Galia Benziman - Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture [2012][a]

Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture

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Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian CultureGalia BenzimanThe Open University of Israel

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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, 610 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 byPALGRAVE 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.

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ISBN 9780230293922

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 DataBenziman, Galia, 1968Narratives of child neglect in romantic and Victorian culture /Galia Benziman.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 9780230293922 (alk. paper)1. Children in literature. 2. English literature19th centuryHistory and criticism. 3. Child abuse in literature. 4. Child rearing in literature. 5. Childrens rights in literature. 6. ChildrenGreat BritainHistory19th century. 7. Child abuseGreat BritainHistory19th century. 8. Child rearingGreat BritainHistory19th century. 9. Childrens rightsGreat BritainHistory19th century. I. Title.PR468.C5B46 2011820.9'3556dc23 2011029561

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 121 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 (19352008): a lover of music and literature, and a real Dickensian.

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vii

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction 1

1 Concepts of Childhood and Adult Responsibility: Locke, Rousseau, More, and Edgeworth 27

2 Redeeming or Silencing the Childs Voice: Blake and Wordsworth 69

3 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

Contents

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viii

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 childadult 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. Zephyras insight, depth of knowledge, and hard questions never ceased to provoke me toward further discoveries. I am also deeply grateful to Robert Griffin, my dis-sertation 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 Bobs 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 Depart ment 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 continu-ally impressed by Leonas 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

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Project for one memorable year, 20089. 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 environ-ment 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 read-ings. 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 StatesIsrael 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): 16797. Portions of Chapter 3 appeared as Whose Child Is It? Paternalism, Parenting, and Political Ambiguity in Frances Trollopes Factory Novel, The Victorian Newsletter, 118 (Fall 2010): 729. I thank the editors of these journals for permission to use the material in this book.

Acknowledgments ix

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1Introduction

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 intui-tively 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 childs subjectivity, the childs distinct perspective, created a highly sympathetic rendering of the childs story, and brought to the

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2 Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture

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 nonfic-tional 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 sociopoliti-cal 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 childs 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 philosoph-ical views about children and the factual data regarding many childrens 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 nations 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 nineteenth- century Britain examines their political subtext, treating these dis-courses, including literary ones, as social texts. I share Fredric Jamesons 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 previ-ous studies such as Laura Berrys The Child, The State, and the Victorian Novel (1999) and Laura Peterss 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 sen-sibilities that the writers of poetry, fiction, and philosophy were first to articulate. Rousseaus harsh critique of the ideological blueprints of the Western educational system in Emile (1762) had an enormous impact on child- rearing practices. Charles Dickenss Nicholas Nickleby (1839) directly brought about the elimination of the kind of Yorkshire board-ing 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 rep-resentation 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 evo-lution 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



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: 612). 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 origi-nating 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, objec-tifying, and nondialogic; it ignored the distinctiveness of the childs perspective while projecting adult values onto the child. The second, progressive approach, largely informed by the ideas of Romantic writ-ers, was liberating, empathetic, and dialogic; it upheld the idea that children were morally innocent, and treated the childs 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 inter-penetrate in various ways. Although it was gradually losing its hege-monic 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 lib-eration 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 less- discussed 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 crit-ics 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: 2005). 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 knowl-edge 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: 1867). Ideologies, or their articulation as discourses, contain residues of what they oppose; hegem-ony 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 reason-able to expect to discover, in the spirit of Foucaults 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 phenom-enon, 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 childs 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 Jamesons term. Yet, in opposition to his model, the inconsistencies operate as textual sites in which the supposedly dis-carded hegemony of middle- class Puritan ideology lingers underneath the texts reformist, counter- hegemonic faade.

Thus, despite their declared commitment to childrens rights and their belief in the childs entitlement to respect, sympathy, and freedom, many nineteenth- century literary works tend to reproduce objectifying attitudes to children, including a wish to curtail the childs freedom or suppress the childs 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



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 influ-ence of the so- called Puritanical outlook had reached other religious movements, and even nonreligious groups.7 Conversely, over the nine-teenth 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 embod-ied 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 childs 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.

