At the early age of twenty-three, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744–1817)
decided to educate his son, Richard, according to the principles
set down by Rousseau. He thrust the little fellow back into a state
of nature by taking his shoes and stockings off and by cutting the
arms from all his jackets. But, try as he did in every way to make a
living Émile out of young Richard, the father found that the theories
did not work. When he took the luckless boy to Paris and called upon
Rousseau, there ensued an examination of results, and the sum-total was
pronounced a failure. Hon. Emily Lawless writes in some glee:
“It is impossible to read without a smile of the eminently
unphilosophic wrath expressed by the sage, because each time that a
handsome horse or vehicle passed them on their walk, his temporary
charge--a child of seven--invariably cried out, ‘That’s an English
horse!’ ... a view which he solemnly pronounced to be due to a sadly
early ‘propensity to party prejudice’!...”
Edgeworth lost entire faith in the practical application of the
Rousseau scheme in after years; but the lasting effect it seems to have
produced upon the unfortunate victim was to place him in the ranks of
mediocrity, for he was hardly ever spoken of thereafter by his family;
and in order to remove himself from further disturbance, as soon as he
reached years of discretion, he hastened to place miles between himself
and the scenes of his youth; Richard came to America.
Edgeworth’s love affairs--for four times he was married--are involved,
and do not concern us, save as they effect Thomas Day. But, personally,
he enters our plan as influencing his daughter, Maria Edgeworth
(1767–1849), with whom he wrote “Practical Education.” There are some
men--and Edgeworth was bordering on the type--who assume an almost
dreadful position in a household; who torture the mind of boy or girl
by prying, and by wishing to emphasise hidden meaning in everything;
who make children fear to ask questions lest a lecture, dry and
unoriginal, be the penalty. Such men have a way of fixing youth with
intense, severe gaze--of smiling with a fiendish self-complacency over
their own superiority--of raising their eyebrows and reprimanding
should the child be watching the flight of a sparrow instead of being
ever alert for an unexpected question or bit of information which a
grown person might put to him on earth. Such men are the kind who make
presents of Cobbet’s “Advice to Young Men,” and who write mistaken
sentiments of nobility on the fly-leaf of Samuel Smiles’s “Self-Help.”
Edgeworth’s redeeming trait was his earnest desire to bring the best
within reach of his children, and he considered his severity the
proper kind of guidance for them. Whatever sin of commission is to be
laid to his charge, it is nevertheless true that it was not so great
as to destroy the love Maria had for him. The literary critic has to
reckon with the total amount of effect his teaching, his personal
views had upon the writings of his daughter. That he did influence her
is certain, and nowhere more thoroughly shown than in her work for
children. In theory this work traces its origin to Rousseau, while in
its modelling it bears a close relationship to Madame de Genlis and to
Berquin.
Banish dolls is the cry in “Practical Education,” and if you have
toys in the nursery at all, let them be of a useful character--not
mechanical novelties, but cubes, cylinders, and the like. Place before
children only those pictures which deal with familiar objects, and
see to it that the pose of every figure, where there are figures,
is natural; a boy once went with Sir Joshua Reynolds through an art
gallery, and invariably he turned with displeasure away from any form
represented in a constrained attitude. This is the general tone of the
Edgeworths as teachers.
The set notions that fill the pages of “Practical Education” often
border on the verge of bathos. They leave no room for the exercise of
spontaneous inclination; by their limitations, they recognise no great
amount of common sense in others. They create in one a desire at times
to laugh, and again a desire to shake the authors who were in the frame
of mind to hold such views. There are certain instincts which are
active by reason of their own natures,--and one is the love of parent
for offspring. We even accredit the wild animal with this quality. When
the Edgeworths declare that “My dear, have you nothing to do?” should
be spoken in sorrow, rather than in anger, the advice irritates; it is
platitudinous; it must have irritated many naturally good mothers, even
in those days when such a tone in writers was more the rule than the
exception.
On the subject of books Miss Edgeworth and her father become more
interesting, though none the less startling in their suggestions.
