renders their work partially continuous with that of the two earlier didactic writers. The continuities between seemingly diametrically opposed writers pointed out in this chapter largely concern the blend, rather than the strict dichotomy, of catechism and regulation on the one hand, empathy and dialogism on the other; especially if compared to what other accounts that discuss Puritan versus Romantic concepts of childhood often propose. Another aspect shared by the writers discussed here, from Locke and his precursors to More and Edgeworth, is their view of the child as an other. Not only for Puritans and nonreligionist educators who hold catechetical assumptions, but also for the more clearly empathetic writers, who strive (at times) to see things from the child’s point of view, the child’s subjectivity is, at least to some extent, foreign territory. Rousseau’s key question in Emile, “What is a child?,” attests to that; so does Edgeworth’s reference to the “simple language of childhood,” which is indeed a different language that we adults should strive to learn. Rousseau, though seeing the child’s subjectivity as pure and authentic, does not envision the child–adult relationship as one that allows for the latter’s nostalgic retrieval of that authentic

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core of his interiority. This becomes the case in Romantic poetry, especially in Wordsworth’s evocation of the child as the core of one’s inner self. This Romantic paradigm, a natural evolution of Rousseau’s theory of childhood, will ultimately clash with the child’s inevitable otherness.

2 Redeeming or Silencing the Child’s Voice: Blake and Wordsworth

Two of the earliest literary advocates of the child’s perspective as a valuable human and poetic quality, William Blake and William Wordsworth, were strongly influenced by Rousseau in their suggestion that the childlike state of innocence was morally and emotionally superior to the condition of adult experience. They added to that a view of the childlike state as artistically productive. Their chief innovation as writers about childhood lies in their granting the child a first-person literary voice. Both envision the child as capable of significant articulation, which contrasts with the underlying assumption of catechism that the child or infant (coming from the Latin word infans, which means “unable to speak”) has no words of its own. Blake and Wordsworth use the child’s own voice as a rich poetic device and repeatedly denounce catechetical modes of interaction in which the child’s perspective is disregarded. In the work of both poets the child is often injured, but whereas Wordsworth tends to repress the injury, Blake makes it manifest. Using the child as a source of both poetic inspiration and political critique, Blake openly denounces what he sees as institutional and familial oppression. In Wordsworth, on the other hand, the focus is personal and private, retreating from sociopolitical reality into an examination of the child’s interiority, or the child as interiority. Despite the different focus, Blake and Wordsworth share an admiration for what they see as the child’s valuably fresh and distinct subjectivity. However, this chapter again challenges the accepted opinion that the Puritan and Romantic concepts of the child at the turn of the nineteenth century functioned as binary opposites. Instead, my following readings of poems by Blake and Wordsworth uncover residues of the catechetical and regulative approaches, which merge with a dialogic and empathetic construction of child figures. Though denouncing authoritarian, 69

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objectifying modes of treating children, each of the two poets imagines the child inconsistently in this respect. The child’s innocence and simplicity thus intermingle with sophistication and acute political awareness; the emblematic function of the child as the core of one’s authentic self blends with a representation of the child as an uncanny other; and the massive idealization of the childlike state becomes dialectically mixed with a dehumanizing distancing of the child from social interaction. Despite their spirited defense of the child’s precious freedom, both produce an ongoing circulation of objectifying, regulative, and catechetical images and assumptions about children. Although their evocation of these assumptions is sometimes consciously parodic, it is also, inadvertently, ambivalent.

Blake and the child’s simplicity Blake’s poetic staging of the child as vulnerable and oppressed is largely impersonal, charged with protest against socioeconomic, political, and religious systems. His poetry rebels against what he sees as the chains of prejudice and harsh institutions that bind the human spirit. The early poems suggest an association, similar to the one portrayed in Emile, between the general oppression of man in Western civilization and child neglect; not just neglect of the child’s physical needs but also of the child’s distinct perspective. In Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), Blake uses the trope of the child to represent spiritual purity in its most fragile and vulnerable form, as a figure that signifies an innocent humanity trapped in an inhuman world. Images of child abuse and neglect serve to show how initial spiritual purity is systematically corrupted. The function of the child in Blake’s Songs is symbolic and open-ended, and as such does not share the realistic and didactic function of child figures in the works by Rousseau, Edgeworth, and More. Yet, these lateeighteenth-century poems should be placed within the context of the contemporary debate on education, with the Puritan legacy of original sin on one side and the alternatives posed by Locke and Rousseau on the other.1 Using traditionally catechetical works such as Isaac Watts’s widely read Divine Songs for Children (1715) and Anna Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), and reworking their motifs, imagery, and structure, Blake inverts their moral scheme and portrays it as oppressive and antagonistic to the child (Raine, 1972: 265; Richardson, 1989: 866; Kennedy, 1998: 362). In the Songs, the speaking voice that renders the state of affairs from its point of view is no longer that of the all-knowing

Redeeming or Silencing the Child’s Voice

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adults but of “Blake’s imploring children” (Kennedy, 1998: 362) who, unlike the children of catechetical poems, instruct the adults rather than the other way around. As part of their protest against the social oppression of children, Blake’s early poems repeatedly dramatize not only an inversion of the traditional catechism, but, more conspicuously, the sad aftermath of the catechism’s successful implementation. The Songs show how the child’s voice is smothered, silenced, and appropriated by a powerful adult discourse. Some of the poems imply that this very silencing augments the subversive potential of the child’s own words, words that could have been uttered had the child not been successfully catechized, or that the child may utter now as part of a redeeming process that the poems grant him by restoring his ability to speak. Yet, my reading suggests that by placing subversion in the child’s mouth, in an attempt to offset catechism, Blake’s poetic representation of the child, rather than constructing a childlike subjectivity according to these poems’ own parameters, subtly performs its own act of ventriloquism whereby what has been constructed as a child’s allegedly innocent, straightforward, simple voice is again appropriated in order to transmit adult ideas. I apply the term “ventriloquism” here and below to denote something similar to what Samuel Taylor Coleridge accuses Wordsworth of doing. In Biographia Literaria II: 135, he censures Wordsworth’s poetic representation of the plain language of rustic folks as “a species of ventriloquism,” meaning that the language used in the poems is nothing but versions of the poet’s own voice, whose presence dominates the scene. Similar claims appear also in Coleridge’s letters (see Parrish, 1958: 367–74). More particularly connected to the issue of representing a child’s voice are Coleridge’s comments on what he sees as an imposition of the poet’s adult vision on the child in the Immortality Ode (Biographia Literaria II: 140).2 Blake’s declared intention is to liberate and rescue the child’s voice from adult distortion. This intention is best demonstrated by the staging of the child as speaker in many of the early poems, a device that serves Blake – as it would later serve Wordsworth – to arouse empathy for the child’s point of view, no longer taken to be intellectually inferior and morally defective. In order to do that he creates a certain repertoire from the outset, defining the child’s voice in a way that sharply counters the innate-depravity doctrine. “Introduction,” the opening poem of Songs of Innocence, stages the child as the central trope of the entire volume and presents him as both the poet-piper’s muse – assigning the piper his poetic task – and, ultimately, his intended audience (“And I wrote my happy songs / Every child may joy to hear,” ll. 19–20). The child is

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envisioned in a cloud, an immaterial being of the spirit, both motivating the speaker to create and at the same time appearing as a thing created, a figment of the poet’s imagination. This multiple function empowers the child, implying that his presence is of the utmost spiritual importance.3 From the outset of the Songs, Blake founds the repertoire of the childlike voice on simplicity and genuineness of feeling. “Pipe a song about a lamb” (l. 4), the child asks, and besides this and similar plain utterances, his mode of communication is preverbal: first he is “laughing,” and then, having heard the piper’s tune and song, it is said that he “wept with joy to hear” (l. 12). His emotional response is strong and direct; significantly, as soon as he asks the piper to write the song in a book, so that “all may read” it (l. 14), he vanishes from the speaker’s sight (l. 15). His presence is mostly preverbal and exclusively aural. He cannot remain in his ethereal, transparent presence as soon as the speaker turns to written language, which, as the poem implies, involves impurity, multilayered communication, and potential deceit (“And I made a rural pen, / And I stained the water clear” [ll. 17–18]). Unlike the symbolically transcendental significations of the child-inthe-cloud figure of the first poem, the depiction of children in many other poems is historicized, set in an earthly sociopolitical reality. These children are stripped of their hallowed position and described as helpless, neglected, and abused. In “Holy Thursday” (Songs of Experience, ll. 1–4), Blake exclaims: Is this a holy thing to see, In a rich and fruitful land, Babes reduced to misery, Fed with cold and usurous hand? The collective neglect of poor children is condemned here as immoral long before ideas about the accountability of the state for issues of welfare came into vogue. Compared with the absence of any thoughts about national responsibility in Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth’s writings about children during the same decade, Blake’s critique, implying that the “rich and fruitful land” bears some collective moral obligation toward poor children, is clearly innovative. His poem presents hungry children whose “ways are fill’d with thorns,” living in a country of “eternal winter” (ll. 11–12), in order to declare that society as a body is guilty of their neglect. When compared to the child in the cloud, even Blake’s more realistically historicized child figures maintain their simplicity. In diction and state of


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mind they are straightforward and guileless. When Blake abandons the aggregate of suffering children in poems such as “Holy Thursday,” and focuses on individual cases of child neglect (which, though individual, stand for all of society’s collective sins), the accusing childlike voices are emphatically innocent. Significantly, these cases of neglect are often associated with an adult refusal or failure to attend either to the child’s speech or to his or her more implicit emotional needs. “The Little Boy Lost” (Songs of Innocence), for example, dramatizes the failure of a child to be heard. Throughout this eight-line poem we witness how a child’s voice is gradually smothered as nobody is listening to him. The first stanza describes the abandoned child’s agony in the first person. He is desperately calling his father: Father, father, where are you going O do not walk so fast. Speak father, speak to your little boy Or else I shall be lost The second quatrain is rendered in the third person – there is no voice left to the child with which to express his distress, because he has been irremediably neglected. The night was dark no father was there The child was wet with dew. The mire was deep, & the child did weep And away the vapour flew. This poem has often been read allegorically, with the father standing for God and the child for humanity,4 yet it is also read in terms of the literal father–son relationship. Thus, it has been suggested that the father has died and the child keeps calling him because he cannot understand the fact of his death; that there is no actual father there, only vapours that the child mistakes for his father; and, simply, that the father is there and is deserting his son (Adams, 1963: 209–10; Bloom, 1963: 46–7; Hirsch, 1964: 188; Gillham, 1966: 90). Whatever the interpretation, what remains constant in all these readings is that from the child’s point of view the father is there, and abandoning him, whether or not he is already dead or absent to begin with. The poem’s main event is that of a child trying to be heard and failing, and this failure is experienced as desertion. The voice of the child is weak and easily smothered, vulnerable in its unknowingness and defenseless authenticity. “The Little Boy

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Found,” which follows as a sequel, reveals that now the child is not alone. He has not really been lost: God and the boy’s mother have been there all along and they care for him, yet the resolution is not an ideal one. God is only “like his father,” and the parent to whom the child is led back is not the one by whom he has been longing to be heard. About this father we hear nothing further; the separation from him is never repaired. Often unheard by the adults who surround them, other Blakean child characters are sometimes given voice through the poems and are thus empowered poetically, even if they are failed and oppressed in the world that the poems describe. In “A Little Boy Lost” (Songs of Experience), probably the bitterest condemnation of the callous hypocrisy of church morals in the Songs, we are shown how subversive the child’s innocent voice may become. On hearing a sermon on the sinfulness of self-love, an intuitively frank child naïvely asks his father: “how can I love you, / Or any of my brothers more [than I love myself ]?” (ll. 5–6). The zealous priest overhears him, seizes him by the hair, and eventually burns him alive on the altar as a fiend. The sentence carried out by the priest as punishment for the child’s sincerity and simple self-love presents institutional religion as madly fanatical and cruel. Church supervision is ubiquitous and intrusive (the child is overheard talking privately to his father; he is then violently snatched from the family seat). It is destructive to family relations and wields greater power than the parents, who are helpless and do not try to interfere; the execution takes place regardless of their tears. It has even been suggested that they weep for their son’s guilt rather than for his punishment; if so, they become accomplices in the institutional crime committed by the priest (see Gillham, 1966: 88). In any case, whether out of fanaticism or out of weakness, they are deeply neglectful as parents if they allow their son to be executed. The child is presented as morally superior because by contrast to the hypocritical moral codes of the church official, his words to his father are spontaneous, innocent, and reflect authentic feelings. Rather than repeating the maxims taught by the priest, he instinctively rebels against the latter’s authority by responding to his preaching with skepticism. The child’s punishment, prior to the actual destruction by fire, is that he no longer has a voice, at least a voice that is attended to: “the weeping child could not be heard” (l. 17). He has been silenced into nonentity. However, the child’s martyrdom – just like the social victimization of other child figures in the Songs – enhances the subversive effect of his perspective. It is the initial ability to voice his most authentic feelings and reject catechetical authority that gives power to


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the child’s independent point of view; so much power that it becomes unbearable to the representatives of church morals. In “The Chimney Sweeper” (Songs of Innocence), the speaker is a child, but his point of view is vague, and his potential for criticizing the adult world or even voicing his own demands is very limited. This poem, as also its counterpart in Songs of Experience, is often read symbolically, but many details suggest that it is informed by a concrete social reality. As Martin Nurmi argues, although Blake does not really describe the living and working conditions of the sweeps, “he presupposes a knowledge” of these conditions – a knowledge that enables the reader to see the poet’s “indictment of a society that allows children to be subjected to almost unbelievably wretched conditions” (Nurmi, 1966: 15). The speaker’s friend’s name, Tom Dacre, is one of the details that ground the poem in a concrete environment: many foundlings, as well as adult poor, lived in Lady Ann Dacre’s Alms Houses. The name, then, is an indication of the boy’s humble origins and of his status as an unwanted child.5 The speaker recounts a story of incredible neglect: after the death of his mother his father sold him to a sweep, “while yet my tongue, / Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep” (ll. 2–3). The inability to pronounce the word “sweep” properly has a double function in the poem: it indicates the speaker’s tender, almost preverbal age at the time of his being sold, which heightens the pathos, and reminds us of “weep.” Line 3 also shows the limited capacity of the child to make his own words potent and meaningful to other people, to make himself heard and attended to. A similar weakness of articulation prevents the child who speaks now, when a little older, from expressing anger at having been sold; his passive acquiescence continues to the end of the poem. Following a description of the little sweeps’ dismal lives, we are introduced to their innocent dream-vision of deliverance in their afterlife. Unlike critics who believe that Blake respects the child’s dream-vision of a heavenly afterlife without excusing the children’s exploitation, Harold Bloom claims that the children’s naïve faith, articulated via the dream-vision, is presented as associated with their “inability to make a necessary moral judgment.” Their failure to condemn the guilty is therefore an indication that innocence is an inadequate state because of its confining and self-deceiving trust in its abusers (Bloom, 1963: 42–3). To connect this argument to the pattern of catechetical silencing of children, it may be further claimed that childish innocence, though spiritually admirable, must be sacrificed – socially as well as poetically – in order to make room for subversion and condemnation of the guilty. The last line uttered by the speaker is an instance of such poetic sacrifice: “So if all do their duty they need not fear harm” (l. 24), a line that has

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puzzled more than one reader. E. D. Hirsch, for instance, considered it a “jarring line” and the one flaw in the poem, because “the sweep’s vision and his going to Heaven do not depend on his dutifully sweeping chimneys” (Hirsch, 1964: 26). This, however, is exactly the point: these are the false words of the supervising adults, put in a child’s mouth as part of his ongoing exploitation, in order to render him obedient. The ending is therefore ironic: the child is obviously repeating maxims that were taught to him. He has been coerced into abandoning his own perspective and adopting – that is, using and believing in – the adult discourse that defines a poor child’s drudgery as a moral and religious duty, and promises the child “no harm” while unremittingly harming him. Having had his own voice appropriated in order to express the words of his oppressors, the child has been successfully catechized. More specifically, the line may be understood (as Hazard Adams and Martin Nurmi suggest) as the adult sweep’s admonition to the children.6 In this case, the “harm” referred to may be physical pain inflicted by the master sweep to make the children climb; the child’s passive reiteration of the threat as a deep moral truth accentuates his passive surrender to his own exploitation. The irony of the line is further augmented if, as Heather Glen reads it, the word “all” indeed means all: including the master sweep and the upper classes, who have failed to fulfill their own duty toward such unfortunate children.7 To understand the last line as ironic – and it can hardly be read in any other way – is to see the poem itself not just as an outcry against the silencing and usurpation of the child’s voice, but as itself making use of the child’s voice while speaking to the reader over his head. The catechized child’s weakness and limited understanding allow the poet to deliver his own adult subversion, which, although meant to serve the child’s political interest, is at the same time alien to him and remote from his point of view. Although the purpose is to liberate the child, he is turned into a vehicle for transmitting adult ideas; his childlike subjectivity is thus emptied of the distinct value that Blake’s own humanistic construction of innocence ascribes to it. The child’s simple diction, naturalness, candid lack of disguise, and unsophisticated absence of irony or hidden meanings are essential components of the childlike repertoire first constructed by Blake, and followed by many later writers. Yet there are other cases in the Songs in which Blake abandons this characteristic simplicity of the child’s speech. In “The Little Vagabond” (Songs of Experience), the child is again juxtaposed with the religious establishment. However, here we see that the child’s supposedly innocent perspective is not maintained consistently.


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The young speaker passes disrespectful judgment on the church as an unpleasant, cold, unhealthy place. He calls for the free distribution of ale for a fire to be lit there, in order to warm the frozen parishioners. He also appeals for an end to fasting and flogging as part of his church experience. Then, he maintains, “[w]e’d sing and we’d pray, all the live-long day” (l. 7). The speaker’s subjectivity as a neglected child, a vagabond who has no home, no fire, and probably not enough food to sustain him, turns his plea into a naïve yet powerful protest against a religious institution that, though speaking in the name of love and virtue, is deeply uncaring. This child’s voice, however, does not follow the convention established in the other poems. The shrewdly satirical tone, and especially the demand for the supply of free ale as part of church service, sound unexpectedly “adult” and call into question not only the compassion of the religious establishment but also the innocent simplicity of the child himself. Within the spectrum of imagined children’s voices, the adult point of view based on ideological and linguistic sophistication is thus imposed on the childlike, naïve, almost preverbal linguistic capacity. The second “Chimney Sweeper” poem in Songs of Experience, another cry against the social neglect of children, demonstrates this once again. Represented in the third person, the child in this poem is first referred to as a “little black thing,” objectified by the dehumanizing treatment he has received. His parents, he tells the speaker, “think they have done me no injury” (l. 10), whereas in fact they, together with social and religious institutions, have been actively destroying him. Unlike the sweep speaker of the first poem, this one dares condemn his exploitation, but his success in voicing his indignation makes the reader doubt whether this is indeed a child’s voice that speaks: “They think they have done me no injury, / And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King, / Who make up a heaven of our misery” (ll. 10–12). Several commentators have noted that this second sweep seems an unnaturally sophisticated thinker and not a very likely child, especially when compared to his counterpart in Innocence.8 In other words, a discourse protesting against social injustice is put in a child’s mouth so that the voice of the child becomes a vehicle for transmitting adult ideas; his childhood, vulnerable and fragile, is used as a rhetorical device for creating pathos.

Wordsworth and the child’s otherness There is no necessary correlation, it seems, between a political agenda that promotes the defense of children’s rights, and a poetic attempt to

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represent a child’s consistent perspective and voice. In Blake’s poems this voice, even when liberated from institutional, familial, and religious oppression, is stifled and subdued once again through adult irony or sophisticated political critique. Writing at a moment of cultural transition in the attitude to children, Blake cannot yet construct a consistent poetic representation of child subjectivity. A similar difficulty in granting the poetic image of the child a distinct perspective may be observed in Wordsworth’s more conscious attempt to do so. For both poets, much of the inconsistency has to do with the question of the adult writer’s (in)ability to access, reconstruct, or imagine the child’s subjectivity, even when the child is constructed as the poet’s younger self. Wordsworth’s ambivalence regarding the question of the child’s sameness or otherness, although mostly repressed, is paramount. The centrality of childhood in Wordsworth’s poetry is unquestionable. His notions of the stages of mental development, of the purity and innate goodness of the child, of the great value of a natural environment in early years, of natural versus artificial selves, are all derived from ideas expressed in Emile, although Wordsworth does not acknowledge this debt explicitly (see Sewall, 1973: 157–65). We know, however, that in the 1790s the young Wordsworth and Coleridge moved in a circle of enthusiastic Rousseauphiles (Legouis, 1921: 56, 365–6). James Chandler sees Rousseau as a formative influence on the original Prelude of 1799, and contends that the book as a whole was conceived as a reply to Emile: in its initial form Wordsworth wanted it to be, like Emile, a five-book, quasi-philosophical work that would cover the stages of a child’s natural education from infancy to early manhood (Chandler, 1984: 95). However, despite the conceptual affinity, Wordsworth’s resistance to Rousseau has also been acknowledged. Chandler himself maintains that Rousseau, who has exerted such influence on the formation of The Prelude, is the main target of Wordsworth’s vehement attack on the educationalists in Book V of the 1805 Prelude. Resistance is also shown in Wordsworth’s attitude to children’s play and pastimes as “memorable solely for themselves,” a view contrasted with that of pragmatist Rousseauvians, who, following Emile, emphasize the strategic usefulness of games and other childlike activities for education (Robison, 1983: 320). A major difference between Emile and The Prelude is that in the former the author fictionalizes himself as the adult, whereas in the latter the poet is identified with the child. Significantly, the child of The Prelude has no tutor. Unlike the young Emile, who is separated from society but is continually accompanied and supervised by an adult, and unlike the exploited children of Blake’s poetic world, the Wordsworthian child


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is imagined as roaming alone in nature. Nature serves as his guide, providing him not only with mental, emotional, and aesthetic sustenance, but with moral instruction as well. It is nature that leads the child to true standards of judgment, and it is the voices and spectacles of the natural scene that scold him when he deserves to be scolded. When he steals a boat, it is the “grim Shape” of a black peak that towers up before him, and “with purpose of its own / And measured motion, like a living Thing” strides after him with mute reproach (Prelude I, 381–5). It is nature that from the child’s “first dawn / Of Childhood” has intertwined for him the “[p]assions that build up our human Soul / … with high objects, with enduring things, / With life and nature, purifying thus / The elements of feeling and of thought” (Prelude I, 405–11). However, nature, although repeatedly personified, cannot be read as analogous to a living tutor, since it is necessarily a projection of the child’s psyche. The child’s mind does not merely absorb the sights and sounds of nature, but also – being “creator and receiver both” (Prelude II, 259) – half creates what it receives. Nature as guide is therefore not distinguished from the child in the way a flesh-and-blood instructor is. Thus, in The Prelude there is no “other” with whom the child has to contend besides the ones he imagines, no adult figures to watch him, instruct him, misuse him, or inquire into his interiority. The Prelude is innovative in its consistent attempt to render the child’s mind from the inside, while exploring its distinctiveness. This can be best achieved when no objectifying adults are around. In this respect, the representation of the child here is quite different from what Edgeworth does in her tales, which is to portray children as little rational, practical adults, with a narrator continually observing them from the outside. Wordsworth also differs here from Blake, who unlike Edgeworth allows his child figures to speak in the first person, but makes their voices subdued, silenced, or utilized to express adult ideas. Rather than being the vehicle of regulative adult discourses, or of the poet’s liberating one, the subjectivity of the child in The Prelude is given full expression and a distinguished status. No longer a mistreated and misunderstood other, the child comes to signify the core of the poet’s early self as minutely remembered and reconstructed. Yet, even for Wordsworth the child’s mind – presented as readily accessible through memory – cannot escape adult mediation. The poet’s own poetic self, the present-day speaker, filters all childhood memories through his retrospective gaze and mature yearnings, regrets, and analyses. Wordsworth’s most frequently quoted statement about childhood, “The Child is father of the Man,” has been understood as an affirmation

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of the continuity between the child’s mind and that of the adult.9 One’s own childhood is the source of everything that is valuable, and the ability to preserve the child’s outlook in maturity is the chief source of existential meaning and emotional receptivity. The adult self is seen as constructed on the foundations of the original, authentic self of childhood, whose added “unnatural” adult components can, and should, be “shaken off” (Prelude I, 20). And yet, Wordsworth’s poetic staging of the child repeatedly dramatizes the unattainability and otherness of the child’s perspective for the adult poet, or, for that matter, any adult. Anxiety about the child’s difference from the adult leads Wordsworth time after time to affirm their sameness, and at the same time to stage the child as distinct. Judith Plotz discusses the way in which Wordsworth’s idealization of the child isolates, reifies, and objectifies this figure, distancing it from the realm of human, historicized interconnectedness (Plotz, 2001: 24, 39). Frances Ferguson similarly points out the problem caused by the special status and respect given to children by the Romantics, who established a way of singling children out and separating them off from other people (Ferguson, 2003: 215). The idealization of childhood was also, inevitably, its othering. This paradox becomes further complicated if we talk not only of the Romantic idealization of children, but of the Wordsworthian idea that the child represents one’s authentic self. According to this idea, derived from Rousseau, within each adult interiority there is an acquired artificial component, the social self. To present it as artificial is to make this part “other,” alien to one’s real interiority. What gives adults their true core is, supposedly, the child within (the natural self ). The paradox is that this natural self, embodied in the child, is repeatedly othered by the adult Wordsworthian speaker. The adult’s narcissistic relation to the constructed child within denies this child a recognized position as a subject that is poetically accessible, and leads to a kind of othering that serves to relegate the child from the position of an equally human being, or (to use a term more pertinent to poetic constructs) an equally valuable focalizer.10 The Wordsworthian child thus comes to serve the needs of the speaker-poet. Although these needs are different from those of the politicized Blakean speaker examined above, they are – again – adult ones. Both Wordsworth and Blake’s construction of the child is subservient to an adult vision, either of society, as in Blake, or of interiority, as in Wordsworth. This relegating othering of the child occurs in two types of poems. In the first, autobiographical type, which I term self-oriented, the child’s voice is filtered through that of the adult in what is presented as an act of remembering. Although the child merges with the autobiographical self


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of the adult speaker, the fact that Wordsworth does not render the young perspective via a child’s voice serves to make that remembered/imagined child quite elusive. In the second type of poems, which I see as otheroriented, the child is depicted as separate from an adult speaker; its presence is clearly distinct and is continually juxtaposed with and presented through the eyes of the adult, who accentuates the child’s status as an incomprehensible, uncanny other. Self-oriented, autobiographical poems, of which The Prelude is a prominent example, are rendered either in the first person or in free indirect discourse; that is, with a child described in the third person but serving as focalizer, which is almost equivalent to first-person representation. This is the case in Book I of The Excursion or in the “Boy of Winander” section (Prelude V). These poems filter the child’s voice through that of the adult, so that the two consciousnesses are blended together. That the Wordsworthian speaker faces repeated difficulty in capturing his own childhood self and relating to it as his own is demonstrated, for example, by the textual history of the “Boy of Winander.” The use of first-person pronouns in the 1799 draft and their rewriting by 1805 in the third person reveal how intertwined the young and adult perspectives are. The boy of the final version dies, and thus his severance from the adult speaker becomes pronounced: This boy was taken from his mates, and died In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old. Pre-eminent in beauty is the vale Where he was born and bred: the churchyard hangs Upon a slope above the village-school; And, through that church-yard when my way has led On summer-evenings, I believe, that there A long half-hour together I have stood Mute – looking at the grave in which he lies! (ll. 389–97) Yet, in the first-person version of 1799 the boy still represents the poet’s own self and forms part of the autobiographical sequence. That which is presented as an autobiographical child in one version is dead and buried (that is, distanced and inaccessible) in another. However, the ambiguity about the boy’s status as self or other is already subtly present even in the 1799 draft, with its peculiar shift from third to first person: And through his fingers ... [he would] Blow mimic hootings to the silent owls

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And bid them answer him. And they would shout ... Responsive to my call. (emphasis added) From this point the draft continues in the first person, turning it into a scene of recollection. In the later version, only the memory of the child (whose actual presence is replaced by his grave) lingers; his own subjectivity becomes even more inaccessible, remote, and enigmatic. This difficulty in recapturing the interiority of the child exposes what would seem obvious if not for Wordsworth’s massive concealment of the fact: the child, even when regained as an autobiographically remembered subject rather than purely invented, is always the product of artistic creation, and his allegedly real origin is persistently elusive. The doubleness of the speaking voice in Wordsworth is embedded in the poetic perspective of the child, which can never be entirely childlike and is always referred to as already lost. Although Wordsworth places so much importance on the invaluable uniqueness, sensitivity, creativity, and innate wisdom of the child, his very attempt to render the inner workings of the child’s mind cannot be free of adult consciousness and present-day yearnings, regrets, and reflections. In the other-oriented poems, Wordsworth presents a child who is distinct from the adult speaker, and the two are juxtaposed. This juxtaposition serves to make the child appear as a strange and exotic other. Again, we can sense here the difficulty of presenting a “pure” child; that is, a child who has not been shaped by adult gazes, intervention, or projection. The child – often female – is confronted by a male adult speaker in a way that makes it impossible to determine which of the two serves as the poet’s spokesperson. The child is idealized, yet her otherness is repulsive or menacing; the child is perceived as delightfully exotic, but is at the same time dehumanized. The speaker, on the other hand, is a familiarly realistic figure; yet the reader does not necessarily identify with him, since he is shown to be narrow-minded and too conventional. Again, as in the autobiographical constructions of the internal child in the self-oriented poems, the poet’s voice seems to be divided between the perspectives of the child and the adult. “We Are Seven” (1798), for example, depicts such an encounter between a young girl and an adult speaker. The influence of the catechetical method on the structure of the dialog in this poem has been acknowledged; critics differ only in the degree of parody and subversion that they attribute to Wordsworth’s employment of the form. Clearly, in his authoritarian and repetitive manner of holding a conversation, the adult questioning


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the little girl resembles the stock Puritan interrogator. The girl, on her part, keeps giving him the wrong answers. Once again, the poem dramatizes the unbridgeable distance between the child’s perspective and the adult outlook. The man and the child are sharply dichotomous. The adult is stereotypically masculine: rational, objective, authoritative, sticking to hard facts, as well as obtuse, obsessive, and patronizing. The child is typically female: delicate, warm-hearted, imaginative, strange, beautiful, and sticking to her internal, subjective truth. The child is an other, both attractive and repelling to the adult speaker, who admires her wild beauty yet recoils at what he sees as her imbecility. For him she is an uncanny creature, because he cannot enter into her point of view. Yet the reader – at least some readers – can. For them, the child’s peculiar logic, which makes her count her two dead siblings among her living ones, makes sense in its resistance to the separation and finality of death; her intuitive refusal to allow her siblings to be eliminated is a token of her emotional self-confidence in the face of adverse circumstances. The poetic dialogue suggests that the man is her inferior in his failure to understand that she thinks differently, or that it is at all possible to think differently. He is also disadvantaged due to his insensitivity, shown in his crude harping on the dismal facts (“But they are dead; those two are dead!”; l. 65). The poem’s manipulation of the catechetical mode contributes to its being read as a critique of adult authoritarianism, exposed here as unsympathetic to the child’s perspective. By making the girl’s answers persistently different from those that the nagging stranger expects to hear, Wordsworth inverts the basic principle of the educational doctrine he is parodying. Several critics have claimed that chief among the catechetical writers who influenced Wordsworth was Isaac Watts, whose Divine Songs for Children Wordsworth both paid homage to and mocked in Lyrical Ballads.11 And yet, despite the unmistakable parody, there are readers of “We Are Seven” who think that Wordsworth identifies with the man here rather than with the child, or at least that he is implicated in both. Mary Jacobus, who sees the poem as “undermin[ing] the complacent and bullying morality offered to eighteenth-century children by those who wanted to improve them,” claims, at the same time, that the poem is a joke at Wordsworth’s own expense ( Jacobus, 1976: 101). Sewall implies that in this poem adult comprehension is presented as superior to the limited understanding of the child, and argues that Wordsworth’s view that children are incapable of comprehending abstractions is the reason the girl “shows no ability whatsoever to comprehend the concept of death” (Sewall, 1973: 159). James McGavran, too, claims that

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Wordsworth allows the girl to be interpreted by her interrogator, or, in other words, that he shares the speaker’s interpretation of the girl, “not as innocent and spiritual but as stupid” (McGavran, 1991a: 57). McGavran concludes that the reader has to resolve how to see the girl, because both her viewpoint and the man’s remain unchanged (ibid.: 64). Offering no resolute closure, this conversation between man and child, although exposing the inability of the former to understand child subjectivity, preserves the position of the child as objectified by the adult gaze. The speaker fixes the girl in the status of an enigmatic other who is to be interrogated and wondered at, and whose mental capacities are to be questioned. It is reasonable to assume that Wordsworth identifies with the girl far more than he does with the man (although there is no critical consensus on the matter), yet the structure of the relationship suggests that, sympathetic to the child as the poet may be, he is no less puzzled by the child’s otherness than is his discomfited speaker. Although its tone is different, “Lucy Gray, Or, Solitude” (1800) resembles “We Are Seven” in its portrayal of a young girl as the focus of adult attention. Lucy Gray never talks to the speaker or sees him, so that in this case the encounter is one-sided. Again, the child’s otherness is accentuated, and again, her distinctive feature is her ability to transcend death. But whereas in “We Are Seven” the adult speaker resents the girl’s denial of the finality and separation signified by death and regards it as a logical impasse, here the speaker, representing a wide adult community, admires this ability in the child. The speaker describes Lucy Gray as a mysterious, wild, and delightful child. Living in “the wild” (l. 2) on “a wide moor” (l. 6), she is “[t]he sweetest thing that ever grew / Beside a human door” (ll. 7–8). Charmingly free and natural, she is a “solitary child” (l. 4), removed from human contact – “No mate, no comrade Lucy knew” (l. 5) – spending her time with hares and fawns. Her solitude is described as a great blessing, because it is her remoteness from human society that preserves her in a state of perfect innocence and glee. The poem is usually read as an evocation of the Romantic ideal of a child’s freedom in nature so typical of Wordsworth. It is taken to reflect the adult speaker’s yearning to escape from the chains of civilization and human society and arrive at a blessed state of solitude in nature. For example, Pamela Woof reads Lucy Gray’s life and death in nature as an indication that she is a part of the natural world: “Lucy is that precious inner part of Wordsworth himself, that first freedom to live fully in nature, that he, as we, must lose.”12 Like the poem’s speaker, however, Woof ignores the realistic aspect of Lucy Gray’s character. It is precisely this aspect that becomes


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prominent in the middle, narrative section of the poem and complicates the girl’s allegedly blissful condition of childlike freedom. In stanza 4, following an idyllic description of the girl’s free and solitary existence, the reader learns, unexpectedly, that Lucy does have some connection to the rest of humanity. She has a father and a mother, and her intercourse with them is surprisingly realistic. Her errand – to take a lantern to town in order to light her mother’s way back home when a storm is approaching – ends in the girl’s own drowning on her way to town. Pastoral and symbolic as Lucy’s free-roaming figure emerges from the first three stanzas, the middle section of the poem belies such a reading. As soon as the text turns from symbolic lyric to semirealistic narrative, a much more earthly and material Lucy appears, and the dreamy atmosphere of the child’s solitude in the opening stanzas becomes, retrospectively, far from perfect. The incongruity between the symbolic, lyrical opening (and ending) of the poem and its surprisingly realistic middle section has been noted by critics, usually to be condemned as anticlimactic.13 However, this incongruity is valuable, because it serves to expose the complexity of Wordsworth’s apparently unequivocal idealization of childlike freedom, and to reveal a suppressed anxiety that surrounds the trope of the solitary child. As long as Lucy’s humanity is ignored, and she is read as an emblem of wild freedom in nature or as some flower, fawn, or hare, the ideological ambivalence of the poem remains hidden. Lucy’s death by drowning while running errands for her parents implies that she is unprotected, allowed as she is to roam alone in nature – a setting that is not always as benign and sweet as the first lines suggest. The next stanzas are devoted to an elaborate description of the anxious parents looking for their child all night and morning; it is implied that besides their concern, they also feel guilty.14 The adult speaker, however, prefers to romanticize Lucy’s fate, and does not dwell on the darker aspects of her story. This does not mean that there are none. The last two stanzas echo the first ones in their lyrical, dreamy tone: Yet some maintain that to this day She is a living child; That you may see sweet Lucy Gray Upon the lonesome wild. O’er rough and smooth she trips along, And never looks behind;

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And sings a solitary song That whistles in the wind. (ll. 57–64) Thus, the speaker, accompanied by the larger community of adults (those “some” who “maintain”), turns Lucy Gray back again from the realistic figure of a child drowned in the snow into the mystical, almost mythic heroine of a folktale. The accumulated voices of the adults do not say anything about the circumstances of the accident. Instead, they envision Lucy as an immortal being (and thus cancel the parents’ possible guilt, because the girl is not really dead) and as one who “never looks behind” (l. 62). Lucy’s ghost never looks back, never complains that she was not protected. A similar dynamic can now be seen as we take another look at the opening stanzas. The adult gaze that mediates the girl for us presents her as one of nature’s creatures, ideally happy in her solitary freedom. It never suggests that there is anything wrong with the fact that she has grown up virtually dehumanized, the sweetest “thing” that ever grew “beside a human door,” an image suggesting that the child is almost homeless, located next to the door of her own family house. The girl’s last name, too – that of a dull color that signifies old age – provides another hint that the overflowing glee of her childhood is to be questioned.15 Looking at the two poems together, we can see that their speakers present two contrary modes of treating children: regulative in “We Are Seven,” liberating in “Lucy Gray.” Yet, the limitations of the apparent contrast illustrate once again the blend between catechetical approaches and the Romantic, admiring, allegedly dialogic mode. Neither of the speakers exhibits much empathy toward the girl; neither attempts to understand her perspective and enter her point of view. In “We Are Seven,” an authoritarian speaker, satirized by the poet, displays obtuseness to the child’s alternative way of thinking. In “Lucy Gray,” an idealistic speaker, who can largely be identified with the poet, romanticizes the child as a happily free, natural, solitary being. At bottom, the regulative and liberating modes do not emerge from these texts as opposed, even though one speaker disparages the child’s mind while the other extols her difference. In both poems the adult disregard of the child’s point of view, and the filters through which she is constructed, put into question her equally human status. Furthermore, a closer look at “Lucy Gray” shows us that the trope of the child’s freedom in nature, one of Wordsworth’s most celebrated ideals, carries ambiguous undertones. The poet clearly sets out to idealize this solitary freedom, but then – intentionally or not – the snowstorm,


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the little child’s lonely mission, the parents’ inability to protect her, and finally the death by drowning present the existence of the child alone in nature as no longer happy, but exposed, vulnerable, and neglected. Can this ambiguity be taken as a principle that holds for the representation of solitary childhood freedom in Wordsworth in general? In order to examine this question, we should take another look at the poet’s greatest reconstruction of his own childhood, The Prelude. In Book V of The Prelude, Wordsworth addresses directly the issue of regulative and oppressive educational systems versus ones granting freedom. He reviles contemporary approaches to children and juxtaposes them with his own idyllic vision (and recollections) of a childhood spent alone in nature. His diatribe against artificial educational systems and didactic literature for children portrays these as a “pest” that dries up the imagination (l. 228). There is a controversy as to the particular theorist or theorists whom Wordsworth is attacking. In contrast to the commonly held assumption that his major poetry is ideologically Rousseauvian, Joel Morkan, James Chandler, and William Ulmer have all argued that Rousseau is the chief target of the poet’s hostility.16 Despite his affinity to Rousseau, Wordsworth did not support the philosopher’s prescribed method for raising children, which, as a system, was artificial and calculated, even though it called for a childhood spent in nature and for preserving the child’s intuitive sincerity. Morkan explains Wordsworth’s resistance to Emile by reference to Rousseau’s limitations and calculations, camouflaged “beneath a surface appearance of freedom” (Morkan, 1972: 251). This, he nevertheless notes, does not necessarily make Rousseau the chief target of the attack; the satiric portrait of the well-educated boy in Book V could just as well be the product of either Locke’s, Kant’s, Wedgwood’s, or Edgeworth’s systems. Yet, whoever the attacked educationalist may be, what becomes quite clear in Book V is that Wordsworth is inimical to any attempt to limit the child’s mental and physical freedom.17 The satiric portrait of the paragon child produced by contemporary educational systems stands out against a lyrical description of the real paragon, which immediately follows. The Boy of Winander epitomizes the ideal of Wordsworth’s own reconstructed childhood. Like Lucy Gray, the boy is a child in and of nature, and his preverbal vocal communication with nature replaces any contact he might wish to have with the human world. Into this idealized picture, however, enter aspects of rejection and neglect. There comes a point when the boy’s call to the owls is no longer answered: he is deserted, left alone to make his solitary cries in vain. What used to be desirable freedom now

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turns into forsakenness. Like the drowned Lucy, the Boy of Winander dies prematurely, perhaps because no one hears him or cares about him. Poetically, however, he dies because Wordsworth cannot do anything with him on any level other than that of the frozen symbolic image. Within a poem of development such as The Prelude, this ideal of a child’s isolation in nature must be left behind. In order for the Wordsworthian child to grow up into a man, he must turn from a static Romantic image into a narrated, biographical child. A narrated child, unlike the fixed and detached image of the Romantic child, must be parented; at least, he must wish to be parented (or otherwise cared for and assisted by human agents other than himself). Within a narrative sequence, a child alone in nature is no longer an image of bliss and joy, as it can be in a lyrically mythologized image encoded by an idealizing adult gaze. This gaze, already encountered in “Lucy Gray,” cannot be maintained consistently and unambiguously in a narrative poem. The boy must die in order to preserve the purity of the image while allowing the narrative sequence to move forward. A similar ambiguity hovers over other descriptions of the poet-aschild in this autobiographical poem. Wordsworth tends to represent his early days as ideal. In the first two books he cultivates a story of selfhood as well as an ideology of childhood that are both based on the idea that early freedom and seclusion in an untamed natural environment are preconditions for the growth of a rich, healthy interiority. It is therefore usually believed that both autobiographically and poetically, Wordsworth consistently idealizes the child’s freedom.18 However, this assumption overlooks textual signs that denote ambivalence regarding the solitary child’s state. Wordsworth’s ambiguity is revealed, in the first place, in the difficulty of describing freedom as boundless. Even while visualizing himself as an untamed, wild child, the poet needs to domesticate his own image. In The Prelude, Book I, the speaker fondly pronounces his childhood a wild one; he pictures himself a child standing “alone”: as if I had been born On Indian plains, and from my Mother’s hut Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport, A naked Savage, in the thunder shower. (ll. 296–300) Rather than the solitary savage of nature, removed from any social network, he imagines himself emerging from his mother’s hut like any civilized child who goes outside to play. Even in fantasy, his poetic childhood


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self must have a safe home and a mother nearby in order to rejoice in his unbounded freedom. In itself, this need for parental protection and a source of connectedness does not necessarily undermine the positive value of freedom. It merely shows that freedom, rather than being a total renunciation of human relationships, has its limits. However, when the child’s need to maintain such relationships and receive parental care is frustrated, the poetic celebration of childhood freedom, so central to The Prelude, becomes a more complex and far less ideal account. In Book II of The Prelude, Wordsworth describes the initial harmony and unity between a baby and his mother: Blest the infant Babe, … Nursed in his Mother’s arms, who sinks to sleep Rocked on his Mother’s breast; who, when his soul Claims manifest kindred with a human soul Drinks in the feelings of his mother’s eye! … No outcast he, bewildered and depressed; Along his infant veins are interfused The gravitation and the filial bond Of nature that connect him with the world. (ll. 232–45) Into the idyllic vision of protection, love, and connectedness are introduced – by way of negation – the seeds of separation, exile, and solitude. The babe is no outcast; not yet, at least. This future is already imprinted in the maternal embrace. Separated he will be; but the speaker – although he has just problematized the image of initial unity between mother and child – is anxious to convince us (or himself ) that the child will not feel dejected or uprooted as a result of this imminent separation, because the mother’s early love has sustained him for life. A similar denial of potential grief occurs when the speaker turns to talk directly about himself. He alludes to a painful rupture that he suffered when separated from his mother: For now a trouble came into my mind From unknown causes. I was left alone, Seeking the visible world, nor knowing why. The props of my affections were removed. (ll. 277–80) Whether this refers to the death of the poet’s mother when he was 8 or to an earlier severance from her is unclear, but what the passage evidently

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recounts is a painful experience of desertion. And yet it leads the speaker to affirm, of all things, how happy childhood is: Many are our Joys In youth, but Oh! what happiness to live When every hour brings palpable access Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight, And sorrow is not there. (ll. 285–9) The joy described originates in the ability to observe the minutest details of the world’s beauty without the “props”; that is, without the maternal presence that the blessed babe had enjoyed. It is a revelation of a newly acquired independence, which yields great satisfaction. Yet the rapid transition from the traumatic rupture to the all-embracing rapture of the child’s solitude, the inexplicable shift from the “trouble” of line 277 to the sweeping declaration of line 289 about the utter absence of any sorrow from any child’s experience – “And sorrow is not there” – attests to a massive effort to smooth over the painful aspects of the ideal childhood that the poet is constructing, and to downplay the price paid by the child for his new solitude and freedom. If any sad sense of desertion and loneliness had been involved in the original experience, it was carefully masked.19 The blessed babe of Book II resembles another description, that of the poet’s own infancy in Book I. The passage (originally the opening lines of the 1799 Prelude) reads: Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved To blend his murmurs with my Nurse’s song; And, from his alder shades and rocky falls, And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice That flowed along my dreams? For this didst Thou, O Derwent! winding among grassy holms Where I was looking on, a Babe in arms, Make ceaseless music, that composed my thoughts To more than infant softness[?] (ll. 269–78) Like the blessed babe of Book II, Wordsworth’s autobiographical infant self is imbued with the voices and sights of nature and granted a human embrace; together, they nourish his soul. Unlike the blessed babe, however, he has to settle for surrogate parents: the river and the nurse. Why – if the initial bond with the mother is so fundamental for the


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future wellbeing of the blessed babe – is the autobiographical “babe in arms” of Book I imagined as having no real mother to hold him? Why, if he could have described himself nursed in his mother’s arms, sinking to sleep rocked on his mother’s breast, drinking in the feelings of his mother’s eye, did he put his poetic infant self in the arms of a nurse? In a scene meant to establish a blessed beginning for the poet’s growth, especially if reread with Book II in mind, the mother’s absence suggests a less than blessed beginning. Her absence is even more marked in the 1805 version: there the speaker describes the river’s route, which at a certain point passed, as he puts it, “Behind my father’s house” (l. 288). In what seems like a projection of the adult (motherless) perspective on these early recollections, Wordsworth does not allude to his first home as his own, nor even as belonging to both his parents, but as being his father’s only. The mother is not there, and her absence brings about the child’s estrangement from his own birthplace. Thus, some air of homelessness and abandonment invades this scene of ideal early childhood, making of the “babe in arms,” lulled to sleep by his nurse, something of an outcast. The maternal absence is central to The Prelude. As a presence, the mother is invoked only once in the poem, in the idealizing “parent hen” description (Book V). This passage immediately leads to the brief account of her death, formulated as an accusation: “She left us destitute, and, as we might, / Trooping together” (ll. 259–60). This desertion, like others hinted at, casts a shade on the vision of the child as a happily solitary being. A solitary childhood may be idealized if viewed as growing out of a liberating parental approach, but if it is the result of parental death, desertion, or carelessness (as in “Lucy Gray”), its great value becomes doubtful. Parental absence would have been made more explicit in The Prelude and elsewhere had the child’s point of view been more clearly represented. However, in The Prelude – as in “Lucy Gray” – it is not the child who serves as focalizer but rather the idealizing adult, who mediates the child to us and deletes the sorrows involved in childlike freedom. James Heffernan claims that the entire Prelude should be read in the light of Wordsworth’s relation to his mother, and several other critics have also regarded her death as the underlying trauma of the poet’s life and a key to his poems.20 Although the portrayal of the mother in Book V shows her as loving and protective, and also as allowing her children freedom, Wordsworth’s oblique yet repeated representation of her as absent suggests a deep and unacknowledged feeling of desertion. His positive ideal of freedom serves to deny his sense of being abandoned

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and is therefore a way of protecting his memory of his mother, by preserving his own childhood as an image of perfect bliss. In this respect, Wordsworth’s bias in representing the child is opposed to that of Blake: by contrast to the political protest of the earlier poet, which makes him highlight the suffering of the child as a poetic instrument for promoting a critical agenda, in Wordsworth the child’s pain is repressed, and the need to construct an idealized interiority – through the figure of the child-as-self – makes him sacrifice the perspective of the child and deny his pain. Representing childhood at large, and his own remembered childhood in particular, as blissful and happy, Wordsworth renders the child both closely familiar (standing for the core interiority of the adult poet) and elusively unknown (because this child’s subjectivity is actively reshaped by adult projection). It is intriguing that, unlike the impression created in The Prelude, Wordsworth’s nonpoetic memories of his mother are not associated with an education of freedom, but rather with its opposite. In his Autobiographical Memoranda he states: I remember my mother only in some few situations, one of which was her pinning a nosegay to my breast when I was going to say the catechism in the church, as was customary before Easter. I remember also telling her on one week day that I had been at church. … My mother commended my having been present. (Wordsworth, 1988: 4) The first of these two recollections – according to his memorandum there were no others – is the biographical origin of the sonnet “Catechizing” (1821), which depicts catechetical experience as a potentially distressing event: From little down to least – in due degree, Around the Pastor, each in new-wrought vest, Each with a vernal posy at his breast, We stood, a trembling, earnest Company! (Wordsworth, 2004: ll. 1–4) The hierarchical order reduces the children to “least” and slightly bigger (the biggest is only “little”), accentuating their inbuilt insignificance. Yet their dress, decorations, and suspense also turn the event into an exceptional and significant one. They are anxious and trembling. When the questions are given some murmur softly, “by thought-perplexing fears betrayed” (l. 6), while others manage to make “a bold unerring answer”


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(l. 7). But then, in ll. 8–14, the speaker changes his focus in favor of a vision of his mother. At the moment the speaker-as-child has to speak up and give his own unerring answer, the speaker-as-adult addresses the child’s mother in his mind and reflects: How fluttered then thy anxious heart for me, Beloved Mother! Thou whose happy hand Had bound the flowers I wore, with faithful tie: Sweet flowers! at whose inaudible command Her countenance, phantom-like, doth re-appear. (ll. 8–12) Both the sonnet and the prose memorandum suggest that the mother, at least in her son’s memory, attached great importance to his church instruction. The vision of the mother’s care, protection, and empathy – her fluttering heart sharing the boy’s trepidation – is intertwined with the memory of the catechism, because it was she who sent him to church, she who wanted him to know his catechism, not out of coercion but out of love. The pastor’s impersonal lesson, then, is evoked in the sonnet with nostalgia. The sonnet shows how the authoritarian function of the religious instruction loses its power to objectify the child and to erase his independent and authentic feelings, when the knowledge that he is being loved sustains him from within. Thus experienced, the catechism of Wordsworth’s childhood becomes a consoling memory of being cared for by his mother. Structurally, then, the catechetical experience is inverted. It emerges out of this poem as an event that allows the internal, subjective world of the child (his thoughts of his mother’s thoughts of him) to triumph over external reality (the demand to give the correct answer, the fearful figure of the pastor). Thus the mother, as a poetic theme, functions to undermine the opposition between the two modes, the liberating and the authoritarian. In the poetic construction of private biography, catechism – a mode that Wordsworth rejects vehemently on the ideological and conscious level – becomes the mode of treatment into which parental love is more convincingly fused than into the far more central and repeatedly idealized image of the free, solitary child. Despite their rejection of the adult regulation of children’s minds, both Wordsworth and Blake maintain some of the structural and formal features of catechism in their poetic representations of children’s voices. Though largely responsible for the rise of the Romantic cult of childhood as an ideal human state, both poets construct the child in a way

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that serves certain adult poetic and ideological needs, which often conflict with their project of releasing the voice of the child from adult distortion. Although formally and grammatically the voice of Blake’s poetic child is sometimes restored to him, what is now being put in the child’s mouth is not constructed as an emulation of a child’s innocent discourse (according to Blake’s own definition of the child’s voice), but a sophisticated and emphatically adult discourse of political radicalism. Thus, we see in Blake how the poetic emancipation of the catechized, smothered voice of the child sometimes ends in a poetic erasure of the difference between this voice and that of the adult, despite the poet’s insistence on the merit of this difference. In Wordsworth, too, the ideal of the child’s freedom – her being mentally uncatechized – is made ambiguous by the implicit association of freedom with loss and abandonment. Less freedom and more regulation for the child thus may be construed as desirable, because it signifies greater parental care, as opposed to what the schematic paradigm offered by Wordsworth more explicitly leads us to think that he proposes. The construction of the child as a necessary layer in the uncovering of the poet’s original self likewise constitutes, to some extent, a simultaneous othering of this figure, whose interiority becomes inaccessible.