Childrens status: Literary images, social processes

Improved understanding and appreciation of the childs mentality, particular needs, and distinct point of view were achieved gradually dur-ing 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 mid-1880s.9 Despite the great progress in the legal protection of children, the pages of The Childs 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 childrens 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 aboli-tion 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 ide-als. 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 expand-ing 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 mix-ture 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: 1718, 1678; Kane, 1995: 37; Horn, 1997: 14; Nelson, 1999: 69).

Even the discourse of social reform that attacked child labor envi-sioned, 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 cru-elty. 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 Aikins study A Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles around Manchester, the first expression of the humanitarian argument that was to become



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 childrens health, if society does not receive detriment from the man-ner in which children are thus employed during their early years (quoted in Kovacevic, 1975: 83). According to Aikins 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 eco-nomic production, resurface in the discourse of reform throughout the century. In 1871, George Smiths 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. Smiths compas-sionate 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 dou-ble argumentation was still common, for example in the heated debate that broke out over the Home Secretarys refusal to follow an inter-national 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 Secretarys 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: 799800)

In other words, children should no longer be regarded as merely their par-ents 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 childrens right to protection and educa-tion. 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, notwith-standing their interest in the childs 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 nobodys children because they are virtually parentless may render them everybodys children and targets for sympathy. Do they not deserve protection and, if so, of what kind? Can British society sim-ply 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 fic-tion 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 psy-chological 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 childs 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



childrens different moral and cognitive sensibilities, modes of perception, and emotional needs started to emerge.14 Only very slowly did a wide acknowledgment of the childs 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 com-mon 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 childrens 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 advo-cates 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 childs gradual and partial transition from object to subject in the collective nineteenth- century British mind is inseparable from the attri-bution of point of view to real and fictional children. In this respect, the changing status of children during the period is conceptually con-nected 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 meta-phoric language, or narrative, or both) when making their claims about the childs 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 childs sub-jectivity 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 deserv-ing 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 childs own point of view, needs, and desires at present, and work for them, rather than for the childs 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 consti-tuted 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 Gagniers cautiousness in the adoption of this perspective when, in the spirit of Raymond Williams, she proposes to reintroduce agency and allow for the subjects ability to mediate, even transform, its embeddedness in the discourse of ideology (Gagnier, 1991: 811).

The concept of subject hinges on a persons being a subject to itself, an I, on the implications of the first- person singular pronoun, yet it includes also the Is 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 [ones imposed social] identity, at the same time allowing a myriad of limitations and often unknowable, unavoidable con-straints 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



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 childs authentic point of view on the other, is never neat and uncom-plicated. 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 Hendersons 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: 34). These notions underlie the Romantic construction of the childs 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 roman-ticizing/sentimental emphasis on the childs subjectivity leads back to the childs 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 ones own self Wordsworths development of Rousseaus 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 childs 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 Rousseaus or Wordsworths 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,


Introduction 13

since the Romantic period, the image of the child has been constructed as emblematic of ones 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, ini-tially perceived as unheimlich, more familiar. This is mainly achieved through sentimental depictions of child characters during the Romantic and Victorian period (see ibid.: 2142, 16174). 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 complex-ity 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 selfs becoming its own social (and psychological) other, its shady double.

The ambivalence regarding the childs being self or other is built into the very attempt of adult writers to construct a childs voice. Critics of childrens 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 inevi-tably a fabricated construct? Does the ambiguity of the childs status as an other standing, as it does, for the adult writers 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 empa-thetic/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 con-ventions that shape our own readerly and critical expectations. My discus-sion of Blake, for example, demonstrates the linguistic features attributed to his child speakers. Many of Blakes 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



they expose the residues of approaches to the childs 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: 12). The child, they say, in naivete or incom-prehension, interprets the world and words in a new way (ibid.: 4). This lingual otherness, however, poses the problem of the uniquely difficult accessibility of childrens 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 childs 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 childrens 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, philosophi-cal, 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 reper-toire of fictional childrens voices and the inconsistencies of its underly-ing 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 15

The common denominator of these situations is the tension between the objectifying/catechetical and empathetic/dialogic modes. To neglect, according to Websters 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 childs physical needs, and some-times 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: 1216).