One of Maria’s early tasks in 1782 had been to translate “Adèle et
Théodore”; to her this book was worthy of every consideration. In the
choice of reading for young folks, the two do not reach very much
beyond their own contemporaries: Mrs. Barbauld’s “Lessons,” the Aikin’s
“Evenings at Home,” Berquin’s “L’Ami des Enfans,” Day’s “Sandford and
Merton” were recommended. And in addition there were mentioned Madame
de Silleri’s stories, known as the “Theatre of Education,” Madame de
la Fite’s “Tales” and “Conversations,” and Mrs. Smith’s “Rural Walks.”
Despite the fact that fairy tales are at this period frowned upon as
useless frivolities, “Robinson Crusoe,” “Gulliver’s Travels,” “The
Three Russian Sailors,” and the “Arabian Nights’ Entertainment” are
suggested because of the interest and profit to be had in voyages and
travels of all kinds. Fancy was thus held at a discount.
Two books of nature are mentioned, and curiously one is emphasised as
of special value for children provided it is beforehand judiciously
cut or blotted out here and there. The Edgeworths obtained this idea
from an over-careful mother who was in the habit of acting as censor
and editor of all juvenile books that found their way into her house.
In Russia, the authorities take an ink pad and stamp out the condemned
passages of any book officially examined. In the same summary manner,
English parents were advised to treat their children’s stories. The
Edgeworths went even further, suggesting that, besides striking out
separate words with a pen, it would be well to cut the undesirable
paragraphs from the page, provided by so doing the sense of the text on
the reverse side was not materially interfered with. To mark the best
thoughts for young readers was also strongly recommended.
The authors are never wanting in advice. If children are good, what
need is there to introduce them to evil in their stories? Evil is here
meant in its mildest sense. They should be kept from all contagion. But
bad boys and girls should be told to read, in “The Children’s Friend,”
tales like “The Little Gamblers” and “Honesty is the Best Policy,”
which will teach them, by examples of wickedness, to correct their
ways. Such strange classification suggests that literature was to be
used as a species of moral reformatory. Two significant facts are to
be noted in this chapter on books: there is an attempt to grade the
literature by some age standard, bringing to light a gap between four
and seven years which may be offset by a similar gap to-day; so, too,
does there seem to have been, then as now, a great lack of history and
biography.
The idea upon which the “Parent’s Assistant” was founded began to shape
itself in Miss Edgeworth’s mind early in life. Left alone for a short
period with her younger brothers and sisters, she manufactured tales
for their edification, many of which, in after years, she utilised.
In 1796 she gathered together and published some of her best stories,
among them “The Purple Jar” and “Lazy Laurence.” “Simple Susan” would
probably not be so widely emphasised were it not for the fact that Sir
Walter Scott recorded “that when the boy brings back the lamb to the
little girl, there is nothing for it but to put down the book and cry.”
Miss Edgeworth and her father had much preferred that the book be
called “The Parent’s Friend,” for lodged in the former’s memory were
disagreeable thoughts of an old-time arithmetic which had plagued her
early years, and was named “The Tutor’s Assistant.”
The theatricals performed in the Edgeworth household afforded much
pleasure. It is very likely that the custom was gleaned from Madame de
Genlis. Plays were written for every festive season. The publication
of the “Parent’s Assistant” suggested the acting of some of the
playlets contained in the book. There seem to have been two theatres,
one fitted up just over Richard Lovell’s study, and another temporary
stage erected in the dining-room. Here, one evening, was enacted the
exemplary dialogue of “Old Poz,” where a poor man is suspected, by a
Justice, of stealing what a magpie has in reality secreted. Lucy, the
good little daughter, clears the innocent fellow, upon whom her father
sits in very stern, very unreasonable, and most unnatural judgment.
Irritable to a degree, the Justice, who is positive about everything,
shuts up any one who gainsays a word contrary to his obstinacy, but
“Oh, darling,” he remarks to his daughter, after her excellent deed,
“_you_ shall contradict me as often as you please.” This method is
neither more nor less than poisonous; it is polluted with a certain
license which no good action ever sanctions. There is small doubt that
children see the absurdity of it, for it cheapens right-doing in their
eyes.