3 Child Neglect as Social Vice: Trollope, Tonna, and Working-Class Subjectivity

The dialectical function of the topos of the child in Blake and Wordsworth’s poetry was repeated in various fictional and nonfictional social narratives that became popular after the late 1830s. Using the child as a political and social victim on the one hand and regarding it as an emblem of the innermost recesses of the self on the other, workingclass autobiographies and early social-problem novels were interested in the child laborer’s perspective. First and foremost, this figure served the political agenda of such texts, which advocated far-reaching changes in the socioeconomic system; touchingly suffering children were an efficient propagandist means of arousing sympathy among middle-class readers and legislators. Secondly, the representation of child figures in social narratives also endowed these literary forms with the depth of what they constructed as interiority, or “self” in the Wordsworthian sense: an individuality that would arouse the reader’s interest and empathy beyond the topical issues at hand. This seemingly apolitical level of representation was, of course, of high political value: the very assertion of working-class subjectivity as a psychological entity that merited empathy was potentially subversive. A central source of learning about the conditions of the working classes during the 1830s was the official Bluebook or Parliamentary Report, the product of governmental commissioners’ visits to factories, mills, and mines. The assignments of commissions appointed during this decade testify to the increasing attention to the phenomenon of child labor, a matter that now became central. The publication of the full reports in Bluebooks, and, more than that, the publicity given to their major discoveries in the press, drew the attention of the general public in this direction. Parliamentary commissions’ revelations about the children’s endless hours of work; about the great number of 95

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accidents and the permanent damage to the youngsters’ health; about the habitual brutality of senior adult operatives and managers were now widely talked about. Another major source of information was the body of evidence gathered by the reformist Ten-Hour Movement, which campaigned for a restriction of the working day to ten hours for both adults and children. The movement collected and publicized data about the brutal treatment of children in mines and factories, and claimed that child operatives were regularly whipped and beaten by their superiors. As Janice Carlisle suggests, it was not accidental that the age of autobiography, which reached its climax during the central decades of the nineteenth century, was also the time “when the discipline of statistics was emerging as a dominant way to configure human experience as a mass or in the aggregate” (Carlisle, 2007: 13). The rise of statistics, part and parcel of the impact of utilitarian ethics on economy and social discourse in nineteenth-century England, should be regarded as a background that had an effect on the growing thirst for individual stories instead of unnamed numbers. Not only the genre of autobiography grew in popularity, but also fictional narratives recounting the sequence of the life, interiority, and action of a central (usually middle-class) individual. The increasing number of representations of the subjectivity of lowerclass characters in social-problem novels, which explored economic and political realities from the domestic perspective, was part of this process. The official reports were thus soon followed by the publication of the private memoirs of adults about their days as child laborers. Probably the first, and a particularly shocking and famous one, was Robert Blincoe’s Memoir, published in 1832 and consisting of a catalogue of horrors inflicted on the child Blincoe by his sadistic master in the mills. The early version of this Memoir was compiled by the working-class journalist John Brown, who had recorded Blincoe’s tale in 1825.1 The famous, widely read 1832 edition was revised and expanded; following Brown’s suicide, it was based on cooperation between Blincoe and John Doherty, himself a former child laborer, a working-class leader in Manchester, as well as a bookseller and printer (Reed, 2007: 81). The book served to arouse public opinion against some of the practices of child employment and instigated a genre of autobiographical writing that had a wide impact. Simultaneously, some particularly horrifying cases publicized by the Ten-Hour Movement focused public attention. One child worker whose suffering became famous was Ellen Hooton of Wigan, who was allegedly forced to work in chains; her story (the “Wigan Case”) caused a scandal. The comparison of the young girl’s shackling to the oppression of slaves was readily made.2

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Alongside the uproar caused by stories of children like Blincoe and Hooton, it was the routine of nonexceptional cases that gradually came to be regarded as scandalous. It now became widely known that child laborers had few, if any, legal rights. They worked from a tender age – 4 or 5, in some cases 3 – either in domestic and agricultural tasks, as in previous centuries, or in the newly expanding industrial workplaces: mills, factories, and coalmines. In one instance, an 1843 subcommissioner discovered an infant under 2 years old in regular employment in the domestic machine-lace industry.3 Children were regularly occupied for 12 or 14 hours a day. If there was a rush of work, they could be working for 15, 16, and even 18 hours consecutively.4 Children above 7 commonly worked from 5.30 a.m. to 9.30 p.m., with an hour or less for dinner, and were not allowed to talk or sit down during work. Punishments were “swift, frequent and severe” (Brown, 1993: 65–6). Children were exhausted at the end of the day, and it was sometimes necessary to prevent them from falling asleep by getting them to sing hymns, or by hitting them with the iron or wooden rod known as the billy-roller (Hopkins, 1994: 80). One girl told the 1833 Children in Factories Commission that she was often “so fatigued that she could hardly take off her clothes at night.” Another said that she was sometimes “so tired she could not eat her supper.” Adult operatives testified that children could “hardly walk home.” Joseph Badder, a Leicester spinner, stated that he had seen child operatives fall asleep as soon as their work was over, and they have been performing their work with their hands while they were asleep.… I have stopped and looked at them for two minutes, going through the motions of piecing fast asleep, when … they were really doing nothing.5

Life stories: Blincoe and Dodd Many of these findings soon became familiar to readers of working-class autobiographies and social-problem fiction. These two genres, which shared a few characteristics, gained some degree of political power. A life story, as Carlisle points out, was now a “political weapon” that operated as a narrative argument for change, providing evidence and at the same time granting a voice to those classes who previously had been denied articulation (Carlisle, 2007: 14–15, 23). Two of the earliest, and most famous, nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies – Blincoe’s Memoir and William Dodd’s 1841 A Narrative of the Experience

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and Sufferings of William Dodd, A Factory Cripple. Written by Himself – had an effect on public debate and legislation. Dodd’s manuscript was considered a key factor, along with his 1842 letters to Lord Ashley, in the passing of the 1844 Factory Bill (Gagnier, 1991: 142). As my reading suggests, both Blincoe and Dodd’s narratives also provide interesting instances of the complex and inconsistent representation of the child’s subjectivity, interiority, and agency in lower-class-authored texts aimed at causing social change. Both Blincoe and Dodd’s narratives spend considerable space depicting their early years as very young operatives. The stage of childhood is important for such narratives, not only strategically, in order to disarm middle-class readers’ uneasiness about working-class dissatisfaction, but also structurally and thematically. A realistic life story, whether fictional or nonfictional, requires development, as well as a sequence of the major character’s life events. These shared characteristics notwithstanding, Blincoe and Dodd differ in their unequal emphasis on private experience and internal dynamics, as well as the degree of their interest in their own earlier point of view. Each autobiographer has his own way of telling his story.6 In Blincoe’s narrative there is a basic tension between the desire to portray the main character (that is, himself) as unique, and the need to construct his own persona as sufficiently representative in order to act as spokesman for his class.7 As part of the former need, young Blincoe’s interiority is underlined. Relatively much attention is given to his early feelings of loneliness and entrapment as a child, as well as his eagerness to learn the identity of his parents (Brown, 2007: 95–100). The recurring urge to be able to learn who his parents were should be seen as part of this boy’s frustrated need to possess an identity of his own, rather than remaining an anonymous part of the indistinguishable mass of workhouse orphans. His emotive responsiveness is foregrounded, and he is described as a highly sensitive child whose “tears trickl[e] down his pallid cheeks, and [whose] voice [is] tremulous and faltering” (ibid.: 95). The early pages of the Memoir emphasize the child protagonist’s sense that he is physically and mentally caged, isolated among his peers, and retrospectively seeing himself as a “destitute” boy of 6 who gradually grows “melancholy” (ibid.: 99–100). These descriptions of isolated interiority are surprisingly similar to the opening paragraphs of Jane Eyre (1847), if not in style, then in subject matter. This is not to suggest any direct influence – we do not know whether Charlotte Brontë ever read the Memoir (although it is quite possible) – but only to illustrate the extent to which Blincoe’s narrative, at least in its early sections, is


interested in constructing the rich interiority of its child protagonist as isolated and special. His difference from the other boys is accentuated time and again, for instance in attempting an escape, all alone: I cannot deny … that I feel a glow of pride, when I reflect that, at the age of seven years and a half, I had courage to resent and to resist oppression, and generosity to feel for the suffering of my helpless associates, not one of whom durst venture to share the peril of the enterprise. (ibid.: 118) Yet he also construes this inborn distinction as problematic in retrospect: the adult Blincoe is judgmental about what he now regards as his early “diseased imagination,” as when describing his childlike, ignorant envy of chimney sweeps and his naïve desire to break free from the confines of the workhouse and join them (ibid.: 100). This judgmental approach is connected to some implicit, repressed conflict about the value and legitimacy of the little boy’s uniqueness. Despite Blincoe’s obvious interest in the child’s interiority and point of view, the Memoir, somewhat inconsistently, often shifts to the third-person plural and its tone frequently becomes impersonal. The opening of the text illustrates this point, as it provides information and makes claims about working-class children at large – all those collectively deserted, destitute, famished, and tortured British children in whose name he writes (ibid.: 91). The narrative first leads to Blincoe’s private history as merely illustrative of the general predicament. Rather than appearing as the center of the work from the outset, filling the position that a protagonist’s consciousness and life events would normally assume in middle-class autobiography, Blincoe’s status in his own story is unstable, and continually tentative. The need to talk for the many is also at the heart of William Dodd’s autobiography. For the most part, and unlike Blincoe, Dodd seems more content with and more consistent in marginalizing his own subjectivity and personal thoughts and suppressing his feelings. In terms of theme, style, and narrative technique, Dodd uses minimal self-representation and hardly any introspection, asserting the neutral and formal factuality of what he is about to relate, which he defines as a “fair and impartial” account (Dodd, 2007: 186). An “impartial” autobiography sounds somewhat oxymoronic; yet this life story can indeed be understood as impartial and objective if we accept the merely illustrative function of the main character, speaking on behalf of the entire class of indigent operatives, who have been pursuing their factory careers since an early age.

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Dodd’s personal experience is repeatedly made subservient to the collective account, as demonstrated in the following passage: The position in which the piecer stands to his work is with his right foot forward, and his right side facing the frame: the motion he makes in going along in front of the frame, for the purpose of piecing, is neither forwards not backwards, but in a sliding direction, constantly keeping his right side towards the frame. In this position he continues during the day, with his hands, feet, and eyes constantly in motion. It will be easily seen, that the chief weight of his body rests upon his right knee, which is almost always the first joint to give way. The number of cripples with the right knee in greatly exceed those with the left knee in; a great many have both knees in – such as my own – from this cause. (ibid.: 190) The structure of this paragraph is typical of Dodd’s narrative. The shift from third to first person is minimal, and occurs only toward the end of the passage, as mere illustration and support for the existence of a widespread phenomenon. The style is factual and neutral, and remains so even when describing the author’s own pain as almost another technical fact, without any shift in point of view, as the next example shows: The cloths upon which the piecer rubs, or pieces, the ends of the cardings, as above stated, are made of coarse wrappering. The number of cardings a piecer has through his fingers in a day is very great; each piecing requires three or four rubs, over a space of three or four inches; and the continual friction of the hand in rubbing the piecing upon the coarse wrapper wears off the skin, and causes the fingers to bleed. I have had my fingers in this state for weeks together, healing up in the night, and breaking out again in little holes as soon as I commenced work on the following morning. (ibid.: 189) Rather than asserting his position as the main character in his own narrative, Dodd uses his personal experience as evidence to support his account of a general phenomenon. Indifferent to private feelings, with no apparent awareness of interiority and no shifts in point of view, but with an unwavering focus on external events, Dodd demonstrates even more strongly than Blincoe the extent to which the private story of the working-class child is harnessed to a political purpose.8 Nevertheless, the dispassionate tone and impersonal subject matter of the larger part of Dodd’s narrative are potentially connected to the


suppression of political rage. We can sense that he is anxious to appear politically mild. Unlike Blincoe’s more personal tone, which is often bitter and resentful, Dodd is cautious to appear forgiving, declaring from the outset “I am not actuated by any motive of ill-feeling to any party with whom I have formerly been connected” (ibid.: 186) and granting forgiveness to anyone who did him wrong (ibid.: 192). It is perhaps a strategic attempt to avoid antagonizing middle- and upper-class readers. As in the social-problem novels of the period, there is some correlation between the degree of freedom in asserting a working-class personal voice and the extent of explicit social radicalism expressed by a character, or an entire text. Despite the impersonal nature of Dodd’s autobiography, there are occasional moments of introspection, in which some of his thoughts are rendered. Significantly, these moments occur only as the main character reaches adulthood, for instance in his deliberations about whether to commence studies as a youth (ibid.: 199). As long as the stage of childhood is described, the biographical character is devoid of subjectivity, and remains marginal within his own story. The reason is probably a traditional, deep-seated disregard of the child’s interiority as insignificant; but when a working-class child is being represented, the devaluation is double, the result of both age and class. It is also significant that as soon as Dodd’s feelings are referred to, when he is a youth, it is also the first time that we hear about his social indignation, his being “disgusted with the system” and severely critical of the manufacturing classes (ibid.: 205). So far, the tone has been mild, forgiving, and forbearing. A potential link is therefore established in this working-class narrative between voicing one’s internal processes and private feelings and a heightened political critique. Differences in style and tone notwithstanding, working-class autobiographers like Blincoe and Dodd were caught between conflicting agendas. Stifling their personal, particular perspective in favor of the political role they assumed by the decision to tell a class-based story, they also had to accommodate the formal prerequisites of autobiography, a genre that highlighted isolated individuality. The humanistic basis for the rise of autobiography was the idealization of the unique and unified subject (Gagnier, 1991: 140), whose source of interest for the reader was his “introspective access to an interior world of thoughts and emotions” (Carlisle, 2007: 26). Yet, this unique and unified self was clearly upper or middle class. Locating the source of their identity and personal history in the larger community of fellow operatives, and asserting their right to be heard on the basis of this relational standing,

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working-class autobiographers – like the writers of former-slave narratives – were prone to feeling uncomfortable about asserting their individuality. Often insecure about their entitlement to use a personal voice, they were also hampered by a sense of inferiority regarding their level of education and linguistic refinement as writers.

Social-problem novels: Trollope and Tonna Some of the patterns visible in these narratives are also at work in industrial novels of the same period. My reading of two of the earliest English social-problem novels, Life and Adventure of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy by Frances Trollope (1840) and Helen Fleetwood by Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (1841), focuses on the ways in which the construction of the child as subject reflects a similar dialectic to the one observed in the autobiographies.9 Advocating working-class self-sufficiency, and interrogating poor children’s subjectivity, these novels are simultaneously anxious to suppress certain manifestations of working-class agency. Influenced by nonfictional contemporary sources, autobiographies among them, these fictional narratives share a complex dynamic that involves an inconsistent attempt to grant young working-class individuals their own voice. More familiar to us today than working-class autobiographies, middleclass versions of working-class experience were also more canonical in the nineteenth century. Middle-class writers enjoyed greater authority than lower-class ones, although their information about factory life was merely secondhand. Social-problem novels are therefore a fruitful site for exploring “the way the middle classes constructed and imagined the working-class people they employed in their homes and workplaces” (Elliott, 2000: 380). Works belonging to this genre share an interest in the material and mental effects of the Industrial Revolution, the living and working conditions of the working class, and what they depict as the unbridgeable gap between rich and poor in contemporary England. These works mark the beginning of a general reaction against novels of high life (what contemporaries called the “silver-fork” school), a reaction that according to Kathleen Tillotson was largely inspired by Hazlitt and Carlyle’s attacks (Tillotson, 1956: 73–5). They are also considered part of the response to the first publication of the commissions’ reports in the early 1830s, which aroused British public awareness of the problematic working conditions of the poor. Although largely forgotten today, these two early social-problem novels were widely read at their time, and several critics argue that they had a major impact


on the development of the genre. Far better known today, later works that belong to the genre – Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), and Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) – resemble Trollope and Tonna’s works in both subject matter and purpose.10 Social-problem novels often draw much of their information from parliamentary Bluebooks and official reports, and their avowed purpose is political: they aim to expose the flaws of the socioeconomic system and stimulate middle-class readers’ awareness of the realities of workingclass life and the pitfalls of charity and patronage. According to Sheila Smith, authors affiliated with this genre often use the novel “as though it were a popular form of Blue book in order to make their readers explore social problems and give them evidence to draw some conclusions.”11 Critics tend to assume that social-problem novels indeed had a great impact on their readers and that the imaginative uses the novelists made of their materials actually played a significant role in shaking the contemporary social conscience awake (Wallins, 1975: 57). Tillotson argues that social novelists exposed information that was otherwise inaccessible to their readers, because it was published only in government reports (Tillotson, 1956: 78–81). There is a debate, however, regarding the extent of knowledge about labor actually available to the reading public prior to the publication of these novels; Tillotson’s description clearly ignores the publication of operatives’ autobiographies, as well as reports in the daily press.12 Yet, when analyzing socialproblem novels, it is important to remember that factory workers were indeed mostly unfamiliar to middle-class readers, and were perceived as potentially alien and menacing. According to Dorice Elliott, most middle-class people, even family members of factory owners, had never been inside a factory and had probably never seen a factory worker, except at a distance; although some protective factory legislation had already been debated and passed in Parliament by 1840, most middleclass people in mid-century Britain were simply unaware of factory conditions (Elliott, 2000: 379). Even if the facts themselves were not new, it is still reasonable to argue that social-problem novels contributed to diminishing middle-class ignorance by presenting individuated and sympathetic working-class characters, and by turning the dry facts of official reports (and much of the early autobiographies) into popular and affecting narratives. The ability of the novel to familiarize the working-class “other” and render her point of view carried political significance by potentially making readers more congenial to ideas of reform. Trollope and Tonna were well

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aware of this potential, as some of the direct addresses of their narrators to the readers reveal. Trollope, for instance, declares at one point, woe to those who supinely sit in contented ignorance of the facts, soothing their spirits and their easy consciences with the cuckoo note, “exaggeration,” while thousands of helpless children pine away their unnoted, miserable lives, in labour and destitution, incomparably more severe, than any ever produced by negro slavery. (Trollope, 1844: 186, emphases in the original) Besides calling their readers to take a stand, the two authors also repeatedly assert the nonfictional dimension of their narratives. Trollope states that her intention was “to drag into the light of day, and place before the eyes of Englishmen, the hideous mass of injustice and suffering to which thousands of infant labourers are subjected, who toil in our monster spinning-mills. … The true but most painful picture has been drawn faithfully and conscientiously” (ibid.: iii). Tonna similarly declares: Let no one suppose we are going to write fiction, or to conjure up phantoms of a heated imagination, to aid the cause which we avowedly embrace. Names may be altered, characters may be grouped …; but not an incident shall be coined to serve the purpose … . Vivid indeed, and fertile in devices must the fancy be that could invent a horror beyond the bare, everyday reality of the thing! Nay, we will set forth nothing but what has been stated on oath, corroborated on oath, and on oath confirmed beyond the possibility of an evasive question. (Tonna, 1852: 43) Like the autobiographies, these narratives claim to be telling a true story. Tonna, in particular, uses judicial discourse in order to present her narrative as legal evidence, “corroborated on oath.” Nonfictional accounts such as memoirs, especially Blincoe’s, indeed served as one of the sources from which Trollope and Tonna drew, as I discuss below. Both authors also made extensive use of information gathered from parliamentary reports. Tonna clearly based her descriptions on actual evidence published in official records, although in her case the possession of first-hand knowledge of laborers has been debated (Kovacˇevic´ and Kanner, 1970–71: 164). On the other hand, prior to the writing of her novel, Trollope made a fact-finding tour to Manchester in February 1839. She visited factories incognita, met labor activists and reformers, and interviewed workers.13 The two novels were thus realistic not merely


in their narrative technique, but also in their reliance on contemporary facts. In terms of credibility, it should be noted that the factuality of the autobiographies themselves was often doubted – part of the strategy of the opponents of reform – and the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, vague in both genres of autobiography and social-problem novel, was constantly blurred as a result of the participation of these texts in the political game. Critics mostly agree that compared with Michael Armstrong and Helen Fleetwood, later factory novels were milder in their account of social injustice and less inclined to shock their readers with harsh details (see Wallins, 1975: 52–3; Kaplan, 1985: 59–60; Harrison, 1999: 20–33). I suggest that the effect of later novels was less disturbing for Victorian readers largely because they tended to marginalize the distressing issue of child labor, which Tonna and Trollope place at the center. In Mary Barton the phenomenon is addressed only obliquely, when it is stated that the young protagonist’s father has refrained from sending her to work at the mill because he objects to child labor. In North and South all lower-class children go to school; even in the half-starved families of rough operatives such as Nicholas Higgins and John Boucher, the children are not sent to work before their late teens. In Sybil the conditions of children in coalmines are alluded to as a horrifying reality, yet this reality is tackled in one isolated passage that is extrinsic to the plot (Disraeli, 1980: 178). Influenced by the First Report of the Children’s Employment Commissioners (1842), Disraeli’s brief description of child miners is general, with no individuated young characters.14 Dickens, who unlike the major novelists of his period had first-hand knowledge of child labor from his days at Warren’s Blacking, consistently refrained from writing about the subject, except for the Autobiographical Fragment, which he decided not to publish during his lifetime, as I discuss in the next chapter. In Hard Times the child characters are mostly middle class, and child operatives are conspicuously missing from the crowd of laborers going in and out of the factory gates, in stark contrast to the noticeable presence of children among factory operatives in nonfictional descriptions of the period.15 In contrast, all factory work described in Michael Armstrong and Helen Fleetwood is performed by children, in a way that seems to serve a political purpose. Although influenced by Romantic sensibilities, in their representation Trollope and Tonna do not depict the child’s subjectivity in order to explore or construct a “self.” In Wordsworth’s case (and in a somewhat different way also in Dickens), the investigation of the child as interiority tends to obscure the sociopolitical dimension of the figure

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of the exploited child. Trollope and Tonna, on the other hand, use the neglected child primarily for a political purpose, and their interest in the child as “self” is comparatively limited. However, their construction of the working-class child’s subjectivity does endow this figure with a distinct moral and spiritual quality, whose political significance should be addressed. In their representation of the child’s voice their narratives expose a similar complexity to the one we have encountered in the autobiographies. The unstable status of the working-class child’s voice, interiority, and point of view is made doubly vulnerable to silencing and disregard because of age as well as class. Trollope and Tonna differ, though, in their willingness to redeem their lower-class child figures from the double silencing to which they are exposed. Michael Armstrong and Helen Fleetwood represent child labor realistically, yet follow the Rousseauvian cult of the child in assuming that the child is originally pure and blameless. This representation serves two purposes: it augments the emotional impact by arousing greater compassion than the character of an adult laborer may generate; and it works to counter widespread anxieties and stereotypes about the working class as menacingly violent, greedy, licentious, and generally immoral. As Laura Berry suggests, in Victorian literature the “child victim emerged in opposition to figures of brutal masculinity,” and as of the late 1830s replaced “the Malthusian male” (Berry, 1999: 30). The child thus gradually acquired an emblematic function, potentially standing for the class of industrial laborers at large. An understanding of the working-class child’s synecdochic function is necessary for a renewed interpretation of the political stance of Trollope and Tonna’s novels. The representation of class oppression while focusing on an exploited child invokes in a most direct – though not unequivocal – way the issue of paternalism, turned almost literal through questions of fatherly protection, biological family ties versus interclass adoption, and a series of parenting dilemmas and guardianship issues that are central to the plot. Figuratively represented by a child, the industrial working class may be perceived by readers as weaker, dependent, ignorant, and irrational in comparison with its adult/middle-class counterpart. In this respect, both author’s and reader’s middle-class concern for working-class children may be disciplinary in nature. In her work on the industrial novel, Catherine Gallagher discusses the “feminization” of working-class characters as a way of insuring their dependence in a paternalistic view of social reform (Gallagher, 1985: 128–9). In my reading of Trollope and Tonna’s novels, I extend Gallagher’s observation and propose to see how it also applies to the representation of the industrial working


class as embodied in the very young sector of operatives, regardless of their gender. I shall thus talk about the “infantilization” of the working class as a way of protecting them while in fact establishing their status as inherently inferior, immature, and dependent. My reading foregrounds the theme of interclass adoption in Trollope’s work as a central trope for interrogating the implications of paternalistic class relations on working-class agency, while the motif of the child’s speech and silencing in Tonna’s novel should be examined as reflecting the dilemmas that surround the emancipation of the voice, subjectivity, and point of view of the working-class child.

Trollope and interclass adoption Frances Trollope (1780–1863) was the author of 40 books: 34 novels and several travel books.16 Her first work was published at the age of 53, six years before the publication of The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy. The work was originally published in 12 shilling monthly installments over a year and a half, beginning in February 1839, and came out as a book in 1840. Although largely forgotten during the twentieth century, Michael Armstrong was popular in the 1840s; a new edition came out as late as 1876. Having published two highly successful bestsellers before – Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836), which went through three editions in its first year – Trollope did not repeat this success with Michael Armstrong. However, although no clear publication data is available, the common assumption among critics is that the novel was widely read, thanks partly to its serialization in shilling parts. In the twentieth century Trollope remained, for the most part, off our critical map (Griffin, 2003: 279). Those critics who deal with her novels argue that her works of social reform deserve much more attention. Though controversial during her lifetime, Trollope was a very successful author. Helen Heineman and Susan Kissel claim that she was one of the most popular novelists and one of the best-known British women of her period, enjoying much influence in spite of her being misunderstood and criticized (Heineman, 1979: 196–206; Kissel, 1988: 151). According to Robert Patten, Trollope’s works continued to sell steadily through the middle of the nineteenth century, and for many years her income as an author exceeded that of many of her contemporaries, her son Anthony included (Patten, 1978: 23, 228). Dickens, for example, was quite delighted at having her name listed among the contributors to his Bentley’s Miscellany in 1836.17

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Though expressing social protest in various works, and appearing too revolutionary for some readers, others also labeled Trollope an antidemocratic Tory, a class-conscious woman, and a conservative snob.18 At the same time, her books dealt with social problems, attacking not only child labor but also black slavery, evangelical excesses, materialism, the bastardy clauses of the New Poor Law, and the legal restrictions on married women. Trollope supported the reformist Ten-Hour Movement’s campaign for reducing the daily hours of work to ten instead of the customary sixteen for adults and children, a campaign that Dickens, for example, never supported, despite much urging (Brantlinger, 1977: 44). As a result, she endured unceasing critical attacks from all directions (Kissel, 1988: 162). Although Trollope’s reformism and commitment to democracy were questioned during her lifetime, Michael Armstrong’s early reviewers did not doubt its outspoken denunciation of the socioeconomic system and largely labeled the text radical. Today, however, although critics mostly share the opinion that later social-problem novels were more conventionally “middle class,” the degree of Michael Armstrong’s subversion is questioned.19 Trollope’s middle-class bias is pointed out, as well as what critics see as Michael Armstrong’s class condescension. A study of the function of the child in the novel – a theme not sufficiently examined in discussions of this work so far20 – reveals new aspects that underline the work’s subversive quality, yet suggests that, following an initially radical impetus that dominates the larger part of the narrative, the author retracts her critique and offers a milder rewriting of her own plot. When first published, Michael Armstrong was received with enthusiasm by the Chartists, who used it as propaganda, while other readers felt antagonized by its political critique.21 Trollope referred to this in a letter and said: “I don’t think any one cares much for ‘Michael Armstrong’ – except the Chartists. A new kind of patrons for me!”22 One of the first reviewers, making a complete identification of the author with the character of the radical Mary Brotherton, declared in the Athenaeum that the author of Michael Armstrong deserves as richly to have eighteen months in Chester Gaol as any that are there now for using violent language against the “monster cotton mills.” … Mill owners cannot refuse the smallest economy that offers in working the mills, on pain of ruin; and without forfeiting a claim to common humanity, they may be brought to look on the sufferings of their operatives, as a general looks on the carnage and mutilation of his soldiers.23


William Makepeace Thackeray, though confessing in a favorable 1843 review of another novel by Trollope that he did not “care to read ladies’ novels, except those of Mesdames Gore and Trollope,” charged in that same review that instead of writing her novels of social reform, of which Michael Armstrong was the prominent example, she “had much better have remained at home, pudding-making or stocking-mending, than have meddled with matters which she understands so ill.”24 In the same vein, Trollope’s own son Anthony, in his 1883 Autobiography, disapproved of his mother’s decision, as a woman, to write fiction of social protest. Though writing affectionately, he accused her of being overemotional, illogical, and subjective, “neither clear-sighted nor accurate” in her descriptions of society. Suggesting that she was out of her depth in considering matters of the world, he claimed that “in her attempts to describe morals, manners, and even facts, [she] was unable to avoid the pitfalls of exaggeration” (Trollope, 1980: 33). Such dismissive views perhaps contributed to Frances Trollope’s gradual fall from grace among literary critics, and to her subsequent neglect as a serious writer. What undoubtedly added force to the work’s critique was its nonfictional element. It was known to Trollope’s readers that the detailed account of factory life and the depiction of the conditions of young apprenticed laborers were based on evidence. Clearly, Trollope had researched her topic thoroughly, despite some early critics’ claims to the contrary. Ashleigh, the town in which the novel is set, is a precise replica of Manchester. Trollope also modeled the character of Reverend Bell of Fairley, a reformist clergyman, after a real Parson, Mr. Bull of Brierly (Heineman, 1979: 180). Certain scenes reproduce actual descriptions of child labor in contemporary sources. It has been assumed that Robert Blincoe’s work was among the “pamphlets and scrapbooks” that Richard Oastler, the labor reformer, loaned Trollope when she was collecting evidence for her novel; around the same time she also met and dined with John Doherty, the second publisher of Blincoe’s Memoir (Carlisle, 2007: 47). The setting of Deep Valley Mill, where Michael is apprenticed under horrifying conditions, is strikingly similar to the scenes in Blincoe’s book set in the isolated, distant Litton Mill. The sickly child workers and horrifying regime of persecution that Blincoe describes are echoed in Trollope’s Deep Valley; even the starved children’s envy of the pigs’ food is the same (cf. Brown, 2007: 132, 149; and Trollope, 1844: 184–5). Trollope abstains from crediting Blincoe as a source, but states in a footnote that the “real name of this valley (which most assuredly is no creation of romance) is not given, lest an action for libel should be the consequence. The scenes which have passed there, and

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which the few following pages will describe, have been stated to the author on authority not to be impeached” (Trollope, 1844: 180). Roger Wallins traces another source for a scene in Chapter 19 of the novel, in an October 1836 item in the Westminster Review, which describes how sick children were forced to go to work even though doctors had said they might die if they continued. The Review recounts how several such children were carried to the factory by their parents, because they were too weak to walk. The scene in Trollope’s novel is almost identical to the passage in the Review, which had its own source in a parliamentary report (Wallins, 1975: 50). This permeation of contemporary facts through the fictional world, and the focus on child abuse as a pervasive by-product of industrialization, are two indications of the reformist agenda that underlies Michael Armstrong. Yet the two adoption episodes that shape this narrative suggest that its agenda is not entirely consistent. One describes Michael’s adoption by his vicious employer, the mill owner; the other presents the adoption of Michael’s brother by a compassionate heiress, who later also becomes Michael’s patroness. A series of intriguing ethical questions surround the various foster-parenting relationships that ensue. Trollope’s use of a working-class child as the protagonist, and the marginal position she assigns to lower-class adults, create a daring synecdochic association between this child and the working class. It is mostly through her satirical use of the literary topoi of adoption and rescue of the poor child – conventional solutions offered in mid-century culture as acceptable forms of narrative closure – that Trollope challenges middle-class protective and paternalistic approaches to the poor. Michael Armstrong manages to complicate the political wisdom and ethical value of such resolutions. The benevolent intentions of the first act of adoption in the novel are explicitly presented as sham. Sir Matthew Dowling, a factory owner who represents the new millocracy in all its ugliness, is persuaded to adopt one of his operatives, the 10-year-old Michael. Although the local community applauds Sir Matthew’s generosity, the actual result of the adoption is Michael’s ongoing suffering and humiliation at Dowling Hall under his hypocritical patron’s regime of brutality and persecution. For the reader, the boy is characterized as sensitive and vulnerable; yet Sir Matthew regards him as nothing more than “a detestable burden” (Trollope, 1844: 31). Treating him badly only when they are alone, the industrialist masks his real attitude by a façade of kindness. Michael is homesick, longing to be reunited with his loving and honest widowed mother and older brother, Teddy, who had previously been maimed in an accident at Sir Matthew’s mill. As part of the anomaly of his


situation, Michael has to face not only the haughtiness of the Dowling family, but also the condescension of the servants. As a result, he feels that even factory work is better than what he is undergoing now. A climax of hypocrisy and condescension on the part of the Dowlings is reached when Michael is coerced by the family daughters to participate in a play about his adoption, in which he should recite the lines: “My mother’s dear, and so’s my brother too, / But dearer still are your papa and you. / His charity’s so great, his heart so good, / He gives the naked clothes; the hungry food” (ibid.: 105). The reader, to whom the omniscient narrator has been representing Michael’s thoughts and feelings most sympathetically, is shown here how social superiors use the working-class child’s voice as an instrument for proliferating their own discourse. Ignorant about his own perspective, they impose on and dictate their own words to the seemingly voiceless little pauper. The appropriation of the child’s voice that Trollope satirizes here will be differently treated in Tonna’s staging of children’s speech and singing, discussed below. The second, separate act of adoption occurs rather late in the novel. The upper-middle-class character now involved is the only member of the millocracy milieu to discern Sir Matthew’s hypocrisy and Michael’s distress. Mary Brotherton, the daughter of a manufacturer, wonders about this “mysterious adoption of the factory-boy” (ibid.: 98). Although ignorant about the working class, the young heiress is intrigued by Michael’s misery and conducts an investigation that soon leads to shocking revelations about the true nature of factory work. Her social conscience is awakened, and she grows to feel guilty about her own wealth, accumulated by the exploitative system of child labor that she has now grown to abhor. When Sir Matthew secretly gets rid of Michael and sends him to the secluded Deep Valley mill, the novel presents a series of horrors: hunger, degradation, and sadistic abuse of child apprentices, all in the spirit of Blincoe’s Memoir. The remote, little-known valley is a factory owner’s paradise. Boys and girls are uninterruptedly imprisoned there for years, in many cases for life (a rather short life for most of them). For presentday readers it is a setting disturbingly similar to a concentration camp, where the slightest disobedience or tardiness is ruthlessly punished and the famished juvenile laborers are literally worked to death. When called to work, the “miserable little troop” of children wait for no second summons, well knowing that the lash, which was now only idly cutting the air above their heads, would speedily descend upon them if they did; but not even terror could enable the wasting limbs of those who had long inhabited this fearful abode, to move

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quickly. Many among them were dreadfully crippled in the legs, and nearly all exhibited the frightful spectacle of young features pinched by famine. (ibid.: 186) The Deep Valley mill operates without any supervision by the authorities, and with no questioning on the part of families, neighbors, or social activists. Following persistent investigations, Mary Brotherton discovers Michael’s location and plans to rescue him, yet due to mistaken identification he is reported dead, and the plan fails. After five years in Deep Valley Michael heroically manages to escape. During these years his mother has pined away and died; Mary, believing that Michael was dead, has rescued and adopted Fanny, his friend from Deep Valley, and his brother Teddy, redeeming him from factory work. After Michael’s escape and return, she becomes his patroness as well. With Sir Matthew’s bankruptcy and death, Michael’s marriage to Fanny, and Mary’s own marriage to Teddy (the two couples having emigrated to Germany because of British class prejudice), the novel reaches its happy conclusion. The complexity and inconsistency of Trollope’s political views, as expressed in her various texts, provide us with a reason to be cautious in assessing the political stance of a novel such as Michael Armstrong, initially construed as unequivocally radical. Later evaluations of the work have detected conservative and paternalistic assumptions underlying its analysis of social problems. Much of the critical discussion of Michael Armstrong during the last two decades has focused on its sociopolitical outlook, without assigning particular importance to the function of the child. While Susan Kissel claims that Trollope was a conscious and systematic advocate of “deep-seated social reform” (Kissel, 1988: 164), most other contemporary readings question the novel’s political commitment. Rosemarie Bodenheimer argues that the novel’s middle-class paternalism is revealed in the narrative pattern that leads the rich heiress Brotherton to act as a “female knight errant” and redeem poor people from their social inferiority, even if failing to reform the factory system itself.25 Dorice Elliott, too, says that although motivated by a reformist impulse, Trollope, as a middle-class author, aims to bring factory workers under the umbrella of the paternalist middle-class home. Thus, Mary Brotherton comes to believe that it is the paternalistic relations practiced by the country gentry, on which her own household relations are based, “that hold out most hope for the improved welfare of factory workers” (Elliott, 2000: 386–7). The political implications of Michael Armstrong’s closure yield diverse interpretations. The class and age disparities in the marriage between


Michael’s brother and the heiress are further complicated by Teddy’s physical disability; Michael, as a youth, is himself rescued from poverty by the heiress – in effect, doubly emasculating him as the object of both middle-class and feminine patronage; and the emigration of all the central characters to Germany implies that social parity is available only outside of England. Critics have read the ending as paternalistic and escapist. Bodenheimer regards it as an utter failure of all female subversions vis-à-vis “the novel’s emphatically male structures of power” (Bodenheimer, 1988: 35). In her classless, noncapitalist little community in Germany, says Bodenheimer, Brotherton can fulfill the fantasy of the female paternalist who is now the head of a family, determining the lives of her grateful, converted, younger working-class followers (ibid.: 29–31). In a similar vein, Elliott sees Brotherton’s emigration as a retreat from political activity. The marriages at the end, she claims, are part of the author’s own retreat from uncompromising struggle, turning instead to the novelistic conventions of the romance plot (Elliott, 2000: 387). Carolyn Betensky, too, sees the emigration as a withdrawal from the knowledge Brotherton has acquired in her investigations, marking a refusal to act on this knowledge (Betensky, 2002: 75–6). However, my reading of Michael Armstrong calls attention to the fact that the critical preoccupation with the degree of Mary’s reformism, and its reflection of the author’s own stance, has overtaken the issue of Michael Armstrong’s life and adventures as the novel’s center of interest. Clearly, the degree of the text’s commitment to reform cannot be determined. Yet, the quality, features, and possible limitations of this commitment can be more richly and thoroughly unfolded if we examine Trollope’s way of embodying social questions through the figure of a child. Such a discussion should take into consideration not only the realistic aspects of this child’s character, but also its emblematic role. Adult factory workers are hardly described in the novel; and thus, as Catherine Gallagher points out, the novel “gives the impression that almost all factory hands were children” (Gallagher, 1985: 127). There are several lower-class adults, for instance the servants at Dowling Hall, but they form a distinct class, markedly differentiated from industrial operatives and contemptible toward them, as illustrated by the way they refer to little Michael as no better than a pig (Trollope, 1844: 22). The only adult working-class character from the laboring sector that is represented is Michael’s mother, an ailing widow who spends her time in bed rather than in the factory. While there are also several reform activists whom Michael meets on his return from Deep Valley much later in the novel, they are extremely marginal and not individuated.

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As a social-problem novel preoccupied with the effects of industrialism and addressing a middle-class readership unfamiliar with industrial workers, the fact that no adult laborers are developed in this work charges the child figure with a representative role. What might be the ideological implications of the authorial decision to use a child, one who “had worked almost from babyhood in the cotton-factory” (ibid.: 54), as the sole representative of the working class? It is reasonable to assume that this choice was meant to expose and refute certain assumptions about this class. One such refutation that Michael’s character allows the novel to perform is clear: he is consistently depicted as morally innocent and unselfish, intuitively kind and affectionate, and emotionally vulnerable. This representation, influenced by Romantic constructs, counters stereotypes and anxieties common among the middle class regarding the inherent violence and immorality of the poor. Another aspect of the function of the child, which I shall now address at greater length because of its ideological ambiguity, is that of middle-class responsibility. The “infantilization” of the working class, embodied in a child, may serve to justify certain paternalistic assumptions about the requisite moral and political treatment of this sector. If the poor are like children, then maybe they are weaker, submissive, and inferior in knowledge and understanding; if neglected, they might be easily manipulated and victimized; therefore, in order to protect them, they – just like children – should be guided, supervised, and disciplined. Dependence is their desirable state, for their wellbeing no less than for that of society. Some of the critical interpretations cited above indeed contend that such implications are endorsed by Trollope’s novel. Nevertheless, my discussion suggests that this is only partly true and that the very use of the child in this narrative works to undermine or at least question the value, moral justification, and necessity of middle-class intervention. The issue of paternalism is central to Michael’s career through the theme of adoption. A defenseless boy, poor and exploited, is unexpectedly offered an opportunity to transcend his social inferiority by being taken in by a new, wealthy family. However, the way in which this theme is developed in the novel complicates both the moral justification and the practical benefits of paternalism, because Sir Matthew’s patronage is presented from the outset as dishonest, morally flawed, and exploitative. Significantly, one major means of tyrannizing the adopted boy is the total disregard of his point of view. Trollope presents this disregard as outrageous, clearly taking the side of the child and making the reader see that he is an equally human subject, whose


desires and feelings are rudely trampled on. In Sir Matthew’s presence Michael often becomes voiceless, “not succeed[ing] in producing [a] sound” (ibid.: 63). The systematic disregard of the boy’s point of view by his class and age superiors is shown not only in Sir Matthew’s hostility, but also in the indifference of the allegedly well-meaning Lady Clarissa, who suggests the adoption in the first place. It never occurs to her to inquire whether Michael wants to be adopted. He is ordered to follow her and her rich companion to the Dowling mansion in what seems to be more of abduction than a benevolent act of kindness. Just as he has been objectified and exploited as a “hand” in Sir Matthew’s factory, so Michael is closely controlled and maneuvered now, when forced to abandon his previous way of life and his family for an unclear future. Lady Clarissa’s kindness to the boy, awakened by her sense of gratitude after he drives away a cow that frightened her, is depicted as artificial, and she is quick to harness Sir Matthew’s means in order to impress her surroundings (and perhaps also herself) with what she sees as her own generosity. When she imposes this adoption on boy and patron alike, Lady Clarissa thinks neither of Michael’s own needs nor of Sir Matthew’s fury at being forced to adopt what he sees as “a bag of rags out of his own factory” (ibid.: 17). During the initial encounter, the dialog carefully establishes Lady Clarissa’s inattentiveness to Michael’s words. He mentions his mother, yet she does not spare a thought for the existence of such a person when she proposes the adoption. When he requests that his brother Teddy be informed about his new whereabouts, Michael’s patroness is surprised: “Teddy? – who is Teddy, my little man?” (ibid.: 17). She has evidently not been listening to Michael at all, since he referred to Teddy just a minute before and told her that he was lame. His further explanations about his brother’s physical injury are repeatedly ignored by both her and Sir Matthew, who keep referring to Teddy’s lagging behind as sloth. One exception in Dowling Hall is Sir Matthew’s adolescent daughter Martha, who is the only one in the household to treat Michael with genuine kindness, the only one to ask his name and address him as “dear,” and also “the only one whose heart was not seared or hardened” (ibid.: 73). More important for an examination of the place assigned to the child’s point of view in the novel, she is also the only one curious to hear about his history as a child operative: “But tell me, Michael, something about the mill: papa has never let us see it yet, but I believe it is only because mamma thinks it is a dirty place. Is it very dirty, Michael?”