As for emotional neglect, it was often perceived not as mere indiffer-ence, but rather as unwarranted attention of the wrong kind, one that is blind or even hostile to what was construed as the childs real needs. This kind of neglect was impossible to define in objective terms: who was to say what the childs real needs were? As we shall see in some of the texts discussed in this book, the distinct vocabulary of each dis-course, 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 dis-pute 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 childs 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 childs point of view and responding to it, whereas the catechetical/objectifying mode does not acknowledge, and sometimes actively resists, the childs perspective. The notion of neglect besides obvious cases of



physical and mental ill- treatment and abuse, or gross carelessness is here also applied to cases of lack of empathy toward the childs needs and wishes. However, as my reading of Wordsworth and others shows, empathy with the child, and granting her total freedom through dereg-ulation, can also be experienced as neglect, as it dehumanizes the child by exempting her from the restrictions that are part of human interac-tion. It is therefore useful to define neglect as a stance that disregards the childs 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 intro-spective adult narrator, this experience produces a reconstructed earlier self that is represented as a righteous victim, a deserving recipient of sym-pathy and compassion, and a dramatic starting point for a Bildung narra-tive. In Dickenss David Copperfield (1850), for instance, neglect serves as a tempering ordeal that shapes ones personality and against which ones moral and mental capabilities are tested. Toward the end of the novel, David, the adult narrator, looks back with satisfaction and com-ments 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 success-ful 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 achiev-ing poetic inspiration through the poets 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 Hardys 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 develop-ment 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 childs 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 17

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 Dickenss 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 par-ticularly shocking example was Robert Blincoes 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 Trollopes 1840 Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonnas 1841 Helen Fleetwood. These works demonstrate the extent to which social docu-mentation 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 real-istic novels, the oppressed and/or abandoned child serves as a major site for exploring the development of ones 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 con-structed as both private (familial and interpersonal) and social (associ-ated 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 Tonnas factory novels, canonical Victorian fiction for example Dickenss David Copperfield, Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights, George Eliots The Mill on the Floss portrays an initial and largely formative state of innocence and natural freedom, an early shat-tered, 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



to as the childs initial happiness, oneness with nature, purity, and authenticity is objectively real, and that this blissful state is shat-tered by the intrusion of external, social forces into the childs 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 heros 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 conform-ist, 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 childs infe-rior and unprotected social positioning was altered. The nonutilitarian facet of the rhetoric of social reform regarding childrens rights derived its justification from humanist ethics and Romantic ideologies of child-hood, 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 lab-orers 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 societys 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 Clyness Memoirs: 18691924, which recounts the horrors of his employment as


Introduction 19

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 mov-ing parts he had to collect broken threads. The Memoirs go on to recount how the little piecer eventually rose to be Britains Home Secretary.

The first renderings of the childs point of view, then, focused on suf-fering 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 nineteenth- century concepts of child neglect and of the ways in which it was under-stood and resisted as part of class relations.

Class- bound views of a childs 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 condi-tions 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 infiltrat-ing 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 parliamen-tary 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, sim-plifying 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: 13).



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 con-temporary 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). Booths 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 childrens 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 serv-ants, 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 con-cession was made to childrens comforts. Memoirs describing Victorian nurseries often recall their spartan conditions. Often there was no car-peting, 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.: 2234). Unlike the luxurious dinners served in the dining room below, the childrens


Introduction 21

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 paren-tal 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 childs distress and to represent the formality and distance typical of many parents as overly authoritarian, uncaring, and damaging to the childs 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 repro-duced in the domestic hierarchy. A fascinating example of the way in which a wealthy childs emotional neglect is constructed, metaphori-cally, in terms of class inferiority is that of Florence in Dickenss Dombey and Son. Both on the level of language and imagery and on that of nar-rative 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 couldnt 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 con-temporary 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 liter-ary works as mere documents of the social and political blueprints, aspi-rations, and anxieties of their period. I also examine the literary work in terms of its own space of artistic freedom. The following chapters illus-trate, 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,



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: 11314). 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 liter-ary to construct interiorities as constituting social change is what allows us to assume that the social and literary discourses of child neglect com-municate a shared experience. My study shows how the poetic rework-ing 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 entangle-ments 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, Jean- Jacques 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 innova-tive in acknowledging the childs difference from the adult and in call-ing the readers attention to the childs 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