The compensating balance of good and bad is exercised to a monotonous
degree in Miss Edgeworth’s tales. There are the meek, innocent girl,
and the proud, overbearing girl in “The Bracelet”; the heedless,
extravagant boy, and the thoughtful, thrifty boy in “Waste Not, Want
Not.” Disaster follows disaster; reward courts reward. Not content with
using these extremes of human nature in one story, Miss Edgeworth rings
the changes, slightly altered in form, in others of her tales.
“The Purple Jar” in substance is the same as “Waste Not, Want
Not”; the moral applications are identical. One has but to glance
through the pages of the latter story to note its didactic pattern.
Yet Miss Edgeworth possessed her literary excellencies in human
characterisation, in that power of narrative which gained effect, not
through ornamentation, but through deep knowledge of the real qualities
of common existence. The dominant fault is that she allowed her
ultimate object to become crystallised into an overshadowing bulwark, a
danger which always besets the “moral” writer, and produces the ethical
teacher in a most obtruding form. When Miss Edgeworth’s little girl
sprains her ankle and her father picks her up, she consciously covers
her leg with her gown. Fate seems never to have worked so swiftly,
so determinedly, as in those tales where thoughtless boys on their
walks had the consequences of their bad acts visited upon them during
the homeward journey. The hungry, the lame, the halt, the blind turn
unexpected corners, either to wince beneath the jeers of one type of
mortal child, or to smile thanks to the other kind for a gentle word or
a much-needed penny.
No one can wholly condemn the tale, typified by Miss Edgeworth’s
“Parent’s Assistant.” Childhood is painted in quaint, old-fashioned
colours, even though the staid little heroes and heroines have no
interests. They take information into their minds as they would
take physic into their bodies. They are all normal types, subjected
to abnormal and unnaturally successive temptations, and given very
exacting consciences. A writer in _Blackwood’s_ becomes indignant over
such literary treatment:
“They [the girls] have good reason to expect from these pictures of
life, that if they are very good and very pious, and very busy in
doing grown-up work, when they reach the mature age of sixteen or so,
some young gentleman, who has been in love with them all along, will
declare himself at the very nick of time; and they may then look to
find themselves, all the struggles of life over, reposing a weary
head on his stalwart shoulder.... Mothers, never in great favour with
novelists, are sinking deeper and deeper in their black books,--there
is a positive jealousy of their influence; while the father in the
religious tale, as opposed to the moral and sentimental, is commonly
either a scamp or nowhere. The heroine has, so to say, to do her work
single-handed.”
What is true of these young people is therefore likewise true of their
grown-up associates. They have definite personalities, and they are
either monstrosities of excellence or demons of vice and temper. But
here also a careful distinction was preserved. Mr. Lucas says in his
“Old-Fashioned Tales”:
“The parents who can do no wrong are very numerous; but they are, it
should be pointed out, usually the parents of the central child. There
are very often parents and relations of other and subsidiary children
whose undesirable habits are exceedingly valuable by way of contrast.”
Despite the fact that there is so much to condemn in this _genre_
of writing, Miss Edgeworth was endowed with that sober sense and
inexhaustible power of invention claimed for her by critics of the
period. Her care for detail, her exhibition of small actions that
mark the manners of all people in different walks of life, were
distinguishing features of her skill.
With her father Miss Edgeworth laboured on other things besides the
“Practical Education”; while the two were preparing the essay on “Irish
Bulls,” published in 1802, she plainly states that the first design was
due to him, and that in her own share she was sedulously following
the ideas suggested by him. Throughout her autobiographical data she
offers us many glimpses of that family unity which existed--whether
from voluntary desire or because of the domineering grip of Edgeworth,
is not stated. She was continuously solicitous for his welfare, not
through any forced sense of duty, but because of her desire to give
pleasure in small ways; she found it agreeable to sit of an evening
doing needle work, while Edgeworth “read out” Pope’s Homer. In the
course of such hours she first became acquainted with Scott’s “Lady of
the Lake” and “Waverley.”