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“Yes, please ma’am.” “... I have heard papa say, that he pays a vast quantity of money to quite little children, and that’s the reason, he says, that the factories are such a blessing to the country. You get wages, don’t you, my little fellow?” “Yes, ma’am; I gets two shilling a week, and Teddy eighteen-pence, ’cause he’s weaker.” “That is not so much, to be sure; but it’s better than nothing, isn’t it?” “Yes, ma’am.” “Do the children in general like it?” “Like what, ma’am?” “Working in the factory, my dear, and getting money for their poor parents.” “The children likes to have the wages,” replied Michael. “But perhaps they do not like to do any work for them, Michael?” said Martha, laughing. “That’s what papa says. But it is not right, my dear, for little boys and girls to be always at play, you know. Don’t you think, Michael, that it is proper for poor people’s children to do something to help themselves if they can?” “Yes, ma’am,” said Michael, but in so low a tone, that it was as much as Martha could do to hear it; and so melancholy a look accompanied the words, that she could not help thinking there was a great deal of truth in what she had constantly heard repeated by most of her father’s friends and neighbours, as well as himself – namely, that the factory children were a race of very idle, ungrateful little creatures; spoilt by the high wages and indulgence they received, and quite unconscious of the inestimable advantages they possessed over all the other children in the British dominions. (ibid.: 73–4) Significantly, Trollope portrays Martha as a sympathetic yet incompetent listener. Indeed, it is her alone in the Dowling mansion whom Michael addresses “in a tone as fearless and confidential as if she had been his sister” (ibid.: 72). Yet, to be kind, it seems, is not enough in order to be able to establish a dialog with a child operative, or to regard his perspective with respect. Because of her middle-class bias, Martha manifests total misunderstanding of the extent of poverty and suffering that children like Michael undergo. Even when filled with good intentions, then, middle-class individuals emerge from Trollope’s novel as incapable of granting lower-class children the status of reliable witnesses.


Breeding nothing but ongoing misery and regret to both parties, the adoption of the poor child by the rich man is an inversion of a common plot device, familiar to Trollope’s readers not only from fairytales and folktales, but also from the fiction of a highly successful contemporary novelist such as Dickens. The unexpected philanthropic intervention of a rich old gentleman in favor of an indigent protagonist features in the two early novels by Dickens that immediately preceded Michael Armstrong: Oliver Twist (1838), with its gentlemanly and kind Mr. Brownlow, and Nicholas Nickleby (1839), with the cheerfully openhanded Cheeryble Brothers. This motif appears in several of Dickens’s later works as well. Trollope was probably influenced by Dickens, whose popular Oliver Twist was the first novel in English for adults that presented a child as the main character throughout (Tillotson, 1956: 50; Coveney, 1967: 127). By 1839, Dickens’s sensitivity to social injustice and to the oppression of children in particular was already famous; in fact, Dickens was the first to acknowledge the connection between Trollope’s work on the factory boy and his own, unfortunately to the degree of resenting what he saw as too much resemblance between Michael Armstrong and Nicholas Nickleby.26 Nevertheless, the similarity between the two novels in plot and theme is rather vague, and the accusation of plagiarism seems groundless. Although both works attack contemporary oppressive institutions, Nickleby’s target is the Yorkshire schools, whereas Trollope deals directly with industrialization and child labor; a theme that, as shown above, Dickens and other contemporary authors systematically avoided. It is true that the boys at Dotheboys school are no less cruelly victimized than those employed in Deep Valley, but their description verges on the grotesque, and, what is more, their suffering is shown to be a direct result of the unique and idiosyncratic aberration of Headmaster Squeers rather than a product of the entire economic system, as is true of apprenticed child slavery in Trollope’s novel. The latter’s critique is therefore much more disturbing on the political level, offering no easy solutions; whereas, in the case of the focused problem of the Yorkshire schools, reform was quick to follow Dickens’s novel. In spite of what Dickens thought, Michael Armstrong was perhaps more strongly influenced by Oliver Twist, mixing as it did social satire with the representation of a touchingly pathetic child protagonist. The fact that both young characters in Dickens, Oliver and Smike, who are believed to have poor origins, are revealed at the end to be the sons of respectable middle-class gentlemen, undermines what seems to be an attempt to resist class prejudice. The many good qualities the two boys exhibit do not refute negative concepts of working-class innate

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characteristics after all. Michael Armstrong, on the other hand, is unquestionably, “genetically,” working class; therefore, his delicacy, natural tact, and moral rectitude challenge the bad reputation of his class. It is significant that in recounting the responses that Michael evokes among his social superiors, both in the initial encounter with Sir Matthew and Lady Clarissa and later on when he is brought to Dowling Hall, the novel avoids certain Romantic clichés regarding his ability to charm his adoptive family. Unlike Dickens’s Oliver, whose good looks and melancholy expression render him touching and appealing to soft-hearted middle-class figures, Trollope grants Michael a more realistic status as a shabby factory boy, clearly unattractive (although naturally handsome). When describing his indifferent reception into the Dowling mansion, the narrator seems aware that the down-to-earth representation of this encounter diverges from more sentimental depictions of similar scenes in other texts: Had he been a ragged sailor-boy, or a ragged plough-boy, or even a ragged chimney-sweeper, there might by possibility have been excited some feeling of curiosity and interest; but a ragged factoryboy was of all created beings the one least likely to give birth to such emotions. (Trollope, 1844: 21) The first adoption in Michael Armstrong inverts the Dickensian pattern in two senses: first, by denying it its function as a magic solution (the adoption creates new problems rather than solving the old ones); and second, by emptying it of any moral content (since here it is not the result of a genuine philanthropic impulse). By invalidating the value of the poor boy’s adoption, Trollope’s work implies that middle-class paternalism, or private acts of charity, cannot serve as a remedy to social problems. More than this, it might pose a social problem in itself. Michael’s adoption exposes both the moral and the legal complexity of what many other novels published in the late 1830s and during the following two decades present as a smooth process. Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861), and other novels describe instances in which poor children are taken in by people who are not their parents, without any supervision of the law. This indeed reflects the legal reality of the time: no law for regulating adoption existed in Britain until the early twentieth century. This freedom sometimes led to severe cases of economic and sexual exploitation as well as infanticide. Trollope does not suppress the problematic possibilities of what Dickens and Eliot


describe as an unequivocally beneficial act. The fact that Michael’s mother is never asked to give her permission to the adoption, for example, is made conspicuous by the boy’s unattended distress about his mother’s anticipated concern for him when he fails to return home. For Sir Matthew and Lady Clarissa, the mother is a nonentity who has no say in the matter. Her being informed about her son’s whereabouts is purely the result of Michael’s insistence that she should be told (ibid.: 21). Their assumptions depend on stereotypes of the poor, exacerbated by the fact that Michael’s only parent is a woman, a widow, and an invalid – hence unproductive. The characterization of Michael’s mother further serves to underline the immoral side of adoption in its inversion of some stereotypes connected to working-class parenting. Unlike common views of the poor as bad parents, the Widow Armstrong is naturally a good, affectionate, and devoted mother, who instills all the requisite moral and religious principles in her two sons. This characterization challenges the moral imperative to interfere in the domestic affairs of the lower class for their own benefit. Many nineteenth-century commentators believed that family life among the lower classes was damaged. This view led to a sense that the nation should step in to care for poor children, who were compassionately regarded as “children of the state” (Nelson, 1999: 71–2). Although this view served to ameliorate the attitude of the state to lower-class children and to injured children at large, it also tended to exonerate the state from responsibility for the sad condition of poor children’s home life. As late as the last decades of the century it was widely believed that poor children should be rescued early from the bad, sometimes criminal influence of their home environment. If residual Romantic sensibilities cast the child as naturally good, then his or her turning out differently had to be blamed on a corrupting environment. For instance, in 1885, Our Waifs and Strays, the monthly paper of the Church of England devoted to issues of welfare, published a piece in this spirit entitled “Give the Boys a Chance!” where the following passage appeared: Look for one moment into a thieves’ home, see the evil faces – hear the foul language. Think what it is for a little child – a child created in the image of God – to be brought up in such a home. How impossible it is for it to grow up to anything but evil.… It is a fact that at this moment thousands of English boys are being trained to lives as evil. – Fagin works still in the heart of our cities. Shall we leave our boys to his teaching? Picture to yourself, on the other hand, what

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these boys may become if we take them in time. Experience teaches us how soon evil habits can be changed into good ones in early childhood.27 (emphases added) There seems to be no clear distinction in this text between actual criminals and regular working-class families; speaking of “thousands of English boys,” the passage cannot possibly refer exclusively to the homes of the criminal underground. It rather seems to envisage a stereotypical lower-class home; it is there that children are taught “foul language” and “evil habits.” The view that much can be done for the children is not accompanied by any ideas about what may be done for the parents; they are clearly beyond hope. Their bad character disqualifies them as parents and makes it legitimate and potentially easy to take their children away. In order to make it seem even easier, the passage refers to the children as “our boys,” rather than their parents’ boys, and depicts them as victims who incidentally fell into the hands of evil corruptors (Fagins) with whom they have no natural bond. Commissioners and witnesses often described working-class parents as selfish brutes, careless about their children’s safety and health, and regularly spending the youngsters’ wages on drink. In The Effects of the Factory System (1896), Allen Clarke attacks what he sees as the dehumanizing indifference and avarice of lower-class parents. His vehemence does not leave much room for a critique of the state or the economic system: And oh! the children – the poor helpless children! – condemned to be born of parents, and entrusted to the care of fathers who have less true affection for their offspring than a savage tiger. I am reluctant to write it, but it is a sad fact, that the majority of parents in Lancashire regard children only as commercial speculations, to be turned into wage-earning machines as soon as the child’s age and the law will permit. For this they oppose the raising of the age of half-timers; for this resent all legislative interference … No wild beast ever treats its young as too many of the fathers and mothers of Lancashire have treated and still treat theirs. (Clarke, 1899: 105–6) In targeting lower-class parents, the discourses of middle-class socialreform activists on the one hand and their conservative opponents on the other often sounded surprisingly similar. Trollope, however, portrays a different picture. The loving relationship between Mrs. Armstrong and her two sons not only undermines some of the biased assumptions that


Trollope’s readers may have entertained, but also those held by almost all of the novel’s socially superior characters. When Michael’s eyes fill with tears as he thinks of his mother, Lady Clarissa observes that he must be hungry: “plenty of food generally cures all poor people’s complaint” (Trollope, 1844: 16). Her assumption is belied by Michael’s misery at being forced to stay away from his beloved mother although he is going to be well fed at the manufacturer’s mansion, and by his wish to send home a basket of food instead of satiating his own hunger. If workingclass parents are as worthy and loving and beloved as Michael’s mother, to adopt their children is not an act of mercy but of cruelty. However, the representation of Michael’s mother does bring to the fore, and perhaps justifies, certain paternalistic assumptions. The “infantilization” of the working class is demonstrated in the characterization of the widow and bears several implications, some of them contradictory. On the one hand, she is depicted as positively childlike because morally innocent and naïve, good-hearted, gentle, and loving. Her spiritual purity is corroborated not only by her religious faith but also by her personal and domestic cleanliness, which is emphasized to counter the conventional association of the dwellings and bodies of the urban poor with filth. On the other hand, she is described as physically and mentally weak, an invalid dependent on her young children’s miserable income and feeble assistance. Like a gullible child, she is too innocent and trusting to make her own decisions: lacking appropriate guidance, she is tricked into signing the pernicious apprenticeship contract that will allow Sir Matthew to dispatch Michael to Deep Valley – sending him, metaphorically, to perdition. When reading this scene we are led to wish that she had had Mary Brotherton’s guidance at this point, because without proper advice or direction from someone reliable stationed above her, she is lost. What qualifies the paternalistic implications of this episode is the fact that Mrs. Armstrong’s error of judgment is the result of the manipulative intervention of her social superiors in her family life. So long as she is not pushed beyond her domestic sphere, she is a good mother who would never do her children any harm; it is broader social interference that is the source of her failure as a mother. Besides the immoral motivation and flawed procedure of interclass adoption, Michael Armstrong also suggests that adoption’s supposedly desirable result – the erasure of social differences – is an impossibility. Unlike what other narratives may imply, the change of social identity is not an easy process. Michael’s adoption by Sir Matthew is represented as a perplexing undermining of social distinctions. Both the rich patron and the indigent boy feel distressed by it. As soon as Michael’s identity as a

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“hand” is discarded along with his grime and ragged clothes, as he is bathed and given a wealthy child’s garb, Sir Matthew is in doubt where to put him: “Parlour or kitchen, school-room or factory, drawing-room or scullery?” (ibid.: 57). He resents Michael’s social promotion, largely of his own making: “it is disgusting to see [Michael] dressed up, walking about the house like a tame monkey, when I know that his long fingers might be piercing thousands of threads for two shillings a week” (ibid.: 116). Michael himself is no less discomfited by the blurring of social distinctions. Paradoxically, what he needs to be rescued from as a result of his adoption is the very protection he has received. More than once he ponders a return to factory life, which he now regards as a blessing compared with his present awkward position. Yet, he likes his young gentleman’s attire, and feels disgusted by the now-strange operative’s garb he is forced to resume wearing in Deep Valley. The unusually observant Mary Brotherton realizes, alone besides Michael himself, the necessity of “rescuing the pale trembling child … from the horrible bondage of Sir Matthew Dowling’s charity” (ibid.: 113). Here both character and author’s ironic use of the word “charity” makes the beneficial quality of the concept equivocal. “Charity” is shown to be, at least in this case, an aggressive act of exploitation, indifferent to the benefited party’s wishes, disconcerting in terms of social and familial identity, and humiliating because of the forced proximity between the assisted party and the prejudiced upper-class milieu that cannot absorb him as an equal. Trollope’s skepticism regarding the moral value of middle-class patronage toward a child is far-reaching even if compared to the future treatment of the theme in Dickens’s more radical social novels of the 1850s, in which he stages such relationships as more complicated and ambiguous than in his early works. In Hard Times, Sissy Jupe’s adoption by her school headmaster, the coldly utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind, confronts the girl with her adoptive family’s emotional aridity. Sissy is not altogether happy about being adopted, yet this act takes place due to her own decision, and is performed under the best intentions on the part of Mr. Gradgrind. Eventually it renders the Gradgrind family a more feeling one, and probably makes Sissy a better-directed, mature person. Sissy’s real father, the poor circus performer, though warmhearted and kind, is represented as irresponsible and incapable of taking care of his child, which makes the adoption morally justifiable. Another complicated case of adoption is presented in Little Dorrit (1857), where the orphan girl Tattycoram, named after Coram’s Foundling Hospital, is taken in by the wealthy Meagles family in order to act as servant and companion to their daughter. Tattycoram runs away because of her


ambiguously inferior position in the house, but this act is represented as a whimsical, ungrateful manifestation of adolescent insubordination. She eventually realizes that she had better go back and learn to appreciate the kindness of her benefactors. In Trollope’s work matters seem less ambiguous. That upper-class involvement is detrimental for the working-class child is underlined by the fact that even the interference of a well-meaning character such as Martha Dowling causes only harm. Her crucial role in convincing Widow Armstrong, Michael’s mother, to sign the apprenticeship contract that would allow Sir Matthew to send the boy off to Deep Valley shows us that middle-class meddling in the domestic affairs of the poor is dangerous. Even if meaning well, as in Martha’s case, such interference is tainted by ignorance and condescension. Martha’s first conversation with Michael, when she offers him food and asks him about the factory, illustrates this clearly: although she is far more compassionate than Sir Matthew or Lady Clarissa and is the only person in the entire household who actually feels sympathy for Michael, her mindset regarding the boy is shaped by her prejudice against the poor, and she does not regard his account of factory work as valuable. Nevertheless, the denunciation of middle-class intervention in Michael Armstrong is not complete, as the second adoption episode suggests. Indeed, when examining the repeated preoccupation with the theme of adoption, it becomes evident that near its ending, Trollope’s narrative evolves toward some kind of Dickensian resolution, in which a private act of kindness on the part of a rich individual is the most successful means of redeeming working-class characters from their life of drudgery. Mary Brotherton’s philanthropic intervention should therefore be looked at closely, in order to see whether, and how, it diverges (though much more subtly than Sir Matthew’s charity) from the Dickensian model. As Mary becomes obsessed with rescuing Michael, first from Sir Matthew’s grasp and then from the torments of Deep Valley, the plight of this one child grows to epitomize, for her as also for the reader, the general condition of the poor. Michael’s personal fate is emblematic of the general problem, yet his personal destiny also obscures that of all others. Mary’s adoption of the now-orphaned Teddy and Fanny indicates that she turns to a private sphere of social activity, motivated by her personal involvement in Michael’s fate. The children she chooses to foster are those closely related to Michael – his girlfriend and brother – and serve as his substitutes. In this respect, her act of adoption resembles the Dickensian paradigm, in which the rich philanthropist is motivated by

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a personal feeling of sympathy for the particular needy child or youth he encounters, rather than by a general stance of political dissent; although in Mary’s case, unlike that of Dickens’s adoptive figures, there is clear awareness of the political dimension of these children’s plight. Although motivated by genuine compassion, Mary’s adoption of Teddy and Fanny, and her later patronage of Michael, share one problematic characteristic with Sir Matthew’s adoption of Michael: it is performed as an entirely private act, not authorized or even looked at by any disinterested party. At the time of adopting Teddy and Fanny, Mary is about twenty-two years old, ... and moreover almost childishly younglooking for her age; and whatever she might have brought herself to think of it, most others would very naturally have deemed her adopting a boy of twelve, and a girl of eleven, a most outrageously preposterous and imprudent act. (ibid.: 295) As in the case of the first adoption, Mary’s act is the result of a private, potentially capricious enterprise. Yet the text, despite the description of Mary just cited, seems to approve of her acts. Is Mary mature and balanced enough to become an appropriate mother to two traumatized children? Is the absence of any procedure or agency that should look into the matter at all problematic? The fact that a few years later she also marries her adopted child is particularly troubling. Such concerns may be anachronistic, because nineteenth-century social sensibilities were not yet ripe to see the issue of adoption and the rights of poor children in such terms. Nevertheless, the narrative’s own deep probing into such questions in its critical depiction of Michael’s adoption by Sir Matthew suggests this kind of awareness, which is now, in the case of Mary as Teddy and Fanny’s adoptive parent, abandoned. Mary’s character seems immune to any critique that the novel otherwise unhesitatingly levels against the rich and the powerful. Her paternalism is legitimized, whereas that of others is deplored. A major difference between Mary’s intervention and that of others is that Mary’s assistance to Michael, Teddy, and Fanny is the result of an ongoing process of social investigation and a growing political awareness. Her acts of benevolence are represented as the least she can do; she is not a smug, self-flattering benefactress, but a social activist who experiences feelings of frustration and despair about her inability to solve the broader problems. Mary’s acts are perhaps paternalistic, but this paternalism, unlike what we see in Dickens’s adoptive figures, is based on a deep factual knowledge and moral awareness of the conditions of industrial


work. She is different from Dickens’s paternalistic gentlemen not only in being a woman – which makes her, as Bodenheimer suggests, less of a power figure – but also because her sense of guilt at enjoying the riches accumulated by the exploitation of children denies her a position of superiority toward the three former child laborers she supports. She offers assistance not as an act of altruism or charity, but as an ethically required recompense, because according to her judgment the money she bestows on her protégés is the product of their (or their fellow laborers’) own hard work. Her assistance is therefore offered on the basis of social and economic justice rather than charity. We can construe Mary’s figure as maternal, even if her actions are economically propped up by paternal money, the fortune accumulated by her father. She is an unconventional Angel-of-the-House figure, who takes to the streets as reformer, and then retreats back to the domestic realm where she enjoys her role as the supporter of male figures, Teddy and Michael, who can now acquire, with her help, higher education and social success. The fact that Mary enjoys using her wealth and social standing for manipulating the social identities of her inferiors exposes the complexity of her largely benevolent intervention. This complexity reaches its climax in her marriage to Teddy, who is not only a social inferior and ten years her junior, but is also her adopted son. Suggestive of incest, this marriage to a disabled younger protégé indicates that Mary wishes to form a married life in which she is certain to maintain her supremacy.28 She ends up surrounded by a family or community of her own making, consisting of her husband and brother- and sister-in-law, who are all much younger than she is and who owe their freedom, wealth, and education to her. No wonder that the word “grateful” is repeated more than once in the novel’s concluding chapter. Mary’s generosity is perhaps not entirely unselfish, yet the novel is not critical of her philanthropy and seems to corroborate her female paternalism and the ensuing undermining of the lower-class youths’ status as free agents. The major differences between the two adoption plots seem to reflect a changed ideology. Speaking for working-class autonomy via the first adoption plot, Trollope reasserts interclass adoption as a magic solution in the second. Her inconsistent treatment of the theme is expressive of a similar dialectic that accompanied the composition of the novel. In her Preface, Trollope recounts the shift in outlook that occurred as she was at work on Michael Armstrong, following the violent riots of dissenting laborers. At first, she had “intended to divide her work into two portions,” the first of which was to “drag into the light of day ... the hideous mass of injustice and suffering to which thousands of

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infant labourers are subjected.” In the second, “she proposed that the hero of her tale ... should have been seen embarked in those perfectly constitutional struggles for the amelioration of the sufferings of his class.” Yet, regarding this latter part, the author’s views have undergone considerable change. “When those in whose behalf she hoped to move the sympathy of their country are found busy in scenes of outrage and lawless violence,” the author feels that “it would be alike acting in violation of her own principles ... were she to persist in an attempt to hold up as objects of public sympathy, men who have stained their righteous cause with deeds of violence and blood.” Under these circumstances she has “determined that the existence of her hero as an operative shall close with his childhood” (ibid.: iii–iv). Trollope’s decision against the planned sequel, ending the narrative with Michael’s childhood, also means that only so long as her workingclass protagonist is a weak, dependent subject can she unequivocally depict his struggle to be heard. She chooses not to articulate the voice of the same operative, no longer a boy at the end of the novel but a youth who has reached the stage of self-reliance and free agency. Trollope’s reasons for this disclaimer could be formal or generic, as well as ideological: having already depicted Michael’s formation and growth, she has accomplished a complete Bildungsroman; to carry on now into another sequel of adventure would mean to lose generic purpose and focus. The child’s distinct point of view is not merely a political but also a rich literary device; as soon as it is no longer available, the sequel is bound to appear less attractive. While, as Laura Berry has argued, the creation of the child was necessary for imagining free subjectivity in the Victorian novel, in Michael Armstrong, no less than in Oliver Twist (as this novel emerges from Berry’s analysis), that free subjectivity is “continually fenced around” and “always in the position of client,” always a child whom someone has to feed, as Berry says about Dickens’s Oliver (Berry, 1999: 59). Although Michael’s heroic escape from Deep Valley renders him far more self-reliant than Oliver, and shows Mary’s upper-class rescue fantasy to be redundant, it does not turn him into a free agent as we might expect. The eventual patronage of the heiress leads him back in the opposite direction. The bottom line is that the ending of Michael’s story places him under the protection of upper-middle-class resources. Since Michael embodies the working class in this novel, the fact that he is shown to grow up toward the end could have suggested that the narrative envisions a potential process of maturation – a de-infantilization – for Britain’s poor. However, besides the point that female protection


renders him permanently childlike, it is hard to see the grown Michael as emblematic of his original social group. As a wealthy, university-educated German gentleman, there is not much left in him at the end that can be associated either with the British, or with the poor.

Tonna and emancipation Trollope’s Michael Armstrong and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood are almost automatically paired together by critics because of their simultaneous publication and shared theme. These two early social-problem novels critically explore the conditions and impact of child labor and are preoccupied with questions pertaining to workingclass agency and the child operative’s subjectivity and voice. Tonna (1790–1846) was an evangelical reformist and a prolific writer, poet, and editor, producing prose narratives, poems, tracts, and articles in the 1830s and 1840s. Her works, published in many editions, made her well known even across the Atlantic (Kaplan, 1985: 52). Helen Fleetwood, considered her most important work, was serialized in The Christian Lady’s Magazine (edited by Tonna from 1834 to 1846) between September 1839 and March 1841. Published as a book by R. B. Seeley in 1841 under the author’s penname “Charlotte Elizabeth,” the novel has been referred to as “England’s first proletarian novel,” the first to mediate information from Bluebooks to the wider public (Kovacˇevic´ and Kanner, 1970–71: 173).29 Yet, the first installments of Michael Armstrong preceded the serial publication of Tonna’s work by seven months. Although her orientation is strongly evangelical, Tonna’s professed agenda is quite similar to Trollope’s: she wants to denounce child labor and to confront middle-class readers with an accumulation of disconcerting details connected to this phenomenon. However, there are formal and ideological differences between the two authors, which become particularly intriguing if examined in relation to the figurative use they make of the child. Inseparable from Tonna’s political critique is her strong religious impulse, which augments the difference. Besides her fictional writing on child labor, Tonna also published texts concerned with other social problems, for example an anti-slavery narrative (The System, 1827) and a treatise on the education of deaf children (The Happy Mute, 1833). She was herself deaf from childhood, following an illness at the age of ten (Kestner, 1987: 134). Her interest in social injustice was the result of an intuitively humane and compassionate stance rather than a well-informed political awareness, and grew out of her experiences in the Anti-Slavery Society.30

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Ivanka Kovacˇevic´ and Barbara Kanner, who jointly redeemed Tonna from obscurity in 1970, discuss what they see as her great contribution to the social-problem genre and emphasize her innovative focus on the details of industrial operatives’ lives.31 Other critics have similarly suggested that Gaskell’s Mary Barton was particularly influenced by Helen Fleetwood, reworking some of the earlier novel’s major themes and characters (Fryckstedt, 1980: 11–30; Krueger, 1994: 344). In the middle of the nineteenth century, Helen Fleetwood had real political influence, and its vision of industrialism as causing moral debilitation developed into a political movement by Frederick Denison Maurice and his group of Christian Socialists (Kovacˇevic´ and Kanner, 1970–71: 160).32 Like Frances Trollope, Tonna deals directly with child labor – a theme that many other contemporary authors avoided. The silencing and disregard of the working-class child’s voice as either inconsequential or potentially seditious is a central theme for both Trollope and Tonna. But whereas Trollope focuses on the way in which adoption and middle-class intervention are insensitive and even antagonistic to the child’s needs, Tonna is less interested in interclass relations; her main trope for staging the disregard of the child operative’s perspective is, quite literally, that child’s own voice and internal conflicts. In Helen Fleetwood, silencing is less clearly imposed from the outside than in Michael Armstrong. It is internalized or presented as something that ought to be internalized. The vocal articulation of the young characters’ subjectivity – especially when negative feelings of frustration, fear, or resentment are experienced – is given much attention in the novel, yet the free expression of such feelings is not necessarily rendered with authorial sympathy. The motif is surrounded by a great deal of ideological ambiguity, reflected in the different uses of the child’s voice in the novel: some of them uplifting, others damaging and sinful. In Tonna’s work the child’s selfexpression is often shown to be undesirable, whereas self-directed acts of silencing are applauded. Tonna’s representation of working-class children reveals a complex mixture of conformist and reformist ideas regarding the class conflict, as well as a merger of traditionally catechetical and empathetically dialogic attitudes to children. A devoutly Christian work, Helen Fleetwood illustrates the gradual evangelical fusion between Puritan ideas of the child as an embodiment of original sin, and the more recent Romantic idea of childhood as a state of innocence. Though influenced by recent ideas about the child’s innate goodness, Tonna does not see the child as unconditionally pure, but as extremely vulnerable to corruption and continually under the threat of being contaminated by the evils of the


factory environment, which might combine with internal propensities for vanity, selfishness, and self-indulgence. In many respects, Tonna is a descendant of Blake, for whom the stage of Experience might arrive all too early. Her symbolic construction of the figure of the biblical orphan – an emblem of vulnerable innocence that serves to measure social injustice – locates the subversion of Helen Fleetwood in the very religious substance of its depiction of society, which critics often take as a sign of the work’s conservatism.33 Unlike Trollope, whose chief concern is to create the image of working-class children as morally pure, and who is busy finding narrative solutions for extricating them from their miserable lot as factory workers, Tonna depicts a gradual process of moral degeneration that accompanies the child’s contact with the spiritually infected atmosphere of the operatives’ community. What her child figures need to be rescued from is not so much industrial work as the severe moral damage that it entails. The children’s afterlife is her chief concern, while their more immediate prospects in this world are of lesser importance. Tonna’s ambiguity originates in her vision of spiritual purity as inseparable from one’s patient willingness to endure suffering. The urge to see the child perform self-directed acts of silencing, actively denying and suppressing her feelings of rage and frustration, has to do with the doctrine that a good Christian child ought to engage in a constant spiritual battle against selfishness and self-indulgence. This vision is in conflict with the novel’s social project, which aims to redeem workingclass figures from objectification, oppression, and dependence. In many respects, Tonna’s project is indeed an attempt to de-objectify working-class children. For one thing, she allows her lower-class characters far greater agency than Trollope does. Since middle-class intervention is marginal in Helen Fleetwood, the working-class characters are given a wider narrative space to make their own choices and suffer the consequences. An illustration of the difference between the two novels in this respect can be found in the portrayal of the two lowerclass widows who serve as heads of family. Trollope’s Mrs. Armstrong is quite different from Tonna’s Mrs. Green, an elderly woman who raises her four orphaned grandchildren, aged 8 to 17, and an adopted orphan, Helen Fleetwood, the daughter of deceased family friends taken in by the Greens when she was 7. Both women are affectionate and caring maternal figures, yet while Widow Armstrong is an invalid, physically and mentally frail and easily manipulated, Widow Green is self-reliant and manifests much courage and determination, for instance when she dares visit the mill owner at his own luxurious

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house and complain about the working conditions of her grandchildren (Tonna, 1852: Chapter 10). Expressing her moral indignation with confidence, despite the mill owner’s rudeness and contempt, she manifests both spiritual innocence and unbending courage, willing to take risks for the sake of the children. Though working class, Widow Green is far more mature and active than Mrs. Armstrong, whose trusting obedience renders her dependent on others, like a child. When Mrs. Green realizes how pernicious her decision to move the children from the country to the industrial city of M— (Manchester) has been, she tries to take matters into her own hands and rescue the young ones from their terrible lot. That she eventually fails is not her fault but that of the economic system. In her struggle, though unsuccessful, she is a mostly resilient working-class female figure, especially if compared to Michael’s mother, who passively pines away and dies with a broken heart after her misguided endorsement of her son’s transition to Deep Valley.34 On a broader level, Tonna speaks for working-class agency when she asserts the priceless spiritual value of each child laborer’s soul. She laments the loss of the intrinsic significance each agricultural laborer used to hold for his employer in the intimate rural community, where he “enjoyed that peculiar feeling, the value of which the poor are seldom aware of until they experience its absence, ‘My employer knows me; I am not in his sight a mere piece of machinery, regarded only while it works in his service’” (ibid.: 179). The rural community is idealized and positioned in stark contrast to the anonymous and mechanized environment of the urban setting. Unlike agricultural laborers, factory workers soon become a community of automata. Nothing seems to animate them. The cold listlessness of their looks sends a chill to the heart of the spectator, who, if he feel rightly, must feel it a degradation to his species to be chained, as it were, to a parcel of senseless machinery, confused by its din, and forced to obey its movements with scarcely an interval for thought or for repose. (ibid.: 272) Pastoral, preindustrial England is figured in this novel via the topos of the child, following the Romantic paradigm. In this respect, Tonna is a follower not only of Blake but of Wordsworth, constructing the natural scene as an unfailing resource of simple joy and energy that is metaphorically embodied in the rural child’s energetic responsiveness and moral integrity. Turning the child into an urban industrial worker is therefore an unnatural act, detrimental to spiritual innocence and intuitive moral qualities. Yet, Tonna differs significantly from Wordsworth in abstaining


from using the trope of the child as a site for exploring the interiority, or the original self. On an additional level, Tonna’s novel seeks to de-objectify and rehabilitate the child’s point of view no less than does Trollope’s. In Michael Armstrong there is an emphasis on instances in which Michael’s words and opinions are unattended to by his patrons, either because they do not want to listen to him or because they simply do not believe him. In Helen Fleetwood there is an effort to redeem the objectified child laborer’s perspective directly by using her as focalizer, and allowing her to shed new light on industrial work. The first description of factory work in the novel, for instance, rendered through the eyes of a child, acquires a peculiarly menacing and gigantic aspect: I was so dizzy with the crowd about us that I hardly knew how we managed. … Nothing ever frightened me so much. … [O]nly think, boys, what it must be to see ever so many great big things, frames upon carriages on each side of the room, walking up to one another, and then walking back again; … and the cotton moves so fast that it is hard to piece it quick enough; and there is a great dust, and such a noise of whirr, whirr, whirr, that at first I did not know whether I was not standing on my head. (Tonna, 1852: 85) Nevertheless, Tonna’s text is revealed as ideologically ambiguous as soon as we observe that her attempt to redeem child operatives from objectification is accompanied by an unmistakable impetus to suppress their assertiveness, individuality, and agency. It is in the representation of the child’s subjectivity that her characters, as well as the reader, are repeatedly led to the conclusion that a good child should not give vent to her innermost thoughts but learn to suppress her feelings instead. Helen Fleetwood’s defense of the child’s point of view is thus quite inconsistent. Although the child operatives’ perspective is granted narrative focus at times, and although the narrator sets out to de-objectify oppressed child figures, Tonna simultaneously endorses social mechanisms that enforce child acquiescence. The inconsistent use of narrative techniques of focalization and shifting perspectives creates moments at which the child’s point of view is conspicuously absent. These moments suggest that giving a voice to the child’s subjectivity is not one of the chief goals of this novel. The identity of each of the two main young characters in Helen Fleetwood, the eponymous heroine and Mary Green, is defined in terms of age, class, and gender. In their case, as very young lower-class females, each of these categories entails powerlessness and dependence, which

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are juxtaposed with the characters’ interiority. Yet, what emerges out of this juxtaposition is different for each of the two. Helen (16) and her close friend and stepsister Mary (11) are contrasted. In Helen’s example, Tonna constructs a young female operative’s subjectivity as passively and admirably enduring what is regarded as inevitable hardship. In Mary’s case, we see childlike boldness and bitterness instead, and these qualities are often equated with insubordination. Mary’s emotional response of resistance to the powerlessness imposed by class, age, and gender is met with reservations from other characters (the widow, Mary’s elder brothers, and Helen) as well as the narrator. These reservations are discernible from the outset. The opening chapter of the novel, set in the country, shows the two girls cheerfully employed in milking the cows, then basking in the sunlight. This is still the happy, preindustrial era of their young lives. A contrast is soon established between the two girls. Mary is characterized as sweet, cheerful, and goodhearted, yet unruly and wanting things to be done her way. She is somewhat spoiled, materialistic, jealous of others, and loves comfort. Helen is fond of nature and attached to simple things; she is responsible, serious, content, hardworking, and ever grateful. As part of the set of contrasts, Mary is also typified by excessive talking, whereas Helen is characterized as quiet and reserved; even of the beauty of nature, which she relishes, she “ha[s] little to say” (ibid.: 8). The narrator explains that “Helen was a simple country girl, whose thoughts had never learned to clothe themselves in language worthy of the occasion that called them into existence” (ibid.: 7–8). This description suggests that as a “simple country girl,” Helen’s reserve is but the natural result of both her class and her gender. Mary, too, is a simple country girl; the implication is that she does not fully know her station. We have here something that goes beyond a Romantic assumption that lofty language might render simple joys inauthentic and deep childlike feelings false. The nonarticulation that is to be repeatedly associated with Helen throughout the novel is a virtue also on the social level. The contrast between the two girls is consistent and made prominent as the family moves to Manchester and the children become industrial workers. It soon turns out that, as Tonna is anxious to show us, not only the physical but also the spiritual environment in the mill is sickly – quite a different account from the one Trollope provides us, with operatives’ solidarity and humanity unquenched by the unbearable physical hardship. In Tonna’s work, the spiritual danger is presented as far more severe than the physical one. Most laborers, adult as well as young, are depicted as depraved, blasphemous, deceitful, and selfish, as a result of


their oppressive conditions as well as their complete withdrawal from any spiritual instruction or religious practice. An illustration of this is provided by Mrs. Green’s urban daughter Sally Wright and her offspring, a bunch of rude children who serve as a sharp contrast to their newly arrived, pious rural cousins, the Greens. Tonna depicts a gradual process of moral and physical decline that the Green children, especially little Mary and Willy, the youngest, undergo as a result of their exposure to the pernicious environment at the mill. The indictment of industrial work as morally damaging is made clear by the fact that the two children of both families who do manage to maintain their moral purity and Christian faith are the ailing James Green (aged 13) and his maimed cousin Sarah Wright (9), whose arm was amputated by machinery at a young age. Neither can be admitted into the mill due to their physical condition and therefore they live quietly at home, away from bad influences. Besides these two, the only girl who manages to do the impossible and maintain her devoutness although she is subjected to the corrupting conditions of industrial labor is Helen Fleetwood. The reader is given to understand that in her case, this is possible only because she is an epitome of unwavering faith, patience, and moral resolution that is rare to find. It is significant that much of Helen’s admirable spiritual strength is revealed in her ability to keep silent. She never speaks about sad, painful things. The death of her parents when she was 7, for example, is something that she has thought about ever since, yet it remains unspoken: “Of these things the girl never spoke, and it was kindly hoped that they had faded from her naturally cheerful mind: but it was far otherwise” (ibid.: 12). Not wishing to burden others with her sorrow, Helen’s interiority, though often uneasy, remains sealed and unexpressed (ibid.: 23). Even her physical posture – at a hard moment she is depicted as withdrawn, “her face concealed” (ibid.: 25) – highlights this reticence. At some point, Helen is on the verge of complaining – for example about the rudeness and coarse language she hears during the ride to Manchester – “but a glance at the widow’s care-worn countenance … silenced the girl” (ibid.: 41). To remain silent is an acquired act, part of one’s education toward unselfishness. Complaining, or speaking what is on your mind, is inconsiderate and egotistical. Helen’s often distressful internal processes are concealed by her peaceful appearance and quiet demeanor. This seeming peacefulness, however, is the result of a constant effort. When suppressing pain, Helen’s body sometimes betrays her by sending forth inarticulate indications of this effort: “Helen colored just because she hoped she would not color at that moment”

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(ibid.: 33). Blushing is an inadvertent way for the body to express agitation and intense feeling. This physical revelation indicates the amount of strength required to suppress the pain. The narrative does not suggest that silencing one’s feelings of distress or anxiety is easy or comfortable; it depicts this process of self-censorship as a heroic, praiseworthy struggle against what is constructed as spiritual weakness. Helen’s voluntary court evidence in Chapter 15, given against a brutal factory overlooker at the mill, seems entirely out of character. The explanation is that she is pleading the case of another: her stepsister Mary Green, who had been beaten by this man, and filed a complaint against the cruel harasser. It is not for her own sake that Helen tries to redress the wrongs done against her and other young operatives; it is an expression of an unselfish wish to help a friend. The court scene shows Helen as an almost hallowed figure, undaunted by the contemptuous and slandering treatment she receives at the hands of the overlooker’s attorneys, who declare her testimony a heap of lies. Helen is undisturbed by the attack, motivated as she is by her inner truth. The overlooker, we are told, goes practically unpunished. Because of her early loss, Helen is depicted from the outset as more imaginative and contemplative than other children her age. A “modest reluctance to make her own concerns more prominent than was suitable for so humble a person habituated her to what Mary termed keeping her own counsel”; the “curious, loquacious” Mary often devotes her ingenuity “to the task of discovering some of Helen’s ‘plots,’” yet “Helen, in truth, had no mystery about her: she was rather reserved” (ibid.: 40). No mystery surrounds Helen’s reticence. Although she hardly ever talks about what troubles her, it is affirmed that her interiority contains no secrets. Through the omniscient narrator her subjectivity is made known to us in its entirety, with no hidden inner life of which we are unaware. As such, Helen’s is a rather one-dimensional subjectivity, being presented as flatly finite and knowable, without giving the reader a feeling that there might be any uncharted areas of feelings, desires, retrospections, or anxieties in her character. It is not accidental that Mary is the one, among the multitude of child operatives in the factory, who goes through the motions of pressing charges against the aggressive overlooker. The offense of brutal child beating, disgraceful as it is, is part of the daily routine of child laborers in this mill as in so many others, according to the descriptions in Tonna’s work and in other sources. Mary’s strategy of coping with this degradation, radically different from Helen’s, is met with little commendation in the novel. Within the familial setting, characterized as far from


severe, Mary – who quite often complains and talks back – is no less often kindly ordered to “hold [her] tongue” (ibid.: 10), mostly by her loving grandmother and admirable older brother Richard. Continually hushed, she is time and again called to mind what her elders say (ibid.: 16). Any critical comment that Mary makes is immediately censored: “‘Cousin Charles was like a wild beast, and would have done somebody a mischief.’ ‘Hush, Mary, you must not speak harshly of your poor cousin, but pray for him’” (ibid.: 76). Even when the content of her speech is commendable, the very fact that she speaks is often presented as inappropriate. As she explains to her uncle Wright, ignorant of holy matters, the meaning of the word “Gospel” – “good news” – her grandmother tells her that she “should be sorry … to hear a child presuming to teach” (ibid.: 71). The idea that a child should know more than an adult is unsettling because it inverts the basic assumption of catechism, which in Tonna’s novel still prevails. As Grandmother Green preaches humility, we can see that this virtue is figured as silence: “‘Hush, my dear child,’” the widow tells Mary as the girl complains about their poverty, when under the threat of being forced to evacuate their home. The widow goes on: “‘Strokes of the rod are sometimes needful for us; and we have a Father in heaven who will apply them when he sees good. You must not speak so hastily,’ she continued, as Mary opened her lips to reply: ‘the wise man tells us that a haughty spirit cometh before a fall. Let us be humble’” (ibid.: 16). Authentically expressing her anguish, social humiliation, anxiety, and resentment, Mary prefers to be attuned to her own feelings. Yet, through its narrator and two consistently commendable characters, the Widow and Helen, the novel preaches against what little Mary represents. The two characters’ religious doctrine carries political implications. To regard economic and social exploitation as a necessary “stroke of the rod” entails passive acquiescence of the lower classes. Thus, gradually, Mary’s different strategy acquires a political dimension as well. Her resistance to the ethos of suffering and tribulation as a Christian way to serve God, supported by the Widow and Helen, becomes the target of Mary’s attack, and she sardonically presents this doctrine as a masochistic discourse that justifies the evils of child labor (ibid.: 212). Her critique is represented as part of a troubling process of moral deterioration that the distraught girl is undergoing. Transgressing the limitations of her religious duty, her class, and her gender, toward the end of the novel Mary will undergo a humbling process of education and retract her boldness. The link between political passivity and the reticence embodied in Helen’s figure on the one hand, and unrestrained verbal expression

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with its potential for political insubordination represented by Mary on the other, is reminiscent of the contrast observed above between autobiographers Blincoe and Dodd. Whereas both autobiographical subjects allude to their early suffering as child operatives, the greater emphasis on subjectivity in Blincoe’s Memoir, and his articulation of the feelings of fear, frustration, and rage that he experienced as a child, are accompanied by a great deal of resentment that is translated into a stance of political resistance. He is not merely angry about the brutality of certain masters who treated him sadistically, but critiques the entire system, for instance the deceit on the part of the workhouse authorities when the children are dispatched to the mill. This resentment never subsides. Dodd, on the other hand, looks at matters from a less personal perspective and dwells very little on his own personal suffering. He therefore seems less bitter, and far more willing to please his middle-class readers, than Blincoe. In Tonna’s novel, the child operative’s resentful point of view is rendered through Mary, but not entirely sympathetically; although her suffering is condemned, to assert such condemnation with her own childlike voice is shown to be inappropriate, carrying irreligious and politically seditious undertones. Not only is Mary’s point of view given to us as dangerously too vocal in Helen Fleetwood, the interiority of the eponymous character herself as an oppressed factory girl is actively blocked and restricted. Nevertheless, the uses of children’s voices in the novel are varied. When singing hymns and praying, rather than expressing discontent, children put their voices to good use. Caroling hymns in Manchester on the first Sabbath morning brings back happy memories of their vanished rural home, and temporarily consoles the entire family (ibid.: 63). Helen’s voice is particularly sweet and thrilling as she sings hymns to Sarah, the crippled cousin who yearns for spiritual instruction (ibid.: 111). Significantly, hymns and prayers also serve Helen as a means of mental escape from the spiritually contaminated surroundings at the mill, and as a weapon against its corruptive influence: it was by continuing in secret, ejaculatory prayer, by speaking to herself in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in her heart unto the Lord, that she contrived to shut out a great deal of what others drank in with contented if not with greedy ear. (ibid.: 295–6) This secret speaking and humming to herself and making melody in the heart amount to an acquired interiority: rather than allow herself to feel


and experience her interaction with her surroundings fully, Helen defends herself from such painful contact by thinking and articulating words, and melodies, that are not her own. Her subjectivity thus becomes formulaic, leaning on religious dogma. Her thoughts and speech are indeed filled with quotations from the scriptures; her dying words demonstrate the extent to which her subjectivity is no longer personal or individual: I know that my thinking about my past sins will not help to wash away their guilt. That is done already through faith in the Lord Jesus; and when I go to him I shall be always praising him for doing it, and surely I shall then remember how great my sins have been. (ibid.: 312, emphasis in the original) To the reader, who knows that Helen is an ideal, generous, impossibly ever-kind figure, these words come as a surprise. Of what “great sins” could Helen possibly be guilty? Her use of the singular possessive pronoun “my,” however, is misleading. Nothing in these last words is specific to Helen’s own history. Her entire self-perception is not private or unique in any way. The sins to which she alludes are those of mankind, and Helen speaks here in the name of human frailty at large. Unlike Mary’s, Helen’s greatest ordeal in the novel is not poverty and the hardship of industrial labor. It is the personal enmity against her at the mill. Phoebe Wright, one of the urban cousins, probably jealous of her grandmother’s partiality toward this adopted granddaughter, slanders Helen consistently. She describes her to the other girls as a parasite feeding on the Greens’ generosity, an immoral girl, and a hypocrite. As a result, they all insult Helen and laugh at her, yet she contends with the ordeal heroically. She is silent and meek, neither accusing Phoebe nor complaining to her grandmother, although she is deeply hurt. Helen, finding herself “at once marked out for the contempt and dislike of the people around her,” resolves that whatever ensued, she should “in the strength of the Lord… submit, and never … grieve her friends by communicating the trial to which their kinswoman had subjected her.” But as time wears on, it becomes more difficult than she had anticipated; for Helen Fleetwood, with all her advantages, was only a poor frail mortal, like others. Often did this determination of keeping her mouth as with a bridle, while the wicked was before her, cost a most severe struggle; … when returning to her home, when meeting the affectionate smiles of its beloved and loving inmates, most galling was the restraint that withheld her from

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claiming their ready sympathy. It would have been so soothing to tell out her sorrow to that maternal friend, and to listen to the simple but sweet comforts that even the children could supply. (ibid.: 88–9) What sustains Helen is the realization that her fellow workers persecute her because they are antagonized by her struggle to keep herself virtuous: “It is not me they hate, but the holiness which I strive to follow” (ibid.: 119). The dilemma of speaking out or remaining silent is central to this episode, and is endowed with strong religious undertones. Keeping silent about Phoebe’s harassment is staged as part of this effort to follow holiness. Reticence thus grows to equal self-sacrifice, and endurance in the interpersonal domain is measured in terms of martyrdom. Tonna constructs a model of feminine acquiescence that is hallowed in terms of the spiritual purity it signifies. It is fitting that readers know very little about Helen’s inner feelings at this stage; the events are hardly described from her point of view. Besides the brief summary cited above, we are not made privy to the inner struggle – whether to complain, talk back, or remain silent – that Helen undergoes. An ongoing enigma in the text, one that Tonna does not seem eager to solve, concerns the precise content of Phoebe’s slander, so repeatedly, yet obliquely, referred to. Helen’s social distress and mental agony at the mill remain unspoken, and the details are largely unknown to us. As the focus of the narrative largely shifts away from Mary and Helen’s perspective to those of the grandmother and Richard, the eldest brother – both characters who are not employed at the factory – we experience a growing distance from the two girls’ daily life and point of view. We no longer share their sad experiences, nor are we still acquainted with their everyday routine. We know nothing, for example, about the incident that serves as grounds for Mary’s complaint against the brutal overlooker; the scene of beating is never narrated. Helen and Mary’s presence in the novel is diminished and loses much of its impact in the narrative as each of the girls ceases to serve as focalizer. True, as a martyr Helen acquires some subversive power (an effect heightened by her premature death), a power not unlike the unsettling political presence of some of Blake’s suffering child figures. Yet, the major ideal in Tonna’s narrative is still that of silent, passive obedience to whatever afflictions befall you. A suffering child like Mary Green may arouse the reader’s resentment against the cruel social system, but is paradoxically expected to suppress any such feelings of resentment herself. Toward the end of the novel, Tonna provides us with the following moral, which should serve as a key for interpreting the representation


of working-class subjectivity throughout the text. “This is Christian principle in its highest, noblest exercise; to stifle self, where self craves spiritual privileges and separation from the wicked; in order to exhibit before others the light that may conduct them into ways of holiness and peace” (ibid.: 296). “To stifle self” is a religious maxim, which entails a rather limited literary scope for developing a character’s subjectivity. The “wicked” in this case happen to be fellow laborers, epitomized in the young, depraved Phoebe Wright. Tonna’s social-problem novel thus instructs self-denial rather than political assertiveness, and presents as the chief enemy of the laboring child the evil to be found within the operatives’ community itself, rather than among the class of those who exploit child workers and gain the profit. “To stifle self” leads to political acquiescence; poetically, it means that the representation of subjectivity is bound to be restricted. Helen represents a double ideal of self-effacement, which is both Christian and gender based. She “had a presentiment of evil,” it is stated at some point; “Yet it was not for herself that Helen trembled” (ibid.: 50). As a young female and a devout Christian, as well as lower class, she always thinks about others first. The Christian, feminine, lower-class ideal of selflessness thus blocks the narrative development of subjectivity as a locus of interest. Selflessness, and even self-sacrifice, formed a major ideal for young girls in mid-century England. Studying advice books for girls published in the early 1840s, especially Sarah Stickney’s highly popular guidebook Daughters of England, Catherine Robson has shown how the codes of behavior dictated to middle-class girls and young women accumulate to an “ethic of self-abnegation” (Robson, 2001: 52). In the construction of Helen’s character, the additional ethos of Christian humility and the social humility of class are added to such gender expectations, which together create an ideal of meek, silently enduring femininity under social oppression. As Robson suggests, in Victorian culture it was the young, innocent girl’s singing voice in particular that served to evoke the cherished past of rural simplicity; the middle-class female child was an antithetical emblem to urban industrialism (ibid.: 54–5). Working-class girls served to problematize and shatter this emblematic function of girlhood, which, although middle class, aspired to present itself as universal and classless. Yet, Helen Fleetwood is an exception to that. It is interesting to see how Tonna manages to preserve the antithesis between female childhood and urban industrialism in the novel, although its young female characters are factory workers themselves. Helen’s innocence, unselfishness, reticence, as well as the one medium in which she is allowed to use her

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voice with confidence – singing – all combine to render her a perfect, Christianized, lower-class version of hallowed, passive, self-sacrificing, middle-class young femininity. Both Trollope and Tonna’s industrial novels differ from works by other mid-century middle-class writers in diminishing the role of middle-class intervention on behalf of reform. In questioning the value of middle-class intervention – openly critiqued in Trollope’s unorthodox adoption plot; significantly absent from Tonna’s narrative – they appear much closer to working-class autobiographers of the same period, who hardly evoke the theme of middle-class assistance, than to the major novelists.35 As in autobiographical writing, however, their construction of working-class subjects, though aiming to grant them agency and selfhood, still consigns these subjects to a position of dependence and limited interiority in terms of psychological depth and narrative focalization. Tonna and Trollope, notwithstanding their reformist intentions, dramatize the middle-class apprehension of free, undisciplined lowerclass assertiveness, independence, or “voice.” In Michael Armstrong, Trollope gradually comes to endorse the conventional assumption that it is only in middle-class intervention that partial solutions to social oppression, particularly child labor, are to be sought. The working-class child, who represents his entire class, thus remains in a position of dependence. Helen Fleetwood’s underlying religious and gender ideology shapes its representation of class relations and child labor as part of a divine plan, whose chief requirement is a devotional ethic of passive resignation to suffering, represented via the motif of self-imposed silence. The ideal of selflessness – originating in assumptions related to gender, class, age, and religious doctrine – entails flattened or absent subjectivities. It is not only working-class writers like Blincoe and Dodd who tend to diminish their own personal perspective as protagonistnarrators; middle-class novelists like Trollope and Tonna, depicting working-class subjectivity in the making, tend to do that as well. An intriguing cultural-historical development occurs during the half century that follows Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth’s representation of lower-class children discussed in Chapter 1. Despite these two writers’ opposed religious and moral outlook (More being a Puritan, Edgeworth a Rousseauvian), their middle-class assumptions are similar, as both regard the status of the working-class child as a simple, unproblematic given. They share a view of upper-class philanthropy and private acts of charity as strictly in keeping with the existing class barriers, and even when they depict a destitute child who is generously


rescued, their narratives do not challenge the social order that has led to such destitution in the first place. By the 1840s, writers dealing with working-class children can no longer represent such vulnerable figures as inveterate social others with the same ease. As we have observed in William Dodd’s representation of childhood, the underlying implicit assumption is that the child is not yet a full subject, not yet capable of possessing any interiority. For both middle- and working-class writers, the child is often still an “other”; particularly when it is a working-class child. The next chapter examines a not dissimilar dynamic regarding the subjectivity of the working-class child in Dickens’s work.