Introduction 23

ground- breaking in its recognition of each childs uniqueness. Despite the blank slate metaphor, Lockes 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 childs specific emotional and developmen-tal needs. And yet, for seventeenth- century educationalists, the childs 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 childs perspective per se; for them, to recognize the childs 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 childs subjectivity thus remains limited: harnessed to pragmatic considerations, geared up to the pupils future character as an adult. Empathetic attention is synthesized with its antithesis, the regulative (or catechetical) project. In this vein, both Rousseau and Maria Edgeworths late- eighteenth- century theories about and literary representations of the childadult relationship betray gaps between empathetic theory and less empathetic practice. Whereas their educational philosophy underlines the invaluable originality, morality, and intuitive wisdom of the childs 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 assump-tions 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 childs subjectivity in the poetry of Blake and Wordsworth, and argues that while promulgat-ing the childs freedom, both poets reveal an inclination to subordinate the childs 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 childs perspective as a valuable human quality and a rewarding poetic device. Although formally and



grammatically the voice of Blakes poetic child is sometimes restored, what is put in its mouth in other cases is a sophisticated and emphati-cally adult discourse of political radicalism. For Wordsworth, the unresolved yet suppressed paradox of the childs status as an idealized other who is at the same time the core of ones authentic, presocial self causes anxiety about the childs otherness. Such otherness renders the childs admirable perspective inaccessible to the adult writer, and this leads Wordsworth, time after time, to affirm the child/adult same-ness, notwithstanding his declared belief in the treasured distinctness of the child. Furthermore, Wordsworths construction of the child as a necessary layer in the uncovering of the poetic autobiographical self does not fully follow the poets own creed regarding the childs being a free, productively unsocial being. The ideal of the childs unbounded solitary freedom is questioned, as it is implicitly associated with paren-tal desertion. This suggests that even for Wordsworth, more adult regu-lation 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 Trollopes works on children under industrialism were never reprinted in the twentieth century (a new edition of Trollopes 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 Tonnas fictional works are didac-tic, 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 adop-tion 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 25

of the childs point of view, are mixed with an authoritarian impulse that leads the authors to justify the childs passivity and mute endur-ance. Praising this figures martyr- like silence, it is especially Tonnas intriguing use of the motif of the childs 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 not-withstanding, the motif of the childs 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 some-what 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 Dickenss 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 compro-mised because of socioeconomic difference. Dickenss deep interest in the childs subjectivity is thus sometimes abandoned, as the marginal figure of the working- class child implicitly threatens to devour the middle- class child protagonists distinct identity. By presenting itself as the protagonists shady double, the marginalized child is constructed as an other whose interiority and point of view cannot be represented.

Chapter 5 argues that Thomas Hardys work offers a critical reworking of the empathetic, dialogic ideology of childhood and uncovers its sup-pressed contradictions and gaps. Hardys 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



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 childs subsequent refusal to grow up as an eth-ical resistance to the shortcomings of adult life, a refusal that is trans-lated 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 construc-tions of child neglect. Instead, Hardy represents childhood as an inher-ently 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 childs needs, Hardys 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 childs voice as linguistically and mentally distinct, valuable, and deserving to be defended against silencing and neglect. Though the poetic interest in representing the childs voice is connected to progress in the social concern for childrens rights, the complex dynamics of catechism and empathy on the one hand, and the ineluctable challenges of the poetic project of constructing the childs voice on the other, point to the ambi-guities of the cultural moment in which this voice begins to emerge.


27

1Concepts 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 assump-tions. 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 child-hood 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 conceptu-alizations 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 exami-nation of John Locke and Jean- Jacques Rousseaus 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 adultchild relationship, each of these four writers addresses fun-damental 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 childrens needs, what are their ethical or legal rights, and what does them harm? What are a parents duties, and how ought adults in general, as individuals but also as organized society, to treat children?

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The concept of childhood

Locke and Rousseaus 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 Aris, 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 Aris, 1962: 12832, 2616, 353, 3689, 4034, 41115). Hence, as David Grylls puts it, according to Ariss theory children were less miserable before they were discovered (Grylls, 1978: 18). However, most historians, Aris 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 Ariss, 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 appro

Documents

Galia Benziman - Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture [2012][a]