Lessons for Children
Lessons
for Children is a series of four age-adapted reading primers
written by the prominent 18th-century British poet and essayist Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Published in 1778 and 1779, the books initiated a
revolution in children's literature in the Anglo-American world. For the first
time, the needs of the child reader were seriously considered: the typographically simple texts progress in difficulty as the child learns. In
perhaps the first demonstration of experiential pedagogy in Anglo-American children's literature, Barbauld's books
use a conversational style, which depicts a mother and her son discussing the
natural world. Based on the educational theories of John
Locke, Barbauld's books emphasise
learning through the senses.
One
of the primary morals of Barbauld's lessons is that individuals are part of a
community; in this she was part of a tradition of female writing that
emphasised the interconnectedness of society. Charles, the hero of the texts,
explores his relationship to nature, to animals, to people, and finally to God.
Lessons had a significant effect on the development of children's
literature in Britain and the United States. Maria
Edgeworth, Sarah
Trimmer, Jane Taylor,
and Ellenor Fenn,
to name a few of the most illustrious, were inspired to become children's
authors because of Lessons and their works dominated children's
literature for several generations. Lessons itself was reprinted for
over a century. However, because of the disrepute that educational writings
fell into, largely due to the low esteem awarded Barbauld, Trimmer, and others
by contemporary male Romantic
writers, Barbauld's Lessons has rarely been studied by scholars. In
fact, it has only been analysed in depth since the 1990s.
Publication, structure, and pedagogical theory
Publication and structure
Lessons depicts a mother teaching her son. Presumably, many of the
events were inspired by Barbauld's experiences of teaching her own adopted son,
her nephew Charles, as the events correlate with his age and growth.[1] Although there are no surviving first edition copies of the
works, children's literature scholar Mitzi Myers has reconstructed the probable
publication dates from Barbauld's letters and the books' earliest reviews as
follows: Lessons for Children of two to three (1778); Lessons for
Children of three, part I (1778); Lessons for Children of three, part II
(1778); and Lessons for Children of three to four (1779).[2] After its initial publication, the series was often
published as a single volume.
Barbauld
demanded that her books be printed in large type with wide margins, so that
children could easily read them; she was more than likely the
"originator" of this practice, according to Barbauld scholar William
McCarthy, and "almost certainly [its] popularizer".[3] In her history of children's literature in The Guardian of Education (1802–1806), Sarah
Trimmer noted these innovations, as well as
the use of good-quality paper and large spaces between words.[4] While making reading easier, these production changes also
made the books too expensive for the children of the poor, therefore Barbauld's
books helped to create a distinct aesthetic for the middle-class children's
book.[5]
Barbauld's
texts were designed for the developing reader, beginning with words of one
syllable and progressing to multi-syllabic words.[6] The first part of Lessons includes simple statements
such as: "Ink is black, and papa's shoes are black. Paper is white, and
Charles's frock is white."[7] The second part increases in difficulty: "February is
very cold too, but the days are longer, and there is a yellow crocus coming up,
and the mezereon
tree is in blossom, and there are some white snow-drops peeking up their little
heads."[8]
Barbauld
also "departs from previous reading primers by introducing elements of
story, or narrative, piecemeal before introducing her first story": the
narrator explains the idea of "sequentiality" to Charles, and
implicitly to the reader, before ever telling him a story.[9] For example, the days of the week are explained before
Charles's trip to France.
Pedagogical theory
Barbauld's
Lessons emphasises the value of all kinds of language and literacy; not
only do readers learn how to read but they also acquire the ability to
understand metaphors and analogies.[10] The fourth volume in particular fosters poetic thinking and
as McCarthy points out, its passages on the moon mimic Barbauld's poem "A
Summer Evening's Meditation":[11]
Barbauld
also developed a particular style that would dominate British and American
children's literature for a generation: an "informal dialogue between
parent and child", a conversational style that emphasised linguistic
communication.[14] Lessons starts out monopolised by the mother's voice
but slowly, over the course of the volumes, Charles's voice is increasingly
heard as he gains confidence in his own ability to read and speak.[10] This style was an implicit critique of late 18th-century
pedagogy, which typically employed rote learning and memorisation.
Barbauld's
Lessons also illustrates mother and child engaging in quotidian activities and taking nature walks. Through these
activities, the mother teaches Charles about the world around him and he explores
it. This, too, was a challenge to the pedagogical orthodoxy of the day, which
did not encourage experiential learning.[15] The mother shows Charles the seasons, the times of the day,
and different minerals by bringing him to them rather than simply describing
them and having him recite those descriptions. Charles learns the principles of
"botany, zoology, numbers, change of state in chemistry ... the money
system, the calendar, geography, meteorology, agriculture, political economy,
geology, [and] astronomy".[16] He also inquires about all of them, making the learning
process dynamic.