4 The Split Image of the Neglected Child: Dickens

The class category that defines Trollope and Tonna’s child figures is an important aspect of many other representations of neglected children throughout the century. The child’s otherness from the adult, articulated by Wordsworth as a coveted ideal, is more fully negotiated as problematic when this child is lower class. The most conspicuous appearance of the kind of othering and distancing involved in such representations occurs in the work of Charles Dickens. Dickens’s preeminence in nineteenth-century British literature and his influence on the novel cannot be measured. One area in which his influence was no less than essential was that of his treatment of childhood. The importance Dickens attached to childhood and the innovative ways in which he represented the child’s point of view generated and have shaped one of the central features of the British novel ever since. In both quantity and quality, Dickens’s repertoire of child characters and his ways of representing the subtleties of the childlike perspective have rendered him, in the eyes of many, the best writer about childhood.1 Dickens’s second novel, Oliver Twist (1838), was the first English novel for adults that placed a child at its center throughout.2 What followed in the 1840s was an unprecedented literary interest in child characters and child subjectivity. Claudia Nelson points out that with the rise in the popularity of the Bildungsroman, there were more and more fictional representations of child protagonists turned adult (Nelson, 1999: 78–9). A growing number of novels followed Dickens’s example in suggesting that early life had a shaping value for a character’s adult life. This assumption was analogous to the underlying belief in the Prelude (written before Dickens was born but published only in 142

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1850) and other poems by Wordsworth that the autobiographical adult subject needed to recapture an earlier, childlike self in order to achieve a more meaningful, and happier, maturity. In Dickens’s work and that of writers that immediately followed, fiction corresponded to the idea that the child embodied the original, pure self that should be explored and reconstructed in order for adults to understand who they were. Besides Dickens, and with variations, such assumptions appear in works of nineteenth-century novelists such as Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, as well as the extremely popular (in their day) Hesba Stretton, Charlotte Yonge, Mrs. Henry Wood, and Marie Corelli. Childhood was also treated as a formative phase in autobiographical novels and memoirs such as Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1873–84, published posthumously 1903), John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography (1873), William Lovett’s Life and Struggles (1876), Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography (1883), Rudyard Kipling’s The Light that Failed (1890) and Baa Baa Little Sheep (1900), Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The One I Knew the Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child (1893), and Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907). In both the fictional and autobiographical genres, issues of cruelty or insensitivity to children are prominent. Penny Kane notes that nineteenth-century writers of autobiographical works tend, increasingly, to call their parents retrospectively to account. We can say the same about child focalizers and narrators in works of fiction.3 In this respect, Dickens’s influence was substantial. What he regarded as formative for the adult-to-be was an experience of early neglect that he kept reconstructing as a shaping ordeal. According to Robert Tracy, Dickens scrutinizes childhood “to find the origin of the mature successful personality,” yet childhood for him was not only “a time of growing awareness of the surrounding world and of the individual’s place in that world,” as in the opening sections of The Prelude for example, but also a time of overwhelming crisis as the family, which should be the source of stability and identity, undergoes a disaster (Tracy, 1986: 277–8). As we have seen, the childhood sections of the Prelude actively veil undercurrents of an early familial crisis. However, what remains subdued and even undergoes idealization in Wordsworth – namely, the child’s abandonment and loneliness – becomes explicitly problematic in Dickens. Unlike the case of Wordsworth, Dickens’s great interest in the child’s point of view is inseparable from an ongoing preoccupation with her neglect. The following passage from Great Expectations (1861)

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demonstrates this particular sensitivity to children’s sense of being wronged: In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. (Dickens, 1985b: 92) It does not matter to Dickens’s narrator who “brings them up” or how: children are bound to feel deeply wronged for reasons that seem trivial to adults. The child’s different perspective is literally visualized in this passage as distinct in terms of size: the relative dimensions of the rocking-horse magnified in the child’s eyes also apply to the different dimensions of the emotional injuries she undergoes. Since the child’s perspective is defined here as shaped by acute sensitivity to injustice, it follows that for Dickens, any serious attempt to construct a child’s point of view should involve a genuine interest in that child’s sense of being treated unjustly, with insufficient attention, care, or sympathy. Indeed, there is no doubt that Dickens is a passionate, strongly committed critic of injustice toward children. His work is considered among the prominent influences that brought about the shift from a regulating, catechetical approach toward children to a liberating and empathetic one. Jacqueline Banerjee states that more than other novelists of his period, Dickens “clearly worked to eliminate … the cruel repression of children … by appealing passionately to the … belief in the value of [the child’s] innocence” (Banerjee, 1984: 487). Peter Coveney (1967: 92–122) and Laura Peters (2000: 17) make similar claims. Arthur Adrian shows Dickens as taking up the cause for the better treatment of children and claims that “Dickens saw even isolated instances of childhood abuse as intolerable and often, to arouse public indignation, exaggerated them in his attacks” (Adrian, 1998: 57). As Angus Wilson has shown, the loved children in Dickens “are mainly offstage”; there are “but a handful of successful loving parent–child relationships” in the entirety of his work (Wilson, 1970: 209). In Dickens: The Orphan Condition, Baruch Hochman and Ilja Wachs present Dickens’s handling of the neglected child – what they term “the orphan condition” – as characterized by a “clash between the orphan’s wish to accommodate to the received world and the fury-driven compulsion to obtain restitution for its abandonment.” Dickens’s art, they claim, manifests a “close identification with


the conflict-ridden consciousness of the abandoned child” (Hochman and Wachs, 1999: 11). Although their reading of Dickens’s treatment of child neglect renders it more complex than other interpretations, Hochman and Wachs, too, assume Dickens’s unequivocal identification with the orphan. Like other critics, their focus on character analysis obscures the less conspicuous existence of another response to the child in these works. There is a simultaneous, far less sympathetic approach to the child in Dickens, one that deviates from total identification and empathy. If we frame the psychological discussion of the “orphan condition” of Dickens’s child characters within its historical and political context, much ambiguity toward such figures is bound to rise to the surface. The political perspective is highly important for this discussion, because the issue of child neglect is located at the very juncture of the “private” domain of familial and personal relations, and the public sphere of social life. Dickens’s works are replete with satirical depictions of institutional wrongs done to children by society – at the workhouse, at school, even in prison – showing child neglect to be a collective, national problem. Yet, quite often the dramatic focus is on domestic settings and on the child’s interiority, showing acts of neglect to be a deeply private event and a locus for the formation of subjectivity. The intricate duality of the social and internal aspects of child neglect in Dickens is one of the major concerns of this chapter. At the same time, we should challenge the distinction itself and ask just how separate the private and public domains are. Even the most subjective experiences of Dickens’s child characters are embedded in certain sociopolitical conditions, although the latter may be denied on the explicit level. It is important to look for this context and examine the denial mechanism that surrounds it. Critical readings of child neglect in Dickens that disregard the sociopolitical dimension do not relate their observations to the well-established corpus of criticism that underlines Dickens’s highly ambiguous position as a social critic. By reading the political back into the personal, we can see how much of Dickens’s political ambiguity in other matters surrounds his treatment of child neglect as well.

Dickens’s social stance: Uneasy complications The question of the sociopolitical dimension of Dickens’s work was already a prominent critical concern in the nineteenth century. Until the 1930s, a dominant evaluation was that his work had radical, even revolutionary components, and he was often presented as an opponent

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of capitalism and bourgeois values.4 However, two highly influential essays of the late 1930s – George Orwell’s “Charles Dickens” (1939) and Edmund Wilson’s “Dickens: The Two Scrooges” (1941) – introduced the notion that he was an apolitical writer and a naïve representative of the moneyed middle class.5 In contrast to such readings, in the 1960s Raymond Williams declared Dickens to be anything but apolitical, the primary fact about him being “that he was a social and political novelist” (Williams 1964: 216–17). The later Dickens represented the social as generating, defining, and controlling moral analysis and moral relations, as well as character (Williams, 1970: 44–6). Acknowledging Dickens’s frequent inconsistencies in representing the social, Williams nevertheless does not see these as weaknesses that betray their author’s unenlightened views, but regards them as contradictions that contain a great critical power, creating a vision of “the means of [man’s] liberation in a close and particular place and time” (ibid.: 48, 58). Neo-Marxist and new historicist readings of the last three decades largely emphasize the dialectical position of the novels. Although they acknowledge the oppositional stance of Dickens’s work, critics like Terry Eagleton and Jonathan Arac, as well as feminist critics, expose the conformist position that hampers the texts’ reformist impulses.6 Following Williams, Eagleton allows the texts some subversive space, reading their contradictions as containing political value by exposing an ideological bind.7 Dickens is thus presented as being subversive without really knowing it, inadvertently betraying the paradoxes of the ideology that his texts consciously intend to support. D. A. Miller’s Foucauldian reading in The Novel and the Police (1988) traces in Dickens similar mechanisms of complicity with social discipline, but sees them as more sweeping, denying the novels any critical force. Rather than being subversive, Miller claims, Dickens’s texts merely create in the reader an illusion of autonomous selfhood, while reinforcing social surveillance on behalf of hegemony to police individual consciousness.8 What most of these readings share is the view that Dickens’s work reveals an ambivalent, inconsistent, or at least complex social stance, somewhere in between political subversion and a reinforcement of bourgeois morality. Almost every critic, despite disagreements, identifies these contradictory orientations in Dickens’s work; the difference lies chiefly in the balance suggested by each reading. Even the most extreme readings, offered by Jackson on the one side and David Miller on the other, grant that some minor presence of the contrasted stance is discernible in Dickens’s work.9


Nevertheless, when we examine the evaluations of Dickens’s position as a critic of the neglect and exploitation of children, we discover a very broad consensus. It is often taken for granted that he was an unequivocal and vehement opponent of injustice to children in all its forms: familial, institutional, explicit, and covert.10 Yet, Dickens’s representation of neglected children is not free of the ambiguities and inconsistencies that characterize his writing on other social matters. It is the very mixture of private and public concerns surrounding the topos of child neglect that poses a problem for Dickens, and this problem manifests itself in ideological and aesthetic inconsistencies. Beyond the evident moral indignation and commiseration, as well as autobiographical identification, which mark Dickens’s writing about ill-used children, his stance toward such figures is complex. Side by side with compassion and empathy, these figures sometimes invoke less clearly pronounced responses of anxiety, estrangement, and rejection. Therefore, the comparison presented in the previous chapter between Dickens and Frances Trollope’s uses of interclass adoption as narrative resolution should lead us to examine more closely Dickens’s ambiguous treatment of the child as social other. As Chapter 3 has demonstrated, both Trollope and Dickens explore the implications of class mobility through the figure of the socially inferior child, offering narrative solutions that were denied by authors like Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth several decades earlier. Whereas for the late-eighteenthcentury writers the child’s class affiliation seemed an essential, hence irrevocable, trait, for Dickens and Trollope any middle-class interest in a lower-class child should involve, at least potentially, some kind of shift in social identity. Yet, for Trollope as well as for Dickens, the new proximity between the classes often entails uneasy complications. Indicating the influence of the dramatic socioeconomic changes that British political life underwent during the first half of the century, the solutions that Dickens and Trollope offer suggest that for both, the working-class child is now required to be de-classed, yet this process is far from simple, arousing a series of ethical and psychological dilemmas and narrative setbacks. Although far more egalitarian than More and Edgeworth in their fictional treatment of the child as social other, the deep ambivalence of these mid-century writers about the possibility of turning a lower-class child into an equal (through inheritance, education, charity, or adoption) underlines the subtle continuities between their work and that of their precursors. To some extent, the child’s social otherness is insurmountable for all these writers.

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Child-as-self and child-as-other Dickens’s texts betray a divided response to neglected children: empathy and compassion on the one hand, suspicion and distancing on the other. This duality is articulated through a split in the image of the neglected child. In fact, it is possible to talk about two different images, or types, of neglected children in Dickens. One serves as an embodiment of private and familial neglect, and is constructed as a “self,” a character with a known history, biography, and – most importantly – an interiority that is represented with much attention and is given priority in the narrative. I shall refer to this first type as the “child-as-self.” The second type is markedly constituted as an other: a figure whose depiction makes it a generalized representative of a group. Regarded as a social phenomenon rather than an individuated character, this “child-as-other” is a minor character, marginal in the text, entirely or partially nameless, its history obscure. The child-as-other in Dickens is regarded solely from the outside, constituted through a recorded variety of responses, and neither its subjectivity nor its interiority is described. In The One vs. the Many (2003), Alex Woloch argues for the importance of minor characters in novels. Seeing the narrative space allotted to characters as connected to the organization of individuals in society, Woloch maintains that the narrative marginalization of certain characters reproduces the marginalization of inferior groups in society. Indeed, the organization of major and minor child characters in Dickens follows this paradigm: the central figure of the child-as-self is middle class, even when this social affiliation is questioned or threatened. The marginal character of the child-as-other, on the other hand, the one whose presence is minimal and overshadowed by the centrality of the child-as-self, is always lower class.11 It is largely the focus of readers and critics on the major character of the middle-class child in Dickens that has made us overlook the complexity of his representation of neglected child figures. Dickens is careful not to let the two types of neglected children merge; there are textual indications that connect this caution to his class anxiety. The seemingly private experience of neglect related to the child-as-self thus obscures the political dimension of neglect represented by the lower-class child. The more clearly politicized figure of the unindividuated, working-class child loses its subversive potential and is treated cautiously, conformingly. However, what makes this split of the neglected child into two distinct types so productive for critical analysis is Dickens’s own ambivalence regarding the very separation. Underlying


the split is an anxiety about the child-as-self’s being mirrored in, or blurred into, the child-as-other. As part of the effort to repress this anxiety, the difference between the two types needs to be sharply articulated in order to deny the possibility that the child-as-self might lose its superiority and uniqueness and become, himself, an other. Although a minor character, the figure of the child-as-other is indispensable for Dickens’s seemingly independent construction of the child-as-self. In Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, Carolyn Steedman refers to the dominant nineteenth-century concept of the self as formed, under the influence of Wordsworth, by the “laying down and accretion of bits and pieces of a personal history” (Steedman, 1995: 10). One of the chief processes that she observes as part of this construction of a self is the ongoing attempt, throughout the century, to make the child, initially perceived as unheimlich, more familiar. This is mainly done through sentimental depictions of child figures (ibid.: 21–42, 161–74). However, my reading also shows a simultaneous opposite dynamic that occurs in Dickens’s construction of the child. In contrast to the familiarizing process that Steedman describes, Dickens’s figure of the child, although initially perceived as signifying the self, undergoes a split that renders some part of it (the child-as-other) unheimlich and alien. This part acquires a threatening nature that relegates it to the status of a psychical and social double/other. At bottom, the notion of the child-as-self in Dickens is shadowed by the anxiety of becoming that other. Thus, we often encounter in Dickens a pair of child figures, both suffering neglect, one of whom is constructed as biographical and subjective, the other as unfamiliar and presented through an external gaze, or a variety of gazes. The latter type, the socially inferior child-as-other, functions as the shady double of the child-as-self, introducing a dark potential of association between the two figures. Dickens’s child-as-other bears a strongly subversive potential. The cause of lower-class children and their social oppression was a burning issue; one that preoccupied Dickens himself as a public figure. What he saw as systematic neglect and exploitation of children was a recurrent theme of numerous essays, journalistic pieces, and public speeches. James Walvin claims that the gradual process of increasing state intervention for the protection of oppressed children was substantially assisted by the spread of information about oppressive practices, and that Dickens was central in the production of “a mass of irrefutable and moving evidence of the plight of many British children” (Walvin, 1982: 198). Dickens, we also know, was the only one of the major novelists of the period “to have had first-hand knowledge of child-labour” (Banerjee, 1984: 485).

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Another field in which he was active was the Ragged schools, set up in 1843 by private individuals and organizations in order to teach slum children the rudiments of reading, writing, religion, and arithmetic. Although he was not satisfied with the pedagogical level found in many of these schools, he censored his criticism in order not to cause them damage.12 According to Philip Collins, Dickens even proposed running a Model Ragged School himself.13 Following a visit to the Philanthropic Farm School, Red Hill, East Surrey – a reformatory school for young delinquents – he wrote the essay “Boys to Mend” (1852), concluding the description of his visit with the following words: Returning by new paths, we dived into the coolness of a narrow sheltered lane, through which a brook was flowing. A hen with her young brood fluttered before us. The chickens in dismay, the hen in wrath and fear, covering the retreat of her children, labouring to find for them a safe path out of the way of evil – for as evil we were obviously regarded – sped down the narrow lane the faster as we made haste to get by, and relieve them of the cause of terror. At last the mother lodged her whole brood in a hole by the wayside, and stood forward menacing death to all the powers that would do them harm. We thought that if Britannia had a little of the hen in her, and took but half as much care of her brood of unprotected young, there would not be so many crushed boys to restore to wholeness. (Dickens, 1968: 432) The metaphor of the hen as providing admirable maternal protection may call to mind Wordsworth’s evocation of the mother hen in Book V of The Prelude (ll. 246–56), commending his own deceased mother. The children of the poor, Dickens suggests here, are the nation’s own children; regardless of class differences, we are all one family. In the weekly journal he edited, Household Words (1850–59), Dickens repeatedly wrote about the condition of working-class children. He pleaded for a changed attitude to child criminality (“The Metropolitan Protectives,” 1851); gave a praising account of the London Foundling Hospital and its founder, Captain Coram, denouncing abandoning parents (“Received, a Blank Child,” 1853); and described a visit to the new Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street (“Drooping Buds,” 1852). Shortly after “Drooping Buds” appeared, the Hospital, with Dickens’s permission, reprinted the piece as a promotional pamphlet (Dickens, 1968: 401).


Critique of contemporary institutional ill usage of children is also part of Dickens’s fiction. Already in the early novels, such organizations form a central target for attack. The workhouse in Oliver Twist (1838) and the school in Nicholas Nickleby (1839) are two such early examples; the counterparts of these two establishments were part of contemporary reality, and their fictional representation was consciously charged with topical innuendos. Despite its different genre, A Christmas Carol (1843), too, was designed as a response to current events; in this case, the findings of the Children’s Employment Commission earlier the same year.14 Such interest in existing institutions, and an urge to expose their cruelty in order to achieve social change, are felt even more strongly in the later novels. Yet, in his fictional writing Dickens betrays ambiguities regarding these very issues. Despite his concern about the institutional neglect of poor children, reflected both in his public activity and in his writing, his fiction shows a breaking away from the political aspects of child neglect. The narrative preoccupation with the interiority of the privately neglected child-as-self obscures the concern for working-class children and their social neglect. The latter are either marginalized to the degree of narrative disappearance, or undergo a massive process of othering by being represented as repellent or threatening figures. His two types of neglected children locate Dickens between the two distinct Wordsworthian and Blakean patterns of representing this topos. We know that Dickens read Wordsworth and admired him; and although there is no record of his having read Blake, there are Dickens critics who assume some influence.15 The question of direct influence remaining open, the links drawn between Blake and Dickens’s political positions are valid if their work is considered as a series of discursive responses to certain ideological formations to which both of them were exposed. Dickens’s duality regarding child neglect recaptures the contrast between the two earlier poets. On the one hand, Dickens’s political critique – his outrage at the institutional oppression of poor children, at their hypocritical and mercenary exploitation – echoes Blake’s diatribes against society on behalf of his silenced, downtrodden child figures. On the other hand, it is also possible to see the influence of Wordsworth: not the kind of influence usually noted (that is, Dickens’s adoption of the view of the child as purely and refreshingly innocent, vital, and authentic), but rather a shared focus on the child as a biographical self, an origin of private interiority. In Wordsworth as in Dickens, such a focus involves a repression of the political implications of child neglect. Dickens’s following both these poetic models simultaneously is

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the source of his ambivalence. He sees child neglect either as a political problem or as a private/biographical concern, and these two options are mutually exclusive for him. The centrality of the subjective child-as-self in his literary works indicates that in his fiction, the stronger impulse is to repress the political dimension in favor of imagining child neglect as a purely domestic, private, internal experience.

Poverty breeds deformity: Dickens’s ambivalence Rather than a shift toward increased radicalism in Dickens’s later novels, about which most critics agree, an examination of the treatment of child neglect exposes an ongoing duality that informs his entire career. More attention to this duality may suggest two things: first, that even in relation to child neglect – one of Dickens’s most warmly embraced social causes – we may discern his wavering between critique of hegemonic ideology and its endorsement. Secondly, a concentration on this particular topic exposes a unique pattern in Dickens’s construction of social issues, which may yield a richer description of his political ambivalence in general. The readings in the following pages examine some of the most intriguing representations of the child-as-other in Dickens, which, although less attentively treated by critics due to their apparent marginality, are highly significant for an evaluation of his social stance and for a better understanding of the child-as-self in his work. Let us first demonstrate the duality by a brief examination of Dickens’s 1848 Dombey and Son. The pattern just described can be discerned in two scenes of this novel, which may be seen as a rehearsal that anticipates the more elaborate duality of child neglect in works published shortly afterward. Florence Dombey, the motherless child who craves in vain to be loved by her father, is the protagonist. Her perspective dominates the novel, we know all her thoughts and feelings, and the novel as a whole is constructed, in many respects, as her biography. She is what I have defined above as the Dickensian child-as-self. Materially provided for (she is probably the wealthiest of Dickens’s child protagonists) yet emotionally deprived, Florence clearly belongs to the upper middle class. Yet, her constant oppression in her father’s house – being relegated to the servants’ company, her presence in the dining room unwanted, her wishes ignored, and her voice continually hushed – serves to destabilize her social identity by making her emblematically related to the lower class. This relation is corroborated by the direct link made in the novel between the father’s economic power – his being a prosperous businessman – and his cold-hearted treatment of his daughter. As a girl


Florence has no economic value, and she therefore becomes nothing to her father: “what was a girl to Dombey and Son! In the capital of the House’s name and dignity, such a child was merely a piece of base coin that couldn’t be invested” (Dickens, 1997b: 5).16 Florence’s lack of value and symbolic relegation to the status of “the poor” despite (or because of) her father’s wealth are further developed through the sequence of events in which she loses her way in the slum after accompanying her brother’s nurse on an illicit family visit. Robbed of her nice clothes and long hair by an old crone, Florence is left to wander alone in the streets, dressed up in the garb of a poor waif given to her by the robber. Passersby mostly fail to notice the weeping child, disregarding her existence because of her rags. If they do notice her, they assume “that she was tutored to excite compassion” (ibid.: 74) and move on. These responses are represented as highly frustrating, because we know that Florence is not really a beggar. The scene is staged in a way that suggests that had she been really poor, the indifference of the people in the street would have been acceptable, because poor children are trained “to excite compassion.” The problem with the passersby is that they fail to realize that Florence is a unique case. Thus, the neglected middle-class child-asself absorbs all our sympathy and attention. Her staging in the role of a little waif adds to her being metaphorically associated with the lower class, but leaves no room for sympathy for any “real” poor child to weep for its own needs, or bewail its own deprivation. The passersby, and we as readers, are made to feel that there should be no reason to be moved by the probably counterfeit tears of an actual beggar child. This taking over of the place of the working-class child by the childas-self is complemented by a portrayal of an actual proletarian child, a character type that makes its single appearance in Dombey and Son in a scene that is completely redundant and disconnected in terms of plot, yet significant in its symbolic implications. In Chapter 24, Florence, whose entire emotional cosmos evolves around her father, encounters a father and daughter (the latter “of about her own age”; ibid.: 336) whose relationship is a complete reversal of Florence’s own relationship with her father. This father is very poor, a hard worker “who seemed to have no regular employment,” yet he is devoted to his daughter. The scene proves to Florence, once again, how unloving her own father is: even this humble, plebeian laborer who looks for “bits and scraps in the mud” treats his daughter with more tenderness and affection than Mr. Dombey has ever shown to her (ibid.: 336). The readers, unlike Florence, are probably less surprised by now: they know that since economic power of the kind possessed by Dombey is detrimental to fatherly care, a poor man is potentially

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a better father than a prosperous businessman. This is a successful reversal of the widespread prejudice, according to which the poor were unreliable as family men. Nevertheless, the scene carries its own negative stereotypes and its own ambiguity. Although her father loves her, the lower-class girl, Martha, resembles Florence in being herself the victim of neglect: not familial neglect of the kind for which Mr. Dombey is responsible, but social and political neglect that, due to her inferior economic position, deprives her of basic needs such as health, housing, and sufficient food, not to mention convenience and education. However, the description of Martha calls into question her status as worthy of sympathy and commiseration. She is depicted as sullen, capricious, impatient, selfish, ungrateful, and of repulsive appearance. A neighbor who passes by comments that due to her selfish idleness she has made herself – largely thanks to her father’s indulgence – a heavy burden on the poor man. Florence enviously admires the laborer’s loving devotion, which does not depend on any engaging qualities of Martha herself, who is “[u]gly, misshapen, peevish, ill-conditioned, ragged, dirty – but beloved!” (ibid.: 337). Though a better father, the poor man is almost biologically inferior to Dombey in managing to produce only an ugly and disagreeable offspring, whereas Dombey’s child is pretty, kind, and warm-hearted. Poverty breeds deformity, it seems. The poor girl’s description is tainted by the most disparaging contemporary stereotypes against the poor, mostly in her being idle (she sits by when her father does all the work), misshapen, and insolent. Although her father does not neglect her, we are almost led to wish that he would. Private emotional neglect and social neglect are shown to be mutually exclusive here: the child-as-self and her private misery absorb all our sympathy and attention. The perspective, interiority, and personal history of the child-as-other (whose physical illness is hinted at by her father but is never developed) are not presented, and her own neglect is not investigated or rendered as moving. Nevertheless, there is an intriguing implicit resemblance between the two girls: they are both of the same age, both lost a mother and have only a father to take care of them, both are unhappy and feel they should have been treated better. Bearing in mind Florence’s metaphoric relegation to the lower class at her own home and her lack of value according to her father’s economic scale of evaluation, poor ugly Martha can be seen as some grotesque double of the novel’s pretty protagonist. The earlier scene, in which little Florence was made into a little waif of misshapen appearance, in rags and with wildly cut hair, has already introduced the possibility that the wealthy child-as-self might find herself put in the unpleasant position


of an unattractive child-as-other. It is perhaps this unsettling possibility that underlies the extremely negative, brief appearance of the only truly destitute child in this novel.

“Give me back myself”: The child’s destabilizing potential A similar pattern is reproduced again, with modifications, in several works produced shortly after Dombey and Son: the Christmas novella The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848), the Autobiographical Fragment (1848, published posthumously), and David Copperfield (1849–50). The complex representation of neglected children in all these texts is connected to the conflicted autobiographical impulse with which Dickens contended during the late 1840s: an internal conflict that largely evolved around the urge to write the story of his childhood and the strong wish to hold it back. The adult protagonists of these texts waver between nurturing and repressing the memory of their neglect as children. A major dilemma that the protagonists face concerns the value and desirability of such memories. Not only the content of their childhood memories but the act of remembering itself serve as a central theme in the narratives. My reading of The Haunted Man, the first of these texts, should nevertheless be preceded by a brief mention of some similar motifs that appear in the 1843 Christmas Carol, Dickens’s first Christmas novella, which anticipates many of the thematic concerns and plot devices of The Haunted Man. The protagonist of the Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge, is a cold, unfeeling, grumpy old miser, who is miraculously reformed into a cheerful, generous old man thanks to three supernatural visitations by spirits that take him on three journeys back and forth in time. Scrooge’s first expedition, which throws him back into childhood, is clearly the most momentous of these journeys. He watches his earlier self, a “solitary child, neglected by his friends” (Dickens, 1997a: 77), left alone at school at Christmastime when all the other boys had gone home for the holiday. The boy’s father, we are led to understand, doesn’t want him to come home. The impact of the reawakening of this childhood memory on the elder protagonist is immediate: “Scrooge sat down upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he had used to be” (ibid.: 77). The novella presents memory as allowing for and nurturing moral growth. Scrooge’s selfishness, materialism, and ill-temper are all the result of his turning away from himself, from the memory of the young boy that he once was. Although his younger self had suffered from parental indifference, repressing this self in order to avoid pain

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meant undergoing emotional and moral death. The encounter with the neglected young self revives Scrooge’s imagination (he recalls with joy the Arabian Nights heroes, who pop up out of the boy’s visions) as well as his generosity (“There was a boy singing a Christmas carol at my door last night. I should like to have given him something”; ibid.: 78). The Haunted Man, the fifth and last of Dickens’s Christmas books, deals again with the effect of early trauma on the adult character, and uses, again, a ghost in order to illustrate the internal processes of remembering and repressing past experiences; only now, the process is inverted: Redlaw, the protagonist, is burdened by his bitter recollections and uses the powers of the spirit that haunts him in order to erase these memories from his mind. However, the bottom line is similar to that of the Carol: as a result of his forgetting, Redlaw becomes even more miserable and loses interest in his fellow men. He no longer has the ability to feel compassion, gratitude, or kindness, and comes to possess a baleful influence on everyone he meets. His moral and psychological rescue is achieved only through a restoration of the memory of which he had tried so hard to rid himself. Although most of his painful recollections belong to early adulthood, Redlaw’s childhood, just like Scrooge’s, signifies an initial experience of rejection and loneliness that underlies all his subsequent experiences of misery, betrayal, and desertion. As Redlaw’s ghost declares in his name: I am he, neglected in my youth, and miserably poor, who strove and suffered, and still strove and suffered … . No mother’s self-denying love, … no father’s counsel, aided me. A stranger came into my father’s place when I was but a child, and I was easily an alien from my mother’s heart. My parents, at the best, were of that sort whose care soon ends, and whose duty is soon done; who cast their offspring loose, early, as birds do theirs. (ibid.: 138, emphasis in the original) The two Christmas stories deal directly with the issue of parental neglect, although no specificities regarding the actual relationships are supplied (we know hardly anything about Redlaw’s parents or Scrooge’s estranged father). Both works present an urge to repress this neglect as well as a belief in the value of recalling it. In both texts the dilemma is resolved in an affirmation of remembrance, implying that since these memories are biographic, they are crucial for the construction of the protagonist’s true self. To lose them is to lose one’s interiority, one’s self; as Redlaw puts it when he demands his memory back: “give me back myself!” (ibid.: 165). This is the reason the burdensome ability to


remember, although figured as a curse, eventually functions as a blessed reunification with one’s meaningful identity. For both Scrooge and Redlaw, the return of memory is rejuvenating and inspiring, bringing them back, indeed, to a time of helpless dejection, yet allowing each of them to recapture what is represented as his long-lost core of being. The remembrance of childhood neglect, then, has some beneficial value; I shall return to this positive side of reconstructing child neglect in my discussion of Dickens’s autobiographical writing. In each of the two Christmas novellas, the injured childhood self of the protagonist is externalized as a concrete image, a semi-actual character present in the story. Scrooge sees a boy representing his earlier self, alone in an empty classroom during the Christmas holiday. He refers to the boy in the third person, and yet the boy is Scrooge. The othering performed here is subtle, because Scrooge feels strong identification with the boy, who simply stands for the past, a piece of memory visualized in front of his eyes. However, in The Haunted Man, which shares so many motifs with the Carol, there is a more complex staging of the interaction between the adult protagonist and the figure of a child who potentially stands for his hidden, early-injured self. In Redlaw’s case, the suppressed childhood self embodied in the figure of a real child functions more ambiguously, and complicates the simple identification of adult with child that we see in the Carol. The child in The Haunted Man is a minor character, almost unnecessary in terms of plot. He is a waif, a wild boy described as barely human, taken in from the street on Christmas Eve by Milly, Redlaw’s kind-hearted landlady, to be warmed and fed. Later on Redlaw takes him as a guide when going out to make a visit in the slum. Mentally underdeveloped and resentful, the wild child can be construed as the symbolic child of neglect, Redlaw’s original self reduced to the most basic, infantile needs that have not been provided. Unlike the boy Scrooge, the wild child of The Haunted Man is not to be literally identified with the protagonist, but on a metaphoric level, the text draws links between them. Indeed, critics have interpreted the child’s character as mirroring the protagonist’s current bitter, antisocial inclination.17 My reading suggests that the child’s function as a double is more strongly connected to Redlaw’s childhood than to his character as an adult. Yet, what should be noticed further is that the wild child represents not only Redlaw’s self, but also, simultaneously, an other. It is the very uncertainty about his status as self and/or other that contributes to his characterization, by the narrator as much as through Redlaw’s perspective, as uncanny. As of his first appearance, even before Redlaw ever

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sets eyes on him, the boy’s presence – merely audible at first – causes perplexity. Redlaw initially hears a loud yell – the boy’s – at the very moment when the Spectre has his memory erased; that is, at a moment of losing his familiar identity: “a shrill cry reached [Redlaw’s] ears… He looked confusedly upon his hands and limbs, as if to be assured of his identity” (ibid.: 142). The confusion of identity Redlaw is undergoing is the result of the sudden memory loss, but it is rendered in the text in a way that allows us to see it as a response to the wild child’s shrill voice. The wild child is introduced into the story – brought to life through his yell as a newborn – to accompany or manifest a crisis of identity. By this mere coincidence, the boy’s existence is allowed to be seen as invoking some identity-related uncertainty in the protagonist: is this unheimlich child to be regarded as self, or other? What inspires particular anxiety in Redlaw as soon as he actually encounters the wild child is that the latter’s asserted otherness does not negate his function as Redlaw’s double, thus threatening to expose the self’s own otherness. Redlaw’s ambivalence reveals this anxiety. He contemplates the “baby monster” with “cold vague terror,… its sharp malignant face turned up to his,” but at the same time recognizes with horror that in spite of “their being unlike each other in all physical respects, the expression on the boy’s face was the expression on his own” (ibid.: 168) because, after the loss of his memory, Redlaw is just as unfeeling, just as inhuman, as the savage boy, both their faces betraying a “frightful littleness of expression” (ibid.: 169). We should bear in mind that what we do know about Redlaw’s childhood (which is not much) concerns not merely parental indifference, but also a striving against some original economic deprivation. Now that he is successful and learned, a renowned scientist and teacher, the encounter with the destitute boy is threatening for Redlaw just because of the ambiguity of the waif’s otherness. In terms of social position, it is perhaps doubtful for Redlaw whether he and the boy are indeed as wide apart as they seem. The wild boy’s function in the story seems to be that of signifying to Redlaw his own traumatic past, but in a most ambiguous way because of his being so actively othered. The child is enigmatic, his identity a mere blank; on being asked his name, he replies that he has none. His difference is accentuated in every possible respect. He is utterly indigent, dirty, and dressed in rags. Being homeless, he does not belong to any social frame. He is also different culturally, because his wildness sets him apart from civilization and he can hardly use language. In terms of species he is also an other, being repeatedly described as subhuman and animalistic, “a creature who might live to take the outward form of a man, but who,


within, would live and perish a mere beast.” He is “a young monster” (ibid.: 143), and when Redlaw first sees him he threatens to bite. One central result of the radical othering of the neglected child-asother, in The Haunted Man and in other works, is its representation as deformed, sick, or ugly. As in the example cited above from Dombey, rather than arousing sympathy, the socially inferior child evokes responses of physical and moral revulsion and uneasiness. In that, the child-as-other is contrasted to Dickens’s child-as-self: the delicate, angelic faces of characters such as Oliver Twist, Little Nell, or David Copperfield clearly function as markers of their moral purity. The neglected child-as-other, on the other hand, is often deformed in external appearance or mentality. Besides visible ugliness, such figures are often associated with infection, stunted growth, or mental incapacity (cf. Smike in Nicholas Nickleby, Jo in Bleak House, Maggy in Little Dorrit, Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend). The inmates at Nickleby’s Dotheboys School are all pale and thin, showing a “shrunken ugliness” of limb (Dickens, 1999: 149), their faces “clustered together in every variety of lank and half-starved ugliness” (ibid.: 772). These children remain unindividuated throughout, constructed through an external gaze that pities them yet is continually repulsed by their looks and suggested animalism. Although their physical deformity may add force to the critique of their social oppression, this kind of representation also achieves a contrary impact. Besides concern, it also produces in the other characters (and in the reader) an unbridgeable distance. Among the surprisingly few critical analyses of the representation of children in Dickens as menacing, ugly, or deformed, there is a significant contrast. Jonathan Loesberg and Eric Berlatsky read diametrically opposed social meanings into this motif. Loesberg regards the deformed child as an indication of Dickens’s attempt to produce moral and reformist response in his reader, whereas Berlatsky suggests that this motif renders the child menacing and exposes Dickens’s most undemocratic, Malthusian impulses and his anxiety regarding overpopulation. Each of these two opposed readings is convincing: put together, they further establish Dickens’s ambivalence.18 The poor child-as-other serves as a juncture of textual contradiction, with a politically reformist impulse that is infiltrated by residues of stereotypes against working-class children as biologically inferior, morally untamed, and inherently, threateningly, different. As I show below, the othering and suppression of the socially inferior child occurs as part of the process of constructing the child-as-self as a target for identification.

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Going back now to The Haunted Man, I suggest that as an other, however repulsive he may seem, the wild child poses an ethical demand to which the protagonist must respond. Following the yell, uttered when lost in the dark building, the wild child accidentally arrives at Redlaw’s door and insists on being taken care of. The child needs to be related to: he obviously has to be fed, clothed, warmed, and, no less important, tolerated. But is Redlaw capable of doing any of this? The question is complicated by the dual function of the child, who represents both the protagonist’s repressed and agonized psychical past, and at the same time a social other standing in for a general, collective problem. As Redlaw’s Spectre’s concluding speech toward the end of the novella suggests, the boy’s predicament is both private and national; having met with not even “one humanising touch” since he was born, “[a]ll within this desolate creature is barren wilderness.” In this respect, he is similar to Redlaw, and his affliction may be regarded as personal. But the Spectre adds: “Woe… to the nation that shall count its monsters such as this, lying here, by hundreds and by thousands!” (Dickens, 1997a: 181) – meaning that the child’s plight is impersonal and general. He is not an individuated character with a biography and a story of his own, but a representative of many; he is a type, his affliction embodying a broad social problem. Redlaw’s major response to the boy is one of aversion. At first, he is unwilling to touch the nameless savage that is described hanging on to its tatters in a “greedy, desperate little clutch” and whose naked feet, though “beautiful in their childish delicacy,” are “ugly in the blood and dirt that cracked upon them” (ibid.: 143). Redlaw’s recoil is instinctive, as he looks at the boy “with repugnance and avoidance” (ibid.: 144), and the tone of narration makes his dislike justifiable. The boy’s unsettling presence – vulnerable and helpless on the one hand, animalistic, monstrously ugly, and blatantly ungrateful on the other – undermines the sympathy that Redlaw, as well as readers, might have felt for a defenseless, lonely, homeless little child. Toward the end of the novella, though, Redlaw’s attitude to the boy becomes more compassionate. No clear explanation for the change is provided, but it seems to be presented as part of the general moral reawakening that Redlaw is undergoing in order to deserve being granted his memory back. Nevertheless, the changed attitude to the boy does not necessarily entail increased moral sensitivity or greater affinity with the child. Quite the contrary: the change occurs once Redlaw gains some confidence that the distinction between the boy and himself can be made clearer. At this stage of the story, when Redlaw hopes to win his memory back, he realizes that its loss has been dehumanizing; he also


perceives this dehumanization as the aspect that has made him and the boy so disturbingly alike. He now reassures himself that the similarity has been illusory and temporary, and can approach the child with less anxiety and greater compassion, “no longer [shrinking] from him with abhorrence or indifference” (ibid.: 182). Now that Redlaw can come to terms with his repressed earlier, injured self, the destabilizing potential of the unheimlich wild child is greatly diminished. No longer a grotesque double of the protagonist’s self, however, the boy’s otherness, his social as well as narrative marginality, continue until the very conclusion, even as he is mentioned in the last paragraph describing the Christmas party. We are told that he will be adopted by Milly, and see him welcomed into the bourgeois community. At the party, however, it is “sad to see the child who [has] no name or lineage, watching the other children as they [play], not knowing how to talk with them, or sport with them, and more strange to the ways of childhood than a rough dog” (ibid.: 200). In The Haunted Man, Dickens presents us with the type of neglected child to which I have referred as the child-as-other. This child is dehumanized and eccentric, a minor character in Redlaw’s story, with no name, biography, individuality, or interiority. In other texts written around the same period Dickens repeats this pattern, although rather than juxtaposing the child-as-other with an adult who is busy working out his own childhood traumas, in the other texts the central figure is that of a child whose uneasy relationship with a marginal, neglected child-as-other is similarly based on a mixture of curiosity, identification, repulsion, and fear.

Autobiography and the value of early neglect The writing of The Haunted Man came after several months in which Dickens had been compiling his memoirs, a project that he eventually abandoned. He worked the memoirs up into a continuous narrative, which he showed to his friend and appointed biographer, John Forster, for the first time on January 20, 1849. His decision was to ask Forster to include the piece in the future biography, and to refrain from publishing it during his lifetime. Forster accordingly reproduces the full manuscript in his 1776 Life of Charles Dickens, published six years after Dickens’s death (Rowland, 1988: 20). The contents of the Autobiographical Fragment and the circumstances of its publication both testify to a dilemma similar to the one presented in the two Christmas stories: the childhood experiences recounted in

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the Fragment, and reported there to be secretly haunting the author ever since they occurred, were both revealed and concealed. Dickens indeed wrote it all down, but kept the most central events secret, telling only Forster about them. It has been claimed that even Dickens’s wife and children had known nothing until Forster’s Life appeared. While writing The Haunted Man, then, Dickens was simultaneously busy writing down his own painful memories. When he ceased writing the autobiography, he was still at work on The Haunted Man. On the basis of this fact, Stanley Tick claims that while writing Redlaw’s story, Dickens had “fears that his twenty or more years of carefully guarded silence … might be undone” (Tick, 2001: 62). Redlaw’s pact with the Phantom, whereby all his sorrowful memories are erased, represents, according to Tick, Dickens’s conflicted urge to repress his own traumas (ibid.: 68). Other critics, too, have referred to Redlaw as an autobiographical incarnation of the author at a significant juncture in his career.19 My reading suggests that the seemingly marginal presence of the wild child in the novella – like the undernoticed presence of other figures of the child-as-other in other works – is charged with a highly complex blend of contradictions that may account for the main character’s dual urge to remember and repress, to articulate and hold back. As Forster recounts in the Life, he himself played a role in Dickens’s initial decision to write the memoirs. Asking Dickens if he remembered a certain acquaintance who had seen him in his youth employed at a warehouse near the Strand, Dickens was silent for several minutes; I felt that I had unintentionally touched a painful place in his memory. ... It was not, however, then, but some weeks later, that Dickens made further allusion to my thus having struck unconsciously upon a time of which he never could lose the remembrance while he remembered anything, and the recollection of which, at intervals, haunted him and made him miserable, even to that hour. (Forster, 1927: I, 19) The basic facts recounted in the Autobiographical Fragment are as follows: as a result of his family’s financial strains, young Dickens had to quit school when not yet 12, and after a while was sent by his parents to work at Warren’s blacking warehouse, pasting labels on bottles along with common laborers. Some time later his father was arrested for debt. However, even after John Dickens’s release from the Marshalsea Prison thanks to an inheritance of several hundred pounds, Charles was not sent back to school but stayed on at the warehouse. Only following the


father’s quarrel with the boy’s employer was he dismissed and allowed to resume his education. Critics have regarded the days at Warren’s Blacking as a shaping trauma in Dickens’s life, and speculated on why the autobiography was abandoned. It has been claimed that the reason was Dickens’s strong bent to secrecy regarding his private life, perhaps due to embarrassment about what he saw as a humiliating experience; and also that he feared autobiographical writing might drain his creative imagination as a fiction writer.20 The assumption is, in any case, that Dickens’s fiction is highly autobiographical, and that the Fragment can serve as a means for decoding the novels.21 The piece is usually taken as an indication of Dickens’s early trauma, and as the source of his preoccupation, as a writer, with dysfunctional families and miserable children. The episode, which probably lasted for about a year, is narrated in the Fragment as a gross act of injustice on the part of Charles’s parents: It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge that I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me – a child of singular abilities: quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally – to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. … My mother and father were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge. (ibid.: I, 21) Charles’s deep sense of being exploited for a meagre side income without the least interest in his own feelings; his anxiety lest he should be de-educated; and above all, his parents’ (especially his mother’s) complacency all recur in the Fragment. Thus, when the rest of the family moves in with John Dickens to lodge at the Marshalsea in order to save the rent, Charles is “handed over as a lodger to a reduced old lady” (ibid.: 23–4). He now has to take care of himself for the entire week, except for Sundays, when he and his older sister (a student at a music academy) visit their parents and younger siblings in prison. Referring to himself as “small Cain, … except that I had never done harm to anyone” (ibid.: 23), he is described as abandoned, having scanty resources and no assistance “from Monday morning until Saturday night. No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support, from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God” (ibid.: 24).

