Abstract
Imagine walking through a bookstore that has no sections labeled ‘Teens,’ ‘Kids,’ ‘Fiction,’ ‘Romance,’ or ‘Thrillers,’ a bookstore that is instead divided up into sections labeled ‘Masters’ and ‘Everybody Else’—and one very small, very new room labeled ‘Children of the Aspiring Middle Class.’ Finding our way in the eighteenth-century book market is a similarly disorienting experience. In our own time, the difference between books for children and books for adults seems natural. It shapes the publishing and marketing choices of presses and the curricula of schools and universities, as well as the floor plans of libraries and bookstores, and the software through which we try to control access to the Internet. When we turn back a few centuries, however, writing, marketing, and readership look quite different, because age itself worked quite differently. While we may consider age differences to be fundamental and differences in social status to be relatively superficial, much writing up through the early eighteenth century sees social status as the fundamental difference, often imagining age itself in the likeness of social status. To this way of thinking, children are like servants and servants are like children. Subordinate status defines them both. John Locke’s enormously influential manual on how to bring up a young gentleman, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), is rightly recognized for eventually playing an important role in the rise of democratizing impulses in educational theory. But this fate is an ironic one. In Locke’s own time, his book was remarkable instead for the rigour with which it attacks longstanding links between gentlemen’s children and their social subordinates.
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Notes
- 1.
Steven Mintz, ‘Reflections on Age as a Category of Historical Analysis,’ Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1 (2008): 5.
- 2.
Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore, ‘Introduction,’ in Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, eds. Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore (New York: Routledge, 2006), 5.
- 3.
For a fuller discussion of the disconnect between chronological age and the ‘childishness’ of servitude, see Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1965) and the Introduction to Teresa Michals, Books for Children, Books for Adults: Age and the Novel from Defoe to James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- 4.
Quoted in Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill: U North Carolina Press, 2005), 107.
- 5.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), vol. I, 2.
- 6.
Keith Thomas, Age and Authority in Early Modern England (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 231.
- 7.
Carolyn Steedman, ‘Servants and Their Relation to the Unconscious,’ Journal of British Studies 42 (2003): 320.
- 8.
Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England: In Four Books (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979, 1765), Book 1, Chap. 14 ‘Of Master and Servant,’ 416.
- 9.
Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 18.
- 10.
On the connection between Protestantism and literacy, see, for example, C. John Sommerville, The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992).
- 11.
John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. John Adamson (NY: Dover, 2007), 156. Further references are made parenthetically and are to this edition.
- 12.
M.O. Grenby, The Child Reader 1700–1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2011), 70. Further references will be made parenthetically.
- 13.
On Locke’s complex relationship to existing educational theorists, and his distinctive cultural impact, see Margaret Ezell, ‘John Locke’s Images of Childhood: Early Eighteenth Century Response to Some Thoughts Concerning Education,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1983): 139–155.
- 14.
Peter Gay, ‘Locke on the Education of Paupers,’ in Philosophers on Education, ed. Amélie Rorty (Routledge, 1998), 189.
- 15.
See Adriana Benzaquén’s ‘Pray lett none see this impertinent Epistle’: Children’s Letters and Children in Letters at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century’ in this volume for a discussion of the Clarke family.
- 16.
‘Edward Clarke,’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and History of Parliament Online.
- 17.
Locke: Political Essays. ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 190. Further references are to this text and are given parenthetically.
- 18.
Natasha Gill, Educational Philosophy in the French Enlightenment: From Nature to Second Nature (Routledge, 2016).
- 19.
Gay, ‘Locke on the Education of Paupers,’ 189.
- 20.
See, for example, Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- 21.
John Chandos notes the survival of this principle well into the nineteenth century: ‘What a classical education was designed to do was to forge a bond of shared thought, sensibility and manners between gentlemen of all ranks, uniting in one caste—the caste of a gentleman—nobility, gentry, and their kin, the professional classes, requisite to the ordering of society.’ John Chandos, Boys Together: 1800–1864 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 32.
- 22.
Alexander Pop, The Dunciad (Auckland, New Zealand: The Floating Press, 2016), 47.
- 23.
Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster: Or, a Plain and Perfect Way of Teaching Children to Understand, Write, and Speak the Latin Tongue (London: Cassell &Co., 1895), 53.
- 24.
On the mother as a kind of quasi-professional educator, see Mitzi Myers, ‘Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children’s Books.’ Children’s Literature 14, 1 (1986): 31–59.
- 25.
On chapbooks and their audiences, and their relation to the new children’s literature of the eighteenth century, see William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); M.O. Grenby, ‘Before Children’s Literature: Children, Chapbooks and Popular Culture in Early Modern Britain,’ in Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, eds. Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore (New York: Routledge 2006), 25–46, and Bennett A. Brockman, ‘Robin Hood and the Invention of Children’s Literature,’ Children’s Literature: Annual of the Modern Language Association Division on Children’s Literature and The Children’s Literature Association 10 (1982): 5.
- 26.
Andrew O’Malley, ‘The Coach and Six: Chapbook Residue in Late Eighteenth-Century Children’s Literature,’ The Lion and the Unicorn 24 (2000): 20. See also Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child (New York: Routledge, 2003) and Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
- 27.
Gary Kelly, ‘Introduction’ to Street Gothic: Female Gothic Chapbooks, vol. II of Varieties of Female Gothic, general ed. Gary Kelly, 6 vols. (Pickering and Chatto, 2002), xi.
- 28.
On the eventual link between this idea of individual human development and stadial theories of society’s development that were popular in the Enlightenment, see Ann Wierda Rowland’s Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
- 29.
Heather Klemann, ‘The Matter of Moral Education: Locke, Newbery, and the Didactic Toy-Book Hybrid,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 44 (2011): 225.
- 30.
On this point, see Beverly Lyons Clark, Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003); and Teresa Michals, Books for Children, Books for Adults.
- 31.
Samuel Johnson, Dr. Johnson’s Works, ed. Arthur Murphy. Oxford English Classics (New York: AMS Press, 1970), vol. iv, 175.
- 32.
Beverly Lyon Clark, Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
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Michals, T. (2018). Age, Status, and Reading in the Eighteenth Century. In: O'Malley, A. (eds) Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods. Literary Cultures and Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94737-2_2
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