The friendship between Miss Edgeworth and Scott was deep and cordial;
one was not without abiding influence on the other. She describes
with graphic pen the first sound of his voice at Abbotsford; and
the biographer has no more agreeable material to work upon than her
fortnight spent as a guest of the novelist, and his return visit to
Edgeworthtown in 1825.
For a man whose avowed detestation of women was well known to every
one, Thomas Day (1748–1789) succeeded in leading a life of romantic
variety. Yet he was not a person of strong passion; in fact, was more
inclined to brooding melancholy. His intimacy with the Edgeworth family
began when he met Richard Lovell at Oxford; and it was when he saw
the training of Émile applied to his friend’s son that his mind was
seized with the idea of carrying out a similar scheme himself. He held
a great contempt for dress; and his numerous vagaries regarding the
conduct and duties of a wife were so pronounced that it is most likely
they came between himself and Maria Edgeworth, with whom it is thought
there was some romantic understanding.
Unlike Edgeworth, Day had no child to experiment upon. So he set
about “breeding up” two girls, away from conflicting influences, and
according to nature. One was obtained from an orphan asylum, and was
known as Sabrina Sidney; the other, called Lucretia, was taken from a
Foundling Hospital. In order to give a moral tone to the situation,
these girls were bound out to Edgeworth, who was a married man. Not
many knew that Day had hastened with both of the damsels to Avignon.
Here he began to educate them with the intention of training one for
his future wife.
Events did not progress smoothly, however; the girls quarrelled as
saints would have quarrelled under the circumstances, and they occupied
their time by falling out of boats and having smallpox. What their
schooling consisted of may be imagined from the fragment of a letter
written by Sabrina to Mr. Edgeworth:
“I hope I shall have more sense against I come to England--I know how
to make a circle and an equilateral triangle--I know the cause of day
and night, winter and summer.”
At the advanced age of twenty-two--even younger than Edgeworth when
he first became imbued with the Rousseau doctrines--Day returned to
Lichfield--the home of Johnson and of Dr. Charles Darwin--bringing with
him his charges: Lucretia, who was hopelessly dull, and Sabrina, who
proved the favourite and was by far the more attractive of the two,
with her fetching auburn ringlets, her long amorous eyelashes, and her
very melodious voice. The young ladies had failed to become thoroughly
steeled against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. In most
respects they persisted in remaining like the average woman with
sensibility. When hot sealing-wax was dropped upon the shapely arm of
Sabrina, to harden her against the fear of pain, she refused to behave
heroically; when a pistol was fired at her petticoats--a volley of lead
for all she knew--her screams and frantic jumps indicated that her
nerves were not impervious to the unexpected.
Day did not fail to show his disgust and disappointment. While Sabrina
was at boarding-school, he hastened to forget all about her, and fell
in love with Honora Sneyd, whose fame chiefly rests upon the fact
that she was once courted by Major André. To make the situation more
awkward, Edgeworth, despite his married state, likewise possessed
strong affection for the same lady. She refused Day, and what followed
contains the zest of a wicked little comedy. He fell ill, and had to
be bled; then he summoned up sufficient strength to escape to France
with Edgeworth, who felt it best to remove himself from temptation. It
was during this trip that he visited Rousseau with poor little Richard.
But before crossing the Channel, Day had succeeded in transferring his
affections to Honora’s sister, Elizabeth.
“Go,” she said to him in substance, “try to assume some of the graces
that you sorely lack. Learn to dress stylishly, and be taught the
proper curl for a wig. Train yourself into a fashionable-looking
husband, and come back to me.”
Thus commanded, Day spent many weary hours wielding the foil, and
being carried through the intricacies of the dance. And those legs of
his--how he put them into exercise, hoping against hope to straighten
them ere he returned to England!
But there was evidently no improvement in the end, for when the lady
saw him, she unhesitatingly refused him. It is sufficient to say that,
in time, Edgeworth married both sisters, Death regarding kindly his
love of novelty.