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After the failure of his father’s freedom to bring about the boy’s own release from Warren’s, when at last he was discharged due to the quarrel with the employer, Charles went home “with a relief so strange that it was like oppression” (ibid.: 32) – oppression, perhaps, because “home” was no longer a trustworthy haven as before. Indeed, he recounts that now, my mother set herself to accommodate the quarrel, and did so the next day. She brought home a request for me to return next morning, and a high character of me, which I am very sure I deserved. My father said I should go back no more, and should go to school. I do not write resentfully or angrily: for I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am: but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back. From that hour until this at which I write, no word of that part of my childhood which I have now gladly brought to a close, has passed my lips to any human being. … From that hour, until this, my father and my mother have been stricken dumb upon it. … I never had the courage to go back to the place where my servitude began. I never saw it. I could not endure to go near it. For many years, when I came near to Robert Warrens’ [sic] in the Strand, I crossed over to the opposite side of the way, to avoid a certain smell of the cement they put upon the blacking-corks, which reminded me of what I was once. … My old way home by the Borough made me cry, after my eldest child could speak. (ibid.: 32–3) Besides the deep sense of having been neglected by his parents, Dickens recounts in this passage a serious crisis of identity: the smell of the cement reminds him of “what I was once” – his own previous identity at the time of his employment at Warren’s is something he wishes to see as separate and detached from him; it is othered. This other “I” of the warehouse child he once was is alien because it has to do with the experience of the middle-class Charles being de-classed and turning into a common drudge. The passage reveals a series of ambiguities typical of Dickens’s representation of child neglect. It shows us that the writer’s clear tone of indignation against his parents is subdued by some reluctance to accuse them (“I do not write resentfully or angrily”). It reveals that the strong impulse to remember and recount parental neglect (“I never shall forget, I never can forget”) clashes with a desire to leave it all behind him (“that part of my childhood … I have now gladly brought to a close”). Finally, it constructs neglect as painful yet productive, being a formative experience for the adult-to-be, or


author-to-be (“I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am”). James Kincaid interestingly claims that it is partly for formal reasons that in his autobiographical writing Dickens emphasizes the desolation and shame he felt as a child: the figure of the outcast child in the Fragment allows him “to point the contrast between [that] child and the successful adult” (Kincaid, 1982: 344). However, it is important to realize that this seeming contrast is not that simple or well defined, because the Fragment also emphasizes the continuity between the unhappy child and the successful yet agonized adult he has become. There is an ongoing internal tension between what is constructed as the persona of the successful adult, the present-day illustrious writer Charles Dickens, and the not yet pacified, injured child Charley, who has grown up without entirely evaporating into thin air. Something of that child is still there, inside, behind the successful façade. As a result of this tension, typical of Dickens elsewhere as well, the topos of child neglect is inextricably intertwined in his writing with a subtle internal dynamics of shifting and mixing identities and “selves.” These shifts, blends, and splits are embodied in the figure of the child-as-other and its ambiguous relation to the child-asself. But before examining these dynamics in the Fragment we should bring David Copperfield into the discussion, the two texts being hardly separable in this respect. As Forster tells us, within a few months after he had begun writing his memoirs, Dickens turned to the composition of Copperfield and gave up the autobiography (Forster, 1927: I, 20). In this first major work narrated in the first person, Dickens constructs again, through an adult narrator voicing a mixture of adult and childlike perspectives, the memory of child neglect. Similarly to the Fragment and the two Christmas stories, David’s account of his early life involves much preoccupation with the burden of memory: I now approach a period of my life, which I can never lose the remembrance of, while I remember anything: and the recollection of which has often, without my invocation, come before me like a ghost, and haunted happier times. (Dickens, 1985a: 205) This introductory sentence appears in the eleventh chapter and refers to the episode in which the stepfather of the 10-year-old protagonist sends him to work at Murdstone and Grinby’s wine cellar, washing and labeling bottles.

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David’s neglect, though, begins much earlier. Being first brought up by his affectionate yet childish widowed mother, he is later tyrannized by her new husband, Mr. Murdstone, a despotic and sinister man assisted by his austere sister, and is made to feel homeless in his own home. The mother’s marriage and submissiveness to her husband are recounted as a series of betrayals, the chief one being her fear of defending her son against her husband’s regime of bullying. Her abrupt expressions of love for her son are performed “hurriedly and secretly, as if it were wrong” (ibid.: 97). Following what is regarded by everybody, David included, as the boy’s hideous crime – he bites Murdstone’s hand while the latter flogs him – he is sent off to a sternly run boarding school. The mother’s weakness amounts to emotional abandonment, and is presented as more painful to David than his stepfather’s abuse. Eventually, following his mother’s death, David has to quit school. Staying on with the Murdstones, he is entirely ignored for months. “I can recollect … to have speculated, at odd times, on the possibility of my not being taught any more, or cared for any more; and growing up to be a shabby moody man, lounging an idle life away, about the village” (ibid.: 188). It is at this point that Dickens begins to interpolate entire passages from his unfinished autobiography. David thus reports, similarly to the narrator of the Fragment: And now I fell into a state of neglect, which I cannot look back upon without compassion. I fell at once into a solitary condition, – apart from all friendly notice, apart from the society of all other boys of my own age, apart from all companionship but my own spiritless thoughts, – which seems to cast its gloom upon this paper as I write. What would I have given, to have been sent to the hardest school that ever was kept! – to have been taught something, anyhow, anywhere! … I was not actively ill-used. I was not beaten, or starved; but the wrong that was done to me had no intervals of relenting, and was done in a systematic, passionless manner. Day after day, week after week, month after month, I was coldly neglected. (ibid.: 204) Being finally sent off to work at the wine cellar, David lives as a lodger at the Micawbers’ house. Just like Warren’s warehouse, Murdstone and Grinby’s is a dirty place swarming with rats. Working there together with common and ignorant boys, David keenly feels his “unmerited degradation” (ibid.: 223), although his position is privileged compared to that of his fellow laborers due to his superior background. The size of the injury is immense: even in his capacity as adult narrator, David is frustrated by


the failure of words to describe it adequately. “No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship, … and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my bosom” (ibid.: 210). And again: “How much I suffered, it is, as I have said already, utterly beyond my power to tell” (ibid.: 218). Young David’s state of mind is indeed inconsolable: “I mingled my tears with the water in which I was washing the bottles; and sobbed as if … my own breast … were in danger of bursting” (ibid.: 210). The adult narrator looks back at his younger self with just the same degree of self-pity: When my thoughts go back, now, to that slow agony of my youth, … I do not wonder that I seem to see and pity, going on before me, an innocent romantic boy, making his imaginative world out of such strange experiences. (ibid.: 225) The allusion to the creation of an “imaginative world” is reminiscent of what Dickens says in the Fragment: “I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am.” Such an idea suggests that the young boy’s suffering also has a productive function. In fact, the anxiety of being de-educated, which underlines both these narratives of child servitude, is possibly pacified in retrospect by the realization that the degrading experience was accompanied by a process of internal growth and the development of an artistic mind. It is now assumed that this middle-class child could not really have grown into a shabby man “lounging an idle life away about the village.” However, the child’s own perspective in the two narratives cannot yet conceive of such a consolation. David Copperfield’s childhood sufferings have been read by critics as a dramatized version of the autobiographical theme. The Murdstones and the Micawbers are construed as hostile and comical portraits, respectively, of Dickens’s own parents.22 Yet a no less interesting and related issue that has been only partly addressed is the “size” and effect of the injury inflicted on David according to his own judgment (especially in retrospect) by being assigned to work in the cellar. What has been said about the issue is that David’s response seems exaggerated; this is part of another frequent claim, that Dickens’s novels tend to present a disproportionately emotional, soppy treatment of children’s suffering.23 This is perhaps true, but more can be said about the function (or perhaps value) of this deeply emotional sense of neglect. Neglect and abuse shape the interiority of the Dickensian child-as-self,

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and produce for the adult narrator a reconstructed earlier self that is represented as a righteous victim and a target for sympathy. Robert Lougy’s Freudian reading of the work of memory in David Copperfield supports the view that the construction of the autobiographical subject is founded on projection, anxiety, and wishful thinking rather than on factual remembrance (Lougy, 2009: 413). A major part of this creative reconstruction is the experience of early neglect, remembered as an ordeal that shapes one’s personality, and against which one’s moral and mental capabilities are tested. In words that echo the Fragment, the adult David says that the “endurance of [his] childhood days had done its part to make [him] what [he] was” (Dickens, 1985a: 888). Thus, early neglect becomes valuable, perhaps indispensable, for the construction of the adult self in Dickens, and, significantly, of that adult as an author. This is a reincarnation of the Wordsworthian paradigm of achieving poetic inspiration through a resurrection (or invention) of the early self. Unlike what we have seen in Wordsworth’s case, however, in Dickens such a resurrection involves the staging of neglect as a central motif. In order to sustain the image of the neglected child as victim, there is a strong emphasis on the child’s angelic, unselfish passivity. The mild and inhibited David is plainly driven to bite Murdstone as a desperate, out-of-character act of self-defense, just as 11 years earlier, Oliver Twist was compelled by the starving boys at the workhouse, against his will, to ask for more. The child-as-self is characterized by a remarkable ability to endure suffering. He is represented as an emblem of innocence and unselfish passivity. At the same time, his pain and distress are compensated for by the acquisition of mental and emotional qualities that would prove to make him a better, and more richly gifted, individual as a result of his neglect. Thus, the entirely negative nature of his neglect is undermined; its political dimension – as a form of social injustice that should be actively resisted – is obscured. The depoliticization of child neglect in Dickens is intensified further in his treatment of the neglect of the child-as-other. In both the Fragment and David Copperfield, the chief and formative vice committed against the child protagonist is that of sending him to work. In each of the two cases this act is experienced, simultaneously, as a familial betrayal and a dramatic shift in social position. What the two narrators remain silent about is the effect of being forced to work at a young age on their fellow laborers, the other children at both Warren’s Blacking and Murdstone and Grinby’s cellar. Critics have already commented on


David’s indifference to the lot of his young companions. Orwell was probably the first to notice this gap: Of course Dickens is right in saying that a gifted child ought not to work ten hours a day pasting labels on bottles, but what he does not say is that no child ought to be condemned to such a fate, and there is no reason for inferring that he thinks it. David escapes from the warehouse, but Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes and the others are still there, and there is no sign that this troubles Dickens particularly. (Orwell, 1954: 61, emphasis in the original) A distinction should be made between David as a 10-year-old character – in whom some indifference to issues of social inequity is natural – and the narrating voice that, despite its maturity and potential social awareness, is still so immersed in the personal trauma of his childhood as to allow it to overshadow completely the deprivation of the other children, those “real” lower-class laborers. These other children are described condescendingly, and with no apparent sympathy or compassion. The same can be said about the narration of young Dickens’s ordeal at Warren’s Blacking in the Fragment. The adult narrator refers to his work there as no less than “anomalous” (Forster, 1927: I, 25) – implying that it is unnatural for a middle-class boy to be degraded to the position of a coarse manual laborer, but quite normal for poor children to find themselves in this position. True, in mid-nineteenth-century Britain it was indeed “normal”; yet, the authorial disregard of the other boys who remain forever at the blacking and wine cellars, the absence of even one passing remark about their childhood spent washing bottles among rats with no hope of release, are striking. This disregard is apparent not only in Dickens’s fictional and autobiographical writing, but also in his journalistic work. Rosemarie Bodenheimer recounts how he repeatedly postponed the writing of a piece against child labor for the Edinburgh Review, requested by the editor, until it was too late to write it.24 Dickens’s avoidance of the subject is so incongruous with his usually indignant views about British society’s maltreatment of various kinds of “drooping buds” or “crushed boys,” neglected due to their class inferiority, that it can be seen as no less than a blind spot. In a 1985 essay on “The Social Sub-Text of David Copperfield,” John Jordan discusses the apparent split that occurs in this novel between the personal and the historical-political spheres, and argues that this separation veils social anxiety. Unlike what most critics have supposed, Jordan asserts that the “purely” personal in David Copperfield is not really apolitical, but

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contains a social subtext that has been repressed.25 He shows how the conservative social stance of the novel is revealed in the condescending attitude toward working-class characters. Without referring particularly to children of the lower class, Jordan shows how this condescension originates in social anxiety.26 This reading may provide an explanation for the way in which the personal and social dimensions of child neglect are not only perceived by Dickens as split, but as mutually exclusive. When the plight of the child-as-self is at stake, it obscures the political dimension of the neglect of the unindividuated child figures represented as social others. However, this political dimension is not absent, but repressed. At its basis, this dimension is related to class anxiety, which, though concealed, continues to operate as a shaping factor of the narrative.

A political and personal dilemma The political blind spot about child laborers, though noted by critics, has not been addressed as an aspect in Dickens’s writing that is worthy of much analysis. It is usually referred to, by Orwell and others, pejoratively, taken as evidence of Dickens’s complicity with bourgeois ideology. However, if examined closely, it is possible to see it as a complex staging of a political and personal dilemma with which Dickens’s protagonists, fictional and autobiographical, are repeatedly confronted. Dickens’s inconsistency has to do with the threat embodied in working-class children. His silence about them, through his narrators, is not a sign of indifference. As shown most succinctly in The Haunted Man, the unexpected proximity of these young poor beings and their tentative otherness are highly unsettling for the main character because of their implicit resemblance to him. Their neglect, mirroring that of the child-as-self, diminishes the categorical distinction between the two types. As a potential double, the child-as-other threatens to swallow the child-as-self, erase his individuality, and turn him into that social other whose proximity he dreads. This anxiety results in two contradictory narrative patterns. First, there is an emphasis (as in The Haunted Man) on the extreme, unbridgeable otherness of the working-class child, so that no possible merger between him and the child-as-self can be imagined. Second, the child-asother is paradoxically characterized (again, as in The Haunted Man) as the child-as-self’s double, the shade of what this self might turn into because of its neglect. Thus, we witness a series of pairs of neglected children that reproduce a mixed pattern of doubling and othering. Such pairing occurs most interestingly, and in a way that seems to have escaped critical notice, in the Autobiographical Fragment. As stated


above, perhaps the chief concern that hovers over this entire narrative is that of being de-classed. The young Dickens, besides his acute sense of his parents’ betrayal, is distressed by what he experiences as a process of proletarianization that he is undergoing. The fact that he no longer goes to school and has to associate with ignorant laborers makes him feel that he is gradually forgetting what he once read and learned. He therefore fears that his obvious superiority to the other boys at Warren’s might be only temporary. As part of the threat of being de-classed, both young protagonist and adult narrator attach much attention to the question of Charles’s being employed upstairs or downstairs at the warehouse, an issue that becomes momentous for him as he struggles to establish an identity based on an asserted distinction from the other boys. At first, by virtue of his privileged station, Charles performs his manual labor at the counting house upstairs. By degrees he loses this prerogative and must go downstairs to join the other boys in the cellar, which is swarming with rats. The two children involved in the ambiguous pairing that is soon to be formed are the protagonist and one of his fellow workers, a boy named Bob Fagin, whose proximity becomes strongly felt following Charles’s relocation downstairs: [M]y small work-table, and my grosses of pots, my papers, string, scissors, paste-pot and labels, by little and little, vanished out of the recess in the counting-house, and kept company with the other small work-tables, grosses of pots, papers, string, scissors and paste-pots downstairs. It was not long before Bob Fagin and I, and another boy whose name was Paul Green, but who was currently believed to have been Christened Poll, … worked generally, side by side. Bob Fagin was an orphan, and lived with his brother-in-law, a waterman. Poll Green’s father had the additional distinction of being a fireman, and was employed at Drury Lane theatre; where another relation of Poll’s, I think his little sister, did imps in the pantomimes. No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship. (Forster, 1927: I, 22) The physical decline downstairs is just another reminder of the social decline, alluded to here as “sinking.” In this passage he appears to have some interest in the other boys, referring to their family members and their ways of making a living. However, the kind of information provided indicates no genuine interest in their history or feelings. It seems to be the kind of knowledge that can help define the boys’ social positioning, in order for the protagonist to try to maintain his own

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superiority and, at the same time, assess the degree of his degradation by being associated with them. In the sentence referring to Paul/Poll Green’s name, he also mocks the boys’ dialect. The protagonist’s stressed reticence about his own family affairs underlines the gap he wishes to maintain with the rest: while he knows all about the occupation of his colleagues’ relations, they are not to know anything about the current disgraceful circumstances of the Dickens family. Bob Fagin, alone at Warren’s Blacking, receives a somewhat unique status in the narrative by being distinguished from the other boys in wishing to act as Charles’s protector. The narrator recounts an episode that followed the habit of two adult workers, respectful to him because of his class, to address him as “the young gentleman,” a habit that at least one of the other boys resented: “Poll Green uprose once, and rebelled against the ‘young gentleman’ usage, but Bob Fagin settled him speedily” (ibid.: 26). Later, when Charles suffers painful seizures, “Bob fill[s] empty blacking bottles with hot water, and applie[s] relays of them to [Charles’s] side, half the day” (ibid.: 27). As the socially inferior boy’s kindness continues, it threatens to establish too intimate a tie between him and the “young gentleman”: I got better, and quite easy towards evening; but Bob (who was much bigger and older than I) did not like the idea of my going home alone, and took me under his protection. I was too proud to let him know about the prison; and after making several efforts to get rid of him, to all of which Bob Fagin in his goodness was deaf, shook hands with him on the steps of a house near Southwark Bridge on the Surrey side, making believe that I lived there. As a finishing piece of reality in case of his looking back, I knocked at the door, I recollect, and asked, when the woman opened it, if that was Mr. Robert Fagin’s house. (ibid.: 27) Bob Fagin’s name cannot escape comment. It seems quite ungrateful on Dickens’s part to repay his young companion’s kindness by conferring his name on one of his most hideous characters. The fictional Fagin, the demonic criminal who makes it his life object to destroy the chances of an innocent, parentless boy to move up the social ladder – indeed, to conceal from this boy the truth about his middle-class “true” identity – may suggest the extent of anxiety aroused by the tie with the autobiographical Fagin. Steven Marcus (1965, 367), Sylvia Manning (1976, 71), and Robert Patten (1979: 273–4) have referred to this point, suggesting that Bob Fagin, the brother-in-law of a waterman, had threatened young Dickens with his degrading companionship, and therefore his name was later used in Oliver Twist in the way it was.


Yet, it is more than degrading companionship that Bob Fagin has to offer. He also presents a threat to devour the child protagonist’s distinct identity by presenting himself as his double and making him regress into the position of social other himself. This possibility is reflected in the little game of identities young Charles is playing at the door of the strange house. First, he pretends that this is where he lives, in order not to become socially inferior in the eyes of the boy whom he is anxious to preserve as his own inferior. Even if Bob is genuinely working class while Charles is not, the fact that the Dickens family currently resides in prison makes young Fagin, at least temporarily, Charles’s social superior. Secondly, he pretends to be looking for a “Mr Robert Fagin,” a falsity that further complicates the game of identities. If we put the two deceits together and turn them into a consistent narrative, then the house in question is first Charles’s own home, then Mr. Fagin’s. That makes Bob and himself one and the same. Furthermore, by designating the lowly boy “Mr Robert Fagin,” and endowing him with a house, young Charles also fabricates for his warehouse mate a new bourgeois identity that may eliminate the distressing aspect of their forced friendship. We should note that the narrator of the Fragment does not allude to the other boy again. He also refrains from speculating about the future lives of any of the boys at Warren’s, both after his release from the warehouse and in retrospect, as an adult. In an essay comparing the Fragment and the eleventh chapter of David Copperfield, Stanley Tick argues that despite the great similarity between the two narratives, a significant difference lies in the Fragment’s monologic quality, the parallel sections in Copperfield being dialogic. In the autobiography the narrator is “untested by any second voice”; that is, no voice is permitted to question or dispute the “narrator’s proud, angry apologetics. The resulting tone is very close to … a discourse of pathos.” In the novel, on the other hand, the presence of other characters besides David (the Micawbers, primarily) “serves to test and modify David’s discourse” (Tick, 1991: 35–6). Following this observation, it could be argued that it is the hermetic, monologic stance of narration that prevents the Fragment’s protagonist from interacting with his fellow workers and the narrator from showing retrospective interest in them. If there is one potential for dialogic encounter in the Fragment, it lies in the figure of Bob Fagin and his offered friendship – but this potential is powerfully resisted. During the walk “home” cited above there is some semblance of a dialog, filled with falsehoods and evasions on the part of the narrator-protagonist, and soon put an end to. The intriguing fact that no equivalent of Bob is reproduced in the

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parallel chapter of Copperfield, although most other components of the autobiography are retained, is an indication that the eleventh chapter of this novel is perhaps less dialogic than Tick suggests, especially if we consider it a text concerned with child neglect. As a selective reincarnation of the Fragment, this fictional narrative refuses to incorporate the voice of any other boy besides that of the protagonist. The anxiety of de-education dominates the experience at Warren’s, as much as it does the scene at Murdstone and Grinby’s. The fear of becoming the social other is more than an apprehension that the protagonist might not advance any further in his education; it is a fear of regression, of forgetting what has already been learned. It was, Dickens states in the Fragment, a “misery … to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more” (Forster, 1927: 22). What bothers the protagonist most about his fellow laborers is their utter ignorance. His fear of regressing to de-education as a result of this companionship implicitly grows into what may be construed as an irrational fear of catching illiteracy like some contagious disease. The following passage from the Fragment, recounting Charles’s scanty meals in coffee shops during his tea breaks at Warren’s, is charged with manifestations of this repressed anxiety: The coffee-shops to which I most resorted were, one in Maiden Lane; one in a court (non-existent now) close to Hungerford Market; and one in St. Martin’s Lane, of which I only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass plate, with COFFEE-ROOM painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backward on the wrong side MOOR-EEFFOC (as I often used to do then, in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood. (ibid.: 25) The mirror letters of the inscription going in the wrong direction – “backward” – signify a movement back into unreadability. Their reader is situated on the “wrong side,” marking his abnormally changed, degraded position from which written words begin to lose their familiar shape. His proletarianization, then, symbolically threatens to turn the young author-to-be illiterate, his learning now beginning to fade, “never to be brought back anymore.” The force of this threat is so great that more than 20 years later, the effect of the inverted words read


backwards still shocks the adult narrator – the author de facto – with no less intensity. Critics have noted how for Dickens, in his fiction and nonfiction alike, education is seen as indispensable for any chance of self-fulfillment: a child’s – any child’s – major aspiration should be to become educated and thus successfully humanized and socialized.27 Dickens the journalist repeatedly refers to the nation’s obligation to provide all its children with free access to rudimentary education. Yet, in his narratives the presence of the middle-class child-as-self obscures any moral or political commitment to the broader issue of illiteracy and ignorance among the lower class, because the child-as-self does not function as a representative of this class. The fear of de-education is personal and monologic in that it turns internally back toward the self, toward this “me – a child of singular abilities,” as the narrator of the Fragment refers to himself (ibid.: 21). Disregarding the other child workers’ real illiteracy implies that their lack of education is normal and uninteresting. The private anxiety of the child-as-self reinforces the existing social distribution of literacy. This concern is somewhat compensated for in two characters of lower-class children who appear in later novels. Both Bleak House (1853) and Our Mutual Friend (1865) go back to treat illiteracy as a class barrier. Yet, rather than articulating a fear of becoming illiterate due to social decline, in these two cases Dickens portrays an opposite movement of a working-class child who strives to move upward through an arduous effort to gain possession of the alphabet. Lizzie Hexam’s younger brother in Our Mutual Friend is described as a curious mixture ... of uncompleted savagery, and uncompleted civilisation. His voice was hoarse and coarse, and his face was coarse, and his stunted figure was coarse; but he was cleaner than other boys of his type; … and he glanced at the back of the books, with an awakened curiosity that went below the binding. No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot. (Dickens, 2002: 18, emphasis added) The son of a waterman – an echo of Bob Fagin, whose brother-in-law held a similar occupation – young Hexam is a social other who bears the unflattering markers of boys “of his type,” yet manages to transcend, to some extent, his categorical otherness through his command of the written word. Such a figure may show some modification in Dickens’s way of representing the social other, whose identity is now rendered

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more elastic and open to development than in previous cases. However, it is intriguing that this boy’s name happens to be Charley, the Christian name of the author in its juvenile, familial version; that is, the name of the protagonist of the Fragment. It is the same with another Charley, again a poor child, this time a girl, again taught to read and write, but without much success. Charley Neckett (whose real name is Charlotte but nobody calls her by it), a minor character in Bleak House, is a little orphan in charge of her two younger siblings. She is a particularly pathetic reincarnation of her namesake from the Fragment: “Is it possible,” whispered my guardian, … “that this child works for the rest? Look at this! For God’s sake look at this!” It was a thing to look at. The three children close together, and two of them relying solely on the third, and the third so young and yet with an air of age and steadiness that sat so strangely on the childish figure. … “And how do you live, Charley? O! Charley,” said my guardian, turning his face away for a moment, “how do you live?” “Since father died, sir, I’ve gone out to work. I’m out washing to-day.” “God help you, Charley!” said my guardian. “You’re not tall enough to reach the tub!” (Dickens, 1994: 193) This girl, later released from her heavy responsibilities for her family to become Esther’s maid, goes through enormous efforts to acquire the rudiments of reading and writing – largely unsuccessful efforts that are minutely described. Neither Charley Hexam nor Charley Neckett is clearly an other. They carry the ambiguity of their status by being replicas of the central character of the child-as-self, mirroring, through their social inferiority, young Charley of the Fragment at a moment when he was striving not to regress to utter ignorance. Their agonized acquisition of basic education and striving for a better social standing, and the ultimate failure of these projects, suggest that the child-as-other may have only a limited chance of overcoming his otherness. Charley of Bleak House is but a minor character who is not even granted the position of the child-as-self’s major double. This role is assigned to another figure, also marked by illiteracy: Jo, the crossing sweeper and slum dweller. The ambiguous pair of children at the center of Bleak House, Esther and Jo, grants the child-as-other a more fully developed representation than in Dickens’s earlier works. We can discern here a stronger effort to enrich the characterization and understanding of the neglected lower-class child; to rid him of disparaging


prejudice; to relax the strict boundary between him and the child-as-self; to make this child more human, as it were – that is, nonaggressive, honest, and intuitively moral; and to politicize his fictional role in order to denounce hegemonic norms. However, despite this relatively greater authorial concern for the neglected child-as-other, some residue of cultural prejudice lingers in his portrayal, especially when he is brought into contact with the child-as-self. As soon as he is compared to this latter child, he is rendered still less human, and inherently – not just environmentally – inferior. Furthermore, although the politicized figure of the neglected child-as-other receives greater space and attention in Bleak House, he nevertheless occupies an undeniably marginal status in relation to the biographical child-as-self, and his suffering is overshadowed by her painful experiences. Although Bleak House is famous for its sweeping critique of social institutions, some of its radicalism is diminished by the ambivalent representation of the neglected child of the slum.

The child in Bleak House: An other devouring the self Child neglect, both literal and metaphoric, is a central theme in Bleak House, pervading not just the main plot but the many subplots too, as several critics point out.28 However, the issue of the split between private and political child neglect in this novel has not been sufficiently addressed. The split is most distinctly represented by the two characters who experience child neglect, Esther and Jo. This pair shows us that the split between private and political child neglect is now even more conspicuous than in Dickens’s earlier works, as it is reproduced in the form of the novel. Bleak House is a double narrative; its diverse sections are related by two distinct narrators. One is a dramatized, first-person narrator who is the protagonist of her own narrative; the other is an undramatized, third-person omniscient narrator. Significantly, Esther’s childhood is reconstructed from her point of view, whereas Jo’s history is assigned to an impersonal voice that does not enter the boy’s mind. Esther’s story is a clear case of Dickensian child neglect. Jeremy Tambling even goes so far as to describe the novel as Dickens’s rewriting of his autobiography “as a woman” (Tambling, 1998: 20). Esther’s account of her early years is one of perpetual wrong and oppression, with no parental warmth or affection. As an illegitimate child raised by an austere, puritanical godmother later revealed to be her maternal aunt, Esther is neglected twice: first, by the unknown mother who deserted her; and second, by the aunt who “never smiled” (Dickens,

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1994: 14), who forbade her to visit friends or go anywhere, made her birthday the most dismal day of the year, and explained that she should strive hard to atone for her sinful existence (ibid.: 14–16). As a result, Esther grows up subdued and self-effacing, burdened by a guilt whose nature is unclear to her. She is perpetually “sensible of filling a place in [the godmother’s] house which ought to have been empty” (ibid.: 16–17), and, rather than show resentment, repeatedly expresses her gratitude for being accepted into her aunt’s house. “I was very retired and quiet,” she sums up her early years, “and tried to be very diligent” (ibid.: 17). Unlike Esther’s history, presented through the prism of her subjectivity and given to the reader as unique and individual, the inferior position of the child-as-other in the narrative has to do with his unindividuated position as the representative of a class and an embodiment of a social problem. Jo is a far less specified character than the child-as-self Esther. Hillis Miller states that in Bleak House Dickens constructs “a model in little of English society in his time,” and the means of this mimesis is synecdoche; thus, Jo is used to serve as the model of “the homeless poor” (Miller, 1971: 30). This function entails a narrative distance from Jo as a character, conspicuously different from the narrative fusion with Esther’s interiority as a character. The narrative distancing of Jo is revealed most clearly in his death scene, usually cited as particularly strong evidence of the harsh social critique that Dickens manifests at this stage of his career, voicing his sense of outrage at the maltreatment of poor children. The scene concludes with a bitter accusation about society’s wrongs, in words that indeed make Jo’s death forceful in its broad political implications: Dead! Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day. (Dickens, 1994: 596) Literally, it cannot be Jo who is “dying thus around us every day.” This general statement renders his neglect an exclusively political issue, and detracts from his uniqueness as an individual character. His death makes him a forceful yet merely incidental instance of the type under which he is subsumed. As in previous narratives, and despite the great disparity in their social class and education, the child-as-self and child-as-other are implicitly paired in this novel. Jo and Esther may be seen as doubles for several


reasons. First, both are neglected and parentless, and throughout the novel are busy finding themselves a place of their own, their search for home being successful in Esther’s case, futile in Jo’s. Their biographies are also symbolically linked through their connections to the enigmatic figure of Captain Hawdon (“Nemo”). Nemo, so we learn rather late in the novel, is Esther’s real father, Lady Dedlock’s lover before her marriage. We also know that prior to his death, for some unknown reason, he cared for Jo. As the gossiping neighbor Mrs. Piper reveals during the inquest, this interest was unusual for him. She has seen Nemo, she declares, “hurry away when run and called after [by the children] as if not partial to children and [she has] never see[n] him speak to neither child nor grown person … , excepting the boy that sweeps the crossing” (ibid.: 135–6). We know from Jo that Nemo was the only person who ever took interest in him and tried to help him; despite his own indigence, he gave the boy the price of a supper and a night’s lodging more than once, and “often spoke to him since; and asked him whether he slept sound at night, and how he bore cold and hunger” (ibid.: 137). The little sweeper’s relationship with Nemo makes it valid to argue that Esther and Jo share a father. According to Katherine Cummings, the alias Nemo, meaning “nobody,” stands for the name of the father of all orphans whose paternity and family name are unknown.29 The relationship to Nemo, then, creates some equivalence between Esther and Jo. Nemo, who never functions as Esther’s father and does not even know of her existence, treats Jo like his own child, thus making him Esther’s changeling. By serving as Lady Dedlock’s guide to the slums, in search of her old lover, Jo eventually leads her to the grave of the now dead Nemo – the spot where she will also die at the end of the novel. Jo thus serves, unknowingly, to bring Esther’s parents together, at last. The link between Jo and Esther becomes even more pronounced and morbid through another plot detail, when he becomes the carrier of the potentially fatal disease that she contracts and that disfigures her face. As James Reed has noted, the wild child in The Haunted Man prefigures Jo: both serve as their social superiors’ guides to the slum and both are compared to abandoned or rough dogs (Reed, 1998: 170). Indeed, the two boys are shown to be the victims of society, and are degraded to the lowest level of existence. There is, however, a major difference: unlike the sinister, aggressive, and emphatically symbolic presence of the wild child, Jo’s character is more realistically developed, and is far more sympathetic and humanized than that of the outlandish little savage. If read chronologically, Jo’s character, like those of Maggy in Little Dorrit (1857) and Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend (1865), seems to

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signify a growing egalitarianism in Dickens’s representation of socially neglected children, who are increasingly seen as weak, helpless, pathetic victims. Yet, though less clearly menacing than earlier characters, all these figures are positioned in an inferior status within their respective narratives, serving as the protagonists’ shady doubles but not as potential protagonists themselves. They are described through the external gaze of the other characters and the narrator, and this gaze is quick to notice their physical or mental deformity. Though humanized, they are still presented as incorrigibly other. It is only in Great Expectations (1861) that the lower-class child turned rich is given the main role, although as narrator Pip is already the well-to-do young man, recounting his past experience in the language of the well-educated gentleman. In this later novel, the main character’s internal “quarrel with myself” (Dickens, 1985b: 155), a dispute between the two social identities Pip is allowed to develop, is represented as a painful process by which the child becomes other to himself: his lower-class position still threatening to devour him, yet this time without being projected onto a separate character. Unlike what we see in the earlier works, in Great Expectations the conflict is not externalized, but takes place in the divided interiority of the protagonist. On the explicit level, the omniscient narrator of Bleak House satirizes everybody’s treatment of Jo as a suspicious, even dangerous, other; a target for incessant speculation, interrogation and supervision. The narrator denounces the inequitable power relations revealed during the inquest, when the Coroner’s interrogation renders Jo criminally unfit to serve as a witness. A similarly satirical rendering of Jo’s harassment by Inspector Bucket follows. The narrator declares himself no party to the mechanisms of surveillance and discipline inflicted on the boy. In Oliver Twist, as D. A. Miller has shown, the authorial voice is not distanced from the supervising and disciplining function of Oliver’s middle-class benefactors (Miller, 1988: 5–10). Yet, in Bleak House these techniques are exposed by the omniscient narrator as repressive and immoral, as, for instance, when he mocks Mrs. Snagsby’s watchfulness and suspicion: [S]he directs her mental eye … with redoubled vigilance, to the boy. “And who,” quoth Mrs Snagsby, for the thousand and first time, “is that boy?” … But happily, … that boy was met by Mr Chadband [the preacher] yesterday in the streets; and … was seized by Mr Chadband and threatened with being delivered over to the police, unless he showed the reverend gentleman where he lived …; and tomorrow


night that boy will be here, and tomorrow night Mrs Snagsby will have her eye upon him. (Dickens, 1994: 327–8) Jo himself is given the opportunity to complain that “they’re all a-watching and a-driving of me. Every one of ’em’s doing of it” (ibid.: 395): Inspector Bucket, and Mrs Snagsby, and Reverend Chadband, and Lady Dedlock, and the Coroner, to cite only a few of his pursuers. Even though the authorial voice supports Jo against his persecutors, the narrative simultaneously works to justify some of the indefinable suspicion that he arouses by his mere appearance. This is done by assigning him an actual contaminating influence. Although this influence is passed on unintentionally – Jo does not know that he infects Esther with his contagious disease – this fact places him, according to the pattern that we have observed in Dickens before, in the position of the threatening child-as-other. This is of course entirely contrasted to the child-as-self’s nonthreatening qualities. As befits the child-as-self, Esther is an epitome of passive resignation, gratefulness, and quiet suffering. There are critics who associate her submissiveness with the circumstances of her birth. Virginia Blain, for instance, finds “psychological ‘truth’” in Esther’s characterization as suffering from an inturned sense of guilt typical of female illegitimate children.30 However, passivity and resignation, as well as a sense of guilt, are typical of the Dickensian child-as-self regardless of gender. Esther’s guilt and resulting passivity can be seen as part of Dickens’s tendency to portray such children as ideally pathetic and sympathetic victims.31 Esther’s illness has received quite a few symbolic and psychoanalytical interpretations that focus on her character. What is important for our discussion, however, is the fact that she contracts her life-threatening disease from Jo as a result of the contact between them, and that although she eventually recovers her health, the disease (probably smallpox, though this is never stated) alters her face completely and disfigures her; in other words, makes her other than herself. The contamination occurs as a result of Esther’s taking Jo into her house out of mercy, in full knowledge of the danger. The narrative leads us to admire Esther’s kindness yet to wish she did not practice it. Although Harold Skimpole’s suggestion to throw Jo back into the street is presented as cruelly selfish, the text implies, quite ambiguously, that there was an element of self-punishment in Esther’s altruism here. Unlike the amoral wild child in The Haunted Man, Jo is mild and nonaggressive; he means no harm, and is later on stricken with guilt and sorrow when told about Esther’s catching the disease: “stunned by what he hears, [Jo] falls to smearing

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his dirty forehead with his dirty palm, and to staring at the ground, and to shaking from head to foot” (ibid.: 580). Yet, again, the pattern that we have observed in The Haunted Man and in the Fragment reappears: the neglected child-as-other, Jo, endangers the stable identity and future happiness of the child-as-self by his mere proximity. Kevin McLaughlin points out that Esther’s disease is acquired “through what the novel holds up as a positive form of ‘philanthropy,’” in an act involving contact and immediacy “as opposed to what Dickens’s third-person narrator ridicules throughout Bleak House as ‘telescopic philanthropy’” (McLaughlin, 1998: 230–31); that is, the espousal of foreign charity while neglecting the poor (or one’s own children) at home. Although contact philanthropy is represented as morally superior, in Esther’s case it is also shown to involve danger. Her contact with Jo illustrates this most clearly, but not only because the disease is life-threatening. Since deformity is one of the Dickensian child-asother’s repeated markers that distinguish this figure from the angelically beautiful child-as-self, Esther’s disfigurement bears a particularly sinister implication. Contagion – the threat that Esther might be swallowed up by her lower-class double – exposes, once again, the underlying fear that the child-as-self might be made over into its disturbing counterpart, the social other. As in earlier cases, Dickens’s ambiguity regarding the child-as-other is demonstrated by its representation as invoking simultaneous repulsion and compassion. Compared with characters such as the wild child in The Haunted Man or poor Martha in Dombey and Son, Jo receives far greater narrative attention; unlike the other figures, he is also morally harmless. His neglect is related to sociopolitical injustice in a way that seems more critically aware and sophisticated. Nevertheless, Bleak House again reproduces the impression that the poor child is deformed or repulsive, either because of the corrupting environment into which he was born, or because the poor are all too often much less attractive than “their betters.” Jo’s association with the filth and scum of the slum, the overcrowded, squalid graveyard, mud smeared on the forehead, and contagious disease is part of the reason he evokes a sense of revulsion in other characters. When Allan Woodcourt, the young and idealistic surgeon – an inarguably kind and enlightened character, motivated by a pure desire to help the needy – approaches the boy in the slum, he has to make an effort to get over his instinctive repugnance. First, he wrongly assumes that Jo is a delinquent: “Allan, not knowing but that [Jo] has just robbed [the woman] of her money, follows in chase” (Dickens, 1994: 579).


When he finally lays hold of him, and the woman explains that the boy has done her no harm, Allan begins to regard him with compassion; yet, what he sees is a figure that is “like a growth of fungus or any unwholesome excrescence produced there in neglect and impurity” (ibid.: 579). When he realizes that Jo was the one who communicated the disease to Esther, he “shrinks back from him with a sudden horror” (ibid.: 580), although he is a physician used to working in the slums and attending the ill and dying. Then, though bent on finding the poor boy a shelter, he continues his communication with him with “a strong effort to overcome his repugnance” and “constrains himself to touch him” (ibid.: 581). Besides his disease, Jo’s defectiveness is suggested in more emblematic ways. Although he is not in any obvious way physically deformed, the narrator depicts him as subhuman. Jonathan Loesberg points out that in Jo’s description almost all traces of human inwardness are eradicated, as he is compared to a sheepdog and said to have less ability to articulate than this animal (Loesberg, 1997: 626–7). To Jo’s inadequate vocabulary we should add his heavy dialect (textually rendered via misspelling) and ungrammatical English. These lingual incapacities create the impression that besides physical infection, there is a mental defect in Jo that originates in something deeper than cultural deprivation (lack of education); that is, some inherent inadequacy (inferior intelligence). Jo’s limitations are augmented by his being depicted only from the outside, without any rendering of his subjectivity.32 His status as intellectually inferior and potentially subhuman is further established by his illiteracy – an issue we have already marked as highly significant in the construction of the charged encounter between the child-as-self and child-as-other in Dickens. If we were to follow Hillis Miller’s famous reading of this novel, we might have assumed that the slum child’s illiteracy was no disadvantage: Miller’s claim is that the great theme of Bleak House is the futility and impossibility of interpretation, and that the most serious disease of the sick, decaying society described is its urge to interpret. The causes of this sickness are located “in the sign-making power, in the ineradicable human tendency to take the sign for the substance” (Miller, 1971: 33). Is Bleak House indeed as deconstructionist as poststructuralist readings tend to assume? Not if we consider the way in which Jo’s illiteracy is represented. Despite the futility of interpretation suggested by the mumbo jumbo of legal bureaucracy, Bleak House is also optimistic about, and supportive of, the activity of interpreting signs, an activity regarded as not only “human” – that is, dignified – but as humanizing – that is,

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crucial for the formation of the subject as a moral and intelligent being. That is why there is nothing ideal or appealing about Jo’s illiteracy and verbal incompetence, nothing about it that suggests a healthier mode of living, free from the intellectual malaise of Western culture. The boy’s illiteracy and difficulty in expressing himself are shown to be degrading; his utter ignorance of written signs makes him a hopeless social outcast and a perpetually dehumanized other. To be both an orphan and illiterate signifies a double exclusion. In her discussion of Dickens’s Christmas story “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners,” Laura Peters states that the figure of the orphan is excluded from both identity (through his lack of family) and discourse (through his literacy) (Peters, 1998: 177). This observation is true of Jo as well. For example, the boy’s affirmation during the inquest that the only thing he knows is that “a broom’s a broom” (Dickens, 1994: 136) shows him as lacking the ability to regard objects as signs, transcend the concrete level of thinking, and conceptualize abstractions. Significantly, the following passage – the single attempt in Bleak House to penetrate the subjectivity of the child-as-other – suggests that illiteracy is a different human condition, a limitation that exceeds mere unawareness of the alphabet: It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets … in utter darkness as to the meaning of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language – to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb! It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think (for perhaps Jo does think, at odd times) what does it all mean, and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me? … It must be a strange state, not merely to be told that I am scarcely human (as in the case of my offering myself for a witness), but to feel it of my own knowledge all my life! To see the horses, dogs, and cattle, go by me, and to know that in ignorance I belong to them, and not to the superior beings in my shape, whose delicacy I offend! Jo’s ideas of a Criminal Trial, or a Judge, or a Bishop, or a Government, or that inestimable jewel to him (if he only knew it) the Constitution, should be strange! His whole material and immaterial life is wonderfully strange. (ibid.: 203, emphasis in the original)


Despite what seems like a rare attempt to render the subjectivity of the neglected child-as-other, an examination of the perspective through which the passage is rendered reveals a narrator trapped in the residues of his middle-class prejudice. The tense used is tentative and hypothetical rather than affirmative (“It must be …” or “should be …”). The condescending suggestion that even Jo does think sometimes; the notion that he sees himself as belonging to the world of animals rather than to that of humans; the emphasis on the strangeness of being Jo all imply that in this passage, too, the otherness of the neglected child remains insurmountable. Rather than “strange,” it is more reasonable to assume that for an illiterate boy it is quite natural to have written signs around him and disregard them as meaningless. Only the educated feel it strange to look at written signs and find them obscure. This passage, though using a young crossing sweeper’s perspective for focalization, echoes the anxiety of the neglected child-as-self, fearing that he might turn de-educated and regress to the position of beastly illiteracy, the disgraceful position of the neglected child-as-other. Dickens’s fear of catching illiteracy and ignorance from his fellow laborers in the Autobiographical Fragment is thus reproduced through Jo, the lower-class carrier of contagious disease. As poor ugly Martha and the wild child function for Florence Dombey and Redlaw, the respective protagonists of their tales, here, too, the child-as-other’s defectiveness is perceived as menacing. If Dickens is one of the finest articulators of child interiority in world literature, he is also at the same time, regarding certain kinds of children, cautious about standing too close.

5 Aged Children and the Inevitability of Being Neglected: Hardy

The last chapter of this book examines the representation of child neglect in the work of Thomas Hardy, focusing on his last novel, Jude the Obscure (1895). The decision to end with Hardy – and particularly the turn-of-the-century Hardy – has to do with his unique relation to the Romantic literary tradition that precedes him and infiltrates his writing. This relation is significant for his representation of childhood. Hardy’s poetical and fictional work, in technique as well as themes and ideology, marks a cultural transition. Critics tend to regard him as a bridging figure between nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, affiliated to his cultural past yet anticipating some of the anxieties and pessimism of the modern era.1 In this respect he is considered a postRomantic writer. The great influence on Hardy of Romantic poetry, especially Wordsworth’s, has been recognized.2 This influence is far from simple; critics sometimes note his ironic or critical employment of Romantic images.3 This chapter argues that much more can be said about the ways in which Hardy employs, while ironizing or inverting, the ideological substance of familiar Romantic tropes. The complex influence of Romantic imagery on his work has mostly been traced in readings of his poems, less so in analyses of his fiction. Besides the nearly exclusive focus on the poetry, critical evaluations of Hardy’s post-Romantic position often discuss linguistic and structural patterns; the examination of thematic concerns tends to center on the treatment of nature. Childhood, however, is no less significant a trope, and its intricate presence in Hardy’s work, especially in the last novel, should be examined in order to reach a better understanding of his complex position in relation to Romanticism – a position whose evaluation is indispensable for a fuller picture of the representation of children in nineteenth-century British literature. 186

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Nowhere is Hardy so preoccupied with children and childhood as in Jude the Obscure, his 14th novel. Some indications of his interest in childhood and in child neglect are already discernible in earlier works, particularly in Far from the Madding Crowd (1864), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1888), and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1892). Yet, these three works either treat the childlike state as a metaphor for man’s natural state (as in Madding Crowd) or regard the neglected child cursorily (in The Mayor and Tess), without a detailed rendering of her subjectivity while still a child. In Jude the Obscure, on the other hand, there are two child characters – Jude of the first four chapters and later on his son, Father Time – who are fully developed and whose mental and emotional struggles are central to the plot. As a reading of Jude the Obscure makes clear, Hardy is an heir to the empathetic, dialogic approach to the child. The reappearance of the Romantic, especially Wordsworthian, vocabulary of images pertaining to the child in his prose is manifest. His interest in neglected and suffering children echoes Blakean sensibilities, and some of the narrative patterns that he employs in representing the neglect of children by family and society indicate that he shares certain thematic concerns with Dickens and social-problem novelists such as Frances Trollope and Charlotte Tonna. Nevertheless, his ambiguous, sometimes subversive use of such images, themes, and plot patterns shows him to be positioned at a considerable ironic distance from the assumptions of his precursors. Modifying, sometimes inverting dominant ideas about childhood, Hardy’s representation of children, particularly neglected ones, exposes what may be regarded as the failure of the dialogic, empathetic concept of childhood to maintain itself as a consistent attitude that is capable of redeeming the child from her oppression. Although previous chapters have shown that such contradictions are inherent in works affiliated with the dialogic, empathetic, and liberating ideology of childhood, no such inconsistencies are openly acknowledged by their authors; rather, they are sometimes vehemently denied at the explicit level of the text. Despite Hardy’s affinity to and longing for Romantic ideas and poetics, his representation of child neglect, and the unique use it makes of Wordsworthian motifs, seems to be aware as no other preceding work has been of the inability of the empathetic approach to liberate the child from oppression, silencing, or neglect. Hardy’s treatment of childhood is thus simultaneously influenced by and yet breaks away from the dominant tradition of the literary representation of children during the century that preceded the publication of his last novel. Hardy’s ironic version of the empathetic approach bears political implications besides poetic ones, and locates him at some distance from

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industrial novelists such as Trollope and Tonna, although his novel does take up socioeconomic injustice as one of its major themes. Here, too, Hardy’s skeptical and ironic stance leads him to describe a more complex and ambiguous interaction between child subjectivity and society than that constructed by his precursors. The fact that the two child figures depicted in Jude the Obscure are victims of both private (familial) and socioeconomic neglect is significant for the novel’s overall interpretation of the relations between self and society. Because of its social unorthodoxy and ideological complexity, Jude was first received by many critics as a complete failure and was even reviled as Hardy’s “worst novel.”4 What are nowadays viewed as the challenging features of this author’s most modern and complex work of fiction were seen for many decades as the “faults and flaws” of his craft, or of his philosophy.5 Gradually, with the rise in Hardy’s reputation around the middle of the twentieth century, Jude came to be reconsidered not only as one of his best novels but as a classic, one of the major works of the Victorian era. The critical discussion of its ideological and political unconventionality should be enriched by an examination of the function of the child in the novel.