Barbauld's
pedagogy was fundamentally based on John
Locke's Some Thoughts
Concerning Education (1693),
the most influential pedagogical treatise in 18th-century Britain.[17] Building on Locke's theory of the Association of Ideas, which he had outlined in Some Thoughts, philosopher
David Hartley had developed an associationist psychology that greatly
influenced writers such as Barbauld (who had read Joseph
Priestley's redaction of it).[18] For the first time, educational theorists and practitioners
were thinking in terms of developmental psychology. As a result, Barbauld and
the women writers she influenced produced the first graded texts and the first
body of literature designed for an age-specific readership.[19]
Themes
Lessons not only teaches literacy, "it also initiates the
child [reader] into the elements of society's symbol-systems and conceptual
structures, inculcates an ethics, and encourages him to develop a certain kind
of sensibility".[20] One of the series' overall aims is to demonstrate that
Charles is superior to the animals he encounters—because he can speak and
reason, he is better than they are. Lessons for Children, of Three Years
Old, part 2 begins:
Do
you know why you are better than Puss? Puss can play as well as you; and Puss
can drink milk, and lie upon the carpet; and she can run as fast as you, and
faster too, a great deal; and she can climb trees better; and she can catch
mice, which you cannot do. But can Puss talk? No. Can Puss read? No. Then that
is the reason why you are better than Puss—because you can talk and read.[21]
Andrew
O'Malley writes in his survey of 18th-century children's literature, "from
helping poor animals [Charles] eventually makes a seamless transition to
performing small acts of charity for the poor children he encounters".[22] Charles learns to care for his fellow human beings through
his exposure to animals. Barbauld's Lessons is not, therefore, Romantic in the traditional sense; it does not emphasise the
solitary self or the individual. As McCarthy puts it, "every human being
needs other human beings in order to live. Humans are communal entities".[23]
Lessons was probably meant to be paired with Barbauld's Hymns in Prose for
Children (1781), which were both written for
Charles. As F. J. Harvey Darton,
an early scholar of children's literature, explains, they "have the same
ideal, in one aspect held by Rousseau, in another wholly rejected by him: the
belief that a child should steadily contemplate Nature, and the conviction that
by so doing he will be led to contemplate the traditional God".[24] However, some modern scholars have pointed to the lack of
overt religious references in Lessons, particularly in contrast to Hymns,
to make the claim that it is secular.[25]
One
important theme in Lessons is restriction of the child, a theme which
has been interpreted both positively and negatively by critics. In what Mary
Jackson has called the "new child" of the 18th century, she describes
"a fondly sentimentalized state of childishness rooted in material and
emotional dependency on adults" and she argues that the "new good
child seldom made important, real decisions without parental approval ... In
short, the new good child was a paragon of dutiful submissiveness, refined virtue,
and appropriate sensibility."[26] Other scholars, such as Sarah Robbins, have maintained that
Barbauld presents images of constraint only to offer images of liberation later
in the series: education for Barbauld, in this interpretation, is a progression
from restraint to liberation, physically represented by Charles' slow movement
from his mother's lap in the opening scene of first book, to a stool next to
her in the opening of the subsequent volume, to his detachment from her side in
the final book.[27]
Reception and legacy
Lessons
for Children and Barbauld's other popular
children's book, Hymns in Prose for
Children, had an unprecedented impact; not
only did they influence the poetry of William Wordsworth
and William Blake,
particularly Blake's Songs of Innocence
and Experience (1789–94),[28] they were also used to teach several generations of
schoolchildren both in Britain and the United States. Barbauld's texts were
used to perpetuate the ideal of Republican motherhood in 19th-century America, particularly the notion of the
mother as the educator of the nation.[29] British children's author and critic Charlotte
Yonge wrote in 1869 that the books had
taught "three-quarters of the gentry of the last three generations"
to read.[30] Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning could still recite the beginning of Lessons at age
thirty-nine.[31]
Writers
of all stamps immediately recognised the revolutionary nature of Barbauld's
books. After meeting Barbauld, the famous 18th-century novelist Frances
Burney described her and her books:
...
