Abstract
The following chapter seeks to gauge the contribution of eighteenth-century English periodicals to the circulation of ideas about childhood. Without a doubt, these early mass media were instrumental for the formation of tastes and the shaping of English morals, manners, political convictions, and mentalities. The enormous success of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s collaborative productions The Tatler, The Spectator, and The Guardian (all published between 1709 and 1714) is also reflected in the various imitations they inspired (among them The Female Tatler and Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator). Each of these periodicals addresses to a considerable extent topics connected with childhood, such as family values, the relationship between parents and children, child care or educational matters. Featuring not only child-related topics but also children in their exemplary tales, the periodicals identify childhood as a highly relevant topic for English society. In an earlier monograph (Müller 2009), I explored in detail the role of those early printed mass media in establishing a veritable discourse on childhood in eighteenth-century England. Informed by Foucauldian theories of discourse, knowledge, and power, I argued that a major function of those periodicals was to convey and popularize ideologies of childhood that were mostly shared by and supported the moral claims of the rising middle classes. The perspective of this earlier study was therefore framed by the questions of what kind of childhood was constructed in eighteenth-century English periodicals and by the possible motivations and purposes behind this construction. Accordingly, the child and childhood were perceived in those texts as social units. The periodicals themselves obviously appeared to perform ideological work, instilling attitudes towards childhood among their readers that should hitherto be regarded as normative. However, the very frequency of admonitions and criticism those periodicals voice about the many existing practices that deviate from the rules they seek to establish raise at least some doubts about the pervasive efficiency of this ideologizing. If the actual ideological effect of eighteenth-century periodicals cannot ultimately be gauged, what can we, then, say about the function and role of those still highly popular texts?
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Notes
- 1.
See, for instance, Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2000), 80–82; and Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
- 2.
For a discussion of the relation of the success of the periodicals to the rise of a leisure society, see J.H. Plumb, ‘The Public, Literature, and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century,’ in The Emergence of Leisure, ed. Michael R. Marrus (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 18–22. Samuel Baudry, Scott Black, Scott Paul Gordon, and Pierre Morère explore the rhetorical strategies supporting this function. In a particular view of The Spectator, Michael Ketcham has stated most pointedly: ‘The Spectator essayists […] create these conventions in order to establish rather than question an idea of social order […], they create conventions which will, in turn, create a self-confirming system of values’ (Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance, and Form in the Spectator Papers [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985]), 5. For a comprehensive study of The Spectator, see Donald J. Newman ed., The Spectator: Emerging Discourses (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). See also Alain Bony’s annotated bibliography on Steele’s and Addison’s periodicals, ‘Addison & Steele et l’essai périodique: bibliographie critique,’ Bulletin de la société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 49 (1999): 111–58. Donald F. Bond estimates a number of about 3000–4000 copies of The Spectator circulating per day. Even when sales dwindled to 50 per cent of the former numbers, after the Stamp Act of 1712, The Spectator remained one of the few papers to survive the stamp tax at all. The increasing number of advertisements and the letters posted at the lion’s head, erected at Button’s Coffee-House for this purpose in 1713, attest to an impressive readership whose diversity can be deduced from the subscription lists for the bound editions. Bound sets of the three periodicals were sold shortly after the papers had been launched. Even the comparatively less-successful Guardian already appeared in a fifth edition in 1729; a collection of selections from the three periodicals had reached its 18th edition by 1765. For further figures and information on the success story of these papers see Bond’s introductions to the Clarendon editions of The Tatler and The Spectator as well as Stephens’s introduction to the critical edition of The Guardian by the University of Kentucky Press.
- 3.
Published from July 1709 to March 1710, with two rival issues from numbers 19 to 44, The Female Tatler was the most enduring of The Tatler offshoots. Its authorship is still under discussion; it has frequently been attributed to Mary Delarivière Manley, Susanna Centlivre, Thomas Baker, and Bernard de Mandeville (for the latter two see the recent edition by Maurice Goldsmith). My quotations refer to Fidelis Morgan’s edition of the complete text.
To date, there is no critical edition of the full text of Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator. My quotations refer to the electronic edition of the first bound London edition of 1745, hosted by The Spectator Project, http://www2.scc.rutgers.edu/spectator/haywood/index.html
- 4.
