The Changing Child In Fiction

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31042, 23 April 1966, Page 4

The Changing Child In Fiction

Nineteenth Century Children. Heroes and Heroines in English Children’s Stories. 1780-1900. By Gilian Avery. Hodder* and Stoughton. 259 pp.

Index. "J)R. JOHNSON says, that

‘Babies do not like to hear stories of babies like themselves: that they require to have their imagination raised by tales of giants and fairies, and castles and inchantment.” The fact remains to be proved, but supposing that they do prefer such tales, is this a reason why they should be indulged in reading them?” These stern remarks by Richard Edgeworth in an introduction to a collection of moral tales by his daughter, the famous Maria, are quoted by Miss Avery in her study of English children’s stories, and illustrates a repressive attitude towards the entertainment of children which appears somewhat remote to us today. Yet, as Miss Avey shows, the transition from the didacticism of the Georgians and early Victorians, to the child centred world of Kenneth Grahame, E. Nesbit, and beyond, was remarkably swift, covering no more than eleven decades, from approximately 1780, when writing for children first became a serious occupation, till 1900, shortly after Grahame’s “Golden Age” was published. Miss Avery’s object is to trace the changing attitudes towards children as reflected in children’s stories written during this period, and she has divided her survey into three sections. In the first, “The Child Improved,” she covers the period from the late Georgians, to the domestic novels of the Victorian writer for girls. Charlotte Yonge. To the Georgians, the ideal child was rational to a degree; his prime virtues diligence, dutifulness, and obedience; and the formidably dedicated women who were the chief purveyors of chil-

den’s litenatue at this time wrote to instruct and reform by moral example. The question of entertainment either did not arise, or was speedily dismissed, since fairy tales and romantic novels were considered a dangerous indulgence in the young. Especially were they so in impressionable young girls like Agatha, of Miss Woodland’s “A Tale of Warning,” whose addiction to light romances led her to neglect her needlework—with disastrous results. One can hardly imagine a child tucking beneath his pillow a book entitled “Punctuality, Sensibility and Disappointment, or Pleasing Stories for the Improvement of the Minds of Youth.” Yet the only alternative to the moral tale was the equally dreary collection of facts, by which, in Eleanor Fenn’s words, mothers might “inform the minds of their little people respecting the objects with which they are surrounded.” With the exception of a handful of writers like Maria Edgeworth and the Kilner sisters, the child of Georgian fiction was little more than a humourless personification of virtues and vices.

No less depressing are the endless evangelical tracts and moral stories through which the early Victorians expressed a religious earnestness as militant as the moral fervour of the Georgians. In the domestic chronicles of Charlotte Yonge, however, we meet characters who are recognisable children, though her pious and somewhat rarefied upper-class heroines, with their domestic pursuits and ecclesiastical enthusiasms (“I cannot fancy enjoying anything, much more than the Consecration of a Church,” remarks one of her characters in a typical passage) are remote from present day tastes.

It is with some relief that the reader turns to part two, ‘The Child Amused” and to the revolution in the ideas of what was fitting for children

which took place in the sixties. For here we are at last in the enchanted territory of “Alice in Wonderland,” and, a little later, the Andrew Lang Fairy Books, and the real children of Mrs Ewing and Mrs Molesworth. Miss Avery stresses Mrs Ewing’s achievement in writing unselfconsciously of children; she succeeded as no previous writer had done, in capturing the happiness of children blissfully absorbed in their own world. Mrs Molesworth, even more so, entered into the child’s world, in her case the all-enclosing walls of the nursery, where parents, except for brief moments, are seen and not heard. Also considered are the boy’s adventure story, and the cult of the innocent child: and she ends, not with E. Nesbit, who is just outside her limits (her first book was published in 1899), but Kenneth Grahame, in whose young rebels from adult authority we see children’s literature at its farthest remove from the Georgian ideal of a century before. Angela Bull has contributed two chapters on the moral fairy tale, and the fairy tale for pleasure: and the survey concludes with a chapter on adult attitudes to class, education and death.

Miss Avery has obviously done a great deal of research on her subject. To sift such an enormous mass of material, much of it unpromising, can have been no easy task. Sometimes, as in the chapter on evangelistic fiction, her material is too much for her, and the reader becomes enmeshed in a dreary catalogue of names and titles. But she has a talent for singling out the significant or entertaining detail and succeeds in writing attractively about works which must be singularly unattractive to read. In all, this is an absorbing account of the transformations of the fictitious child, and of adult ideals of behaviour in the young.