With affections thus left high and dry, Day turned once more to
Sabrina. He had long ago discarded Lucretia, who apprenticed herself to
a milliner, and later became the wife of an honest draper. But Sabrina
was fair to look upon and Day saw no reason why she should not satisfy
his ideas of wifehood, provided she would dress according to his
tastes. We applaud the shake of those auburn ringlets as she refused
his wishes, and thus escaped matrimony with him.[32] There was another
lady upon whom this honour was to descend.
When Miss Milnes, of Wakefield, was approached by Day, she was informed
of all his requirements, and was deceived as to none of his vagaries.
It must have been somewhat of a surprise to him when she accepted him,
outlandish attire and all; and it is a pleasant disappointment to know
that the marriage was a happy one, despite the fact that Mrs. Day
insisted upon holding opinions of her own.
Day was most content when he was theorising; at the same time, it
must not be lost sight of that he had timely interests. His feelings
were strongly aroused against the state of negro slavery in America,
and he was earnest in his advocacy of parliamentary reform. His great
fault was that he was always carried to extremes whenever good motives
prompted him. His earnest concern for the poor, during 1781, was
accompanied by stern denials of pleasures for himself,--well-nigh of
the necessities of life.
Day realised the failures of his theories as applied to grown people;
had he not done so, we most likely would not have had “Sandford
and Merton.” His attention was soon attracted to the infant mind as
an unworked field; the Edgeworths were meeting success with their
children’s books; he would attempt the same thing, and so, during
1783, 1787, and 1789, the three successive volumes of his famous story
appeared--an elongated “Waste Not, Want Not.”
Day had heretofore suggested a certain effeminate bearing in his
character; he recognised it, and was now suddenly beset with a
consuming desire to supplant this manner by an overtowering manliness,
by the exercise of firmness and strength. But the new policy was to
prove his undoing. On the afternoon of September 28, 1789, he went to
ride on an unbroken horse, believing to curb him by the discipline of
command rather than of the stock. The animal took fright and threw
him; he received injuries from which he almost immediately died. On
the evidence of Miss Seward, it is recorded that Mrs. Day thereafter
“lay in bed, into the curtains of which no light was admitted, ... and
only rose to stray alone through her garden when night gave her sorrows
congenial gloom.”
The estimate of such a work as “Sandford and Merton” cannot be
based upon modern standards; all of the factors characteristic of
the didactic writers for children, such as persistent questioning,
the encyclopædic grown person in the shape of Mr. Barlow, and the
monotonous interchange of narrative and dialogue, are employed as
vehicles for knowledge. The book is unique, inasmuch as it sought to
supply a variety of stories suitable in style and content for the
beginner.
“The only method I could invent,” writes Day, “was to select such
passages of different books as were most adapted to their experience
and understanding. The least exceptionable that I could find for
this purpose were Plutarch’s Lives, and Zenophon’s History of the
Institution of Cyrus, in English translations; with some part of
Robinson Crusoe, and a few passages in the first volume of Mr. Brook’s
Fool of Quality.”
In those days, if authors are to be believed, birds were in the habit
of alighting on the hands of good children; they are more timid now,
though children are not less good. The poor boy was made to feel how
kind the good rich boy was to him throughout his shocking adversity; we
are more considerate to-day. And so, Tommy Merton and Harry Sandford,
products of a stilted age, are clad in uniforms similar to those worn
by Miss Edgeworth’s children. They are endowed with no exceptional
qualities, with no defined will power; they stand in a long row of
similarly subjected slaves of theory.
Miss Agnes Repplier calls this story one of her early moral pitfalls.
She read it at a period when information was being forced down her,
and “which,” so she writes, “I received as responsively as does a
Strassburg goose its daily share of provender.”
Among the writers of this period, none are more important than Anna
Letitia Aikin Barbauld (1743–1825). Her position is a unique one,
for, being acquainted with all of her literary contemporaries and
subject to their influence, she stands in a transition stage. Through
her mental independence, she succeeded partially in breaking from
the introspective method of motive-hunting, and foreshadowed the
possibilities of Mrs. Hemans, the Brontés, and Mrs. Browning. She was
reared in an atmosphere of intellectuality by her father, John Aikin, a
professor and a man of advanced opinions regarding female instruction,
two points which argued for her less conventional mind and for her less
stilted manner.