This confirmed, albeit based on another textual corpus, Andrew O’Malley’s observations on the contribution of eighteenth-century children’s literature to ‘the making of the modern child.’ See his excellent monograph The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003).
- 5.
On Addison’s and Steele’s Whiggish leanings, see William Walker, ‘Ideology and Addison’s Essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination,’ Eighteenth-Century Life 24, no. 2 (2000): 65–84.
- 6.
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 71. Emphasis in the original. By figuration, Latour means the shape an action takes (Latour, Reassembling the Social, 53–4). Within the actor network of the family, for instance, childhood can thus be regarded as an actant, because it is not only related to the other actors in that network (such as father, mother, other relatives, but also child care, education, material provisions like toys, books, etc.); it also engenders transformations, for example, while establishing the particular affective and material conditions, dynamics, and bonds within a nuclear family—as opposed to other family types.
- 7.
Ibid., 71.
- 8.
Latour illustrates this distinction by contrasting a computer (which may appear highly complex but will, if working properly, process its input predictably according to the algorithms it has been programmed with) with a face-to-face conversation (which may appear simple and banal, but offers various points of possible interpretations or misunderstandings, from which unpredictable consequences my bifurcate). See Latour, Reassembling the Social, 39.
- 9.
David J. Krieger and Andréa Belliger, Interpreting Networks: Hermeneutics, Actor-Network Theory and New Media (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014): 58, 73.
- 10.
Latour, Reassembling the Social, 163.
- 11.
Ibid., 164.
- 12.
Ibid., 164–65.
- 13.
Krieger and Belliger, Interpreting Networks, 99.
- 14.
Latour, Reassembling the Social, 169.
- 15.
Ibid., 170.
- 16.
Krieger and Belliger, Interpreting Networks, 113–14. Emphasis in the original.
- 17.
Anja Müller, Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689–1789 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 113. In the fourth chapter of Framing Childhood, I have elaborated at length on the ways in which eighteenth-century periodicals contributed to a theorization of the family by explaining and determining the child’s place within this social unit.
- 18.
Further actors can be added to this network, such as the mother or the father, whose roles are equally constructed through this network. Moreover, it needs to be mentioned at this point that actor networks are by no means isolated entities, but that an actor network such as the family can itself be an actor in another actor network—such as childhood—and vice versa.
- 19.
The Spectator, 1711–14. 5 vols. ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 2:243–44.
- 20.
The Spectator 120,1:491. Later in the century, John Huddlestone Wynne’s Choice Emblems, Natural, Historical, Fabulous, Moral and Divine; For the Improvement of Youth opens with an emblem ‘Of Filial Duty and Affection,’ which draws on the belief that young storks repay the care they received by carrying their old parents on their backs when the latter are too weak for the journey into southerly regions. See John Huddlestone Wynne, Choice Emblems, Natural, Historical, Fabulous, Moral and Divine; For the Improvement of Youth, 2nd ed. (London, 1775).
- 21.
The Spectator, 2:253, 255. This patriarchal tableau has a feminine counterpart in issues 31 (16 April 1713) and 150 (2 September 1713) of The Guardian, which, respectively, describe blissful scenes of mothers encircled by their daughters (Guardian pp. 131 and 490–491, respectively).
- 22.
The Spectator, 2:244.
- 23.
Once again one can discern the tension between the nuclear family as a mediator—with its unpredictable effect on its members as well as on the community—and the desire of the periodicals to reduce the complexity of this actor network, rendering it a mere intermediary.
- 24.
Eliza Haywood, The Female Spectator, 4 vols. (London 1745. Rutgers University Libraries: The Spectator Project), 1:150–51. http://www2.scc.rutgers.edu/spectator/haywood/index.html
- 25.
The Guardian, 536–537.
- 26.
On a critical position towards this acclaimed narrative, see Ruth Perry, ‘De-familiarizing the Family; or, Writing Family History from Literary Sources,’ in Eighteenth-Century Literary History: An MLQ Reader, ed. Marshall Brown (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 159–71.
- 27.
Latour, Reassembling the Social, 169–70.
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Müller, A. (2018). Circulating Childhood in Eighteenth-Century England: The Cultural Work of Periodicals. 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_3
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