Jude the Obscure: No blissful beginning Although Jude the Obscure has received ample critical attention, its depiction of childhood has not been sufficiently addressed. Most discussions of Jude that refer to the protagonist’s childhood do so only in passing. Indeed, although several critics argue that Jude’s childhood is important for the shaping of his adult character, they hardly dwell on the significance of childhood as a theme, or examine its representation in depth.6 References to the second child figure, Father Time, are also scarce; in the relatively few cases in which he is mentioned, his presence in the novel is deplored as an artistic failure and he is referred to as a grotesquely symbolic, ill-fitted element in this otherwise realistic novel, hence as deserving no serious critical attention.7 Aesthetically and ideologically, there is one marked difference between the representation of child neglect in Jude and that in the works discussed in previous chapters. For writers of fiction and poetry such as Blake, Wordsworth, Dickens, Tonna, and Trollope, and for writers of nonfiction such as Rousseau, child neglect is perceived as an injury or blemish that follows an initially pure, blissful state. To use Blake’s terminology, Experience is always preceded by Innocence, or the initially blissful state of the not-yet-injured child. David Copperfield perfectly adapts


this paradigm to narrative: the neglect, pain, and resulting self-loathing inflicted on the young protagonist are rendered as the corruption of an earlier, idyllic phase, a pastoral Eden of early childhood, also marked by naïveté and ignorance. The intrusion of antagonistic forces into the scene, and the emotional neglect that follows, construct these earlier days, in retrospect, as something to long for. This paradigm suggests that as powerful and destructive as the inimical forces of experience are to the child, they cannot obscure the memory of bygone days; perhaps they even augment the nurturing, sustaining value of these early days in the memory of the protagonist, narrator, or speaker. In many respects, the ending of David Copperfield attempts to restore the initial domestic bliss of innocence, relived through the protagonist’s role as father to his own happy, not-to-be-neglected children. The initial existence and ongoing influence of the state of innocence is the legacy of Rousseau, Blake, and Wordsworth, manifested in the representations of an early-shattered yet ever-remembered childlike bliss and natural freedom in the works of diverse Victorian novelists besides Dickens, the most conspicuous being Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights and George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss, as well as the factory novels of Trollope and Tonna. Two shared assumptions about child neglect as a social phenomenon underlie these narratives, despite the great ideological and aesthetic differences between them. The first assumption is that the phase of innocence – or what we may refer to as the child’s initial happiness, oneness with nature, purity, and authenticity – is objectively “real.” The second is that innocence is shattered by the intrusion of external social forces into the child’s domain. These oppressive, uncaring, and injurious forces may originate in parental figures or in broader social factors, but whatever the case may be, their being external to the child implies that the destruction of innocence is not inevitable and might have been prevented. This supposition augments the political critique inherent in these works, whether the target of their attack is the callousness in the private domain of family relations or the injustice of the broader social structure. Significantly, many of these texts offer not only a blissful beginning but also (or alternately) a comforting conclusion. For a Michael Armstrong, an Oliver Twist, a Florence Dombey, or a David Copperfield, the eventual recompense for acts of cruelty performed against them by parents or institutions in the past suggests that a child’s suffering can be stopped and made up for. The very structure of the novel of education, the Bildungsroman – which delineates the formation process of a young protagonist who overcomes obstacles on the way to happy maturity – indicates that child

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neglect is no more than one such obstacle. An underlying assumption of the advocates of reform in nineteenth-century Britain, too, is that child neglect is preventable, and that the social positioning of children as inferior and unprotected indicates a denial of their ethically equal status. In this respect, the ideologues of reform derive their justification from the Romantic cult of Innocence, and shape their representation of the social sphere according to the ideology of the Bildungsroman.8 Jude the Obscure is different. Structured as a Bildungsroman, it is nevertheless an inversion of Bildung.9 Commencing with a miserable beginning, the protagonist’s life story ends in deterioration and collapse rather than growth and success. Instead of following the socially optimistic assumptions of the genre, Hardy’s novel adheres to certain features of classical tragedy. From its initial reception, readers and critics alike were struck by the negativity and despair of this novel, and throughout the century or so that has elapsed since its publication have often referred to Jude as a tragedy – following the author’s own definition of his work as “the tragedy of unfulfilled aims.”10 The source of this sense of tragedy that hovers over the work originates, I argue, in the main character’s failure to grow beyond his experience as a neglected child. Trapped for ever in this paralyzing condition, his story can produce no triumph over initial adversity. Beyond the private career of the protagonist, the novel implies that there can be no remedy for neglect, perhaps because there is no initial (hence also no eventual) bliss to long for or strive to regain. The child’s suffering is an all-engulfing condition, and this is shown not only in the story of the protagonist but also in his replica, the son whose sense of neglect is even greater. The imagery surrounding the child in the first chapters of Jude the Obscure is filled with echoes of Wordsworth. The second chapter in particular offers Wordsworthian resonance, when the 11-year-old Jude is placed in a cornfield. Like so many Wordsworthian child figures, the boy is staged as sojourning alone in nature, seeking some comfort in the rural surroundings, away from the less reassuring qualities of human contact. He feels a particular bond with nature and its creatures, and is shown to be responsive and sensitive to natural elements. However, the scene in Hardy’s novel may be described as one in which the young hero is trying hard to become a Wordsworthian child, but failing. Like another Boy of Winander or a male Lucy Gray, the boy Jude feels that he belongs in nature much more than in human society, and imagines that he can commune – actually enter into a dialog – with nature’s creatures, whom he addresses as equally cognizant. He sees the birds as his “gentle friends,” believes that they are “interested in him,” and


projects his own pain of “thwarted desires” on them (Hardy, 1999: 14). Significantly, he addresses them aloud. And yet, unlike the owls of Winander, Hardy’s birds never talk back: they remain silent and just eat, “inky spots on the nut-brown soil” (ibid.: 14), a belittling, earthly metaphor that belies Jude’s idealistic personification of the birds, and perhaps ironically calls attention to the medium (ink) through which the small creatures may be recreated and glorified by poetic minds. The only response that Jude’s offered friendship wins is the sudden, brutal punishment by farmer Troutham, Jude’s crude employer and the figure representing here the unattractive face of his actual surroundings. The birds never respond. Although the young protagonist’s idealistic aspirations are depicted with sympathy, the text underlines their detachment from reality. His short bonding with nature is exposed here as impossible for two reasons. First, it is entirely one-sided since the birds are persistently silent. Secondly, it is incongruous with the crudeness of Jude’s circumstances, signified, among other things, by the fact that it is this boy’s paid job to scare the birds away from the corn. In the first place, then, Jude’s relationship with nature is marred by his forced employment as the birds’ harasser for a sixpence a day. Although a child, he is already trapped in a set-up in which he is expected to frustrate the union with nature rather than desire it. He is also compelled to destroy the initial harmony within nature itself, acting as the agent of economic rights that intrude on the natural order: the birds are forbidden to eat the corn, which is their natural food, because according to the laws of human society this corn belongs to farmer Troutham. Jude’s feeble attempt to mend this cruel scheme of affairs by becoming the birds’ friend is presented as morally and emotionally justified, but at the same time as unrealistic. From the farmer’s angry words it is clear that had Jude settled for the humane gesture of allowing the birds to eat without addressing them “aloud” and imagining that they were his friends, he might have gotten away with it: “So it’s ‘Eat, my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, ‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry!” (ibid.: 14). Jude is punished by the farmer not so much for his compassion as for his romanticism. The ironic use of the Wordsworthian paradigm undermines, and exposes as illusory, the ideal of the solitary child’s innocent unity with nature – a nature reduced here to no more than some “inky spots” on a uniformly tilled, brown ground. Jude’s imagination is not granted the power to integrate subject and object in the way that Wordsworth envisions in The Prelude, or in The Excursion (1814),

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where he tells us how “exquisitely the individual mind … / to the external World / Is fitted: – and how exquisitely, too … / The external World is fitted to the Mind” (V, ll. 63–70).11 For Hardy, the child cannot be imagined as a part of nature. The complication of the Wordsworthian paradigm that envisions an innocent bond between the child and nature is achieved in Hardy’s novel on two levels that affect one another. First, as we have already seen, Jude’s unity with nature is exposed as impossible. Secondly, we may observe here and in several other passages that Jude’s interiority – his subjective assumptions and projections – locates him at some distance from the perspective of the Wordsworthian child. Whereas a child of the kind we encounter in The Prelude would feel blissful unity with and admiration for nature, the quality of the identification with nature that Jude experiences is quite different, based on what he perceives as nature’s pain, weakness, and flaws rather than on its sublimity, grandeur, or beauty. In young Jude’s world, everything that belongs to the natural scene is flattened and reduced to lesser dimensions. Set in the environs of a village named “Marygreen” (misleadingly echoing the merriness and greenness of fresh growth), the second chapter is filled with descriptions of nature as uniform, graceless, and colorless – qualities of which Jude is painfully aware. “How ugly it is here,” he murmurs as he first enters the cornfield. The narrator concurs: “The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the expanse” (Hardy, 1999: 13). Emptied of meaning and beauty, however, the natural scene in Jude evokes in the child protagonist a strong sense of affinity; ironically, this affinity is based on the boy’s keen sensitivity to defects and blemishes rather than an appreciation of the richness and beauty of creation. Jude – an unwanted and uncared-for child – pities the birds because he sees them as rejected, their desires thwarted: “They seemed, like himself, to be living in a world which did not want them” (ibid.: 14). Projecting his own pain onto natural objects, he can “scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his infancy” (ibid.: 15). From the start Jude is located in a setting of experience, and is granted no blissful beginning. By the time he arrives on the scene, at the very opening of the novel, the merciless intervention of human society in the ways of nature has already turned everything – natural growths and little children alike – into a commodity to be exploited, with no appreciation of their intrinsic value. His environment is damaged


beyond repair, its innocence and beauty despoiled, and perhaps had never existed. Jude lacks a blissful beginning not only on the level of imagery and setting but also on that of plot. Much of his childhood is excluded from the narrative, having taken place before we encounter him at the age of 11. The little we do know about what had taken place prior to his arrival at Marygreen is dismal. This is made known to the reader by the few details about his past that are provided: we hear some hints about his parents’ aggressive estrangement, his mother’s suicide, his alcoholic father’s harshness and ensuing death. Rather than childlike innocence, his characterization underlines premature maturity. The Jude of the first four chapters is directly and indirectly represented as an aged boy, “his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the pricks of life somewhat before its time” (ibid.: 11), and in his mind resembling “an ancient man” (ibid.: 23). Already burdened by an awareness of suffering, ugliness, death, and the world’s indifference and injustice, Jude’s childhood is anything but innocent in the Blakean-Wordsworthian sense. The authorial decision to introduce Jude to us at this stage of his life and to exclude his earlier years from the narrative is repeated in the presentation of the second child character, Father Time, who makes his first appearance at the age of 9 and is defined even more emphatically as “preternaturally old” (ibid.: 220). Each of the two child figures is thus represented as already having a history, already immersed in experience.

A focus on interiority Young Jude’s neglectful human surroundings seem to place him in a similar position to that of many other neglected child figures in nineteenth-century British novels, as far as external circumstances are concerned. The parental figures that surround him – biological parents, adoptive great aunt, employer, and schoolmaster – have all deserted or abused him. The first scene in the novel shows us how Jude’s beloved schoolmaster, Mr. Phillotson, is going away, in what the reader soon realizes to be just another desertion in a long series. Rejection by parental figures, then, is a recurrent motif in Jude’s young life. The familial set-up introduced to us is one of extreme emotional neglect. The “grimly Dickensian” Aunt Drusilla, to use James Kincaid’s description (Kincaid, 1993: 141), humiliates the boy, slanders him, forces him to “earn any penny he can,” and wishes him out of this world (“It would ha’ been a blessing if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor useless boy!”; Hardy, 1999: 12). What she sees as Jude’s

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unnecessary, miserable existence is discussed in his presence, and so her gossip with her friends makes him feel “the impact of their glances like slaps upon his face” (ibid.: 13). As often happens to Dickensian child figures, Jude is objectified; his point of view and innate value are denied. On the social level, too, Jude seems to resemble other neglected child figures in contemporaneous novels: he is economically disadvantaged, coming from a poor family and struggling against a life of inferiority and frustrated desire to promote himself socially and intellectually. Similarly adverse circumstances await Father Time, the second unwanted child in the novel, who must also face antagonistic external conditions, to which I refer later. However, Hardy’s interest in the neglected state of these two children has a unique focus. The emphasis in Jude the Obscure is not so much on wrongs inflicted by external, objectively powerful agents – although such wrongs are inflicted – but rather on the child’s interiority. The novel represents adverse social forces as hopelessly detrimental, because of the child’s projection that augments their powerfulness, conditioned as the child is to interpret his surroundings as antagonistic. This inherent pessimism, which is even more emphatic in the case of Father Time, renders the state of neglect irreparable. One passage from the early chapters may serve to illustrate the extent to which the authorial focus lies on the child’s suffering as internal, even when there are objective external agents that harm him. The scene occurs right after Jude’s dismissal by farmer Troutham and the ensuing scolding by Aunt Drusilla. Jude leaves the house, “feeling more than ever his existence to be an undemanded one” (ibid.: 16); lying on his back he “pull[s] his straw hat over his face, and peer[s] through the interstices of the plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting.” He then thinks how Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for … [and] sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it. If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man. (ibid.: 17) The focus on internal dynamics is illustrated by the fact that the chief anxiety sensed here is that of being invaded. Unlike previous


neglected child figures who perhaps resemble Jude in familial and social circumstances, here the cause of suffering is abstract and all-engulfing: it is a “something,” that glares and rattles at you, a cluster of “noises.” The external world as a whole is perceived as a violent, vulgar intrusion into the child’s interiority, the fragile “little cell called [his] life.” Rather than feeling bitter about his concrete experiences with particular people, Jude is oppressed by the broader conditions of existence, nature’s logic being too “horrid” for him to bear. This passage is strikingly similar to a scene in Hardy’s autobiography (written in the third person), where the very young Tom is described lying in exactly the same posture, hat and all, and wishing – though with less resentment – to remain a child because of his awareness of the flaws of human life (Hardy, 1962: 15–16). Ironically, even if he had been able to remain a child, he would not have been sheltered from this awareness, because no blessed initial innocence is available to him. There is indeed some difference between childhood and adulthood even in Hardy, a difference that indicates that the child is still somehow protected: Jude, in the passage quoted above, thinks of the shudder that seizes you as you grow up. However, unlike the RousseauvianWordsworthian paradigm, the difference is not categorical but merely one of degree. The previous state Jude contemplates – his early childhood – differs from his present one (at the age of 11) only in being located at the “circumference” of one’s life or at its center. There is an ongoing movement toward this “center,” and though Jude has not arrived there yet, he can already see what it looks like. This novel offers no possibility of enjoying entire innocence, and even if it had, this would have been a merely illusory possibility, the result of observing life from a point at which it is blocked from sight rather than seeing it for what it really is. The child’s dismal thoughts about the world present him as already intruded by these negative forces. Fully aware of the meaning of growing up, the child is, in a sense, already “grown up.” He already knows the anguish and pain of adult life. The yearning for a phase of innocence is there, but it is accompanied by a realization that its existence might be no more than an imagined construct. The vision behind Jude’s thoughts underneath the hat, which is shared not only by the young biographical author-to-be but also by the implied author of 1895 (because, as I shall show, it shapes so much of what follows in the novel), differs from what we may find in other representations of neglected children during the century. It assumes that neglect and oppression are omnipresent and inescapable. The last sentences of Chapter Four, which end the first section of the novel and the

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phase of the protagonist’s childhood, echo Jude’s pessimism, but this time revealing the narrator’s, rather than the protagonist’s, outlook. At this point, again, Jude feels despondent, and the narrator comments: Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him… . But nobody did come, because nobody does; and … Jude continued to wish himself out of the world. (ibid.: 27) This pessimistic prognosis turns the state of neglect into a universal rule, an almost objectively inevitable condition: nobody ever comes. Yet, this conviction originates in the neglected child’s perspective. Such a reading is bound to diminish, or at least complicate, the intensity of the political and social critique that may be attributed to Jude the Obscure. In this respect it goes against some of the major traditional interpretations, which have tended to locate the source of Jude’s failure, or tragedy, in external, impersonal forces and to underline their oppressive impact on the oversensitive protagonist.12 Rather than a furious attack on marriage, academia, class discrimination, religious institutions, or neglectful parents, my reading sees Hardy’s novel as an investigation of the way in which human interiority enables external factors to become so influential and destructive. Indeed, in the last two decades there has been a growing tendency to recognize the selfcontradictions and ideological ambiguities of Jude. This shift in critical approach entails a diminished emphasis on the novel’s direct referentiality to society, and a greater attention to the nonrealistic aspects of the work, its symbolism, impressionistic style, and focus on subjectivity.13 What follows from such a reading is that, rather than locating the source of his novel’s tragedy in external and impersonal forces, Hardy presents us with a narrative whose course is determined by a complex interplay of internal and external dynamics. That is why the novel’s construction of subjectivity is of paramount importance. The treatment of child neglect in Jude the Obscure is the central motif in this work that supports such a reading. It is through the issue of the neglected child that other aspects of Jude’s social critique are subjectivized, because it is the protagonist’s condition as a neglected child that leads him (and, after him, his son) to perceive and shape his entire life, even when adult, as dominated by inimical forces. It could be argued that the pessimism of this novel regarding child neglect is not categorically different from other literary representations. Blake’s poems of Experience, Tonna’s industrial novel, and even


certain elements in Dickens’s work (to which I refer below) delineate cases in which the wrongs inflicted on children cannot be overcome. But unlike the vision of Jude the Obscure, these other texts are melioristic. Their protest is a central feature, and originates in an assumption that originally the child is, or can be, happy. It is a wrong, or a series of wrongs, performed against her by individuals, institutions, or social relations that we should blame. Hardy’s novel, on the other hand, offers us a negative, disillusioned perspective, according to which the very noises of the external world are to blame, the very logic of natural existence is seen as flawed beyond repair. What is the function of the child’s interiority in Jude the Obscure? The authorial focus on the subjectivity of the child bears further implications than mere narrative attention to thoughts and emotions. Jude as a whole suggests that the importance of the child’s interiority is much greater than the particulars of his external condition. Jude’s case shows how the child’s mind projects and creates its own reality, but, rather than affirming this process as blessed, as Wordsworth would, in Hardy what is being underlined is the incongruous and destructive side of the child’s imaginative gift, which perpetuates his state of neglect. Adult aggression thus turns into self-aggression; rejection by others leads to self-destruction. In this respect, the state of neglect is convincingly presented here as inescapable. This is illustrated by Jude’s physical posture in the scene discussed above. Lying on his back, hiding his face behind a hat, his position expresses an emotional stance of passivity and withdrawal. Rather than facing reality, he effaces the external world, regarding it through the interstices of his hat as a vague reflection of brightness. This vague reflection is more pleasing to the eye than the “glaring, garish” reality of human life. It is also more agreeable than the naturalistic setting in which Jude’s author has located him, at the top of “a heap of litter near the pig-sty” (ibid.: 16–17). From behind his hat, Jude can avoid noticing both pigsty and litter, or observe – as he did in a previous scene – “How ugly it is here” (ibid.: 13). The external world is evaded because of this ugliness, which is more than aesthetic: it is emotional and moral, with nature’s logic – or the world’s lack of beauty and compassion – sickening Jude’s sense of harmony. He seems to be trying to fulfill here his desire to observe the world from a “point at its circumference,” to imagine that the “little cell” called his life can be protected from being shaken and warped. Jude thus captures himself in the position of being rejected and unwanted by the world, retreating from an encounter with anything the world has to offer, because of the pessimistic assumption that

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it can offer only harm. This physical position of evasion and retreat into interiority is endlessly repeated in Jude’s mental stance in later stages of the novel, in an inversion of the socialization process typical of Bildung narratives. In Jude we may observe how the condition of neglect is adopted and even nurtured by the child as he grows up, in some selfdestructive surrender to the pain that it inflicts.

Growing up: no potential for change Where does all that lead the child? What happens to the unwanted child when he grows up? Hardy proposes a different answer from those suggested by Trollope, Tonna, or Dickens. Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Florence Dombey, and Michael Armstrong all provide us with a model that posits eventual triumph over initial abuse and neglect. Their material, social, and familial success as adults becomes possible through their struggle against earlier silencing, oppression, exploitation, and objectification – a struggle essential for the structure of Bildung. It is true that not all cases of suffering children, even in works by the authors already discussed in this book, end in triumph: Tonna’s main character, Helen Fleetwood, dies prematurely, as do Dickensian child figures such as Little Nell and Paul Dombey. But the deaths of these children are idealized and denote another kind of victory than the social one of Bildung. Their victory is spiritual: like some of Blake’s child figures in Songs of Experience, Helen Fleetwood, Little Nell, and Paul Dombey die in order to preserve their moral innocence and immunity from callous adult materialism and hypocrisy. Their demise is therefore consoling as much as it is sad. The Christian aura that surrounds these figures contributes to the sense that although they should have been treated better, they have managed to overcome their neglect by avoiding resentment and going peacefully, martyr-like, to their little graves, and, of course, to their eternal afterlife. Their death is edifying because it teaches those they leave behind an important moral lesson.14 In Hardy’s novel, on the other hand, we have two child characters who do not struggle against, and certainly do not triumph over, their neglect. Before we discuss Father Time’s short life and early death – a death that is categorically different from the consoling demises just referred to – we should examine the protagonist’s own case. Jude carries his sense of neglect with him into adulthood, and in an inversion of Bildung recreates his initial rejection in his mature relations. The sense of being unwanted is an inherent feature of his character, with no potential for change. Jude never solves the problem of his childhood


pain, but rather preserves it in a way that reveals the novel’s critique of the optimism of the liberating and reformist patterns of envisioning child oppression as a problem that can be tackled. The motif that best exemplifies Jude’s perpetuation of his initial neglect is that of his attachment to Christminster (Hardy’s Oxford), the city and colleges that become his obsession. This obsession is carried from childhood into adulthood, and quite explicitly forms one of the major causes of the protagonist’s ruin, being the central object of desire within what Nicola Harris sees as “Jude’s extreme subjectivism” (Harris, 1998: 45). However, whereas many critics have discussed the representation of the university and Jude’s failure to be admitted there as indications of the novel’s social and political critique, what has been overlooked is the connection between Jude’s agonized relationship with Christminster and his initial deprivations as a child. Child neglect, seen as the absence of a sustaining beginning, leads to the protagonist’s immersion in fantasy as a compensation for what is represented as a defective reality. His looking at things through the interstices of his hat marks Jude’s ensuing evasion of reality in favor of idealism and fancy. Critics have observed his self-destructive idealism. Irving Howe, Bruce Johnson, and Forest Pyle explain it, as I do, as his emotional deficiency caused by the absence of a living past to which to return. However, they talk about this absent past as communal – historical, traditional, or rural.15 They do not refer to the personal past; that is, to Jude’s childhood, which I consider the most fundamental lack that mars his life. His fantasies may be better understood if read in this light, as they all evolve around the need to retrieve, imagine, or invent a state of protected, cared-for, parented childhood of the kind that Jude has never had. Yet because this lack is given as inescapable and irreparable, this search perpetually recreates his earlier experience of abandonment. The first awakening of the desire for Christminster occurs immediately after the scene in which Jude lies on his back with the hat on his face. Then, all of a sudden, he jumps up with new energies and makes inquiries about Christminster. This “city of light” seems to Jude like a “castle” glimmering in the distance (Hardy, 1999: 22–3), and a site to which he is now becoming “romantically attached” (ibid.: 21). The place emerges in front of his idealizing eyes as that “other,” unknown, hence unreal place, a projection and a symbol. That this object onto which he now projects his frustrated desire for love, beauty, and protection bears parental qualities is first suggested by the fact that it is the place to which his schoolmaster is now heading, having uttered, while leaving, a vague promise

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to remember Jude and a careless invitation to come and visit. In the first place, then, Jude’s obsession with Christminster might be seen as an extension of his longing for the father figure of the departing schoolmaster. And indeed, in the initial stages of Jude’s fetish, Phillotson and the city are intertwined in his mind into one object of desire: He had heard that breezes travelled at the rate of ten miles an hour, and the fact now came into his mind. He parted his lips as he faced the north-east, and drew in the wind as if it were a sweet liquor. “You,” he said, addressing the breeze caressingly, “were in Christminster city between one and two hours ago, floating along the streets, pulling round the weather-cocks, touching Mr. Phillotson’s face, being breathed by him; and now you are here, breathed by me – you, the very same.” Suddenly there came along this wind, something towards him – a message from the place – from some soul residing there, it seemed. Surely it was the sound of bells, the voice of the city, faint and musical, calling to him, “We are happy here!” (ibid.: 20–21) This entire passage is rendered from Jude’s perspective. Although Jude is the focalizer, the reader is led to treat the appealing terms in which Christminster is described with considerable distrust. The glowing, magnificent city is beheld by young Jude from afar, through a mist, and is shown to be the product of the viewer’s fancy rather than a real place. For Jude, Christminster is “miraged in the peculiar atmosphere,” and he “strain[s] his eyes persistently; sometimes to be rewarded by the sight of a dome or spire, at other times by a little smoke, which in his estimate had some of the mysticism of incense” (ibid.: 19–20). The accentuated discourse of romance associated with the place is clearly incongruous in the dreary, mundane backdrop that serves as this novel’s reality. Soon, the image of the city takes over and grows to be more central in Jude’s fancy than the figure of the man Phillotson. Accordingly, the city is now personified (as are education and knowledge, which are associated with it) and its symbolic function becomes that of a surrogate parent. First, when still a child, Jude’s desire for Christminster is described as “the yearning of his heart to find something to anchor on, to cling to” (ibid.: 22). Later, when he is a young man, the void that Christminster is expected to fill designates more clearly its parental role, as Jude perceives it as a loving figure that will take care of him. The city is expected to assuage “that feeling which had been his undoing more than once – that he was not worth the trouble of being taken care of either by himself or


others” (ibid.: 142). He thus fancies himself, as an adolescent, the child of Christminster: “‘Yes, Christminster shall be my Alma Mater; and I’ll be her beloved son, in whom she shall be well pleased’” (ibid.: 32). Towards the end of the novel, as a grown man, he retrospectively meditates on his failure to become a student and sums up this frustrated ambition as a life’s attempt “to be a son of the University” (ibid.: 254). As part of this attempt, he significantly initiates his relationship with Christminster and education on a day “which happened to be his next birthday” (ibid.: 26), when he sends for the Greek and Latin grammars from Phillotson and begins his arduous quest toward becoming a son of the university. Symbolically, the boy’s wish to learn ancient languages is fundamentally a wish to be born again as the child of the new parent, Christminster. However, Jude’s attempt to find an emotional anchor in Christminster fails, and for several reasons. First, the text implies that he has made a wrong choice in desiring Christminster as the parent to whom he wishes to be born. The desire to be reborn and make a fresh start is ironically juxtaposed with the moldering, stale old nature of this “new” parent Jude is seeking. The languages he strives to study in order to be admitted by Christminster are dead ones, the Greek and Latin books are “ancient,” their pages having been “thumbed by hands possibly in the grave” (ibid.: 28). The city itself is a monument, a medieval site that has suffered the assaults of time, change, and decay. Its “aged erections” are “wounded, broken, sloughing off their outer shape in the deadly struggle against years, weather, and man” (ibid.: 68). Secondly, Jude’s wish to be adopted by Christminster fails, simply because the latter does not want him. Nevertheless, the simplicity of this explanation is misleading. To see this rejection as the result of social discrimination alone, as many critics have done, and to regard Jude as the victim of a conservative system that would not allow a working man to enter the college doors, is not to grasp the whole picture. Jude’s inferior class and Victorian social hierarchy are significant factors, but so is his psychology. Paradoxically, although his entire existence is shaped by the desire to become a son of the University, and his mental energy is devoted solely to this project for years, he hardly does anything in order to find his place at Christminster. His single attempt to contact the heads of some colleges, after a long and purposeless sojourn in the place, results in one letter of rejection. He is “exasperated” (ibid.: 95), and his immediate step is to get drunk. Mary Ann Melfi claims that Jude’s bent for alcohol is a central feature of his immaturity that maintains in him “a childlike sense of powerlessness.” Through his repeated drinking he “eludes pain rather than regard it as an informant” (Melfi, 1995: 316).

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In other words, Jude does not learn from experience because he is too busy avoiding it. The wish to mend everything that went wrong in his early life by becoming the university’s child is, ironically, darkened by Jude’s entrapment in the old patterns that have dominated his existence from the start. Foreshadowing the destructive role that Christminster will play in his life, the following scene, which takes place on the night of his first arrival in the city, is staged entirely in his mind. It demonstrates once again the parental role that Jude – now a young man – assigns to Christminster and the childlike role that he assigns to himself. He lies in his bed, imagining that he hears “a gentle-voiced prelate [speak], during whose meek, familiar rhyme, endeared to him from earliest childhood, Jude fell asleep: ‘Teach me to live, that I may dread / The grave as little as my bed. / Teach me to die’” (Hardy, 1999: 67). As the narrator indicates, this hymn is not actually heard, only imagined. The imaginary new mother – Christminster – lulls her child to sleep, but the morbid words attached to her singing are too similar to the legacy of the first mother, the real one who committed suicide when Jude was an infant. When he realized, as a youth, that she had drowned herself, he tried to do the same; so the only thing his real mother ever taught him was how to die. Now, in Christminster, he is asking his symbolic new mother to instruct him, again, how “to die.” In his ambition to become a child of the university, Jude may seem to be aspiring to intellectual, spiritual, and social liberation, and to some extent this is true. But at bottom, his desire is self-destructive, and his role as the city’s child is connected to death rather than life, stagnation rather than growth, rejection rather than love. In his relationship with Christminster Jude keeps placing himself in the position of the unwanted, uncared-for, unrecognized child, and abstains from developing, changing, growing up. As he wanders about, viewing the ancient, impressive colleges, he observes the yellow street lamps, “some of those lamps which had sent into the sky the gleam and the glory that caught his strained gaze in his days of dreaming, so many years ago. They winked their yellow eyes at him dubiously, and as if, though they had been awaiting him all these years in disappointment at his tarrying, they did not much want him now” (Hardy, 1999: 63). The youthful dream is ironically equated here with the Wordsworthian vision of the “gleam and the glory” of childhood (Immortality Ode, l. 57). Jude now walks along “obscure alleys” and observes “decrepit and superseded chambers” – quite different surroundings from those of the heavenly Jerusalem he visualized from afar as a child. But when he


“passe[s] objects out of harmony with [the city’s] general expression he allow[s] his eyes to slip over them as if he did not see them” (ibid.: 63–4). He evades actual contact with the city by construing reality so that it may fit his mind’s early vision. And indeed, as his drunken response to the single letter of rejection indicates, Jude is not going to learn anything from what happens to him. He will not try to be admitted to the university ever again, although until his last day he will return – in mind and body – to the blocked college gates, not in an attempt to get in but in order to voice his indignation in pathetically unanswered, unanswerable monologs. He will not make any further attempt to be admitted and will not try to find a place in the city’s nonacademic community either. In his lengthy diatribe by the gates, rendered in the first chapter of Part Six, Jude accuses the social system of coldhearted indifference and injustice toward poor people such as himself. His words may be regarded as a powerful, moving summary of his life as the victim of unjust forces. However, Jude’s moral integrity is qualified by the way in which the scene is staged: he is lamenting his lot while ignoring the pleas of his pregnant spouse and three young children to find a shelter from the rain. Possessed by his inner world, he becomes blind to the needs of other people and to his responsibilities toward them.

Father Time: The realism of the allegorical child Can an immature individual such as this, constantly in search of surrogate parents, be somebody else’s parent? Can a grown man who does not want to stop being a child be responsible for his own child? And is it accidental that Jude, the child who wishes to evade contact and gaze at the world from a point at its circumference, becomes the father of a child who does not want to live? This child, Jude’s firstborn, is a minor character that has bothered critics because of its emphatically allegorical, some say artificial presence, so incongruous with this largely realistic novel.16 Even Nicola Harris, who presents Father Time as not only congruent with but crucial for the thematic unity of the novel, focuses on the character’s allegorical role without addressing his function on the realistic level.17 Yet, even if we were to concede that Father Time is incongruous, this is not necessarily a disadvantage. Rather, it demonstrates the great significance of what his figure represents. If indeed there is something constrained and overdone about this figure, this indicates that Hardy was willing to risk much with this second character of a neglected child, because of the

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great significance of the theme in this novel. Father Time demonstrates, even more clearly than does Jude, Hardy’s vision of child neglect as an internal state that exceeds the dimensions of a problem that may be solved. Father Time’s presence contributes further to the critique of the empathetic, dialogic mode to which we have alluded in the discussion of Jude’s childhood. As his name indicates, Father Time was born old. Like young Jude, he enjoys no initial state of childlike bliss, no innocence that precedes experience. Serving as his father’s grotesque double, his character reintroduces into the narrative the image of the thoughtful, gloomy child who is burdened by an acute awareness of the defects of existence: [A] small, pale child’s face could be seen in the gloom of a third-class carriage. ... His eyes remained mostly fixed on the back of the seat opposite, and never turned to the window … On the other seat were two or three passengers, one of them a working woman who held a basket on her lap, in which was a tabby kitten. The woman opened the cover now and then, whereupon the kitten would put out its head, and indulge in playful antics. At these the fellow-passengers laughed, except the solitary boy ... who, regarding the kitten with his saucer eyes, seemed mutely to say: “All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun.” (ibid.: 217) Unlike his father’s ineffectual attempt to commune with the birds, little Father Time is unmoved by the kitten. Yet, his apathetic disdain for the beauty of life and acute awareness of death (“I should like the flowers very very much, if I didn’t keep on thinking they’d be all withered in a few days!”; ibid.: 234) are similar to those we have observed, though in a milder form, in the young Jude. Both children are depicted as placed already in the state of experience, highly sensitive to what the novel represents as a flawed, dissonant, pitiless existence. Father Time’s aged visage and disposition have been his markers from a very young age: “‘Little Father Time is what they always called me. It is a nick-name; because I look so aged, they say’” (ibid.: 220). Both Jude and Father Time express a wish not to have been born; both try to commit suicide at a young age. Jude’s son’s peculiar name provides an additional hint at his being his father’s double: he is called “Little Father,” which means that the actual father – Jude – is incorporated into the son’s identity. Nevertheless, little Father differs from his father in that he does not evade the indifferent or ugly aspects of “nature’s logic.” On the contrary,


he seems to be acutely observant of these very aspects. Jude’s decision in response to his neglect has been to turn his eyes from the ugliness of the world and construct an ideal domain of delusions. This response is proven to be destructive for his wellbeing throughout the novel. Father Time, who is also a neglected child, responds quite differently to his condition; yet this response, too, proves fatal. In constructing the character of Father Time, Hardy invests some efforts in depicting – besides the child’s agonized subjectivity – also the external minutiae of neglect, inattention, and disregard of his point of view. Some of these instances are severe cases of neglect, the result of sheer heartlessness; but others are far subtler, originating in unintended insensitivity. It is significant that some of the more subtle acts of neglect are performed, inadvertently, by the first neglected child of the novel, now grown up, and by his spouse and cousin Sue, herself the survivor of an agonized childhood. The dysfunction of this pair as parents serves a double purpose here: both in establishing the environment against which Father Time is depicted, and in revealing the inescapability of child neglect by showing how the formerly neglected children become, in their turn, neglectful parents as well. The new generation of parents, whose liberating, dialogic ideology substitutes for the older generation’s disciplinary, catechetical approach, is ironically shown to be neglectful and inattentive toward its children in its own way. Thus, it follows from Hardy’s novel that the liberating approach is no less problematic than the conservative one: although it seems to be attuned to the child’s needs, it is liable to fail to perceive the child’s distinct point of view. The nature of Father Time’s initial neglect is clear: he is an unwanted child, born to parents already separated, and for nine years his existence is unknown to his father. He is rejected by his mother, who places him in the care of her untrustworthy relatives in Australia and walks off. However, when he first appears on the scene he is taken in by his real father. Jude and Sue are both affectionate and filled with good intentions toward him. It is nevertheless with them as parents that Father Time reaches the nadir of his despondency and kills himself. In order to understand how this happens, we should examine Sue and Jude’s function as parents and the relation of that to Father Time’s subjectivity.

The impartiality of parents As Jude the Obscure demonstrates, being a parent is not only a biological fact but also an ethical obligation. Parenthood is perhaps the ultimate demand to be responsible for an other, and it is, significantly, an other

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who is a child – a dependent being that cannot yet be self-reliant. If we examine the four parental figures described in the novel – Aunt Drusilla, Arabella, Sue, and Jude – we may trace an intriguing similarity in the way in which all of them assume their parental roles. The first striking resemblance is that none of them wishes to have a child; all the children in this novel seem to be imposed on, rather than welcomed by, their biological or adoptive parents. Consequently, two of these parents – Drusilla and Arabella – blatantly reject the child under their charge. Aunt Drusilla is hostile, deprecating, and wishes little Jude out of this world; Arabella renounces her maternal role, assigning her child’s upbringing to other people. The two other parents here – Jude and Sue – do not perform any conscious act of rejection toward their children and do not abandon them. However, in a much more subtle way the narrative implicates them in the deadly act of their gloomy child. Although Father Time is a desperate child, it is important to note that initially he is not entirely without hope. When he first enters his new house – Jude and Sue’s – he clearly wishes to be loved, and asks Sue’s permission to call her Mother. As he calls her by that name, “a yearning look [comes] over the child and he [begins] to cry” (ibid.: 219). Until the end he keeps seeking an assurance that his existence is desired, but Jude and Sue, despite their good intentions, do not manage to provide him with such basic confidence. Jude’s carelessness as a father and Sue’s insensitivity as a mother are suggested already before Father Time makes his appearance, when they receive Arabella’s letter telling them about the boy’s expected arrival. The couple’s response to the news shows how unnatural it is for them to assume the role of parents. Instead of referring to the particular, specific child born to Jude without his knowledge, they both hurry to invent an ideology, based on generalizations about children at large and about humanity’s obligations toward them: “All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care,” declares Jude (ibid.: 216). This sentiment sounds noble enough, and might be taken as reflecting an exceedingly responsible stance toward the world’s children. Terry Eagleton sees it as “a courageous affirmation of human solidarity” (Eagleton, 1987: 64). However, in the context of Jude’s first realization that he is a father – and the father of a particular child, whom he is about to meet – his words acquire quite a different meaning. They indicate an evasion of responsibility, because if humanity is to protect all children and provide them with its equal and impartial “general care,” what is, exactly, Jude’s role as a parent?


Sue responds to Jude’s words enthusiastically (she “jumped up and kissed Jude with passionate devotion”), embracing his ideology to an extremity that makes it absurd: “And if he isn’t yours it makes him all the better. I do hope he isn’t. ... If he isn’t, I should like so much for us to have him as an adopted child!” (Hardy, 1999: 216). This response foreshadows the couple’s difficulty in assuming the role of parents: benevolent and idealistic as they are in theory, they are only prepared to play the game of parenthood without realizing their child’s actual needs. It is during the few years they will spend with their child that their inability to relate to his point of view and respond to him dialogically will gradually acquire momentum, until the final catastrophe.18 The rapidly formed ideology about humanity’s responsibility for all children is a substitute for relating personally to the particular child about to enter the house. This is augmented by Jude’s treatment of Father Time as soon as he appears. Without knowing the first thing about the boy, not even his name, and before asking him any questions or offering him anything to eat, Jude follows Sue to the adjoining room and declares: “I have an idea! We’ll educate and train him with a view to the University. What I couldn’t accomplish in my own person perhaps I can carry out through him?” (ibid.: 219). Jude has no interest in the child – his personality, his desires, his immediate and future needs. Instead, he makes use of him as some kind of vehicle for his own interior conflicts and thwarted desires, projecting his subjectivity onto the unfamiliar boy. Jude’s inability to see the child as a subject in his own right reaches its climax in the sixth and last part of the novel, entitled “Back at Christminster.” Now Father Time and his younger siblings are sacrificed by the idealistic desires of both their parents. Jude’s obsession with Christminster makes him drag the pregnant Sue and the little children around for hours in the rain, half forgetful of their existence, sunk in his own frustration and rage. Sue’s drive for rebellion against conventions comes over her and she, too, compromises the wellbeing of her children: when at last they find some accommodation for the night at a late hour, Sue cannot overcome the urge to assert her individual freedom by “impulsively” telling the landlady that “though in her own sense of the words she was a married woman, in the landlady’s sense she was not” (ibid.: 260). Her desire to play the unyielding social rebel is fulfilled at the expense of her children; just like Jude, she is blinded to the demands of practicality and responsibility when her Romantic desire for social freedom is at play. The result – which could have been anticipated in the light of Jude and Sue’s prior experiences of society’s

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intolerance – is that they are practically turned out. Sue goes with Father Time to find other lodgings, but fails. “‘I ought not to be born, ought I?’” Father Time now asks “with misgiving” (ibid.: 260). Sue, fatigued, does not reply. Importantly, he states his concern as a question, and does not affirm it with certitude. But hanging in the air with no reply, it becomes a rhetorical question, one that can be answered only in the affirmative. Father Time tries again, but Sue’s replies keep driving him on to the inevitable conclusion that he is unwanted: “Can I do anything?” “No! All is trouble, adversity and suffering!” … “It would be better to be out o’the world than in it, wouldn’t it?” “It would almost, dear.” “’Tis because of us children, too, isn’t it, that you can’t get a good lodging?” “Well – people do object to children sometimes.” “Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have ’em?” “O – because it is a law of nature.” “And what makes it worse with me is that you are not my real mother … . I oughtn’t to have come to ’ee – that’s the real truth! I troubled ’em in Australia, and I trouble folk here. … I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, … and not allowed to grow big and walk about!” Sue did not reply. (ibid.: 261–2) Sue does not say even once that she cares for Father Time, or that parents love their children and may have even wanted to have them. Sunk in her own despondency, she fails to realize her role toward this child. Instead of trying to become a sustaining and supportive figure, she remains self-absorbed; and although she is depicted as more selfabsorbed than uncaring, the boy is already mentally trained to construe everything as a rejection. Her inadvertent message to the child is identical to the more direct, openly stated abuse hurled at Jude by aunt Drusilla at the beginning of the novel: “‘It would ha’ been a blessing if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor useless boy!’” (ibid.: 12). Sue is far more sensitive and enlightened than the rough, uneducated village baker Drusilla, who has no pretensions of being self-aware or progressive. Yet, the resemblance is there, and its impact is ironic because of Sue’s freethinking, liberal, humane ideology.


Furthermore, in this crucial last dialog – followed by the boy’s suicide – Sue does not tell the child the truth. She does not explain that they are put in such a vulnerable, homeless state on a rainy night not because of the existence of the children, as he supposes, but – primarily – because of her and Jude’s own conduct. Her refusal to marry is the main reason, alongside with Jude’s obsession about Christminster, for their having no roof over their heads. Jude and Sue were forced to leave Aldbrickham because of the narrow-mindedness of their employers and neighbors, who disliked the fact of their living together out of wedlock. This is the reason they cannot provide their children with a stable home and a supportive community. At the present they have no place to stay because of Jude’s desire to follow the Christminster graduation procession to the last, in spite of the late hour and foul weather, and because Sue has just chosen to assert her marital state to the landlady in a burst of courage. It is the idealism of the parents rather than the existence of the children that is the cause of the family’s current despondency. The fact that this idealism is maintained at the expense of the children’s welfare is kept from Father Time. Paradoxically, the only one who is responsible and concerned about others in this novel is Father Time: the aged boy who, because of his parents’ shortcomings, is forced to behave like an adult. His sense of guilt, making him feel that he is a burden to others, is corroborated by Sue’s responses: “‘Poor father!,’” he laments, “‘Father went away to give us children room, didn’t he?’ – ‘Partly,’” Sue replies (ibid.: 261). As the only figure in the novel who learns from experience, this child stares reality straight in the face and perceives it in its most horrid form. His deadly act is the result of learning from experience: since he and his siblings cause trouble, so he believes, the responsible thing to do – from his guilt-stricken point of view – is to eliminate himself, together with them. Father Time’s terrible act is performed, staged, and explained in terms of social responsibility. His laconic suicide note – “Done because we are too menny” – indicates that he does not take his own life simply because he does not wish to live (even though this is what the doctor later on suggests and Jude hurries to believe); he does it, and takes the other children with him, in what he sees as an unselfish attempt to release his parents from their arduous obligations. The suicide note, however, with its childish spelling, also reminds us that as experienced and aged as Father Time seems, he is still a child. Ironically, it is his grave error, which extends far beyond mere misspelling, that shows us that even this child is still naïve. Rather than valuable simplicity, his innocence breeds destruction, leading him to misconstrue

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his family’s circumstances. As a child whose subjective sense of neglect surpasses the degree of his environment’s mistreatment of him, his suicide is performed not so much out of aged pessimism but out of childlike loneliness, vulnerability, and helplessness. Father Time’s demise is different from other literary children’s deaths. Little Nell and Paul Dombey, just like Helen Fleetwood, did not take their own lives, although they welcomed death as an outlet from a world whose ways had become too corrupt or unjust for them to bear. Their deaths were therefore represented as consoling and edifying for those left behind. As a critique of various kinds of child neglect, the function of such early departures was to augment the protest voiced in the texts, by showing these children as morally superior to their adult (failed) guardians. The Old Curiosity Shop and Dombey and Son, as well as Helen Fleetwood, represent adult society as heartlessly materialistic and exploitative. The pathos of Nell, Paul, and Helen’s premature passing underlines the novels’ critique of a society that would have made it impossible for them to grow up without compromising their purity. This pattern follows the Wordsworthian construction of child figures such as Lucy Gray or the Boy of Winander, who must die because their childhood is envisioned as a state of hallowed innocence and freedom that adult society is too flawed to accommodate. The dead child in Jude, on the other hand, rather than feeling himself pure and immune to the flaws of his surroundings, is burdened with guilt. It is this guilt that leads him to kill himself. Father Time’s environment is represented by Hardy as partly responsible for his fatal decision, by not being attentive to his point of view. Yet, the main reason for his suicide is this boy’s interiority, shaped by his surroundings yet inherently distorted to an extent that makes him believe that he is the cause of his parents’ suffering. Father Time’s suicide is not represented as a sanctified, admirable act of self-sacrifice but rather as a senseless error, which neither edifies anybody nor produces any social change.