When she married Rochemont Barbauld, who had been a student under her
father, and who was a non-conformist, she was well versed in Greek and
Latin, and in every way was equipped to do literary work. She was more
or less influenced by her husband’s religious independence; he changed
his congregation from English Presbyterianism to Unitarianism, and it
is not surprising to find the English public looking somewhat askance
at Mrs. Barbauld’s fitness to write for children. Madame de Genlis was
in like fashion criticised for the religious views she held, and we
shall find Miss More subject to the same scrutiny. The Aikins were the
first to introduce the material lines in children’s literature, “but
the more anxiously religious mothers felt a certain distrust of the
absence of direct lessons in Christian doctrines; and Mrs. Trimmer was
incited to begin a course of writing for young people that might give
the one thing in which, with all their far superior brilliancy, the
Aikins were felt to be deficient.”
We are not concerned with all of Mrs. Barbauld’s work; she used to
write poetry, some of it in repartee vein which struck the acute
fancy of Charles Lamb; her essays were of an exceptional order, in a
few instances expressed in imitation of Johnson; he himself had to
acknowledge that of all who tried to ape him, she was most successful.
Her educational opinions, sent from time to time in letters to Mrs.
Montague, marked her ability as a teacher; but the method that she
believed in was well nigh Socratic and ofttimes wearisome in its
persistency; history and geography were given to infant minds in the
form of lectures. Around 1802 William Godwin, of whom we shall have
something to say later in his connection with the Lambs, wrote:
“I think Mrs. Barbauld’s little books admirably adapted, upon the
whole, to the capacity and amusement of young children.... As far as
Mrs. Barbauld’s books are concerned, I have no difficulty. But here my
judgment and the ruling passion of my contemporaries divide. They aim
at cultivating one faculty; I should aim at cultivating another....
Without imagination, there can be no genuine ardour in any pursuit or
for any acquisition, and without imagination there can be no genuine
morality, in profound feeling of other men’s sorrow, no ardent and
persevering anxiety for their interests. This is the faculty which
makes the man, and not the miserable minuteness of detail about which
the present age is so uneasy.”
Childless herself, Charles Aikin was adopted by Mrs. Barbauld, the
little Charles of “Early Lessons for Children,” composed especially for
him. The latter work was followed by “Hymns in Prose for Children,”
consisting of translations from all tongues, put into simple language,
and not into verse, for fear they might fail to reach the comprehension
otherwise. These hymns are probably most representative of Mrs.
Barbauld’s individual writings, for the work by which she is best
known, the “Evenings at Home,” was written in collaboration with her
brother, Dr. Aikin.
In the “Evenings” a new tone is detected; despite a stilted style, the
two authors aroused an interest in external objects, and, by their
descriptions and suggestions, attempted to infuse meaning into the
world surrounding the child. This small departure from the sectarian
tendency prevailing in so much of the literature of that period,
imperceptible though it may be, was due to a shifting of attitude
toward women which was taking place in England. Mrs. Barbauld might
be considered a “bold” example of feminine intellect reaching out for
a larger sphere. We read that Fox was surprised that a woman could
exhibit such clearness and consistency of viewpoint as were to be
discovered in such of her essays as “Monastic Institutions”; and there
were others who wondered at the alertness and interest she manifested
in all matters pertaining to public affairs. Her force of intellect
pleased some, her manner others. Scott confessed that her public
reading of poetry inspired him to court the muse; Wordsworth unfolded
so far as to envy the beauty of her stanzas on “Life,” which toward the
end contain these attractive, hopeful, and faith-abiding lines:
“Life! we’ve been long together,
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;
’Tis hard to part when friends are dear;
Perhaps ’twill cost a sigh, a tear;
Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time;
Say not good-night, but in some brighter clime,
Bid me good-morning.”
Mrs. Barbauld was one of a group of women writers, seeking through
the force of their opinions to destroy the conventional barriers
which kept the exercise of feminine minds within prescribed bounds.