the authoress of the most useful books, next to Mrs. Trimmer's, that have been
yet written for dear little children; though this for the world is probably her
very secondary merit, her many pretty poems, and particularly songs, being
generally esteemed. But many more have written those as well, and not a few
better; for children's books she began the new walk, which has since been so
well cultivated, to the great information as well as utility of parents.[32]
Barbauld
herself believed that her writing was noble and she encouraged others to follow
in her footsteps. As Betsy Rodgers, her biographer, explains: "she gave
prestige to the writing of juvenile literature, and by not lowering her
standard of writing for children, she inspired others to write on a similar
high standard".[33] In fact, because of Barbauld, Sarah
Trimmer and Hannah
More were galvanised to write for poor
children and to organise a large-scale Sunday
School movement.[4] Ann
and Jane Taylor
began writing children's poetry, the most famous of which is "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star". Ellenor
Fenn wrote and designed a series of
readers and games for middle-class children, including the best-selling Cobwebs to Catch Flies (1784). Richard Lovell Edgeworth began one of the first systematic studies of childhood
development which would culminate not only in an educational treatise
co-authored with Maria Edgeworth
entitled Practical Education (1798), but also in a large body of children's stories by
Maria, beginning with The Parent's Assistant (1798). Thomas
Day originally began his important The History of
Sandford and Merton (1783–89)
for Edgeworth's collection, but it grew too long and was published separately.[34]
In
the second half of the 1790s, Barbauld and her brother, the physician John
Aikin, wrote a second series of books, Evenings
at Home, aimed at more advanced readers,
ages eight to twelve.[35] While not as influential, these were also popular and
remained in print for decades. Lessons was reprinted, translated,
pirated, and imitated until the 20th century; according to Myers, it helped
found a female tradition of educational writing.[36]
While
Day, for example, has been hailed as an educational innovator, Barbauld has
most often been described through the unsympathetic words of her detractors.
The politician Charles James Fox
and the writer and critic Samuel
Johnson ridiculed Barbauld's children's
books and believed that she was wasting her poetic talents.[37] In his Life
of Johnson (1791), James
Boswell recorded Johnson's thoughts:
Endeavouring
to make children prematurely wise is useless labour ... Too much is expected
from precocity, and too little performed. [Barbauld] was an instance of early
cultivation, but in what did it terminate? In marrying a little Presbyterian
parson, who keeps an infant boarding-school, so that all her employment now is,
'To suckle fools, and chronicle small beer.' She tells the children 'This is a
cat, and that is a dog, with four legs and a tail; see there! you are much better
than a cat or a dog, for you can speak.'[38]
Barbauld
had published a successful book of poetry in 1773 which Johnson greatly
admired; he viewed her switch to children's literature as a descent. The most
damning and lasting criticism, however, came from the Romantic essayist Charles Lamb
in a letter
to the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
Mrs.
Barbauld['s] stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery ... Mrs.
B's and Mrs. Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant
& vapid as Mrs. B's books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape
of knowledge, & his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his
own powers, when he has learnt, that a Horse is an animal, & billy is
better than a Horse, & such like: instead of that beautiful Interest which
made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger
than a child. Science has succeeded to Poetry no less in the little walks of
Children than with Men.―: Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?
Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with Tales and old
wives fables in childhood, you had been crammed with Geography & Natural
History? Damn them. I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights
& Blasts of all that is Human in man & child. [emphasis
Lamb's][39]
This
quote was used by writers and scholars to condemn Barbauld and other
educational writers for a century. As Myers argues:
[Lamb]
expresses in embryonic form ways of thinking about children, teaching, and
literature that have long since been institutionalized in historical account
and classroom practice: the privileging of an imaginative canon and its
separation from all the cultural knowledge that had previously been thought of
as literature; the binary opposition of scientific, empiricist ways of knowing
and intuitive, imaginative insights; even the two-tiered structure of most
modern English departments, with male-dominated imaginative literature on the
upper-deck and practical reading and writing instruction, taught most often by
women and the untenured, relegated to the lower levels.[40]
It
is only in the 1990s and 2000s that Barbauld and other female educational
writers are beginning to be acknowledged in the history of children's literature
and, indeed, in the history of literature itself.[41] As Myers points out, "the writing woman as teacher has
not captured the imagination of feminist scholars",[42] and Barbauld's children's works are usually consigned to
"the backwaters of children's literature surveys, usually deplored for
their pernicious effect on the emergent cultural construction of Romantic
childhood, or in the margins of commentary on male high Romanticism, a minor
inspiration for Blake or Wordsworth perhaps".[42] The male Romantics did not explore didactic genres that
illustrated educational progress; rather, as Myers explains, their works
embodied a "nostalgia for lost youth and [a] pervasive valorization of
instinctive juvenile wisdom" not shared by many female writers at this
time.[43]
Serious
scholarship is just beginning to investigate the complexities of Barbauld's Lessons;
McCarthy, for example, has noted the resonances between Lessons and T.
S. Eliot's The
Wasteland that have yet to be explored:
No comments:
Post a Comment