The inherent failure to protect the child By the time of Jude the Obscure’s publication in 1895, the liberating, dialogic attitude to children had already triumphed. Children’s legal rights were by now ascertained, and the norms regarding the appropriate treatment of children by parents, schools, and society had made significant progress. Yet, Hardy’s novel registers a major inconsistency within the reformist, dialogic educational mode. The first chapters show us a child who is oppressed, exploited, and disregarded, and


whose emotional neglect is accompanied by economic deprivation and discrimination. Both at this stage of the narrative and in later sections, Romantic ideology is represented in the text as a sentimental illusion: first we see a child whose attempt to commune with the birds is ludicrously exposed as detached from reality; later, we are shown how the new generation of parents, which manifests idealistic rebellion and aspirations for individual freedom and self-fulfillment, becomes almost fanatically self-centered. The young, enlightened parents, themselves the survivors of child neglect, fail in their treatment of their own child by not providing him with a sense that his status as an equally valuable human being is appreciated. What Jude the Obscure reveals in various ways is that even within the empathetic ideology, there is an inherent failure to protect the child or be adequately attentive and sensitive to the child’s distinct point of view. In this respect, Hardy exposes what may be discerned only on an implicit, unconscious level in some of the poems, novels, and prose works discussed in this book, texts whose manifest goal is to promote the empathetic attitude to children, yet that fail at times in relating to the child’s perspective as valuable. However, alongside this sadly ironic awareness, Hardy manifests in his last novel some yearning to regain this very vision of earlier, idealistic writers. Raymond Williams has maintained that the “general structure of feeling in [The Woodlanders, Tess, and Jude] would be much less convincing if there were only the alienation, the frustration, the separation and isolation, the final catastrophes. … Hardy does not celebrate isolation and separation. He mourns them, and yet always with the courage to look them steadily in the face” (Williams, 1970: 117). As the early chapters of Jude testify, the child’s subjectivity is extremely valuable for Hardy. Even in this last, most pessimistic, and least pastoral of all his fictional works, Hardy’s Romantic side cannot be denied. To see Jude’s immersion in childlike idealization and irresponsibility as merely neurotic and evasive is to present only a part of the picture. If we refer the representation of childhood in Hardy’s novel to the wider cultural heritage of Rousseau and Wordsworth’s cult of the child, we are bound to discern also the positive, appealing aspects of this trope in Jude the Obscure. Alongside his critique of Romantic ideology, Hardy also makes us see some vanished ideal and lost meaning, some bygone past of a collective childhood of innocence, in which oneness with a benign and inspiring nature was something to cling to, even if merely imagined. This phase is represented in the novel as already lost, but not as void of meaning. Presenting a setting that is uniform and ugly, the narrator evokes a pastoral past that yields meaning – a meaning

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obliterated by modernity. That this pastoral past is now deleted is the ache of the utilitarian modernization in which Jude’s existence is enveloped. The obliterated ancient church, whose former location “was not even recorded,” and “eighteenpenny cast-iron crosses warranted to last five years that replace the obliterated graves,” joins in with the “meanly utilitarian air” of the field, whose harrow lines tak[e] away its gradations, and depriv[e] it of all history beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone there really attached associations enough and to spare – echoes of songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words and of sturdy deeds. … But this neither Jude nor the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place. (Hardy, 1999: 13–14) Our past, says Hardy – our early days as a collective (being a rural society attuned to nature) and as individuals (our childhood) – is valuable. But on the eve of the twentieth century, as the doctor maintains his attempt to explain the boy’s suicide, we have a pessimistic generation of children who have nothing to sustain them, not even an imagined memory of a blessed beginning. Instead, they “seem to see all [the world’s] terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them” (ibid.: 264). Romantic illusions of the kind Jude entertains are perhaps harmful because they block his development as a mature person; but in their absence he would have become a hopeless child like Father Time, fully perceptive of the sad aspects of human existence, too desperate to long for the world’s beauty. For all the thinkers, writers, and educationalists discussed in this book – Thomas Hardy excepted – the child is an other. Not merely the spiritual other that the Puritans take it for, and not just the social other that middle-class writers see in the working-class child, the child is an ontological other, as Rousseau’s key question in Emile – “what is a child?” – attests. Similarly, Maria Edgeworth’s reference to the “simple language of childhood,” a different language than the one used by us, indicates that children are perhaps a different species. Fundamentally at odds with adult nostalgia for the authentic self embodied in the child, a longing manifest in Rousseau, Wordsworth, Blake, Dickens, and other writers, the increasing adoption of the pattern of Bildung – not only in the novel but even in Wordsworth’s poetry, with the publication of The Prelude in 1850 – requires that the child stop being a child. The success of the Bildungsroman during this period has to do with this


genre’s attempt to reconcile the opposing conceptualizations of ideal, timeless childhood distanced from society on the one hand, and a productive socialization of the child that enables it to turn into an adult on the other. As the process of socialization demands, the child, so vital for the formation of the self, gradually loses its otherness and merges with the adult that it becomes. It is therefore not accidental that Hardy’s Jude – a work that is so sadly and ironically aware of the gaps and inconsistencies of the idealizing, dialogic concept of childhood – is at the same time also an inversion of the Bildungsroman. The boy Jude’s mental and physical gestures of evasion of the social world are endlessly repeated in this character’s social and mental stance in later stages of the novel. The grown-up Jude’s childlike retreat into interiority and his series of personal, erotic, professional, and parental failures expose the successful model of the Bildung narrative as founded on an ongoing contradiction, as the idealization of childhood disqualifies the child from participating in the goings-on of adult society even when he grows up. Articulating the child’s voice and perspective with empathy as well as irony, Hardy’s work nevertheless leaves us with the realization that the idealization of childhood cannot redeem the child from neglect.

Notes Introduction 1. See Coveney, 1967: 32; DeMause, 1974: 1–73; Plumb, 1975: 64; Grylls, 1978: 16; Walvin, 1982: 95; Brown, 1993: 1–7; Richardson 1994: 15; Cunningham, 1995: 61–70; Kane, 1995: 37–47; and Nelson, 1999: 69–70. 2. See Goodenough et al., 1994: 5. 3. See Brown, 1993: 1, 94 and Kane, 1995: 50. Kane mentions Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) and David Copperfield (1850), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1866). There are, of course, many other examples. 4. See McCord, 1991: 214–19 and Hopkins, 1994: 148. 5. Arthur Adrian (1949: 237–41) and others have shown that following the publication of Nicholas Nickleby, parents dreaded the disgrace that would attach to sending their children to places run by incompetent and brutal headmasters such as Mr. Squeers; more serious intervention led to the collapse of most establishments of this kind. In a preface to the first cheap edition of Nicholas Nickleby (1848), ten years after the original publication, Dickens was pleased to inform his readers that the number of cheap Yorkshire schools of the kind he described in the novel had shrunk considerably since the original publication, and that it was now possible to refer to the “rotten” race of Yorkshire schoolmasters in the past tense. 6. See Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique,” 384–9. Critique, says Foucault in this essay, “is the movement through which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth” (Foucault, 1996: 386). Regarding the possibility of criticizing social discourses, see Foucault, “Truth and Power” (1980: 132–3). 7. As Penny Brown has shown, in the Georgian period there was a secular educational approach that was influenced by the Puritan doctrine: it upheld values of duty, severity, and strict obedience, but without adhering to the Christian substance of the Puritan system (Brown, 1993: 15). 8. Alan Richardson (1989) makes similar use of the term catechetical as indicating a broadly authoritarian, nondialogic approach to children. 9. It is revealing that the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in 1824, 60 years before the establishment of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (Walvin, 1982: 53). 10. Eric Hopkins notes that evangelical antislavery activists were also involved in the founding of working-class educational institutions, especially through the activity of the Sunday School movement, begun in Gloucester in the 1780s (Hopkins, 1994: 3–4). 11. In 1801, when the first census was held in England and Wales, there were less than 10 million aged 14 and under. In 1837, the year of Victoria’s 214

Notes

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

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accession, their number reached 14 million. In 1901 it was 32 million. The 1851 census also revealed that more than half of the population were urban; by 1901 around four-fifths lived in towns and cities (Hopkins, 1994: 6, 161). See Kovacˇevic´, 1975: 83. John Aikin, Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles around Manchester, 221f (cited in Kovacˇevic´, 1975: 82–3). Indeed, Lionel Rose argues that the purpose of laws restricting the hours of children’s work, fixing an age minimum, improving working conditions, and providing poor children with education was to create “sufficiently tolerable conditions for [child laborers] to prolong their productive lives and to make them more tractable as a massed workforce through rudimentary education” (Rose, 1991: 8). One of the major claims of the seminal work on the history of childhood, Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood, is that prior to the seventeenth century there had been no general concept of childhood. By the end of the seventeenth century, emotional ties between parents and children had been strengthened, with the child seen as an “imperfect adult” who needed to be carefully guarded (see Ariès, 1962: 128–32, 261–6, 353, 368–9, 403–4, 411–15). Ariès’s thesis and the claims of his opponents are discussed in Chapter 1. Prince Albert’s observation was quoted in the Report of the Royal Commission on Popular Education in England (PP [=Parliamentary Papers] 1861, Vol. XXI, Part I), 188. Cited in Horn, 1997: 100–1. The parents’ desire to keep child labor going was sometimes just as powerful as that of the employers. Marjorie Cruickshank cites cases in which parents would cheat about their children’s ages, and would even forge birth certificates, so that the children could go to work prematurely (Cruickshank, 1981: 85, 97). We should be cautious, however, about adopting contemporary estimations of the dimensions of this phenomenon. Furthermore, the analogy between avaricious employers and indigent parents is highly problematic, since the latter were sometimes on the verge of starvation. One should take into account the fact that children’s welfare was also adversely affected by the insufficiency of the family income. I discuss the frequently biased representation of lower-class family life by middle-class commentators below. Ferguson 2003: 215. See also Judith Plotz’s useful discussion of the claim that the Romantic approach to the child as a transcendental or nostalgic object dehumanizes and alienates that child both from the adult world and from the child’s own subjectivity (Plotz, 2001: 46–7). See, for example, Jacqueline Rose’s contention in The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction that behind the concept of children’s fiction lies the fantasy to be able to represent the child, to speak to and for children, to address children as a group that is knowable – all these being impossible claims (Rose, 1984: 1–2). See, for example, Laura Berry’s argument that the endangered or victimized child became the “paradigmatic subject” of the novel in the early nineteenth century, manifesting “the logic of dependent selfhood” (Berry, 1999: 12). John Ruskin, Praeterita, 17. Cited in Robertson, 1974: 417.

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Notes

1 Concepts of Childhood and Adult Responsibility: Locke, Rousseau, More, and Edgeworth 1. See Pollock, 1983: 50–67, 96–124. Historian Eric Hopkins, among others, claims that Pollock’s sources are misleading. Since the lower classes were mostly illiterate, her study, based on personal documents, concerns only the middle class, and only the minority of parents who recorded their family life. Her findings therefore do not reflect widespread values (Hopkins, 1994: 1–2). 2. Both Ezell and Nelson supply data that support the simultaneous rather than linear multiplicity of conceptualizations of childhood. Ezell claims that one should not think of eighteenth-century attitudes “as an orderly progression toward an enlightened view of children,” because both the attitudes toward children and the literary images associated with them were often mixed, and do not show a chronologically linear development (Ezell, 1983–84: 139). Nelson presents the great variety and inconsistency of adult attitudes to children during the Victorian period: childhood was seen as a threat; as a stage during which desire outstripped self-control and animal nature proved the ineffectuality of civilization; as an emblem of innocence; as the arena where a better society might be engineered; as a reminder of personal and social injustices endured in youth; and as a commodity to be marketed in forms ranging from child labor to the sentimental greeting card (Nelson, 1999: 79–80). 3. Bartlett Jere Whiting and Helen Wescott Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly before 1500 (1968), 83. Cited in Tucker, 1974: 230. 4. Grant Kalendrier et compost des bergiers, 1500 edition, quoted by J. Morawski, Les douze mois figurez (archivum romanicum, 1926), 351–63. Cited in Ariès, 1962: 22. 5. Montaigne, Essais, II, 8. Cited in Ariès, 1962: 39. 6. William Perkins, The Foundations of Christian Religion, Gathered into Six Principles, in Works, 3 vols. (Cambridge: John Legate, 1608), i, 3. Cited in Spellman, 1988: 29 (my emphasis). 7. Richard Allestree, The Whole Duty of Man (London: 1658), 20. Cited in Plumb, 1975: 65. 8. Grace Mildmay, “The Journal of Lady Mildmay,” The Quarterly Review 215 (1911): 127–8. Cited in Pollock, 1983: 98, 113. 9. See, for instance, Pollock, 1983: 107 and Cunningham, 1995: 61. Others see Rousseau, rather than Locke, as the first educationalist to introduce a more humane approach. See Coveney, 1967: 41 and Kane, 1995: 45. 10. See Ezell, 1983–84: 154–5. Plumb, too, mentions a perceptible new and more liberal attitude to the practical sides of child rearing toward the end of the seventeenth century. He refers to several precursors of Locke in the educational field, e.g., John Evelyn and Aubrey (Plumb, 1975: 67–8). 11. John Earle, Micro-cosmographie (London: 1628; fifth edn., London: 1629, S. T. C. 7442). Cited in Boas, 1966: 42–3. 12. Plumb adds, however, that “this thin stream that stems from earlier generations becomes a broad river [only] in the generations that follow Locke” (Plumb, 1975: 68–9).

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13. Another precursor of Locke was Joseph Glanvill, who already in 1661 described early age as “melted wax or a rasa tabula.” See Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing: The Three Versions (Hove Sussex: Harvester Press, 1970), 126. Cited in Ezell. 1983–84: 149. 14. Obadiah Walker, Of Education, Especially of Young Gentlemen (1673), 24, 34. Cited in Yolton and Yolton, 1989: 11. 15. For a survey of the three treatises, see Yolton and Yolton, 1989: 9–11. 16. Yolton and Yolton (1989: 5) cite, for example, a letter from William Molyneux, the founder of the Dublin Philosophical Society and one of Locke’s friends, who tells the philosopher about the results of his application of the method in the upbringing of his son, then 5 years old. In the letter he praises the author for the “Extraordinary Effects your Method of Education has had on my little Boy” (Letter of Molyneux to Locke, no. 1896, 7 May 1697, in Correspondence, E. S. de Beer, ed., v, 363). 17. In an essay on Locke’s use of the formulation “natural law,” Daniel Flage says that the term signifies divine law, civil law, or the “law of reputation” (i.e., social mores). All three are different aspects of the same law. Flage adds that “natural law,” as the term is used in moral and political philosophy, specifies what “ought to be the case,” and not necessarily what the case actually is (Flage, 2000: 436, 439). 18. In the first of his Two Treatises on Government (1689), Locke argues that it is a basic duty to nourish one’s children until they can look after themselves. The fulfillment of this duty is what yields the father authority over his children, an authority that automatically ends when the child is grown up. See references in Stone 1977: 239 and Yolton and Yolton, 1989: 24. 19. See Passmore, 1965: 22–3. Discussing Locke’s theological writings, Passmore goes even further when he asserts that Locke’s conviction was that “the doctrine of original sin was an evil to be rooted out” (ibid.: 23). 20. See An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Book ii, Chap. 1, 121–6, and Some Thoughts concerning Education, section 217 (the Conclusion), where Locke describes the pupil as “white Paper, or Wax, to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases” (Locke, 1989: 265). 21. Spellman, 1988: 151, 5, 109. For more on the debate regarding Locke’s view of original sin, see Yolton and Yolton, 1989: 23–4. 22. Ferguson, 1984: 70. For a fuller presentation of her argument, see ibid.: 66–70. 23. It is worth noting here Ferguson’s claim that Locke fails to understand the child’s perspective: when talking of the need to restrain the child’s desire for mastery, for example, he refers to the child’s desire for the “property” of another, while ignoring the child’s different understanding of the situation, according to which the term “property” is meaningless. By using the adult terminology of which the child is ignorant, Locke keeps “denying the existence of the child’s interpretation of ‘that thing’ [which the child desires to obtain] as something freely available” (Ferguson, 1984: 72). This observation supports my claim that Locke’s interest in the child’s way of thinking does not arise out of pure interest in the child’s mind, but in the ways in which that child might be more effectively manipulated. 24. For views on Locke’s influence on, and difference from, Rousseau, see Passmore, 1965: 41 and Ferguson, 1996: 30. 25. The letter is cited in Kessen, 1978: 155–6. According to Kessen, Rousseau’s children probably did not grow up, since the odds against a child of the

218

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

Notes mid-eighteenth century surviving in the foundling hospital until the age of 5 were about four to one (ibid.: 164–5, n. 1). Rousseau’s early years can be described as a series of desertions. His mother having died shortly after his birth in 1712, he was raised mainly by his aunt. Several years later his father, who was of an unstable temperament and given to violent outbursts, deserted him. He was then taken care of by a maternal uncle, and later sent to a school in the country. At 13 he became apprenticed to a notary and then to an engraver, from whom he fled at the age of 15. For a survey of various Rousseauvian self-contradictions in other matters, see Bloom, 1978: 135–6. Richardson, 1991a: 147. He criticizes the tutor’s methods as tyrannical, but only as far as gender relations are concerned (focusing on the education of Sophy in Book V). Richardson does not see the education of the male child as problematic. In Practical Education (1798), Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, though avowed supporters of Rousseau, complain about the “debasing cunning” of the tutor. However, they object to it on practical grounds, fearing the risk of JeanJacques’s being found out. Their objection has nothing to do with any ethical demand to tell the child the truth. The Edgeworths explain the problem thus: “If his pupil had not been uncommonly deficient in penetration, he would soon have discovered his preceptor in some of his artifices; then adieu both to obedience and confidence” (Edgeworth and Edgeworth, 1996: i, 273). William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, 2 vols. (London: 1793), ii, 504. Cited in Stewart and McCann, 1967: 24. John Morley, Rousseau, 2 vols. (London: 1873), i, 94, ii, 248. Cited in Evans, 1955: 15. Passages from Caroline Hill’s book appear in Moberly Bell, Octavia Hill (1942). David Williams, Lectures on Education (London: 1789), i, 185. Cited in Stewart and McCann, 1967: 25. See Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Memoirs (London: 1820), i, 177–9. Cited in Stewart and McCann, 1967: 25–6. See Brown, 1993: 5–6 and Stewart and McCann, 1967: 32–4. See Evans, 1955: 19 and Stewart and McCann, 1967: 34, 32, where they cite John Brown’s Sermons on Various Subjects (London: 1764), Sermon I, pp. 7, 12, 16–17; Sermons II and III, passim. Dr. Watts’ Plain and Easy Catechisms for Children (Hartford, CT: Cooke, 1820), 7. Cited in McGavran, 1991a: 62. The date of the original publication of Watts’s Second Catechism is uncertain; the earliest surviving copy is from 1750. Here we may also observe the influence of the cult of the “man of feeling,” advocated during the last three decades of the eighteenth century by Henry Mackenzie and the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and claiming that the naturally good heart of the man of feeling was a rare yet admirable quality. For more on Shaftesbury’s ideas see Chapin, 1983: 47–50. Penny Brown, in her discussion of other tracts that More published in 1795, shows how More glosses over the harsh realities of poor children’s lives in a way that serves to sustain conservative views about class relations (Brown, 1993: 63–5). According to Alan Richardson, More’s tracts, like so much

Notes

40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

2

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literature for children of the period, were “critically affected” by ruling interests (Richardson, 1991b: 41). Robert Hole states that More’s arguments were the orthodox ones of the governing elite, and that both in her writing and in her educational activity as a founder of schools, she “had a highly developed awareness of the use of religion and education as means of social control” (Hole, 1996: vii). Richard Altick claims that for More, the tracts were a political instrument and “the chosen weapon of aggressive, proselytizing religion” (Altick, 1957: 100). The phrase “the simple language of childhood” appears in Practical Education 735. See especially her analysis of such situations in Practical Education i, 149–51. This does not prevent us from accepting Myers’s second argument, that there is some affinity between certain stories by Edgeworth and fairy tales, in their containing wish-fulfillment and projection of fantasies. See Myers, 1991: 106. The Fleece, III, 281–5. Cited in Kovacˇevic´, 1975: 78. Parliamentary Papers 1902, Vol. XXV, 18–19.

Redeeming or Silencing the Child’s Voice: Blake and Wordsworth

1. Among the critics who have provided such contextualization, see for instance Nelson Hilton’s (2003) essay on Blake’s early work (especially p. 198). 2. For more on Coleridge’s critique, see Magnuson, 1988: 280. 3. According to Kathleen Raine, the child in Blake represents the human soul and the essence of life – a portion of divinity – in a way that contrasts with Locke’s and the mechanical scientists’ view of the child’s mind as passive and devoid of innate moral or spiritual traits (Raine, 1972: 253–9). 4. Henry Summerfield (1998: 349) registers such readings by Joseph Wicksteed, Kathleen Raine, Geoffrey Keynes, and Foster Damon. 5. See Stanley Gardner, Blake (London: Evans Brothers, 1968), 78–9; cited in Summerfield, 1998: 348. 6. Hazard Adams suggests that “duty” is made ambiguous and abstract here: the child may take it to mean his love for his friend Tom; however, it is not his duty “to tolerate the adult world, which imprisons him in chimneys, and yet one suspects that this is what the adults around him mean when they speak of duty” (Adams, 1963: 261–2). Martin Nurmi claims that doing one’s duty here “means primarily going up chimneys without having to be forced, and the ‘harm’ is the very real punishment given boys who would not climb” (Nurmi, 1966: 21). 7. See Glen, 1983: 98, 101–102. Hilton claims that the conclusion may be heard as at once innocent (literally, “free from harm”); ignorant, given the debilitated end that awaited sweepers like Tom and the speaker; and apocalyptically threatening the poem’s art-purchasing, house-possessing (“your chimneys”) readers with the mob vengeance of “thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe, Ned and Jack” (Hilton, 2003: 200). 8. See, for instance, Zachary Leader’s claim that the speaker presents the boy to the reader in a calculating way, and that the poet is attacking large social injustices “at the expense of particular truths or individuals. … Our sense

220

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

Notes is that the Bard is using his speaker” (Leader, 1981: 159–60). D. G. Gillham also notes that the speaker is “rather glib and very worldly-wise for his age” and that he “applies psychological and political theories to his description of himself and his parents” (1973: 30–31). As Lionel Trilling puts it in his discussion of the Immortality Ode (where the phrase serves as a motto), the adult man is the child’s heir, and the valuable possession that he inherits is the recollection of his own childhood: “for the mind, as the rainbow epigraph also says, is one and continuous, [and] … [t]he child’s recollection of his heavenly home exists in the recollection of the adult” (Trilling, 1950: 148). A similar critique of Wordsworth’s ethical employment of the figure of the infant appears in Ortwin de Graef’s reading of Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain. He suggests that the tropes of infant and savage, though represented in this poem as valuable for creating a sense of sympathy among mankind, operate on the basis of sameness: in the era of savagery suffering was shared by all, and therefore people felt sympathy for the suffering of one another. The same goes for human beings’ collective state as fallen infants and their sad sympathy for each other on the basis of this fall. This kind of Wordsworthian sympathy, de Graef claims (2004: 39), cannot accommodate difference; hence it leaves no room for any ethical relation. For more on the influence of Watts’s Divine Songs on Wordsworth and Blake’s early work, as well as on followers of Rousseau such as Thomas Day and the Edgeworths, see Jacobus, 1976: 101–3; Pickering, 1981: 160–64; Richardson, 1989: 853–68; and McGavran, 1991b: 5 and 1991a: 56. Richardson reads “We Are Seven” as a parody of the catechetical method that, although exposing the inferiority of the adult perspective, does not subvert it: Wordsworth merely inverts the roles by making the child the instructor of the adult, and does not undermine the hegemonic discourse that the catechetical structure represents. Unlike Richardson and McGavran, Pickering defines Watts’s direct influence on Wordsworth as “speculative,” but points out that both were heirs of Locke’s empirical theory of the understanding and that both used natural theology to teach the truths of the human spirit (Pickering, 1981: 160). According to McGavran, however, they differed totally in their approaches to these truths. Woof, 1999: 35, 29. Linda Austin, too, reads the poem as an adult fantasy of escape (Austin, 2003: 87, 90–91). For a wide survey of critical views lamenting the anticlimactic effect of the narrative middle section, see Jones, 1995: 77–8, 294. Jones recounts that a printed shorter version of “Lucy Gray,” which omitted its middle stanzas, was circulated during the nineteenth century. One of the reasons the middle stanzas of the poem seem incongruous with the rest is, perhaps, that “Lucy Gray” had a factual origin. As Wordsworth was to tell Miss Fenwick in 1843, he based the poem on a story his sister had told him of the actual loss of a child in the snow not far from Halifax: “Her footsteps were traced by her parents to the middle of the lock of a canal, and no other vestige of her, backward or forward, could be traced. The body however was found in the canal” (cited in Woof, 1999: 30). What Wordsworth did with this event was to remove it to the realm of a romanticized fantasy about a child’s freedom. However, the poem retained something of the

Notes

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

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dismal circumstances surrounding the real child’s death, which could not be entirely idealized. James McGavran (1991b: 7–8) makes similar claims about the Romantic poets who, instead of freeing the child, consign it to the cycles of nature, as for example in Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” or Wordsworth’s other Lucy poems. See Morkan, 1972: 249; Chandler, 1984: 116; and Ulmer, 1995: 17–18. Morkan also cites David Erdman’s claim that Thomas Wedgwood, rather than Rousseau, is the primary target. It should be noted that even that is not entirely clear. Chandler, unlike Morkan, thinks that the resistance to Rousseau is an indication of Wordsworth’s traditionalism and not the other way around (Chandler, 1984: xxii). It is not that for Wordsworth Rousseau’s system grants the child insufficient freedom (as Morkan argues), but that it grants him too much (ibid.: 93–119). Chandler’s argument, based on the claim that the poet was influenced by Edmund Burke’s attack on Emile, resonates with my own reading, which calls into question Wordsworth’s unequivocal admiration of childhood freedom. Thomas Pfau, too, draws parallels between Wordsworth’s “Romantic pedagogy” and contemporary pedagogical theories of the late 1790s and early 1800s, arguing that Wordsworth’s poems and the new monitorial educational systems (in which pupils were instructed by their schoolfellows) both relied “on a deepstructural logic of self-surveillance” and sought “to convert the individual’s self-consciousness into its own disciplinary authority” (Pfau, 1997: 11). For a comparison between the pedagogical innovations of Reverend Andrew Bell’s monitorial system and Wordsworth’s poetic project of an internalized monitory system of self-education, see Pfau, 1997: 151–62. Joel Morkan states that Wordsworth attributed his imaginative growth to his mother’s good sense in allowing him freedom (Morkan, 1972: 252), and mentions Wordsworth’s happy memories of his days at Hawkshead (where he went to school) as an ideal of freedom: “He was jealous of the freedom and leisure he had had there, and believed that his early, unfettered schooldays were very important in the growth of his imagination” (ibid.: 249). In his biography of Wordsworth, largely based on the poet’s own poetic accounts, Émile Legouis, too, takes the poet at his word and pronounces his schooldays “free and joyous” (Legouis, 1921: 30). Such readings assume that in the Wordsworthian vocabulary, childlike freedom is simply synonymous with joy and bliss. Stephen Gill’s William Wordsworth: A Life adds a biographical dimension that supports this reading. Gill, who claims that Wordsworth tended to gloss over the unpleasant aspects of his early years, points out that “in the opening of The Prelude’s account of boyish pleasures Wordsworth moves … straight to school-days at Hawkshead, thus eliding some five years of his childhood which were unsettled and far from uniformly happy. … [F]or whatever reason William and Dorothy were packed off to the Cookson [maternal] grandparents at Penrith for periods of time that from a child’s perspective must have seemed endless. There is evidence that Wordsworth was staying in Penrith when only 3 years old and that long visits took place from 1775 to 1776 and over the winter of 1776/7” (Gill, 1989: 15). Gill also states that Wordsworth’s account of his mother’s death in Book V of The Prelude, where he describes the family orphans as “trooping together,” was inaccurate: the family, says Gill, “split apart” (ibid.: 18).

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Notes

20. Heffernan argues that “the repressed memory of this woman [is] haunting [Wordsworth’s] consciousness in ways that he cannot help but express” yet are often indirect, presenting symbolic surrogates that stand for a maternal presence, in order to avoid dealing with her absence (Heffernan, 1988: 256). Richard Onorato, too, sees the poet’s loss of his mother when he was 8 (and to a lesser degree, the loss of his father at 13) as formative traumas that shaped his poetry (Onorato, 1971: 27–8, 71–87). Barbara Schapiro claims, on the other hand, that the poet’s relationship with his mother prior to her death is more central, and that in his poetry he does not seek to recapture his lost mother, but to resolve the pre-Oedipal ambivalence he had felt toward her (Schapiro, 1983: 93–4). We can accept the mother’s centrality even without recourse to the Freudian paradigm (for Freudian readings, see Heffernan, 1988: 253 and Easterlin, 2000: 261–3). According to Easterlin, “a common theme of psychoanalytic readings is that nature and Dorothy are mothersubstitutes who reveal the poet’s regressive libidinal desire for union” (ibid.: 262). Robert Hale surveys further psychoanalytical readings of The Prelude by Michael Friedman, Margaret Homans, and others (Hale, 2000: 147–9).

3 Child Neglect as Social Vice: Trollope, Tonna, and Working-Class Subjectivity 1. This early, less-familiar version was published serially in the radical paper The Lion in 1828. See Elizabeth Reed’s (2007) “Note on The Text,” Factory Lives pp. 79–85. 2. See Hopkins, 1994: 85. The Wigan Case is reported in the First Report of the Factory Inquiry Commission (PP 1833), 103–15. As James Walvin states, the material circulated by the Ten-Hour Movement and the reports published by Parliamentary commissions as of the 1830s supplied sufficient grounds for reformers to compare the condition of British child workers to that of slaves in the New World (Walvin, 1982: 51–3, 64). 3. See Mr. Grainger’s Report, Appendix to the Second Report of the Children’s Employment Commission, 1840 (PP 1843, Vol. XIII), 10. 4. The Second Report of the Children’s Employment Commission, 1840 (PP 1843), 32, 79, 80–82, 84, 85. See also Hopkins, 1994: 24–8. 5. Report of the Children in Factories Commission (PP 1833, Vol. XX), 25–7. This report is printed in full in Pike, 1966: 141–3. 6. It is important to notice Janice Carlisle’s cautionary observation in Factory Lives, an anthology of nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies, that “there was neither a single, essential nineteenth-century worker’s voice to be heard nor a single way in which workers should be expected to speak” (Carlisle, 2007: 39). 7. See Regenia Gagnier’s claim that nineteenth-century working-class autobiographers were chiefly concerned with their “image and status as atoms of the masses” (Gagnier, 1991: 143). 8. Janice Carlisle maintains that Dodd “was directly identifying his story as testimony to be considered in support of the ten-hour movement” (Carlisle, 2007: 49).

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9. According to Ivanka Kovacˇevic´ and Barbara Kanner, Michael Armstrong was the first novel in English that described actual conditions in factories (Kovacˇevic´ and Kanner, 1970–71: 157–8). Similar claims are made by Roger Wallins (1975: 49) and Joseph Childers (1995: 129). The few precedents of the late 1820s and early 1830s were shorter works of fiction: Harriet Martineau’s “The Rioters,” “The Turn-out,” and “A Manchester Strike” (1827, 1829, and 1832 respectively), and Charlotte Tonna’s The System (1827). Though shorter, Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy, her popular series of novellas published in 1832–4, should perhaps be considered the first industrial novel, and it is reasonable (although there is no evidence) that along with the reports of the royal commissions, it influenced Trollope and Tonna’s industrial fiction. 10. For claims about the influence of Trollope’s Michael Armstrong on subsequent social-problem novels, particularly those written by Dickens and Gaskell, see Kissel, 1993: 121. For similar claims regarding the influence of Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood see Kovacˇevic´ and Kanner, 1970–71: 153–8, 162, 165, 173. 11. Smith, 1970: 29. For more on the connections and mutual development of Bluebooks and fiction, see Brantlinger, 1977: 28–32. 12. Roger Wallins maintains that social-problem novels hardly revealed any new facts, because the findings of the reports had already been mediated in more accessible form by the press. The daily papers’ coverage was short and undetailed, but the quality periodicals had included the same information as the social novels later did, and had reached the same reading public. Essays in the periodicals preceded even the earliest social-problem novels by some six years, and the specific issue of child labor had been one of their central concerns since 1833 (Wallins, 1975: 47–50). See also Betensky, 2002: 61, n. 1. 13. For a detailed account of Trollope’s trip to Manchester, see Chaloner, 1960: 160–61. Some social-problem novelists, including Gaskell, visited factory workers personally; others based their novels mainly on Bluebooks (Elliott, 2000: 388, n. 3). See also Brantlinger, 1977: 28–32. 14. See also Benziman, 2011 (SEL, forthcoming). Critics have shown that in this passage and several others in Sybil, Disraeli drew heavily on Bluebooks (Smith, 1962: 369; Wallins, 1975: 47). Martin Fido argues that Disraeli was more directly influenced by William Dodd’s autobiography (Fido, 1977: 270–71). Disraeli’s account is not different from journalistic reports published during the same period, and does not attempt to produce a particularly strong emotional impact. 15. Rosemarie Bodenheimer recounts how Dickens systematically avoided the theme of child labor, and how, for example, he repeatedly postponed the writing of a piece against child labor requested by the editor of the Edinburgh Review, until finally it was too late to write it (Bodenheimer, 2007: 63). 16. On the contradictory evidence regarding the year of her birth (1779 according to some sources), see Super, 1986: 336–7. 17. In his letter “To Richard Bentley,” dated November 30, 1836, Dickens declared: “The show of names [Trollope’s included] is excellent” (Dickens, 1965: 202). Several years later, on the publication of Michael Armstrong, Dickens came to feel less kindly toward Trollope, as I recount below. 18. This was largely the result of certain sentiments expressed in Trollope’s first book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, which had launched her literary career. The book, written after a stay in the United States, pointed out

224

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

Notes the advantages of being governed by the few instead of the many. Trollope referred in her preface to the dangers of mob rule and of placing all the power of the state in the hands of the populace, a stance that granted her the label of an antidemocrat. For comparisons between Trollope’s novel and the work of followers such as Gaskell, Disraeli, and Charlotte Brontë, see Wallins, 1975: 52–3 and Kaplan, 1985: 59–60. One exception is Monica Flegel’s essay “Masquerading Work: Class Transvestism in Victorian Texts for and About Children,” which discusses Michael’s childhood and argues that the boy protagonist represents an ideal of classless childhood, which allows him to be salvaged from a life of factory work (Flegel, 2009b: 66–9). On the Chartists’ response to the novel, see Michael Sadleir, 1961: 104. Cited in Dickens, 1965: 507, n. 3. Anon., review of Michael Armstrong, Athenaeum 615 (1839): 589. Cited in Kissel, 1988: 159. Thackeray, review of Jerome Paturot, Fraser’s Magazine 28 (1843): 350. Cited in Kissel, 1988: 151. According to Bodenheimer, this pattern supports a return to paternalism, though not one based on masculine power but rather on a fantasy of feminine protectionism and intervention without power (Bodenheimer, 1988: 23–5). In 1839, when both Michael Armstrong and Nicholas Nickleby were serialized in monthly installments, Dickens politely declined an invitation to dine with Mrs. Trollope (“To Frances Trollope,” Dickens, 1965: 499). In his diary he expressed his anger that Trollope’s new novel was being jointly advertised by Colburn, their mutual publisher, along with his own Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, charging that Michael Armstrong was a reworking of Nickleby (ibid.: 640). In two letters to Laman Blanchard dated February 9, 1839, he referred to this matter: “If Mrs. Trollope were even to adopt Ticholas Tickleby as being a better-sounding name than Michael Armstrong, I don’t think it would cost me a wink of sleep.” In the letter immediately following he added that he would “express no further opinion of Mrs. Trollope, than that I think Mr. Trollope must have been an old dog and chosen his wife from the same species” (ibid.: 506–7, emphasis in the original). Our Waifs and Strays 10 (February 1885): 3. If we compare this marriage plot to William Dodd’s complaints about his repeated failure to find a wife because no woman would marry a “factory cripple” (Dodd, 2007: 212), Trollope’s happy ending suggests that at this point she abandons realism in favor of fairy-tale, recounting a Cinderella story in which the gender roles have been inverted. Tonna used this pen name in order to prevent Mr. Tonna, her first, abusive husband, from receiving any of her earnings. For more on Tonna’s writings against slavery, see Midgley, 1992: 58, 99. Midgley is unique among critics in referring to Tonna as Charlotte Elizabeth Phelan, adding the last name of the author’s second husband. Before 1970 Tonna’s work had received but scant attention, until, following the reintroduction of her industrial fiction to critics by Kovacˇevic´ and Kanner, it has found a place in discussions of Victorian social-problem

Notes

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33.

34.

35.

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novels. Yet, as Deborah Kaplan states, scholarly examinations of her work are still rare (Kaplan, 1985: 62, n. 4). As Ella Dzelzainis states, Tonna was also affiliated with the reform movement that promoted the Ten-Hours bill. She cites a contemporary reference to the useful contribution of Helen Fleetwood to this campaign, appearing in the 1857 History of the Factory Movement by Samuel Kydd, known as “Alfred” (Dzelzainis, 2003: 181). On Tonna’s employment of the biblical widow and orphan figures, see Krueger, 1994: 342. For more on the affinities between Tonna and Blake, see Benziman, “Aspects of Child Labor in Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood” (SEL, forthcoming). As Monica Flegel suggests, Tonna demonstrates middle-class paternalism in her negative description of Mrs. Wright (the widow’s urban daughter), a portrait that taps into the middle-class anxiety that, “without the paternalistic influence of the middle and upper classes, the choices of the poor would be influenced solely by materialism” (Flegel, 2009a: 118). However, the fact that not all poor characters in the novel are as misguided as Sally Wright is indicates that paternalism should at least be selective. Janice Carlisle claims that the story of legislative reform that emerges from nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies is unlike that told in many conventional histories or industrial novels by Gaskell or Dickens, which “continue to emphasize the role of middle-class and aristocratic reformers” (Carlisle, 2007: 41–2). Trollope and Tonna’s novels are much closer to the autobiographies in this respect.

4 The Split Image of the Neglected Child: Dickens 1. George Orwell claims that no one “has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child’s point of view” (Orwell, 1954: 67). Robert Newsom argues that Dickens “made an enormous difference in the way our culture thinks about children” (Newsom, 2001: 92). Other evaluations in a similar spirit appear in major studies of the representation of childhood in literature; see especially Coveney, 1967: 110–15; Adrian, 1998: 50–58; and Hochman and Wachs’s (1999) Dickens: The Orphan Condition. 2. See Tillotson, 1956: 50; Coveney, 1967: 127; Banerjee, 1984: 482. 3. See Kane, 1995: 52. Claudia Nelson states that the most serious charges leveled against adults are neglect and an inability to fathom the child’s needs (Nelson, 1999: 78–9). She refers to Thackeray’s Henry Esmond (1852), Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1833), Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1866) and Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), and Mill’s Autobiography, and brings Florence Montgomery’s 1869 sentimental novel Misunderstood as evidence that adult incomprehension could prove lethal even to children of wealthy and conscientious adults. 4. On Marx and Engels’s admiration of Dickens’s commitment to social change, see Demetz, 1967: 45. Another favorable Marxist reading is that of Bernard Shaw’s 1913 essay “Hard Times,” (Shaw, 1972: 42). Theodor Adorno’s 1931

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5.

6.

7.

8.

Notes essay, too, emphasizes Dickens’s critique of capitalism, claiming that the precapitalist elements in his novels dissolve “the very bourgeois world they depict” (Adorno, 1992: 172). Although Adorno’s reading of Dickens is dialectical, seeing the novel as both the product of mass culture and an instrument for criticizing this very culture, the political critique he attributes to Dickens is powerful. In 1937 T. A. Jackson presented Dickens as a true revolutionary, a harsh critic of bourgeois society who exposed the oppression of human beings under capitalism (Jackson, 1987: 150–52, 177). Orwell’s 1939 essay claimed that Dickens was far from being a champion of the proletariat (Orwell, 1954: 55); change could occur, according to Dickens, only on the moral and personal rather than political level (ibid.: 67). We should note, though, that Orwell did consider Dickens a subversive writer who “attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached” (ibid.: 56). Offering a biographical-Freudian frame for interpreting Dickens, Edmund Wilson’s essay regarded Dickens’s social critique as apolitical, originating in personal anxieties (Wilson, 1965: 42). On the great impact of Wilson’s reading, see Leavis and Leavis, 1970: ix, xiii; and Suchoff, 1994: 11. Another influential evaluation of the same period, by Humphry House (1941), regarded Dickens’s fiction as more politically aware than Orwell or Wilson granted, yet pointed out Dickens’s limitations as a social critic. Censorship, House asserted, affects the entirety of his reformist writing and stamps it with middle-class morality (House, 1960: 215–17, 219). Both J. Hillis Miller and Eagleton argue, for instance, that the form of Dickens’s novels imitates, rather than denounces, existing bureaucratic and oppressive social structures, and thus corroborates them. In his 1971 Introduction to Bleak House, Miller claims that this novel “has exactly the same structure as the society it exposes” (Miller, 1971: 29). For a similar view see Eagleton, 1976: 129. Arac, too, sees some subversive value in Dickens’s novels, yet chiefly emphasizes their involvement in the formation of hegemonic, disciplinary discourses. Arac’s thesis in Commissioned Spirits (1989) is that Dickens, like his contemporary fellow novelists, was “closely involved with the forces at work in the world around [him],” and joined the “writers of journalism and social polemic in establishing a discourse crucial for the new social sciences.” In so doing, his texts paralleled “the activity of the centralizing agencies of government” (Arac, 1989: 7). Yet Arac’s reading is not as total as it might seem: he grants that Dickens’s later novels also offer subversive representations of society (ibid.: 188–9). According to Eagleton, despite Dickens’s ideological weakness, it was his personal position on the ambiguous petty-bourgeoisie rung of the social ladder, looking down as well as up, that enabled him to “encompass a richer … range of experience than those writers securely lodged within a single class” (Eagleton, 1976: 125). Dickens’s later novels in particular are “twisted and self-divided by the very contradictions [they] vulnerably reproduce,” contradictions that maintain a strong subversive function (ibid.: 127–8). Miller, 1988: 81. This reading has had much influence on Victorian studies, but was also strongly opposed, notably by Dominick LaCapra (1998: 116–23) and Bruce Robbins (1998: 157–8), who both resist Miller’s view of power as totality, and of Bleak House (Miller’s chief example) as supporting the bureaucratic structures toward which it is only “superficially hostile.”

Notes

227

9. Jackson, who defines Dickens as a Marxist revolutionary, allows some room for a different view when he claims that Dickens was more revolutionary than he realized. D. A. Miller, who indicts Dickens for complicity with institutional oppression, acknowledges a subversive quality in the texts, yet contends that this subversion is mere illusion. 10. Among the few critics who question Dickens’s investment in the child is James Kincaid, who recognizes that Dickens’s use of child figures does not necessarily originate in respect for the child as subject (see Kincaid, 1992: 80, 2000: 29–31). See also Berlatsky, 2002: 101–2. Another example discussed below is George Orwell’s claim about the authorial indifference to workingclass children in David Copperfield. 11. In his analysis of child deaths in Dickens, Laurence Lerner draws attention to the social standing of Dickens’s dying child characters and states that “they virtually all fall within the social range of Dickens’s readership. Dickens was read, as all Victorian novelists were read, overwhelmingly by the middle classes; and in his pages, no aristocratic children die, and hardly any of the children … belong to the proletariat.” Oliver Twist is, of course, only mistakenly believed to be lower class. Similarly, Little Nell is poor, but, as Lerner notes, she and her grandfather have come down in life (Lerner, 1997: 121). Jo the sweeper in Bleak House seems to be an exception, but my discussion below shows that he, too, is represented as an other. 12. Harry Stone (1968: 421–2) cites an unpublished letter by Dickens from August 19, 1852, addressed to W. H. Wills, his vice-editor at Household Words, asking him to soften a phrase in “Boys to Mend” (published a month later) so as to qualify Dickens’s criticism of a certain school he had visited, in order to prevent possible damage to the Ragged schools movement. 13. Collins asserts that no novelist knew the Ragged schools better than Dickens: “he had been one of their earliest and most prominent supporters” and “visited them frequently from within a few months of their beginning; he enlisted the financial help of [the philanthropist] Miss Coutts, and tried (in vain) to obtain Government funds as well; he undertook to write about them in the Edinburgh Review, but having broken this promise, he appealed on their behalf in the Daily News” (Collins, 1964: 87). 14. For more on this connection see Davis, 1990: 43; Tillotson, 1993: 166; and Heady, 2002: 19, n. 8. 15. On the one hand, Philip Collins maintains that “Dickens was unlikely to have picked up his Romantic ideas from the poets, except possibly Wordsworth. He never read much poetry, and probably owed much more to the Romantic middlemen – essayists such as Lamb, de Quincey and Leigh Hunt.” These writers’ views on childhood as a solitary and sensitive state, he claims, anticipate many passages in Dickens (Collins, 1964: 213). Angus Wilson, too, emphasizes Dickens’s particular admiration for Wordsworth among the poets. Dickens declared his admiration for “We Are Seven” in conversation at a dinner to celebrate the conclusion of Nicholas Nickleby, “which may be associated with the Smike’s grave tableau ending of that novel and with the child who shows Nell his brother’s ‘garden’ in the graveyard” (Wilson, 1970: 221). However, F. R. Leavis has a different opinion: it is “plain beyond question” that Dickens was familiar not only with Wordsworth but “with Romantic poetry in general” (Leavis, 1970: 227–8).

228

16.

17.

18.

19.

Notes Although it is unclear whether Dickens even heard of Blake, Leavis speculates that a study “may some day be written showing that Blake, his poetry and his thought were well enough known to make him an ‘influence’ of certainly no less importance on the literature of the Victorian age than Wordsworth” (ibid.: 227–8). Such a study has not been published yet. With or without direct acquaintance, the association of Dickens with the same tradition of thought identified with Blake has become commonplace. See Trilling, 1956: 44; Williams, 1964: 224–5; Coveney, 1967: 114; Wilson, 1970: 221; and Banerjee, 1984: 488. Dombey’s neglect is explained by his obsession with his business: he wants a male child to ensure the further success of the firm as a “Dombey” establishment (this, of course, has something to do with his ego no less than with cold business considerations). Lynda Zwinger has shown how the fact that Florence is a girl leads to her rejection by her father, because for him, as archetypal Victorian patriarch and businessman, a daughter “stands for impotence.” Unlike a son she “cannot be invested in the future of the family business.” Dombey and his daughter can therefore be reconciled only after he has lost all his money (Zwinger, 1985: 429, 439). Wendy Carse argues that the wild child embodies Redlaw’s condition once he receives the gift of forgetfulness, as the child’s “deprivation has separated him from humanity” in a similar way to Redlaw’s own separation from human community (Carse, 1994: 165). James Reed, too, sees the resentful, ragged boy as a personification of one of Redlaw’s potential choices at this point in his life: revenge (Reed, 1998: 169). Following Kant’s thesis that we respond to some repulsive element in nature or in art by a subjective reaching toward ethical concepts, Loesberg maintains that by twisting the bodies of children, Dickens makes aesthetic imperfection the very process of moral understanding. By presenting a deformed signifying object (a deformed child) Dickens confronted a self-indulgent art with a morally engaged one (Loesberg, 1997: 625–54). According to Berlatsky, although Dickens openly denounces the Malthusian approach, his narrators share the Malthusian tendency to see children as nameless numbers who literally “eat” through a family’s economic and physical wellbeing (Berlatsky, 2002: 101–2). The Haunted Man has been read as evolving around the general theme of memory as a mental and psychological process. See, for instance, Ruth Glancy for an emphasis on the restorative power of memory (Glancy, 1980: 57), and on the role of memory in shaping a character’s moral fibre (Glancy, 1986: 65). John Bowen discusses the affinity of Dickens’s novella with nineteenth-century psychological theories of memory and split minds (Bowen, 2009: 75–92). Other readings tend toward the autobiographical, seeing Redlaw as “the gloomy side of Dickens, masquerading as a complete person” (Rowland, 1988: 18), and the novella as “an allegory of autobiographical anxiety” (Bodenheimer, 2007: 66). Scott Moncrieff offers to see not the processes of memory but its content (what is remembered) as the center of the story (Moncrieff, 1991: 536). Showing the textual affinity between Redlaw’s Spectre’s words and the Fragment, Moncrieff claims that the painful sense of betrayal in the story (following Redlaw’s fiancée and best friend’s eloping together) echoes the betrayal of which Dickens accused his own parents (ibid.: 538). Edgar Johnson, Dickens’s biographer, relates Dickens’s personal history to that of Redlaw, concluding that it is

Notes

20.