Harriet Martineau has outlined the tyrannical limitations which beset a
young girl of the early nineteenth century; decorum stood for mental
annihilation. When genteel persons came to call at the home of Jane
Austen, the latter, out of regard for family feeling, and for fear of
being thought forward and unmaidenly, was constrained to cover her
manuscript with a muslin scarf.
Mrs. Barbauld did not make any revolutionary declaration, nor attempt
any public defiance of custom; however, she did, by her reaching toward
the manifest facts of life, secularise our concern for the common
things about us. She encouraged, through her plea for the freedom of
thought, the movement which resulted in the emancipation of her sex,
and which found vent, on the one hand, in Mary Wollstonecraft’s[33]
“The Right of Woman” (1792) and, on the other, with more determined
force, in John Stuart Mill’s “On the Subjection of Women” (1869). As
this freedom became more and more assured, there underwent a change
in the educational attitude; a girl’s mind had something more to
work on than the motto of a sampler; her occupations became somewhat
altered. And the women writers began to emphasise, in their stories for
children, the individual inclinations of hero and heroine.
Wherever Charles Lamb discourses upon books, he assumes the critical
attitude that deals with literature as a living force, as something
built for human appeal. He met Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Trimmer on
several occasions, and we can imagine the delight he took in shocking
their ladylike senses by his witty and sudden remarks. At one period
some dispute and ill-feeling existed between himself and Mrs. Barbauld,
due to a false report that she had lampooned his drama, “John Woodvil.”
Elia was not the sort of literary devotee to sanction anemic literature
for children; his plea was for the vitalising of the nursery book. On
October 23, 1802, he wrote to Coleridge:
“Mrs. Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics, ... and the
shopman at Newbery’s hardly deign’d to reach them off an exploded
corner of a shelf, when Mary ask’d for them. Mrs. B’s and Mrs.
Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant and
vapid as Mrs. B’s books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the
shape of knowledge, and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit
of his own powers, when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and
Billy is better than a horse, and such like; instead of that beautiful
interest in wild tales which made the child a man while all the time he
suspected himself to be no bigger than a child.”
He saw the penalty that lay in cramming the child with natural
history instead of furnishing him with some creative appeal. We can
forgive Elia all his pranks when he thus pleads the genial claim of
imagination; if, in a witty vein, he called Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs.
Inchbald the “bald” old women, we must understand that Lamb had
his petulant hours, and that children’s literature of the day was
sufficient to increase them!
The purport of “Evenings at Home” is instruction. Within the compass of
a few pages, objects crowd one upon the other as thick and as fast as
virtues do in Miss Edgeworth. Such keenness and alertness in observing
common things, as are cultivated in “Eyes and No Eyes,” stagger the
intellect. It is well to teach your young companions to feel the
hidden possibilities of nature and to cultivate within them a careful
observation; but there is a vacation time for the mind, and the world,
though it may be a school-room, is also a very healthy place to play
in. Mr. Andrews, the immaculate teacher, is represented by the artist,
in my copy of the book, as seated in a chair, with a compass in one
hand resting upon a book, while behind him stretches the outline of a
map; the two boys stand in front of him like prisoners before the bar.
Here then is a new algebraic formula in the literature for the young.
Mrs. Barbauld thus represents a transition stage in juvenile writing;
education and narrative walk side by side. She made it possible, in
the future, for Peter Parley and for Rollo to thrive. Thomas Day
foreshadowed the method of retelling incidents from the classics and
from standard history and travel,--a form which is practised to a
great extent by our present writers, who thread diverse materials on a
slender wire of subsidiary story, and who, like Butterworth and Knox,
invent untiring families of travellers who go to foreign parts, who see
things, and then who talk out loud about them.
But before this secularisation gained marked hold, a new tributary is
to be noted, which flowed into the moral stream,--a tributary which
afforded the moral impulse a definite field to work in, which centred
its purpose upon a distinct class. For heretofore the writers of
juvenile literature had aimed for a general appeal. The struggle was
now to be between the Sunday-school and the text-book.