21.

22. 23.

229

because of the novelist’s attempt to solve a psychological problem by an act of will through this work, that the story seems “so sentimental and overmoralistic” (Johnson, 1986: 344). See also Jerry Herron’s argument that the simplified Christian message of the story is overlooked by critics who seek (in the light of Edmund Wilson’s demand) greater complexity in the psychological and biographical sphere (Herron, 1982: 46). For evidence regarding Dickens’s reluctance to reveal details about his life, see Carr, 1985: 447, 450–51. In an 1856 letter to Wilkie Collins, where he did supply some biographical material on request (although with no significant revelations), Dickens stated: “This is the first time I ever set down even these particulars, and, glancing them over, I feel like a wild beast in a caravan describing himself in his keeper’s absence” (ibid.: 447). Dickens turned much of his preoccupation with his own past into material for his novels because he was afraid that an autobiography “might uncover aspects of himself that would permanently disrupt his self-image” (ibid.: 452, 454). Robert Tracy assumes that Dickens abandoned the idea of writing an autobiography because “he still could not bear to expose his early humiliations and his family history to the world,” but it is “equally possible that Dickens recognized that his talents would be straitened by an autobiography. He chose fiction not to preserve his secrets but because it offered him a greater freedom to dramatize events” (Tracy, 1986: 279). The links between the Fragment and some fictional texts are evident – notably the eleventh chapter of David Copperfield, which incorporates entire passages from the Fragment, and The Haunted Man, which contends with the burden of painful memories. Yet, critics tend to draw wider links between the Fragment and Dickens’s fiction in its entirety. In this they have followed two major early authorities, Forster and Edmund Wilson. Like Forster, Wilson claims that Dickens’s early experiences “produced in [him] a trauma from which he suffered all his life” (Wilson, 1965: 6). Ned Lukacher refers to the employment at Warren’s as Dickens’s “primal scene,” which he was compelled to restage in each of his novels after 1839 (Lukacher, 1987: 304). Rosemarie Bodenheimer discusses the Fragment as “one of many stages in [Dickens’s] attempt to take rhetorical command of those memories” (Bodenheimer, 2007: 69). Albert Hutter, too, reads the Fragment as explanatory of Dickens’s fiction, though finding in it healthy rather than traumatic patterns of psychological development (Hutter, 1977: 1–14). Robert Newsom sees certain aspects of the Fragment – especially Dickens’s secrecy and shame – as explanatory of certain motifs in the novels (Newsom, 1983: 1–24). Alexander Welsh, on the other hand, objects to the central status given to the warehouse experience as capable of “explaining” Dickens (Welsh, 1987: vii–viii, 1–7). See Marcus, 1965: 360; Manning, 1976: 70; and Johnson, 1986: 349. Alexander Welsh notes the “vein of self-pity that crops up again and again in the novels,” associated with the childlike experience (Welsh, 1987: 4). Ned Lukacher argues that for Dickens, as a writer, the work of remembrance was not restorative; quite the contrary, “every effort to master the compulsive memories of loss and abandonment seems only to have increased the intensity of the compulsion” (Lukacher, 1987: 291). James Kincaid, too, accuses Dickens of indulging in self-pity and constructing the child as an emblem of injured innocence (Kincaid, 2000: 37–8).

230

Notes

24. Bodenheimer, 2007: 62–3. She states that throughout his career, with the exception of Chapter 11 of David Copperfield and the Autobiographical Fragment, Dickens never wrote “about children who worked – as he had done – in nondomestic jobs for regular wages” (ibid.: 63). 25. As Jordan points out, David Copperfield, unlike Dombey and Son and Bleak House (the novels that immediately precede and follow it), does not attempt to analyze Victorian England as a totality of social and economic relations. It is a domestic novel, and history and public controversies hardly intrude into its narrative. However, there is an unacknowledged sociopolitical basis for this seeming exclusion of the political from the narrative (Jordan, 1985: 61–3). 26. Other critics have also noted the social anxiety in David Copperfield, but emphasized its biographical rather than political dimension. See Tracy, 1986: 278 and Sicher, 1998: 35–9. Rosemarie Bodenheimer, too, alludes to class anxiety in Copperfield, and her main argument is that rather than being repressed, this anxiety is on the surface of the text, and the ways of dealing with it are part of Dickens’s conscious concerns (Bodenheimer, 2001: 226). 27. Dianne Sadoff argues that protagonists such as Pip or David assume that scholarship, “mastering the skills and mysteries of language,” will help them “rise in the class structure” (Sadoff, 1987: 186). As Hana Wirth-Nesher claims, the desire for education as the key to the Dickensian orphan’s social success is contrasted to the Romantic (largely American) vision of an ideal childhood as a state of freedom, away from school and its stale maxims (Wirth-Nesher, 1986: 260–61, 267). 28. See especially Miller, 1971: 33; Zwerdling, 1973: 432–3; Hochman, 1997: 72; Blain, 1998: 70; and Robbins, 1998: 143–4. 29. According to the novel’s law of metonymy, she claims, “Nemo will substitute for Jo’s loss of an originating signifier and the original facts of the orphan’s birth. Not only does he identify (with) the boy as outcast, but he shares what little he has to share and so becomes a kind of father” (Cummings, 1998: 196). 30. Blain, 1998: 66. Such female children, Blain argues, bear the man-made burden of female guilt for sexual transgression because of the “popular nineteenth-century belief that children begotten in sin would naturally inherit their parents’ weakness” (ibid.: 78, 85). 31. My reading of the child-as-self as inherently and ideally passive can be linked to the predominant gender construction of the period, and lead to a reading of this figure as symbolically female. According to Catherine Robson, the Victorian cultural imagination’s fascination with the child creates a gendered image of the child according to its function. When the child is regarded as the incipient adult – that is, a potential directed toward the future – it is embodied in the masculine child. When the interest in the child is retrospective, as in Wordsworth’s Lucy poems or Dickens’s Little Nell, the child is associated with the past, with stasis and sealed perfection, hence with the female gender (Robson, 2000: 118). 32. It is interesting to compare this with the history of Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations. Jo and Magwitch share similar early experiences. Magwitch describes his younger self as “a ragged little creetur as much to be pitied as ever I see,” and notes that “there warn’t a soul that see young Abel Magwitch, with as little on him as in him, but wot caught fright at him, and either drove him off,

Notes

231

or took him up”; while “others on ’em giv me tracts what I couldn’t read, and made me speeches what I couldn’t unnerstand” (Dickens, 1985b: 361). Despite the resemblance in their careers, a significant difference is that in this part of the novel Magwitch narrates his own history, whereas Jo’s perspective is hardly represented and is completely mediated by the omniscient narrator of Bleak House.

5

Aged Children and the Inevitability of Being Neglected: Hardy

1. Hardy’s unique position between two literary periods makes him hard to classify. Merryn Williams defines him as “neither quite Victorian nor quite modern, although his work combines elements of both” (Williams, 1976: ix). Dale Kramer similarly states that Hardy exceeds narrow or historical definitions of the Victorian and modern eras through which he lived (Kramer, 1999: xv). Irving Howe bases much of his reading in Thomas Hardy on a similar supposition. 2. Peter Casagrande provides ample evidence demonstrating Wordsworth’s function as a major early influence on Hardy the poet, an influence that Hardy openly acknowledged (Casagrande, 1977: 222); even at the final stages of his career, as late as 1922, Hardy “clearly … continued to wish to be seen as a descendent of Wordsworth” (ibid.: 226). Walter Wright states that “the influence of Wordsworth permeated Hardy’s work. … Hardy and Wordsworth were again and again trying to express similar feelings and … the memory of Wordsworth’s verses was always present for Hardy to draw upon” (Wright, 1967: 79–80). Dennis Taylor, too, maintains that Wordsworth is “so pervasive an influence that he cannot be confined to specific parallels and contrasts” (Taylor, 1986: 441–2). Bernard Jones, who surveys the affinity between Wordsworth and Hardy’s uses of language, brings evidence from Hardy’s ‘Studies, Specimens &c.’ Notebook, indicating that from about 1865 he had been a close reader of Wordsworth’s poetry (Jones, 1999: 509). 3. Kenkichi Kamijima argues that as a poet, Hardy uses a Wordsworthian vocabulary but in order to achieve a “mock-Romantic” style, exposing “some unromantic aspects of life by the very use of Romantic diction” (Kamijima, 1998: 80). According to Kamijima, Hardy’s relation to Wordsworth was ambivalent, a “paradoxical alienation from what he had been longing for in heart” (ibid.: 81). Dennis Taylor, too, claims that several of Hardy’s poems seem “to parody and reverse Wordsworth’s poems” (Taylor, 1986: 443). He notes, for example, Hardy’s “The Bird-Catcher’s Boy” as a reversal of the ending of “Lucy Gray.” According to Casagrande, Hardy’s use of Wordsworth is an effort toward “intellectual revisionism”; that is, a swerve from Wordsworth’s views on God, Man, and Nature. Casagrande defines Hardy’s attitude toward Wordsworth as highly ambivalent (Casagrande, 1977: 228); he took from him “what best served his own view of things, … to describe a most un-Wordsworthian view of Nature as unfeeling, lawless, and capricious” (ibid.: 219). As Casagrande observes, Hardy did not regard influence as anxiety (ibid.: 211). In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom maintains that Hardy is one of the very few poets who “attain the poetry of discontinuity” (Bloom, 1973: 80).

232

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4. L. W. Phelps, 1910; quoted in Widdowson, 1989: 18. The initial rejection indeed had to do with moralistic repulsion at the fact that the two protagonists, Jude and Sue, live together as man and wife without marrying each other. However, the difficulties of reviewers and critics to digest this novel or treat it as valuable also have to do with some of the work’s other qualities – mainly, its complexity. 5. For a survey of such views see Widdowson, 1989: 62. 6. Rosemary Sumner, for instance, notes the attention paid here by Hardy to childhood experiences as shaping the adult personality (Sumner, 1981: 143). However, her own analysis does not make use of this observation by establishing links between Jude’s characterization as a child and his representation as an adult. Rosemarie Morgan refers to Jude’s orphanism, and particularly his “maternal deprivation,” as accounting for his “desperate need for a reassuring, nurturing love object” in adult life (Morgan, 1988: 138). Ross Shideler quotes her and adds Sue’s similar sense of “orphanism” (Shideler, 1999: 154). Neither, however, discusses the theme of childhood. 7. Two exceptions are Nicola Harris and Mary Ann Melfi’s readings (discussed below), which argue for the importance of the representation of Father Time for the novel as a whole and address the theme of childhood from psychological and ethical perspectives. 8. Frank Giordano presents the traditional pattern of the Bildungsroman as one in which an “orphan hero embarks on his quest for personal development, as a means to or preparation for some role in the public world. This effort to adjust the private self to function within the social realm implies a basically optimistic view of both the individual and society. … In this faith the early Bildungsroman reveals its roots in the Romantic optimism about personal development and social progress” (Giordano, 1972: 587). 9. For a reading of Jude the Obscure as a parody of the Bildungsroman see Giordano (1972), especially pp. 587–9. 10. Hardy’s preface to the first edition of Jude the Obscure (Hardy, 1999: 5). In his postscript to the 1912 edition he adds that his purpose was to create the “fable of a tragedy” with “certain cathartic, Aristotelian qualities” (ibid.: 7). 11. Kenkichi Kamijima uses this passage to offset the different constriction of subject–object relations in Hardy’s poems with the Romantic paradigm according to which the inner mind, or the imagination, transforms the physical universe (Kamijima, 1998: 82–3). 12. Some critics have seen these forces as metaphysical: “an omnipotent and indifferent fate,” to cite one example (Cecil, 1943: 26). Others emphasize social forces and the clash between class and institutions such as the university, the Church, or marriage. A prominent example is Terry Eagleton’s reading, which argues for the centrality of class to the novel’s plot and to the theme of education in particular (Eagleton, 1987: 61-–71). Other interpretations underline the oppressive influence of physical forces: sexual desire, presented as blindly detached from, and even inimical to, the protagonist’s own interests and emotional needs. Such readings tend to extract from the novel definite ideologies: socialist, feminist, antireligious. 13. For a discussion of Hardy’s impressionism and modernism, see Daleski, 1997: 1–12. He quotes Hardy as defining his own art as impressionistic, Hardy famously stating that “a novel is an impression, not an argument” (Preface

Notes

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

233

to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 1891). A few examples of the change in critical approach: Patricia Ingham, in a 1985 introduction to Jude, exposes the ambiguity of Hardy’s treatment of academia and marriage and defines earlier readings of these themes as simplistic, directed at finding one-dimensional social critique (Ingham, 2000: 20–31). Peter Widdowson (1989: 16–43) and Penny Boumelha (2000: 1–6) point to a growing interest in the ambiguities of Jude, which comes to replace an ongoing critical attempt to find unity and consistency in Hardy’s novels. Barbara Hardy, in a retrospective essay, attacks her own previous reading of this novel 30 years before, in which she saw Hardy as “a simple dogmatic novelist” with a one-dimensional anti-Christian agenda that made her ignore contradictory aspects of the text (Hardy, 1997: 22). Vincent Newey expresses doubts regarding the “assumption that Jude presents an objective world outside language and imagination” and claims that although the novel belongs to the tradition of nineteenth-century realism, it also “declares its own artifice to such an extent that we are never quite allowed a secure suspension of disbelief” (Newey, 1995: 214). See, in this context, Cedric Watts’s analysis of Paul Dombey’s death and its relation to Jude the Obscure (Watts, 1992: 89). See Howe, 1968: 396–7; Johnson, 1983: 129–31; and Pyle, 1995: 363–9. About the damaging absence of tradition and community from Jude see also Gatrell, 1999. For more on the view that Jude’s main weakness is his romanticism, reflected in his refusal or inability to live in an immoral universe, see Gregor, 1974 and Collins, 1990. Most critics of Jude ignore Father Time altogether. Those who discuss the character see it as either unrealistic or too awkwardly symbolic (Newey, 1995: 218). Cedric Watts joins what he defines as the long-established critical consensus that the creation of Father Time “is a disaster,” making the novel “grotesquely melodramatic” (Watts, 1992: 87–8). Among the few who mention Father Time yet treat him as a failure are Kramer, 1975: 183; Robinson, 1980: 135; Lerner, 1997: 144–5; and Mizener, 1999: 409. If his symbolic function is discussed at all, as it is by Gregor, 1974: 221 and Johnson, 1983: 143, then his being a child and his role on the realistic level of the narrative are both ignored – two central aspects whose significance I discuss below. Marjorie Garson does refer to his narrative function, but argues that Father Time’s symbolism and enslavement to the exigencies of Hardy’s plot make it “impossible to relate to him as to a real child, a character in his own right” (Garson, 2000: 196). Harris emphasizes Father Time’s nightmarish qualities and suggests that he is symbolic of Thanatos, of Schopenhauer’s “hope of cosmic suicide,” and of “modern terror” (Harris, 1998: 47). Similarly, Arabella’s incapacity as a mother is reflected in her penchant for playing at being mother. She fakes pregnancy in order to ensnare Jude into marriage; as part of the courtship she also hides an egg in her bosom: “I am hatching a very rare sort. I carry it about everywhere with me, and it will get hatched in less than three weeks” (Hardy, 1999: 47). These two mock pregnancies mask the absence of a genuine maternal instinct, as shown later in her callous abandonment of her child.

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Index Note: an “n” after an entry indicates a note on that page. accidents and safety regulations, 19, 86, 96, 110, 133; see also child labor Adams, Hazard, 73, 76, 219n6 adoption, 24, 58, 63, 66, 67, 106–25, 128, 129, 137, 140, 147, 161, 193, 201, 206, 207 Adorno, Theodor, 225–6n4 Adrian, Arthur, 144, 214n5, 225n1 adult gaze, 11, 12, 79, 82, 84, 86, 88, 149, 159, 180 adult perspective, 4, 6, 11–13, 23–4, 66, 71, 76–86, 88, 91–4, 144, 165, 195, 220n11, 225n3 age minimum, 8, 120, 215n13, 215n16; see also child labor agency, 11–12, 45, 64, 88, 98, 102, 107, 125, 126, 127, 129–31, 140, 194 Aikin, John, 7, 8, 215n12 Altick, Richard, 219n39 apprenticing, 109, 111, 117, 121, 123, 218n26 Arac, Jonathan, 146, 226n6 Ariès, Phillipe, 28–30, 215n14, 216n4, 216n5 attitudes to children authoritarian, catechetical, objectifying, 4–6, 12, 13, 15, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 29, 34, 40, 41, 43, 45, 46, 54, 55, 59, 60, 61, 67, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 82, 83, 86, 92, 93, 128, 144, 205, 214n8, 220n11 dialogic, empathetic, liberating, 4–6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 36, 39, 40, 41, 43, 50, 53, 55, 59, 60, 61, 62, 67, 69, 71, 79, 86, 93, 95, 128, 144, 145, 147, 148, 187, 199, 204, 205, 207, 210, 211, 213 inconsistency and fusion of, 4–5, 7–9, 12–14, 15, 22–6, 29, 35–7, 40–41, 47–50, 55, 60–62, 69–70,

76–78, 86–94, 102, 123–6, 128–9, 131, 140–1, 145, 147–8, 151–2, 159–61, 168–71, 173–7, 179–85, 187, 205–13 see also cult of the child; Puritan concept of childhood; Romantic concept of childhood Austin, Linda, 220n12 autobiographical writing, 16, 17, 21, 96, 143, 225n3 in Dickens, 105, 147, 155, 157, 161–77, 185, 228n19, 229n20 in Hardy, 195 in Rousseau, 44–5 in Wordsworth, 81–2, 88, 90–91, 92, 143, 221n19 in working-class writing, 24, 29, 95–102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 136, 140, 222n7, 223n14, 225n35 Banerjee, Jacqueline, 144, 149, 225n2, 228n15 Barbauld, Anna, 54, 70 Bell, Andrew, 221n17 Bell, Moberly, 218n32 Bentley, Richard, 223n17 Bentley’s Miscellany, 107 Benziman, Galia, 223n14, 225n33 Berlatsky, Eric, 159, 227n10, 228n18 Berlin, 1891 Labor Conference in, 8 Berry, Laura, 3, 106, 126, 215n19 Betensky, Carolyn, 113, 223n12 Bildungsroman, 16–18, 26, 126, 142, 189, 190, 198, 212, 213, 232n8, 232n9 Blain, Virginia, 181, 230n28, 230n30 Blake, William, 5, 11, 13, 23, 24, 26, 34, 58, 69–77, 78, 79, 80, 92–4, 95, 129, 130, 138, 151, 187, 188, 189, 193, 196, 198, 212, 219n1, 219n3, 220n11, 225n23, 228n15

247

248

Index

Blake, William – continued “The Chimney Sweeper” (Songs of Experience), 77, 219–20n8 “The Chimney Sweeper” (Songs of Innocence), 75–6, 219n6, 219n7 “Holy Thursday” (Experience), 72–3 and inconsistency of child’s voice; 76–78 “Introduction” (Innocence), 71–2 “The Little Boy Found” (Innocence), 73–4 “A Little Boy Lost” (Experience), 74–5 “The Little Boy Lost” (Innocence), 73 “The Little Vagabond” (Experience), 76–7 Blincoe, Robert, 17, 96–101, 104, 109, 111, 136, 140 Bloom, Allan, 49, 218n27 Bloom, Harold, 73, 75, 231n3 Bluebooks, 7, 16, 17, 95, 103, 127, 223n11, 223n13, 223n14; see also parliamentary reports boarding schools, 3, 52, 166 Boas, George, 216n11 Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, 112–13, 125, 169, 223n15, 224n25, 228n19, 229n21, 230n24, 230n26 Booth, Charles, 20–21 Boumelha, Penny, 233n13 Bowen, John, 228n19 Brantlinger, Patrick, 108, 223n11, 223n13 breastfeeding, 36, 51–2 Brontë, Charlotte, 98, 143, 224n19 Jane Eyre, 98, 214n3 Brontë, Emily, 143 Wuthering Heights, 17, 118, 189 Brontë, Patrick, 53 Brown, John (journalist), 17, 96, 98, 109 Brown, John (vicar), 53–4, 218n36 Brown, Penny, 2, 54, 63, 97, 214n1, 214n3, 214n7, 218n35, 218n39 Burke, Edmund, 221n17 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 143 Butler, Samuel, 143 Calvinism, 30–31, 33, 39, 43, 53 Carlisle, Janice, 96, 97, 101, 109, 222n6, 222n8, 225n35

Carlyle, Thomas, 102 Carr, Jean Ferguson, 229n20 Carse, Wendy, 228n17 Casagrande, Peter, 231n2, 231n3 catechism, 6, 26, 54, 67, 69, 71, 92–3, 135 see also attitudes to children Cecil, David, 232n12 Chaloner, W. H., 223n13 Chandler, James, 78, 87, 221n16, 221n17 Chapin, Chester, 218n38 Chartism, 108, 224n21 child labor abolition of, 7, 10, 65 and age minimum, 8, 120, 215n13, 215n16 and children’s health, 8,19, 96, 100, 109, 110, 120, 132 in coalmines, 95, 96, 97, 105 and hours of work, 95–7, 108, 169, 215n13 and legislative reform, 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 18, 98, 103, 105, 108, 112, 120, 215n13, 222n2, 225n32, 225n35 in mills and factories, 17, 19, 64, 95, 96, 97, 98–100, 102, 103, 104–5, 108, 109–18, 120, 123, 129–39, 223n9 as represented in parliamentary reports, 2, 7, 16–17, 65, 95–7, 103, 104, 110, 219n44, 222n2, 222n5, 224n20 as represented in the press, 2, 8, 16–17, 95–6, 103, 108, 110, 169, 223n12, 223n15, 224n23 as valuable, 64–5 see also accidents and safety regulations; half-timers; Ten-Hour Movement; wages child neglect and social class, 2–3, 4, 7, 9, 14–21, 24–5, 41, 58, 64–7, 76, 98–101, 105– 7, 110–41, 142, 147–85, 196, 201, 212, 218n39, 224n20, 225n3, 227n10, 227n11, 230n26, 230n27 see also lower-class parents; middleand upper-class parents

Index Child’s Guardian, the, 6; see also NSPCC Childers, Joseph, 223n9 children and abuse, 2, 6, 9, 19, 45, 111–12, 134 and death, 19, 30, 84–7, 138, 178, 198, 210, 220–21n14, 227n11, 233n14; see also infanticide; suicide as deformed or ugly, 154, 159, 160, 180, 182–3, 185, 228n18 as dehumanized, 24, 70, 77, 82, 85–6, 120, 160–61, 175, 179, 184, 215n17, 228n17 and disease, 110, 132, 159, 174, 179, 181–3, 185 and gender, 23, 25, 34, 41, 82–3, 106, 107, 112–13, 125, 131–2, 135, 138–40, 181, 218n28, 224n28, 228n16, 230n30, 230n31 and human rights, 5, 7, 8, 10, 18, 26, 27, 77, 97, 124, 210 as innocent, 1, 2, 3, 4, 11, 13, 17–18, 25, 32, 33, 34, 39, 49, 51, 55, 56, 59, 69, 70, 71, 73–5, 77, 84, 94, 114, 121, 128, 129, 130, 139, 144, 151, 168, 172, 188–93, 195, 198, 204, 209, 210, 211, 216n2, 229n23 and living conditions, 2, 20–21, 96–7, 119–120, 130, 132–3, 154 and subjectivity, 1, 4, 5, 6, 9–19, 23, 25, 41, 43, 46, 54, 59, 67, 69, 71, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82, 84, 92, 95, 96, 98, 101, 102, 105, 106, 107, 126, 127, 128, 131; see also voice as uncanny, 9, 13, 70, 81, 83, 149, 157–8, 161 see also attitudes to children Christian Socialists, 128 Clarke, Allen, 120 Clynes, John Robert, 18 coalmines, see under child labor Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 51, 71, 78, 219n2, 221n15 Collins, Deborah, 233n15 Collins, Philip, 150, 227n13, 227n15 Collins, Wilkie, 229n20 Contemporary Review, the, 8 Coram’s Foundling Hospital, 122, 150

249

see also foundlings Corelli, Marie, 143 cotton mills, see under child labor Coutts, Angela Burdett, 227n13 Coveney, Peter, 4, 28, 117, 144, 214n1, 216n9, 225n1, 225n2, 228n15 cruelty, see under children and abuse; NSPCC Cruickshank, Marjorie, 215n16 cult of the child, 11, 106, 211 Cummings, Katherine, 179, 230n29 Cunningham, Hugh, 4, 28, 35, 42, 214n1, 216n9 Dacre, Lady Ann’s Alms Houses, 75 see also foundlings Daleski, H. M., 232–3n13 Damon, Foster, 219n4 Darwin, Erasmus, 51 Davis, Paul, 227n14 Day, Thomas, 51–3, 220n11 Defoe, Daniel, 58 De Graef, Ortwin, 220n10 DeMause, Lloyd, 31, 214n1 Demetz, Peter, 225n4 demographic change, 1, 7, 214–5n11 see also urbanization De Quincey, Thomas, 227n15 Dickens, Charles, 5, 13, 16, 17, 24, 25, 26, 67, 105, 107, 108, 117, 122–5, 141, 142–85, 187, 188, 189, 193, 194, 197, 198, 212, 223n10, 223n17, 224n22, 224n26, 225–31 The Autobiographical Fragment, 105, 155, 161–76, 182, 185, 228n19, 229n21, 230n24 and biographical/autobiographical writing, 142–3, 149, 151, 155, 156, 161–77, 228–9n19 and Blake, 151, 228n15 Bleak House, 159, 175–85, 226n6, 226n8, 227n11, 230n25, 231n32 “Boys to Mend,” 150, 227n12 and child labor, 117, 149, 168–71, 223n15, 230n24 and the child as social/psychical other, 147, 149, 154–5, 157–61, 164, 169–70, 173–7, 180–5 A Christmas Carol, 151, 155–7

250

Index

Dickens, Charles, – continued David Copperfield, 16, 17, 155, 159, 165–9, 173, 188, 189, 198, 214n3, 227n10, 229n21, 230n24, 230n25, 230n26, 230n27 Dombey and Son, 21, 152–5, 159, 182, 185, 189, 198, 210, 228n16, 230n25, 233n14 “Drooping Buds,” 150, 169 and Frances Trollope, 103, 105, 107, 108, 117–18, 122–5, 126, 141, 147, 169–70 Great Expectations, 143–4, 180, 230n27, 230n32 Hard Times, 17, 103, 105, 122 The Haunted Man, 155–62, 170, 179, 181, 182, 228n19, 229n21 Household Words, 150, 227n12 Little Dorrit, 122, 159, 179 Nicholas Nickleby, 3, 117, 118, 151, 159, 214n5, 224n26, 227n15 The Old Curiosity Shop, 159, 198, 210, 227n11, 227n15, 230n31 Oliver Twist, 117–18, 126, 142, 151, 159, 168, 172, 180, 189, 198, 214n3, 227n11 Our Mutual Friend, 159, 175–6, 179 “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners,” 184 The Pickwick Papers, 224n26 “Received, a Blank Child,” 150 and social class, 108, 117, 147–50, 152–5, 159, 164, 169–77, 179–85, 227n11 and social-problem novels, 103, 105 and Wordsworth, 142–3, 151, 168, 227–8n15, 230n31 didactic literature, 1, 24, 27, 54, 55, 62–3, 67, 70, 87 Disraeli, Benjamin, 103, 224n19 Sybil, or, The Two Nations, 105, 223n14 Dodd, William, 97–101, 136, 140–41, 222n8, 223n14, 224n28 Doherty, John, 96, 109 Dunckley, Henry, 8 Dyer, John, 64–5 Dzelzainis, Ella, 225n32

Eagleton, Terry, 146, 206, 226n6, 226n7, 232n12 Earle, John, 33–4, 37, 38, 45, 216n11 Easterlin, Nancy, 222n20 Edgeworth, Maria, 22, 23, 27, 52, 60–67, 70, 72, 79, 140, 147, 212 Harry and Lucy, 51 Moral Tales, 62, 219n42 The Parent’s Assistant, 63–67 Practical Education, 60–61, 218n29 and Rousseau, 50, 54–5, 60–62, 67, 218n29, 220n11 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, 50, 51, 60, 87, 218n29, 220n11 Memoirs, 52, 218n34 Edinburgh Review, the, 169, 223n15, 227n13 Education Act of 1870 (Forster’s Act), 65 Eliot, George, 118–19, 143 The Mill on the Floss, 17, 189, 214n3 Silas Marner, 118 Elliott, Dorice, 102, 103, 112, 113, 223n13 empathy, see under attitudes toward children Engels, Friedrich, 225–6n4 Erdman, David, 221n16 evangelicalism, 1, 2, 4, 25, 50, 53, 58, 108, 128, 214n10 Evans, A., 50, 51, 52, 53, 218n31, 218n36 Exodus, the book of, 8 Ezell, Margaret, 29, 34, 35, 216n2, 216n10, 217n13 factories, see under child labor factory novels, see social-problem novels Ferguson, Frances, 39, 49, 80, 215n17, 217n22, 217n23, 217n24 Fido, Martin, 223n14 Flage, Daniel, 217n17 Flegel, Monica, 15, 19, 224n20, 225n34 Forster, John, 161, 162, 165, 169, 174, 229n21 Foucault, Michel, 5, 214n6

Index foundlings, 44, 63, 75, 122, 150, 217–18n25 freedom, 5, 12, 16, 17, 23, 24, 37, 40, 45, 47–8, 52, 62, 70, 84–94, 126, 189, 207, 210–11, 220n14, 221n15, 221n17, 221n18, 230n27 French Revolution, 53 Friedman, Michael, 222n20 Fryckstedt, Monica, 128 Gagnier, Regenia, 11, 98, 101, 222n7 Gailhard, Jean, 10–11, 34 Gallagher, Catherine, 106, 113 games; see play Gardner, Stanley, 219n4 Garson, Marjorie, 233n17 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 53, 103, 128, 143, 214n3, 223n10, 223n13, 224n19, 225n35, 225n3 Gatrell, Simon, 233n15 Gill, Stephen, 221n19 Gillham, D. G., 73, 74, 220n8 Giordano, Frank, 18, 232n8, 232n9 Glancy, Ruth, 228n19 Glen, Heather, 76, 219n7 Godwin, William, 50, 218n30 Goodenough, Elizabeth, 14, 214n2 Gosse, Edmund, 143 Gregor, Ian, 233n15, 233n17 Griffin, Susan, 107 growing up, 18, 26, 33, 37, 42–3, 65, 79–80, 88, 119, 126–7, 143, 167, 189, 193–203, 210, 212 Grylls, David, 28, 214n1 Hale, Robert, 222n20 half-timers, 8, 120 Hall, Donald, 11 Hardy, Barbara, 233n13 Hardy, Florence Emily, 195 Hardy, Thomas, 16, 25–6, 143, 186–213, 231–3 and aged children, 193, 204, 209–10 and the Bildungsroman, 189–90, 198, 212–13, 232n8, 232n9 and Blake, 187, 188, 189, 193, 196, 198

251

and critique of Romantic/liberating ideology, 187, 191–2, 199, 205, 207–13 and Dickens, 187, 188, 193–4, 197, 198, 210 and Frances Trollope, 187, 188, 198 Jude the Obscure, 25–6, 186–213, 232–3 The Life, 195 The Mayor of Casterbridge, 187 and parental figures, 199, 200–3, 206–7 and pessimism, 186, 194, 196, 197, 210 as post-Romantic writer, 186, 187, 191–2, 211–12, 231n2, 231n3, 232n11 and the refusal to grow up, 189, 193–203, 210, 212 and Rousseau, 188, 189, 195, 211, 212 Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 187, 232–3n13 and Tonna, 187, 188, 196, 198, 210 The Woodlanders, 211 and Wordsworth, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190–3, 195, 197, 202, 210, 211, 231n2, 231n3, 232n11 Harris, Nicola, 199, 203, 232n7, 233n18 Harrison, Antony, 105 Hazlitt, William, 51, 102 Heady, Emily, 227n14 Heberle, Mark, 14 Heffernan, James, 91, 222n20 Heineman, Helen, 107, 109 Henderson, Andrea, 12 Herron, Jerry, 229n19 Hill, Caroline Southwood, 51, 218n32 Hilton, Nelson, 219n1, 219n7 Hirsch, E. D., 73, 76 Hochman, Baruch, 144–5, 225n1, 230n28 Hole, Robert, 219n39 Homans, Margaret, 222n20 Hopkins, Eric, 97, 214n4, 214n10, 215n11, 216n1, 222n2, 222n4 Horn, Pamela, 7, 65, 215n15 Hospital for Sick Children, 150

252

Index

House, Humphry, 226n5 Howe, Irving, 199, 231n1, 233n15 humanism and humanitarianism, 7–9, 10, 18, 76, 101, 206–7 Hunt, Leigh, 227n15 Hutter, Albert, 229n21 Illick, Joseph, 31, 32 illiteracy, 6, 48–9, 52, 72, 150, 174–6, 183–5 see also schooling imagination, 61, 62, 72, 79, 87, 99, 156, 163, 190–92, 202, 211, 221n18, 232n11, 233n13 industrial novels; see social-problem novels industrialism, 7, 25, 97, 102, 110, 114, 117, 124–5, 128–33, 139 infanticide, 19, 118 see also children and death; suicide Ingham, Patricia, 233n13 Jackson, Louise, 19 Jackson, T. A., 146, 226n4, 227n9 Jacobus, Mary, 83, 220n11 Jameson, Fredric, 3, 5 Johnson, Bruce, 199, 233n15, 233n17 Johnson, Edgar, 228–9n19, 229n22 Jones, Bernard, 231n2 Jones, Mark, 220n13 Jordan, John, 169–70, 230n25 Kamijima, Kenkichi, 231n3, 232n11 Kane, Penny, 7, 20. 51. 143, 214n1, 214n3, 216n9, 225n3 Kanner, Barbara, 104, 127, 128, 223n9, 223n10, 224n31 Kant, Immanuel, 87, 228n18 Kaplan, Deborah, 105, 127, 224n19, 225n31 Kennedy, Thomas, 70–71 Kessen, William, 217n25 Kestner, Joseph, 127 Keynes, Geoffrey, 219n4 Kincaid, James, 165, 193, 227n10, 229n23 Kipling, Rudyard, 143 Kissel, Susan, 107, 108, 112, 223n10, 224n23, 224n24

Kovacˇevic´, Ivanka, 8, 104, 127, 128, 215n12, 219n43, 223n9, 223n10, 224n31 Kramer, Dale, 231n1, 233n17 Krueger, Christine, 128, 225n33 Lamb, Charles, 51, 227n15 Lassonde, Stephen, 65 Leader, Zachary, 219–20n8 Leavis, F. R., 226n5, 227–8n15 Leavis, Q. D., 226n5 legislative reform, see under child labor Legouis, Emile, 51, 78, 221n18 Lentricchia, Frank, 5 Lerner, Laurence, 227n11, 233n17 Locke, John, 10–11, 22–3, 27, 28, 33–43, 48–50, 67, 70, 87, 216n9, 216n10, 216n12, 217n13, 217n16, 217n17, 217n19, 217n20, 217n23, 217n24, 219n3, 220n11 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 34, 217n20 and fusion of conflicting attitudes to children, 40–41 Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 35–41, 217n20 Two Treatises on Government, 217n18 Loesberg, Jonathan, 159, 183, 228n18 Lougy, Robert, 168 Lovett, William, 143 lower-class parents, 10, 15, 19–20, 63, 65, 98, 110, 119–21, 153–4, 215n16, 216n1 see also child neglect and social class; middle- and upper-class parents Lukacher, Ned, 229n21, 229n23 Magnuson, Paul, 219n2 Manning, Sylvia, 172, 229n22 Marcus, Steven, 172, 229n22 Martineau, Harriet, 223n9 Marx, Karl, 225n4 Marxist and neo-Marxist readings, 4–5, 146, 225–6n4, 227n9 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 128 McCann, W. P., 50–51, 62, 218n30, 218n33, 218n34, 218n35, 218n36

Index McCord, Norman, 214n4 McDonagh, Josephine, 19 McGavran, James, 83–4, 218n37, 220n11, 221n15 McHale, Brian, 14 McLaughlin, Kevin, 182 McLaughlin, Mary, 30 Melfi, Mary Ann, 201, 232n7 memory, 12, 17, 46, 56, 79, 80–81, 82, 92, 93, 155–65, 168, 171, 174, 189, 212, 222n20, 228n19, 229n23 middle- and upper-class parents, 20–21, 41, 44–5, 51–2, 154, 216n1, 225n3 see also child neglect and social class; lower-class parents Midgley, Clare, 224n30 Mill, John Stuart, 143, 225n3 Miller, D. A., 146, 180, 227n9 Miller, J. Hillis, 178, 183, 226n6, 226n8, 230n28 mills, see under child labor Mizener, Arthur, 233n17 Molyneux, William, 217n16 Moncrieff, Scott, 228n19 Montaigne, Michel de, 30, 216n5 Montgomery, Florence, 225n3 More, Hannah, 15, 22, 25, 27, 53, 54–9, 63–7, 70, 72, 140, 147, 218–19n39 “Betty Brown,” 55–9, 64, 65 and Rousseau’s ideas, 54–7, 59, 66–7 “The Story of Sinful Sally,” 55–7, 59 Strictures on Female Education, 55, 58–9 Morgan, Rosemarie, 232n6 Morkan, Joel, 87, 221n16, 221n17, 221n18 Murdoch, Lydia, 19 Myers, Mitzi, 60, 63, 219n42 NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children), 6, 15, 19, 214n9 natural state, 12, 17, 31, 34, 36, 45–7, 56–9, 76, 78, 80, 84, 86, 119, 130, 187, 189, 230n30 Nelson, Claudia, 7, 20, 29, 54, 119, 142, 214n1, 216n2, 225n3

253

Newey, Vincent, 233n13, 233n17 Newsom, Robert, 225n1, 229n21 nostalgia, 67–8, 93, 212, 215n17 Nurmi, Martin, 75, 76, 219n6 nurses, 20, 30, 44, 45, 46, 51, 52, 90–91, 153 Oastler, Richard, 109 old children, 52, 86, 176, 193, 204, 209–10 Onorato, Richard, 222n20 original self, 16, 94, 131, 157 original sin, 4, 22, 28, 31, 32, 34, 37–8, 45, 59, 70, 128, 217n19, 217n21 orphans, 52–3, 56, 63–6, 98, 122, 123, 129, 144–5, 171, 176, 179, 184, 221n19, 225n33, 230n27, 230n29, 232n6, 232n8 Orwell, George, 146, 169, 170, 225n1, 226n5, 227n10 Our Waifs and Strays, 119, 224n27 parents, see under lower-class parents; middle- and upper-class parents parliamentary reports, 2, 16–17, 19, 65, 95–7, 102, 104, 105, 110, 215n15, 219n44, 222n2, 222n3, 222n5, 223n9, 223n12 see also Bluebooks Parrish, Stephen, 71 Passmore, John, 37–8, 217n19, 217n24 paternalism, 24, 106–7, 110, 112–14, 118, 121, 124–5, 224n25, 225n34 Patten, Robert, 107, 172 Peachman, Henry, 10, 34 Peters, Laura, 3, 144, 184 Pfau, Thomas, 221n17 Phelps, L. W., 232n4 Philanthropic Farm School, 150 philanthropy, 1, 7, 57, 58, 65, 67, 117, 118, 123, 125, 140, 182 Pickering, Samuel, 220n11 Pike, Royston, 222n5 play, 30, 32, 40, 42, 46, 48, 61–2, 78, 88, 116, 173, 207, 233n19 Plotz, Judith, 80, 215n17 Plumb, J. H., 31, 33, 35, 214n1, 216n7, 216n10, 216n12

254

Index

Pollock, Linda, 29, 32, 216n1, 216n8, 216n9 Poole, Thomas, 51 Prince Albert, 10, 215n15 Puritan concept of childhood, see under attitudes to children; religious instruction; original sin Pyle, Forest, 199, 233n15 ragged schools, 150, 227n12, 227n13 Raine, Kathleen, 70, 219n3, 219n4 Reed, Elizabeth, 96, 222n1 Reed, James, 179, 228n17 reform, discourses of, 3, 7, 8, 10, 13, 18, 24, 55, 77, 94, 103, 105, 120, 140, 190 regression, 171–6; 185, 222n20 see also illiteracy religious instruction, 3, 6, 22, 30–33, 35, 38–9, 43, 50, 53–9, 70, 74, 76–8, 92–3, 119, 133, 137–40, 150, 219n39 Richardson, Alan, 49, 54, 70, 214n1, 214n8, 218n28, 218–19n39, 220n11 Robbins, Bruce, 226n8, 230n28 Robertson, Priscilla, 215n20 Robinson, Roger, 233n17 Robison, Roselee, 31, 60, 62, 78 Robson, Catherine, 139, 230n31 Romantic concept of childhood, see under attitudes to children; cult of the child see also freedom; imagination Rose, Jacqueline, 215n18 Rose, Lionel, 6, 20, 65, 215n13 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1, 3, 5, 11, 12, 15, 17, 22, 23, 27, 28, 34, 39, 42–57, 59–62, 66–8, 69, 70, 78, 80, 87, 106, 140, 188, 189, 195, 211, 212, 216n9, 217n24, 217n25, 218n26, 218n27, 218n29, 220n11, 221n16, 221n17 The Confessions, 44–5 Emile, 3, 10, 11, 35, 42–55, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 67, 70, 78, 87, 212, 221n17

and influence on English education, 50–55, 59–62 and residues of authoritarianism, 47–50 Rowland, Peter, 161, 228n19 Sadleir, Michael, 224n21 Sadoff, Dianne, 230n27 Schapiro, Barbara, 222n20 schools and schooling, 20, 51, 53, 56, 58, 65, 105, 117, 122, 145, 150, 151, 155, 159, 162–4, 171, 175, 210, 214n5, 214n10, 218n26, 219n39, 221n18, 221n19, 227n12, 230n27 see also boarding schools; illiteracy; ragged schools; Sunday school servants, 20, 32, 38, 111, 113, 122, 152, 176 Sewall, Bronwen, 78, 83 Shaw, Bernard, 225n4 Shideler, Ross, 232n6 Sicher, Efraim, 230n26 silencing, 5, 25, 26, 61, 71, 74, 75, 76, 79, 106–7, 128, 129, 133–5, 140, 151, 187, 198 see also voice slavery, 7, 8, 96, 104, 108, 117, 127, 214n10, 222n2, 224n30 Smith, George, 8 Smith, Sheila, 103, 223n11, 223n14 social class, see under child neglect and social class; lower-class parents; middle- and upper-class parents social-problem novels, 16, 17, 24, 25, 26, 95–7, 99, 101, 102–41, 142, 187, 188, 189, 196, 223n9, 223n10, 223n12, 223n13, 223–4n31, 225n35 social reform; see under reform, discourses of Sokoloff, Naomi, 14 Sommerville, Charles, 32 Spellman, William, 31, 38, 216n6, 217n21 Steedman, Carolyn, 13, 149

Index

255

Stewart, W. A. C., 50–51, 62, 218n30, 218n33, 218n34, 218n35, 218n36 Stone, Harry, 227n12 Stone, Lawrence, 28–9, 217n18 street children, 7, 56–8, 64, 153, 157–60, 178–81 Stretton, Hesba, 143 Suchoff, David, 226n5 suicide, 193, 202, 204, 209–10, 212, 233n18 see also children and death; infanticide Summerfield, Henry, 219n4, 219n5 Sumner, Rosemary, 232n6 Sunday school, 56, 214n10 Super, R. H., 223n16 surrogate parents, 15, 90, 200, 203, 222n20

Trollope, Anthony, 51, 107, 109, 143 Autobiography, 109 Doctor Thorne, 51–2 Trollope, Frances, 17, 24, 67, 102–29, 131, 132, 140, 142, 147, 187, 188, 189, 198, 223n9, 223n10, 223n13, 223n17, 223–4n18, 224n19, 224n26, 224n28 and the child’s voice, 106, 115, 126, 128, 131 Michael Armstrong, 17, 24, 102–27, 128, 131, 140, 189, 198, 223n9, 223n10, 223n17, 224n23, 224n26 and middle-class paternalism, 114–27, 140 and working-class agency, 125–7, 140 Tucker, Melvin, 30, 32, 216n3

Tambling, Jeremy, 177 Taylor, Ann, 51 Taylor, Dennis, 231n2, 231n3 Ten-Hour Movement, 96, 108, 222n2, 222n8, 225n32 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 109, 224n24, 225n3 Tick, Stanley, 162, 173–4 Tillotson, Kathleen, 102, 103, 117, 225n2, 227n14 Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth, 17, 24–5, 102–7, 111, 127–41, 142, 187, 188, 189, 196, 198, 223n9, 223n10, 224n29, 224n30, 224n31, 225n32, 225n33, 225n34, 225n35 and female powerlessness, 131, 135, 139–40 The Happy Mute, 127 Helen Fleetwood, 17, 102–7, 127–41, 198, 210, 223n10, 225n32, 225n33 and self-sacrifice, 129, 135, 138, 139 and silencing, 128–9, 133–9 The System, 127, 223n9 and working-class agency, 129–30, 140 Tracy, Robert, 143, 229n20, 230n26 Trilling, Lionel, 220n9, 228n15

Ulmer, William, 87, 221n16 urbanization, 2, 7, 121, 130, 133, 139, 214–15n11 see also demographic change utilitarianism, 7–10, 63–7, 96, 122, 212 voice, 1, 5, 13, 14, 23–4, 26, 69–82, 93, 94, 97, 101–2, 106, 197, 111, 115, 126, 127, 128, 131, 136, 139–40, 152, 158, 173–4, 177, 213, 222n6 see also silencing Wachs, Ilja, 144–5, 225n1 wages, 10, 64, 116, 120, 121, 163, 191, 215n16 waifs, see street children Walker, Obadiah, 10, 34, 217n14 Wallins, Roger, 103, 105, 110, 223n9, 223n12, 223n14, 224n19 Walvin, James, 2, 3, 7, 140, 214n1, 214n9, 222n2 Warren’s Blacking, 105, 162–74, 229n21 Watts, Cedric, 233n14, 233n17 Watts, Isaac, 54, 70, 83, 218n37, 220n11 Wedgwood, Thomas, 87, 221n16 Welsh, Alexander, 229n21, 229n23

256

Index

Wesley, John, 53 Wicksteed, Joseph, 219n4 Widdowson, Peter, 232n4, 232n5, 233n13 Williams, David, 51, 52, 218n33 Williams, Merryn, 232n1 Williams, Raymond, 11, 21–2, 146, 211, 228n15 Wills, W. H., 227n12 Wilson, Angus, 144, 227–8n15 Wilson, Edmund, 146, 226n5, 229n19, 229n21 Wirth-Nesher, Hana, 230n27 Woloch, Alex, 148 Wood, Mrs Henry, 143 Woof, Pamela, 84, 220n12, 220n14 Wordsworth, Jonathan, 51, 52 Wordsworth, William, 1, 5, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 23–4, 26, 34, 39, 51, 68, 69, 71, 77–94, 95, 105, 130, 142, 143, 149, 150, 151, 168, 186–93, 195, 197, 202, 210, 211, 212, 220n10, 220n11, 220n14, 221–2, 227–8n15, 230n31, 231n2, 231n3 and ambiguity about the child’s freedom, 84–94 Autobiographical Memoranda, 92

“Catechizing,” 92–3 The Excursion, 81, 191–2 The Immortality Ode, 71, 202, 220n9 “Lucy Gray,” 84–8, 91, 190, 210, 220n13, 220–21n14, 231n3 and maternal absence, 89–92, 221n19, 222n20 and the othering of the child, 79–80, 82–4, 94 The Prelude, 78–81, 87–92, 142–3, 150, 191–2; 212; 221n19, 222n20 and Rousseau, 78, 87 Salisbury Plain, 220n10 “We Are Seven,” 82–4, 86, 220n11, 227n15 workhouse, 98–9, 136, 145, 151, 168 Wright, Walter, 231n2 Yolton, Jean, 40, 217n14, 217n15, 217n16, 217n18, 217n21 Yolton, John, 40, 217n14, 217n15, 217n16, 217n18, 217n21 Yonge, Charlotte, 143 Zunshine, Lisa, 54 Zwerdling, Alex, 230n28 Zwinger, Lynda, 228n16

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